Hisuian Zoroark VSTAR — My Favorite Archetype from Lost Origin
Hello to all PokeBeach readers! This is Gabriel Semedo again with another Pokémon TCG article, and this time, I’m going to talk about Hisuian Zoroark VSTAR and analyze the list I’m currently using.
Before starting the main subject of today’s article, I want to comment on the two Regionals that we had in the current format, Sword & Shield through Lost Origin, in October, which were Peoria and Salt Lake. What are the most popular decks of the format? At those two tournaments, with 1084 and 837 people, the metagame was represented like this:
- Origin Forme Palkia VSTAR / Inteleon
- Kyurem VMAX / Origin Forme Palkia VSTAR
- Arceus VSTAR /Hisuian Goodra VSTAR
- Arceus VSTAR / Flying Pikachu VMAX
- Regigigas
- Mew VMAX / Genesect V
- Sableye Lost Box
- Giratina VSTAR Lost Box
- Hisuian Zoroark VSTAR
- Blissey V
About ten decks make up the competitive metagame right now, and the next step is to understand why these ten archetypes in particular were most successful. Each of them has specific strengths to take down the format’s other strong decks, but they also have weaknesses that keep them from reigning supreme. This is where the work begins, because you need to do a theoretical and practical analysis of the lists.
In the interval from the Peoria Regional to the Salt Lake City Regional, players analyzed these ten decks for their strengths and weaknesses. They did not find any particularly fantastic new ideas, but they did identify which of these ten could do better based on the most successful decks from the previous tournament.
The big highlights of Salt Lake were Arceus and Regigigas. There were four Regigigas decks in the Top 8, making it the great meta call of the tournament due to its good matchup against Lost Box, Palkia / Inteleon, and Kyurem / Palkia. However, two Arceus decks, taking advantage of the Regis’ success in clearing the field of any Giratina Lost Box, were able to beat two Regigigas decks in Top 4 to set up an Arceus mirror final in the end.
The third and final step is to look forward. You have to understand the current metagame in order to build up the future metagame, and thus increase your chances of choosing the right deck for the next competition. This is where the creativity factor can be a big differentiator, because depending on the quality of your analysis, you may be able to create a perfect answer for your accurately predicted metagame, either by creating a new deck or by simply choosing the right existing one.
In the context of Salt Lake, we can make some assumptions about the metagame of the next tournament based on Regigigas’s great showing and Arceus’s continued success. Some known ways to counter Regigigas are cards like Flying Pikachu VMAX, Collapsed Stadium, and Avery, while against Arceus, players often win with cards like Giratina VSTAR, Kyurem VMAX and Hisuian Zoroark VSTAR.
Speaking of Hisuian Zoroark VSTAR, I would bet on it winning a Regional in the future, because its most ideal metagame seems to be emerging now.
This concludes the public portion of this article.
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