Some of us will soon return to the stores and regular play will resume. Yay! However, we won't really have an option but to engage with a broken and repetitive Standard metagame. Bleh.
This period that comes after a rather massive break in play means that a lot of players won't have their Standard decks ready, at least for a while. That's a great opportunity to start with other, alternative (and more balanced) formats. Obviously Single-Prize Only is a great option, but it's a completely new metagame that's quite unexplored, and it might feel daunting to some. I was looking for something in the middle - familiar enough to be instantly appealing, but still fixing some issues with the format. That's where the idea of a Single VMAX came to my head.
It's rather simple - each player is only allowed to play a single VMAX card throughout the game. This might seem insignificant, but has a bunch of wide-reaching consequences. For a start, every game will feature at least three knockouts (no ADP in SwSh-on) - you cannot count of another VMAX with 300+ health to soak up the damage. Regular V cards are often quite underwhelming, even compared to their previous GX equivalents, which limits their explosiveness and allows single-prize Pokemon to be viable options as follow-up attackers.
The main advantage of this format is that the core Standard decks are actually still viable, they just need to be built in more interesting ways. There is no worrying about kids in the store pulling a shiny VMAX card and then finding out that nobody wants to play a Standard that features them. It's definitely a more appealing option to sell to your players, rather than having them build completely new SPO decks. I'll be trying out this format in my League soon and will return back with some feedback, but if you have any initial thoughts, let me know.
This period that comes after a rather massive break in play means that a lot of players won't have their Standard decks ready, at least for a while. That's a great opportunity to start with other, alternative (and more balanced) formats. Obviously Single-Prize Only is a great option, but it's a completely new metagame that's quite unexplored, and it might feel daunting to some. I was looking for something in the middle - familiar enough to be instantly appealing, but still fixing some issues with the format. That's where the idea of a Single VMAX came to my head.
It's rather simple - each player is only allowed to play a single VMAX card throughout the game. This might seem insignificant, but has a bunch of wide-reaching consequences. For a start, every game will feature at least three knockouts (no ADP in SwSh-on) - you cannot count of another VMAX with 300+ health to soak up the damage. Regular V cards are often quite underwhelming, even compared to their previous GX equivalents, which limits their explosiveness and allows single-prize Pokemon to be viable options as follow-up attackers.
The main advantage of this format is that the core Standard decks are actually still viable, they just need to be built in more interesting ways. There is no worrying about kids in the store pulling a shiny VMAX card and then finding out that nobody wants to play a Standard that features them. It's definitely a more appealing option to sell to your players, rather than having them build completely new SPO decks. I'll be trying out this format in my League soon and will return back with some feedback, but if you have any initial thoughts, let me know.
