Don’t You Know That You’re Toxic? — Recapping My Atlanta Regionals Finish
Hello PokeBeach Readers! Isaiah here, and I am happy to be writing another article for you all! Last time, I gave a sort of preamble to the new Standard format that we just recently played at the Atlanta Regional Championship, and now that the event has happened, it is probably best to discuss the accuracy of my assessments in that article. One of the core ideas that I discussed in that article was that decks like Gholdengo ex, Dragapult ex, and Raging Bolt ex would continue to be top tier threats, and I think that I hit the nail on the head with those assessments. Raging Bolt ex did not really make a super deep run, making it the definite worst of these three, but it still put up some solid finishes. The biggest story of the weekend was, of course, the sheer dominance of Dragapult ex in the new format. I think it was pretty easy to predict that Dragapult ex was going to be good, and maybe even the most played deck in the event. Some people even predicted that the deck would be pretty dominant, but I do not know that anyone would have predicted that Dragapult ex decks would be five of the Top 8, with three advancing to Top 4 and one placing second overall. Not just that, but the deck was by FAR the most played deck in Day 2, with Dragapult ex decks making up an astounding 29.41% of Day 2. As far as I can remember, there has never been a deck that has converted so well since Lugia VSTAR was at its peak in late 2022 and early 2023. Additionally, if you look at the list of players who chose to bring Dragapult ex, the lineup consists of almost every single top player who attended the event.
However, there was a fairly large group of top players that also chose to play one of Dragapult ex’s biggest counters, Gardevoir ex. I have missed the mark a few times in my Pokemon career when it comes to predicting what decks would be good for an upcoming event, but never in my life have I missed the mark as badly as I initially did with Gardevoir ex. I, like many others, assumed that Gardevoir ex was going to be something along the lines of “good but not great” in the new format, but as the Atlanta Regional Championships were approaching, my opinion did shift a bit, and it is clear that other players came to the same conclusion, the most notable of which being Henry Chao, who was able to win the entire event with Gardevoir ex with a thin N’s Zoroark ex line for a little extra draw power. I am a huge fan of this deck, actually, and I wish I had put some time into the idea when I had it a few days before the event, but I typically am not a huge fan of Gardevoir ex, so I decided to stick with what I had tested the most.
In that last article, I also talked about a few new decks, namely Walls (e.g. Farigiraf ex or Milotic ex), Feraligatr , and Noctowl decks. The first two of these had a disastrous weekend, going 0/33 and 0/24 on making Day 2, respectively. The unfortunate reality is that neither of these decks were particularly great into the expected metagame for this event, and even worse, the decks that did well also are really bad matchups for both decks, so they probably will never get their chance to shine. Noctowl’s weekend was a bit weird. I think that, initially, a lot of players expected Noctowl Tera Box to do really, really well, but the highest finishing one only got 39th. It’s kind of hard to say what went wrong for the deck this weekend, but I think it was mostly just everyone being almost too prepared for the deck that it just drowned into a field of everyone being teched for it. This is one deck that I would definitely expect to pop up and do well at a future event, though, even if it did not have a great weekend in Atlanta.
A big part of why Tera Box had a rough weekend was also because of the emergence of the Terapagos ex / Bouffalant variant emerging which is naturally very, very good against Tera Box. Because of that favorable matchup, a lot of players switched to it, allowing it to overtake traditional Tera Box in the overall meta share. I do not think this deck is very good (although, I did lose to it on the official stream this weekend, so maybe that’s a bit ripe coming from me) and I really do not expect it to do much going forward with its typically poor matchup into Dragapult ex. Finally, there was also a Flareon ex / Sylveon ex / Noctowl deck that did pretty well, but I am not sure what to think of it. It seemed pretty good when I sat by it a few times, though, so maybe it has a future in this format.
This concludes the public portion of this article.
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