Surprising Worlds Results! A Meta Shift for Baltimore!
Hello everyone! This year’s World Championships have just concluded, and it was an exciting one! We are going to conveniently ignore the fact that I bombed out of the tournament big time, and look at the decks that did well this year. Regidrago VSTAR was expected by everyone to be the best and most popular deck. Interestingly, a very large portion of elite players just decided to rip it in with Regidrago VSTAR, unconcerned with mirror matches or potential counters. My group also recognized the unparalleled power and versatility of the deck, but it felt like it didn’t make sense to play it for this tournament. A part of me wishes that we had, as I was well-versed in the deck and its lines of play. At the very least, it couldn’t have gone worse for me than it did…
Instead, we played Snorlax stall. After some more testing, we teched it out to a point where we were relatively fine with the Lugia VSTAR and quad Iron Thorns ex matchups, which were the biggest pain points in considering Snorlax as a play.
In theory, this deck wouldn’t lose to any of the meta decks, making it seem like a broken pick that was sure to perform well, however, we collectively ran into a plethora of bad matchups including Pecharunt ex in Ancient box decks, Skwovet in Charizard ex, as well as Chi-Yu ex in the mirror. Worlds was supposed to be the tournament where we didn’t run into random nonsense, but complaining won’t solve anything, so life goes on.
The Worlds Meta
Back to Regidrago VSTAR. The deck flooded the field and performed very well, taking up four of the Top 8 spots. This meta development prompted a lot of players to try and counter Regidrago VSTAR, with the obvious response being turbo-aggressive decks like Raging Bolt ex . One Raging Bolt ex made Top 8, but more interestingly, other turbo decks showed up to fulfill a similar role to Raging Bolt ex, but with different attackers. Jesse Parker’s Miraidon ex turned heads as he blitzed through the tournament undefeated until Top 4. Miraidon ex’s sheer speed was enough to box out Regidrago VSTAR, and it had a significantly better matchup against Lugia VSTAR than Raging Bolt ex does. Ryan Harris also made Top 16 with Miraidon ex, with those two being the only top-finishing Miraidon ex decks. I have to say that this was a stellar performance for Miraidon ex considering its low meta share. It wasn’t too hard to figure out that Miraidon ex was poised well going into this metagame, but I did not want to play it due to a personal dislike and bad experiences with the deck. I also thought that playing luck-based decks was a bad move, as it squanders my potential to skill-diff opponents. Of course, with my dismal result, my thought process ultimately amounted to nothing, but I am simply sharing how I made these decisions at the time.
A pure turbo Roaring Moon ex deck happened to appear out of nowhere and take second place, and was not seen anywhere else. This was funny and completely unexpected, but it makes total sense. Just like Raging Bolt ex and Miraidon ex, Roaring Moon ex functions as a fast and aggressive deck that aims to completely shut out Regidrago VSTAR. The list was built purely for speed and consistency, and it looks very fun to play, although I said I wouldn’t want to play a luck-based deck, this would be the one I would have liked to play if I were to do so. While I am a big hater of the Judge card, it appears in this list as a clever solve to the Charizard ex matchup. Pokémon Catcher has four copies in this deck, but as long as you’re able to find Prime Catcher and Boss's Orders, you realistically only need to flip one or two heads over the course of a game. Sometimes you don’t need any, but the card just makes sense in here.
A Quad Thorns Surprise
It’s time for the elephant in the room – quad Iron Thorns ex. This deck won Worlds on a technicality, but regardless, still earned a Top 8 finish. Iron Thorns ex is a deck that I have an extremely low opinion of. I don’t remember if I even mentioned it in my Worlds preview articles because it just wasn’t relevant enough, however, after arriving in Hawaii, it became clear that people were actually playing this deck, and that we should prepare for it. We built the deck to test and swiftly took it apart because it was so bad. After that, we had second thoughts and re-built it, which is an extreme anomaly. That’s the first and last time we will fully scrap a deck only to come back to it. Well, you’ve probably heard that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result, and boy were we going insane. The deck was still terrible, losing often enough to matchups like Regidrago VSTAR and Charizard ex that it was supposed to counter. We didn’t even bother testing it against Lugia VSTAR, but can you imagine if it lost to that too? Would be pretty funny.
The Worlds list made the necessary innovation of playing Prime Catcher and four copies of Pokémon Catcher. We also had arrived at the Prime Catcher conclusion, and Azul mentioned playing Pokemon Catcher, but those didn’t end up making their way into the list before we sent the deck to the scrapyard. While the extra gust effects were clearly a great decision for the deck, I still don’t think it salvages the overall archetype or makes it good. It’s hard to defy the empirical data right before my eyes, however. In addition to the top list, Iron Thorns ex had three more Top 32 spots (and got 33rd), so clearly the deck was doing something right despite its rather low meta share.
This concludes the public portion of this article.
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