Diving Deep — Analyzing Complex Board States
Hey PokeBeach readers, I hope your season has been off to a great start!
It is hard to believe we are already approaching the end of the first quarter of the season. I recently followed up my 2nd place finish at the Baltimore Regional Championships with a Top 8 at the Louisville Regional Championships! I played the exact same 60 card deck list at both tournaments, and was rewarded for continuing to put my faith in Lugia VSTAR!
I actually wasn’t even planning on attending Louisville, but when more registration slots opened up I decided I should keep playing hot off of my Baltimore finish, and I’m very glad I did! If you want to read about my Lugia deck and it’s construction check out this article I wrote last month. Even though we had Stellar Crown come out since Baltimore, nothing has really changed for Lugia. I still think the deck will continue to be a strong play for the rest of the format!
Besides myself in the Top 8 of Louisville there were some other cool decks. I ended up losing to a re-imagined Lost Box deck piloted by Michael Davidson, who himself lost to a unique take on Raging Bolt. A pair of Dusknoir decks also cracked the Top 8, one with Origin Forme Palkia VSTAR and another with Terapagos ex. To round it out were the familiar Regidrago VSTAR and Charizard ex. All in all there were seven unique decks in Top 8, which shows that there is a wide variety of decks you can pick from and see success.
Heading into the rest of the Stellar Crown format I expect a fairly wide metagame. It seems like a safe bet that Raging Bolt ex will continue to be the most popular deck, but after that there are a plethora of decks making up the rest of the meta share. I think it is exciting that we aren’t in a metagame where there is a clear best deck, and there are six to eight decks that I think could compete for a major tournament victory!
Moving on from Louisville, I wanted to talk about the focus of today’s article. Back in July I wrote an article about approaching your turn and going over some board states. I thought today I would write a continuation of that concept and go over some board states/puzzles I’ve made. I personally think analyzing positions in other games or even your own is a great way to get better. I consistently pull out board states from my own practice and when I watch stream games. While playing games of Pokemon is a great way to improve, taking a step back and diving deeper into complex positions is a fantastic way to improve your critical thinking and pattern recognition skills!
I’m going to go over some complex positions I’ve made up and show you my thought process and how I approach them. Hopefully you can take away a thing or two on how I think through my turns to plan ahead and come to the conclusion of what play is best in different situations! I did my best to test a concept in each one such as Prize mapping, understanding opponents’ win conditions, and check mates! I recommend you try on your own before reading my approach so you can practice the concepts on your own! I built each board in ptcgsim.online so feel free to use the links I provide to try out solutions!
Board 1: Terapagos Vs Charizard
This first board came from a game I played myself when testing for a tournament. In this board you are the Terapagos ex player who just had your previous Terapagos ex Knocked Out by your opponent’s Charizard ex. You can’t win on this turn, but try to figure out how to finish this turn in the strongest position possible!
The first thing to note is that the deck is still full of a lot of resources and we have Pidgeot ex‘s Quick Search as well as a Noctowl in our hand if we want to use Jewel Seeker. I think this turn we should be able to access pretty much everything in the deck! The question becomes do we need to?
This concludes the public portion of this article.
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