Hope Springs Eternal — Eternatus VMAX Makes Top 4 in 2,800-Player Tournament
Hello all PokeBeach readers! This is Gabriel again with another Pokémon TCG article, and this time I’m going to talk about the return of Eternatus VMAX in the competitive metagame, now with Galarian Weezing and even Crobat VMAX in the list.
The end of the year has been crazy for me, but it’s been so much fun. My last two months were split between the Latin America International Championship (LAIC), the World Cup, Christmas, finishing all my work, end-of-year parties, and already starting my preparation for the Regionals in 2023 in Brazil. For next year, I want to increase the intensity of my training to get better results, because I believe that this season, I didn’t perform at my best because of some personal problems that ended up taking my focus away from preparing for competitions. When I say “focus,” I mean that I didn’t do what needs to be done to be a champion, which is to train a lot. Compared to the Gabriel Semedo of about seven years ago, I don’t think I’ve trained half as much as he did. Now, though, almost a year after the return to face-to-face tournaments, I have no more excuses for having a poor season, so it’s just a matter of working to correct the things that went wrong, improving my focus, and training hard.
The 2022 season in Brazil ended for many players with the end of LAIC, as now our remaining Regionals are all in 2023. As I said, though, I decided not to take a vacation from competitive Pokémon in the interest of remaining focused, so I continue to follow closely the tournaments that are still happening, especially in Japan. Recently in Japan there was a huge competition with more than 2,800 players, the Champions League Kyoto, and the deck that drew the most attention there was Eternatus VMAX. Nobody expected Eternatus to have such an impressive result in such a big tournament after so long.
Eternatus VMAX arrived at the Pokémon TCG at the worst moment in history. When Darkness Ablaze was launched, it was August 2020, the height of the pandemic; that is, Eternatus only had one year of competitive Pokémon TCG in face-to-face tournaments, during precisely the worst year. The peak of Eternatus was 2020 and 2021, but already in 2022 it was failing to stay competitive.
One of the biggest proofs of its failure was the evidence that it did not have a good matchup against Mew VMAX. Even though Eternatus VMAX is Darkness-type and Mew VMAX has Weakness to Darkness, the fact is that the opponent only needs to KO three Crobat V to win the game. Eternatus VMAX’s fragile and vulnerable Bench compromises every other quality of the deck.
But Yuta Nakamura did differently at Champions League Kyoto, and managed to bring a list of Eternatus VMAX that alleviates the deck’s weaknesses a little and still brings much-needed new qualities to the metagame. Largely responsible for this is Galarian Weezing. With the inclusion of a heavy lineup of Galarian Weezing, the strategy changes completely.
The list that will be analyzed today is no longer a classic Eternatus VMAX deck, which has as its main characteristics its trademark speed and aggressiveness. Now, with Galarian Weezing, you slow down the game for both yourself and your opponent. This decrease in game pace is positive for your strategy and negative for the opponent, because in this way you develop your setup and the opponent is unable to put on the pressure they would like in order to stop you.
This concludes the public portion of this article.
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