Uncommon Tournament: A Pelliper/Swanna Second Place Tale

The Format

Common and Uncommon cards only

Decks must contain only one type of Pokemon! No mix-type decks, even if they come from the same evolution line.

Additionaly banned

Hypnotoxic Laser

Trubbish (Plasma Storm 65/125, with Tool Drop)

Joltik/Pumpkaboo/Lampent (Phantom Forces, Night March deck)

Golbat (Phantom Forces 32/119, Sneaky Bite ability)

This tournament was held to honor a dear friend of the Pokemon Community who passed away recently, and to help raise funds for her memorial and funeral services. Testimony from her dear friends tell of her constant willingness to jump in and help anyone she could. I personally did not know her very well, as I've only recently come back into the competitive community. I do however know that this person exemplifies what it means to be a member of our community: To be as family. When we're having trouble with a team or a deck, we help each other out. We travel together and make friends all across our cities, states, nations, even across the world. Pokemon is to us what people often look for in life: a sense of community. So to honor our friend, to honor our hobby, and to honor each other, let us never forget this important truth to what our community is about. Remember to love your fellow fan, be it a veteran or a newcomer, the same way that our friend did for all of us.

The Deck

Pokémon

4 Wingull (Roaring Skies 18/108)
4 Pelipper (Roaring Skies 19/108): Simple method, great results. For a meager two energy, deal a base of 30 damage and heal an amount equal to your damage output, after accounting for muscle band and weakness. Weakness to lightning proved inconsequential, as the electric type menace was quickly scared off by the threat of fighting types, supported by the ever present Korrina and Strong Energy. Peliper also boasts a resistance to the expected prominence of fighting types, making the water bird a clear choice to stall an opponent. The second attack saw no use, costing four energy for 70 damage and sleep, but amassing the energy cost was simply counter productive, as well as near impossible with so many Enhanced Hammer and Team Flare Grunt floating around. All in all, Swallow kept Hit Points moving in my favor, and even without getting to use Water Pulse, opponents had a hard time taking out this beast.


4 Ducklett (Boundaries Crossed 42/149)
4 Swanna (Boundaries Crossed 43/149): Now here was a beast, and by far the scariest offense I built into this deck! Aerial Ace was largely ignored, thought it did provide the opportunity of landing a turn-1 Double Colorless+Wally combo for early damage. The real gem is Defog. Three energy lands 60 damage, with an additional 40 if I choose to discard an in-play Stadium card. The best feature was actually having the option to discard the stadium, meaning any opponent who played their own stadium ran the risk of taking heavy hits just for giving me the fuel. Naturally, I played my own Stadium card in case they didn't provide me with the torpedo. Considering the format, however, it was fairly seldom that I actually needed the extra damage! Stunfisk fell to weakness from Defog's base damage, and Bunnelby just hit that 60 Hit Point mark. It came in handy for finishing up games against Bouffalant, one of which I needed the added bonus of Muscle Band to topple over.

Energy

6 Water
4 Double Colorless: To be honest, I was initially worried about my energy count. I almost went with eight water energy, but I just wanted to try squeezing a couple more trainers in. I did however manage to slip in two Energy Retrieval cards, which in essence takes the six basic energy I was using and turn them into ten, and in the end, I found my energy count to serve my needs perfectly.

Supporter

1 Lysandre: I'll explain this one for the people who may be new. Lysandre allows a player to effortlessly pull up an opponent's Pokemon. Whether it's one they should have difficulty switching out of, preventing their attack, or whether it's one you desperately need to knock out before causing havoc on your own lineup, it depends on what you need at the given moment. I chose to use only one since I didn't see too much need for it, considering Swanna is capable of One-Hit-Knock-Outs against most possible opponents. That, and a number of VS Seeker cards let you use it over and over as needed.


3 Professor Sycamore: Discard your hand and draw seven new cards! This card is part of the reason I decided to run full four-four lines of both Pokemon in this deck. At six prize cards, per game, I could afford to lose one or two of either Pokemon's evolution line with Sycamore to get the hand I needed to finish a productive turn.


3 Shauna: I picked Shauna over Birch and N for two reasons: Consistency over the whole game, and avoiding the likelihood of giving opponents a fresh hand they might need. I cannot even count the number of times an opponent played N and ended up giving me a better hand than they gave themselves. Granted, top-caliber players swear up and down by N, but in a format that is completely devoid of item lock effects, fresh hands can really make a next turn count.


2 Team Flare Grunt: Admittedly, when this card first came out, I said to myself "This looks horrible. One supporter per turn, just to discard one energy, and only from the active?" But since the shenanigans at Nationals with Wailord, these grunts have worked their way out of the realm of good fashion sense and into my heart.


3 Wally: I could have just as well gone with Evosoda instead, but the chance at evolving the same turn a Pokemon was played proved too enticing. Were I to use this deck again, however, I will likely trade for Evosoda, since item lock is not an issue. That's right! No rares means no Treavenant, no Seismitoad-EX and come next set, no Vileplume. I thought the supporter version would work just fine this time around though, considering Dive Ball and Evosoda provided me little to no functional difference in pulling an evolution card.

Item

3 Dive Ball: With so little space remaining, it became difficult to find room for sets of four copies of cards by this point. However, some cards just cannot run in sets of less than four. Dive Ball is one of those. The ability to search for any Pokemon in your deck without the penalty of discarding cards from your hand is vital, especially when every card in your deck serves a purpose in nearly every pairing you could face. Of course, Dive Ball only searches Water type Pokemon, but if you've read this far you already know the only Pokemon I have in my deck!


2 Energy Retrieval: I knew going in that energy disruption would be a major issue. Sure, I could have just run more basic energy, but as I've mentioned before, each of these cards effectively creates two energy cards! Plus, the shock on a person's face when they see someone playing a second Retrieval is simply priceless.


4 Enhanced Hammer: I'm going to level with you for a moment. The inclusion of four of these was an accident. If I were paying closer attention to the deck I was building, I'd have likely cut one of these cards out for a fourth Rough Seas. However, the expected plays that this card prepares for did show up! Fighting decks' Strong Energy and most decks' Double Colorless were prime targets for this pinnacle of disruptive potential.


3 Muscle Band: Even in such a low Hit Point version of the game, sometimes you need a little extra damage. Especially when your attack heals based on your damage output! This one tool card made Pelipper a beast to take down. The potential to heal 50 HP per turn almost meant an opponent would have to take it down in a single attack, or watch their work become undone as their own health gets chipped away. For the opponent's sake, though, I sure hope they don't have weakness to Water type cards.


2 Switch: Swapping places with something on the bench? Much better than paying a two-energy retreat cost, especially when you only have ten total energy cards in the deck, and you've probably already lost half of them to Enhanced Hammer and Team Flare Grunt.


3 Trainers' Mail: Sure, it may not seem like much, only peeking at four cards off the top of your deck. But do some quick math. 16 Pokemon, ten energy. That means this deck packs 34 trainer cards. Subtract the three copies of Trainers' Mail, since it cannot grab its own copy from the selection, and you still have over 50% of a deck that Trainers Mail can get you at any given time. Most decks carry this kind of Pokemon/Energy count, if not even fewer, making Trainers' Mail something that should go in nearly every deck.


2 VS Seeker: Somehow, I only cut in two of these cards. I usually run three or four, but the space just wasn't there. At the same time, I almost felt as though the supporter counts were enough on their own, and considering how the day actually unfolded for me I'd say it was a pretty good choice. Surprisingly, I found myself using it to grab Team Flare Grunt more than any other supporter from my discard pile.

Stadium

3 Rough Seas: Really, the only stadium that benefits this pure water deck. I even found myself using its healing effect less than I thought I would, typically dropping it just to knock a Magnetic Storm or Scorched Earth out of play, or to give Swanna her much coveted 100-damage Defog attack.

The Concept

I expected a lot of two things: Fire and Fighting. Fire decks come packing Blacksmith, Fighting decks get Strong Energy. Both get Scorched Earth. Swanna gives a way to discard the stadium, and both Pokemon hit fire, and some fighting, for devastating weakness damage! Add resistance to Fighting type damage and we have a recipe for success. What I did not predict, however, was the swarm of Bunnelby that I actually saw. However, its discard-twice shenanigans actually didn't cause me as much trouble as most might think. After all, Swanna lands a base 60 damage without dropping a Stadium card, so they were fairly easy to deal with. I generally intended to rush out whichever bird seemed to be the first arrival on the field and either stall-heal or sweep, based on which Pokemon surfaced first. So moving on, we have five Swiss-pairing rounds, no top cut! I ended up taking second place, though due to the charity function of the event, there were little to be gained in tournament prizes. Each of the top 12 placers received three booster packs from a Roaring Skies box, as well as a pick of the organizer's goodies, including a card binder or one of several mats or special sleeve packs. You can see my prize pulls for placing, as well as raffle winnings (all proceeds went to the charity) on YouTube.

The Rounds

Round 1

VS Bunnelby and Girafarig: Bunnelby creates excellent early game disruption... that is, if you can get the energy attached to it. After an early game Team Flare Grunt, the opponent had some difficulty digging for a second energy. Had he managed to get a hold of it, though, you could rest assured that the Girafarig would start causing its fair share of trouble! Running basic Psychic energy, this player had the clever idea of using Girafarig's Psybite to deal a full blown 80 damage, boosted to 100 with Muscle Band. Unfortunately for me, that 100 would have meant a one-hit-KO to anything in my deck. Unfortunately for this player, though, the draw support was just not with him. Granted, I was forced to take my sweet time setting up as well, getting a few turns without energy to play, but I did pull off a win by finally digging a couple energy cards before it was too late.

Round 2

VS Bunnelby, Bibarel and Bouffalant: Start disrupting a player's deck with Bunnelby discards, set up Bibarel with Continuous Headbutt and Trick Coin for double-chances at easy knock outs, and pack a hefty basic Pokemon like Bouffalant to not only wreck a field with heavy damage, but disrupt energy without the need for Enhanced Hammer! We played a little game of back-and-fourth on Team Flare Grunts, but I managed to set up a Swanna on the bench with three Water Energy to avoid an Enhanced Hammer. For the longest time, I hesitated putting it up, until I finally dug Lysandre out of my deck and managed to pull up the Bibarel that was one energy away from causing all sorts of problems. A Muscle Band on Swanna and a Stadium in play, and I managed to take it down in one fell swoop and regain control of our stand-off to cinch a second victory of the day.

Round 3

VS Stunfisk, Lunatone and Solrock: A great combination, put together by a clever player! Stunfisk does minor damage on its own, but the bench damage proves valuable for setting up consecutive knock outs. Add in a Solrock who deals a base 40 damage for a single energy, as long as Lunatone is benched, and a Lunatone who checks and rearranges the top two cards of your own deck every turn, and you have a recipe for success! Considering how my first two opponents were using Colorless decks with fighting type weaknesses, it's easy to see how a fighting deck in the hands of a skilled player also scored two wins up to this point. However, even with all of that, and after scoring a quick and easy knock out against my leading bird with a Muscle Band and two Strong Energy, the long term game became quickly controlled by Rough Seas, Swallow and Enhanced Hammer. I mean, when you deal 100 damage with Pelipper's Swallow attack, that's essentially a full heal. This opponent played a great game, and I personally loved the Lunatone/Solrock combo he ran with. Had I been aware of that particular pair of them, I might have run it myself. However, the water-birds once again gave me the control I needed to claim a third victory, leading to a far more intimidating match.

Round 4

VS a lonely Stunfisk: A long time competitive player and local star went super-light on his Pokemon line, and I have to admit, before even knowing what he used I was intimidated. You know how you have those players who are infamous for being tough to beat? They play some of the best decks in the format, and play with amazing skill to consistently top cut in events. Yes. This is one of those guys. And he ran raw Stunfisk. If there was another Pokemon in the deck, I never saw it. I only saw two Stunfisk, and one of them came back with Revive, though I must assume there were two others somewhere in his deck. Running such a low Pokemon count allowed for a lot of room in search, disruption and recovery options. Naturally, since trainer lock is a complete non issue, he pretty much had free reign to do as he wished! Unfortunately, between weakness and resistance (after I used Swanna to blow away a Magnetic Storm, of course), plus Rough Seas constantly healing over his low damage output, the win was fairly easy to grasp, and my hype carried me into the final round.

Round 5

VS Unfezant and Miltank: And who else would my opponent be, other than one of the 2014 national champs. At first glance, I thought stage 2 Pokemon would be too much of a liability, so I overlooked Unfezant in my initial research of the tournament's legal possibilities to use a Miltank's one-energy-for-80-damage Powerful Friends attack. But boy was I wrong. Winona provided all the search this player needed. It was all I could do to keep energy off his Miltank, even using a VS Seeker to reuse Team Flare Grunt to get rid of a fire energy, thinking that he might have burned through most of them by that point, just to buy myself one turn. But alas, he steamrolled right through my birds, one by one. He easily proved how he went undefeated through the rest of the day to face off in the finals. After all, Unfezant carries resistance to ground, to counteract the weakness that Miltank suffers to the likes of Stunfisk and Lunatone, and the choice of Fire energy as his basic was chosen solely on the fact that some players might use Scorched Earth, thus taking advantage of their draw support for his own. All in all, I am proud to say my only loss of the day was to such a well crafted and executed deck.