Infernal Reign — Charizard ex’s Dominance in Brazil
Hello to all PokeBeach readers! This is Gabriel Semedo again with another article, and this time I’m going to talk about how Charizard ex simply dominated the Curitiba Regionals in Brazil.
I recently played the Curitiba Regionals, the first tournament of the new season in Latin America, and in that tournament I reached Top 32 with Charizard ex. Unfortunately, I lost the win-and-in for Top 8 and my resistance bubbled me at 17th, but I’m still happy with the result, as I started the first day with two defeats and I hadn’t thought I could make it so far. At first I thought I had made a mistake with the meta call and that Charizard ex really wasn’t as good as my testing had showed — but the six wins in a row on Day 1 and a reasonably good Day 2 convinced me I was right. The problem is that it wasn’t just me and my teammate Dalton (Top 8 with the same 60) who were right. Several other Brazilian players also made the right meta call and saw great results with Charizard ex.
And the funny thing about it is that all the Charizard ex variants made it to Day 2: Charizard ex with Gallade; Charizard ex with Lost Box; Charizard ex with Arceus VSTAR; and the most successful version, created by William Azevedo, Charizard ex with Arven and Entei V. Regardless of the variant, the fact is that Charizard ex is very good and it was only in Brazil that this became evident. I believe that one of the factors that led to this is the fact that we had more time to prepare for this competition, and also the fact that we have very few Regionals here, which means we have to dedicate much more to a single competition.
Many will say that Charizard ex’s success was an isolated case of this tournament: that since the whole event had only 379 players, perhaps its results do not match reality. But the truth is that some of the best players in the country chose to play Charizard ex because it is really good, and as people test the lists they will realize that they are some of the best decks in the format. Of course, none of them is a perfect deck and there are always decks that can beat them, so in this article I will focus on the matchups and differentiate the strengths and weaknesses of each of the variants.
Charizard ex’s Dominance in Brazil
For Charizard ex to do well, it needs to have a favorable metagame. At Curitiba, the metagame in general was good for Charizard ex, as matchups which can easily Knock Out a Charizard, like Chien-Pao ex / Baxcalibur, or matchups that involve a lot of Path to the Peak, like Giratina VSTAR / Lost Box or Miraidon ex, ended up not being very popular. Those decks also suffered against other decks in the meta, such as turbo Lost Box, even when they did get played. Gardevoir ex is a tricky matchup, but if the best players in the country who play Gardevoir are playing Charizard instead, then there are fewer really good players left with the deck.
In general, Charizard ex can play against everything, as there is no deck that really has a great matchup against it. However, each of the four variants of Charizard ex has its peculiarities, and they end up having slightly different strengths and weaknesses.
This concludes the public portion of this article.
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