Cyrus
Iron Chef - Master Emeritus
~~~Pooka~~~
Before I start, I just want to thank you, Johnny, for running these tournaments. I know you put a lot of work into them, and everyone participating in them appreciates all the work you've done. It's been fun. =)
Now we have another subpar ex to work with. Yum.
// Pokemon
4 Holon's Castform
1 Holon's Voltorb
3 Dragonite d
2 Dragonair d2
4 Dratini d2
2 Nidoqueen d
1 Nidorina d
2 Nidoran d (F)
3 Rocket's Raikou ex
2 Mewtwo d
1 Lugia ex
// Trainers
4 Holon Transceiver
4 Rare Candy
4 Holon Mentor
2 Giant Stump
2 Windstorm
2 Holon Researcher
2 Switch
2 Holon Adventurer
1 Holon Scientist
1 Holon Farmer
// Energy
11 Lightning Energy
Well, after looking at the options for Raikou, Dragonite d clearly seemed to be the best. However, just running it with Dragonite would be plain and boring. Let's spice it up a bit!
Yes, the focus of the deck is to load Rocket's Raikou ex with a bunch of Lightning and start beating down. However, there are a few tricks you can pull, and they all revolve around Mewtwo d. If a Raikou is damaged, just plop another one on the bench, Delta Switch (Mewtwo's Power) the Energy to the fresh Raikou, Switch/Retreat to the new one, and Stump away the Mewtwo and damaged Raikou. Then, Farmer the stuff back into the deck, and grab it again with Nidoqueen. Mewtwo gives the deck plenty of options and can easily catch the opponent off guard.
While Nidoqueen is mostly there for consistency purposes, it's a valuable attacker as well. Overall, Queen gives the deck more flexibility and more options.
Running Dark Energy for Raikou's Power was an option, but it wasn't a very good idea. Since there's really no benefit from Dark Energy (Lightning just adds 10 to Raikou's attack anyway), it was pointless. If a situation comes up where the Power would be necessary, just attach a Castform.
Of course, I couldn't resist running Lugia ex for that big surprise KO. It does 200 damage!!!111
There you have it. I've had fun doing these, and I hope they continue. Again, thank you for running these, Kettler! Good luck to Gordon.
Deck (10/10): Pooka consistency is consistently succeeding! You’ve got great draw, great switching, decent protection against power-haters, and good Pokemon lines. 4-2-3 sounds awfully awkward for the Dragonite, but with Holon Farmer protecting you from falling apart, this’ll do. Energy’s also hardcore. Good going, Pooka.
Creativity (4/5): Take a popular card this format, an unpopular card, and…make a creative deck? Yes, you did just that. I think the only thing directly uncovered here is Rocket’s Raikou’s vulnerability to OHKO’s, but Lugia can answer back to anything big enough to run through you quickly. Giant Stump+Windstorm is a nice combo for your deck, and adds a whole new dimension to game-play possibilities.
Card Use (4/5): The poke-power is excellently used in combination with the Giant Stump, and the unlimited damage potential is abused to true quality. You’re discarding your damaged/reusable Pokemon successfully. Higher quantities of key cards like Stump might have pushed the deck over the top, but I’m lovin’ it.
OVERALL: 18/20
~~~Slimeygrimey~~~
Ok, Rocket’s Raikou was one of the most challenging cards I’ve had to try to build a deck around. It’s a card I’ve occasionally glanced at in my binder and thought briefly about what could be done with it before tossing it aside each time. This time however, I have to use Raikou =/. So I tried and tried to find disruptive ways and cards to make use of Raikou’s Poke-Power, but I just couldn’t come up with a combination that made sense. It’s difficult to use the power without attacking with Raikou, since you need to attach an energy to Raikou most turns to make good use of the power, so I looked for Pokémon that could use their Poke-Powers as offensive weapons. However, nothing really worked. Jolteon and Shiftry (etc.) aren’t powerful enough, nor does it make any sense to use them with Raikou’s power. So instead of trying to make some ridiculous combo with Raikou’s power that would allow me to ignore the rest of the card, ;x I’m instead forced to look at the entire card. ;p
After looking through my binder, I finally managed to come up with a way to play the card that seemed interesting, and actually pretty decent. I decided to focus on Raikou as an attacker. Unfortunately, Raikou has only semi-decent HP, and requires a lot of energy to do a lot of damage, resulting in a frequent need to charge a new Raikou with a lot of energy. To keep you from losing all your energy when Raikou is knocked out, we can use the Energy Trans Sceptile to move energy away from your damaged Raikou after it has been hit by an attack, and then put a fresh one active with all the energy. The problem is if your Raikou gets OHKO’d. If that happens, you lose your energy and Sceptile can’t save them. This is a really big deal because a lot of cards in the game can do 100 damage, which is exactly Raikou’s HP. In order to prevent these attacks from knocking out Raikou, we can play Buffer Piece, which can conveniently be attached to ex’s, effectively increasing Raikou’s HP to 120, and moving it out of KO range for most attacks. We’re still left with damaged Raikou’s on the bench though after it gets attacked. A damaged Raikou is nearly useless, because you can’t risk all your energy on attacking with it, and eventually you’re going to run out of Raikou or bench space before you’ve won the game. In order to keep on the offensive without risking your energy on damaged Raikou’s, we can play Giant Stump/Holon’s Farmer to discard and recycle your Raikou’s.
There is the unfortunate issue of Raikou’s weakness to deal with as well. Raikou’s weakness to Fighting effectively means that any solid Fighting type Pokémon can OHKO it. To deal with this I’ve decided to include Sceptile ex d; since I’m already playing Sceptile POP, Sceptile ex d is probably the most efficient catchall solution to the fighting type. It doesn’t OHKO every Fighting type Pokémon, because they aren’t all Psychic weak, but most of them are weak to it, and it still overpowers the ones that aren’t Psychic weak. Sceptile ex d also has the advantage of easily OHKO’ing Lugia ex and Latias*, the only two frequently played cards that can OHKO Rocket’s Raikou ex with a Buffer Piece attached.
Now, the problem with Buffer Piece is that it only lasts one turn, and there are cards out there that deal 100 damage every turn. As well, you may want to reduce damage anyway to hopefully allow two straight attacks with the same Raikou. If you’re playing an opponent that does 60 damage a turn, and you can play two Buffer Piece in two turns to allow for two attacks with the same Raikou before having to switch to another one. More so the issue is the cards that do 100 damage each turn, and to help deal with them we can add Quagsire d to retrieve your Buffer Pieces. Quagsire also works with the Giant Stump/Holon Farmer combo to allow for even more usage of your Buffer Pieces
Anyway, here’s a list:
Pokémon: 27
3 Rocket’s Raikou ex
2 Sceptile POP4
2 Sceptile ex d
2 Grovyle d
3 Treecko d
2 Quagsire d
2 Wooper d
2 Nidoqueen d
1 Nidorina d
2 Nidoran d (F)
4 Holon’s Castform
1 Holon’s Magnemite
1 Holon’s Magneton
Trainers: 25
4 Holon Transceiver
3 Holon Mentor
2 Holon Researcher
1 Holon Adventurer
1 Holon Farmer
3 Giant Stump
3 Buffer Piece
3 Windstorm
3 Rare Candy
2 Balloon Berry
Energy: 8
4 Darkness Energy
4 Rainbow Energy
Unfortunately, this deck is very tight on space. I would have liked a 4th Treecko, a 4th Mentor, a second Adventurer and maybe another energy or two, but other cards had to be included over them.
The strategy of the deck is to attack with Raikou, keep it from getting KO’d with Buffer Piece, retreat it to another with Balloon Berry, and then move all the energy up to the fresh Raikou with Sceptile’s Energy Trans. Using Quagsire’s Poke-Power, both Buffer Piece and Balloon Berry can be re-used, and once you’ve accumulated a couple of damage Raikou’s or spent Quagsire’s on the bench, you stump them away and search them out again with Nidoqueen. You only need to pull off a Quagsire every few turns, so there’s no rush to find one of those after a stump if you time it right. Raikou’s power also works very well with stump in that it will force your opponent to discard all of their “dead cards” on the bench, meaning they will have nothing to put up as a decoy, and so will be forced to put up something like Metagross DX or a half-built stage one.
Despite the lone adventurer for supporter-based draw, this deck should have little issue finding what it needs with Holon’s Castform and Nidoqueen d. 2 Holon Researcher should insure a fast Nidoqueen each game, while Castform fills your hand with 3-4 cards per turn. The only basic you want on your bench that isn’t delta is Raikou, which you can easily get away with just one of at the beginning of the game.
Two Sceptile ex d are included because in some matches you will be forced to attack with them more than Raikou. If you don’t need one for the match you’re in, you’re best off not putting it down, as it takes away from your Quagsire/Raikou space. The Poke-Body of Sceptile ex d is a non-issue for Raikou, as you will have more than just three energy on Raikou anyway, but it is a big deal for opponent’s Pokémon ex, and it will make it harder for them to get built and KO Raikou. The issue between Sceptile’s Poke-Body and Raikou is made even less significant by the fact that if you want to be attacking with Raikou, you shouldn’t have Sceptile in play, and if you’re attacking with Sceptile, you’re not attacking with Raikou.
I’ve included a large number of Transceiver/Mentor to make Delta Drawing with Castform easier and more effective, and two Holon Researcher because it searches everything except Sceptile POP and Raikou, especially important is that it finds your Nidoqueen which will fetch you everything else. The Farmer is needed to retrieve Raikou, Sceptile ex d (and pre-evolutions), and the Quagsire line. The three Giant Stump are necessary because you will be required to play it several times to recycle Raikou and Quagsire. Buffer Piece is necessary to protect your Raikou’s from OHKO’s, and Windstorm is necessary to get rid of opponent’s stadiums and Cessation Crystal, but also to remove your own Giant Stump so you have room for damaged Raikou’s. Balloon Berry is played over Switch or Warp Point because you can retrieve them with Quagsire. It’s necessary to play switching cards because you will be doing a lot of switching to save your damaged Raikou’s, and do not want to have to be spending two energy cards each time to do it.
The deck has 9 energy that can be attached to Castform, including one that can be searched by Mentor, and all of the energy in the deck except the Magnemite cause Raikou’s Power to activate. Sceptile can move all the energy except the Darkness Energy and the Magnemite. 5 Holon’s double energy are included because they can be moved with Sceptile, and allow you to recycle your darks to be used again with Raikou, and activate its power at the same time. Generally, you just want to activate Raikou’s power because if your opponent has something active, that’s what they have allowed you to attack. If you activate Raikou’s power, you’re forcing them to give you something that they didn’t want to. Sometimes this isn’t the case and your opponent is forced to attack with something they don’t want you to attack, but a lot of the time hitting something that your opponent has on the bench is not what they want you to do.
The Holon’s energy are really good in here as they do three things for you. They activate Raikou’s power, return energy to your hand to allow you to re-attach them to Raikou to use its power again, and they provide a 20 damage boost to Raikou’s attack. Darkness energy is interesting because it actually provides the same effect as a lightning energy on Raikou. The difference though is that Darkness activates the power, so Darkness is the choice.
Deck (8/10): The build is tight, and it hurts certain parts of your deck. Your consistency and search are all very high, but with only one adventurer to rely on, this may take a long while to get all the necessary cards if you’re forced to attack earlier than expected. Also, even with the six holon pokemon, I feel like the energy count is a bit too low, especially when it comes to castform-attachable stuff. You might have wanted the fourth rare candy also, but other than those things, you did fine here.
Creativity (4/5): Wow, this is pretty cool! I think that you not only revived Raikou ex effectively, but you also found a neat deck for Sceptile POP4 to be a part of. Repetitive Buffer pieces almost guarantee that your opponent will not get the OHKO on Rocket’s Raikou ex. The Darkness type was also exploited, but not necessarily to the extent it could have been, and the dog does little damage. Great going, though.
Card Use (5/5): Who says you have to play Raikou in a lightning deck? Your abuse of the power is simply phenomenal, and you also have a great way to keep the attacks going. You protect yourself two-fold vs most fighting cards out there, thanks to Psychic and Grass type Sceptiles. Conservation of energy, plus some pretty darn cool tricks, give you a top score here.
OVERALL: 17/20
After both narrowly losing to their opponents, Pooka narrowly defeats Slimeygrimey! To put this competitive nature into perspective, no match this tournament was decided by more than three points, so fantastic going to all sixteen competitors.
Before I start, I just want to thank you, Johnny, for running these tournaments. I know you put a lot of work into them, and everyone participating in them appreciates all the work you've done. It's been fun. =)
Now we have another subpar ex to work with. Yum.
// Pokemon
4 Holon's Castform
1 Holon's Voltorb
3 Dragonite d
2 Dragonair d2
4 Dratini d2
2 Nidoqueen d
1 Nidorina d
2 Nidoran d (F)
3 Rocket's Raikou ex
2 Mewtwo d
1 Lugia ex
// Trainers
4 Holon Transceiver
4 Rare Candy
4 Holon Mentor
2 Giant Stump
2 Windstorm
2 Holon Researcher
2 Switch
2 Holon Adventurer
1 Holon Scientist
1 Holon Farmer
// Energy
11 Lightning Energy
Well, after looking at the options for Raikou, Dragonite d clearly seemed to be the best. However, just running it with Dragonite would be plain and boring. Let's spice it up a bit!
Yes, the focus of the deck is to load Rocket's Raikou ex with a bunch of Lightning and start beating down. However, there are a few tricks you can pull, and they all revolve around Mewtwo d. If a Raikou is damaged, just plop another one on the bench, Delta Switch (Mewtwo's Power) the Energy to the fresh Raikou, Switch/Retreat to the new one, and Stump away the Mewtwo and damaged Raikou. Then, Farmer the stuff back into the deck, and grab it again with Nidoqueen. Mewtwo gives the deck plenty of options and can easily catch the opponent off guard.
While Nidoqueen is mostly there for consistency purposes, it's a valuable attacker as well. Overall, Queen gives the deck more flexibility and more options.
Running Dark Energy for Raikou's Power was an option, but it wasn't a very good idea. Since there's really no benefit from Dark Energy (Lightning just adds 10 to Raikou's attack anyway), it was pointless. If a situation comes up where the Power would be necessary, just attach a Castform.
Of course, I couldn't resist running Lugia ex for that big surprise KO. It does 200 damage!!!111
There you have it. I've had fun doing these, and I hope they continue. Again, thank you for running these, Kettler! Good luck to Gordon.
Deck (10/10): Pooka consistency is consistently succeeding! You’ve got great draw, great switching, decent protection against power-haters, and good Pokemon lines. 4-2-3 sounds awfully awkward for the Dragonite, but with Holon Farmer protecting you from falling apart, this’ll do. Energy’s also hardcore. Good going, Pooka.
Creativity (4/5): Take a popular card this format, an unpopular card, and…make a creative deck? Yes, you did just that. I think the only thing directly uncovered here is Rocket’s Raikou’s vulnerability to OHKO’s, but Lugia can answer back to anything big enough to run through you quickly. Giant Stump+Windstorm is a nice combo for your deck, and adds a whole new dimension to game-play possibilities.
Card Use (4/5): The poke-power is excellently used in combination with the Giant Stump, and the unlimited damage potential is abused to true quality. You’re discarding your damaged/reusable Pokemon successfully. Higher quantities of key cards like Stump might have pushed the deck over the top, but I’m lovin’ it.
OVERALL: 18/20
~~~Slimeygrimey~~~
Ok, Rocket’s Raikou was one of the most challenging cards I’ve had to try to build a deck around. It’s a card I’ve occasionally glanced at in my binder and thought briefly about what could be done with it before tossing it aside each time. This time however, I have to use Raikou =/. So I tried and tried to find disruptive ways and cards to make use of Raikou’s Poke-Power, but I just couldn’t come up with a combination that made sense. It’s difficult to use the power without attacking with Raikou, since you need to attach an energy to Raikou most turns to make good use of the power, so I looked for Pokémon that could use their Poke-Powers as offensive weapons. However, nothing really worked. Jolteon and Shiftry (etc.) aren’t powerful enough, nor does it make any sense to use them with Raikou’s power. So instead of trying to make some ridiculous combo with Raikou’s power that would allow me to ignore the rest of the card, ;x I’m instead forced to look at the entire card. ;p
After looking through my binder, I finally managed to come up with a way to play the card that seemed interesting, and actually pretty decent. I decided to focus on Raikou as an attacker. Unfortunately, Raikou has only semi-decent HP, and requires a lot of energy to do a lot of damage, resulting in a frequent need to charge a new Raikou with a lot of energy. To keep you from losing all your energy when Raikou is knocked out, we can use the Energy Trans Sceptile to move energy away from your damaged Raikou after it has been hit by an attack, and then put a fresh one active with all the energy. The problem is if your Raikou gets OHKO’d. If that happens, you lose your energy and Sceptile can’t save them. This is a really big deal because a lot of cards in the game can do 100 damage, which is exactly Raikou’s HP. In order to prevent these attacks from knocking out Raikou, we can play Buffer Piece, which can conveniently be attached to ex’s, effectively increasing Raikou’s HP to 120, and moving it out of KO range for most attacks. We’re still left with damaged Raikou’s on the bench though after it gets attacked. A damaged Raikou is nearly useless, because you can’t risk all your energy on attacking with it, and eventually you’re going to run out of Raikou or bench space before you’ve won the game. In order to keep on the offensive without risking your energy on damaged Raikou’s, we can play Giant Stump/Holon’s Farmer to discard and recycle your Raikou’s.
There is the unfortunate issue of Raikou’s weakness to deal with as well. Raikou’s weakness to Fighting effectively means that any solid Fighting type Pokémon can OHKO it. To deal with this I’ve decided to include Sceptile ex d; since I’m already playing Sceptile POP, Sceptile ex d is probably the most efficient catchall solution to the fighting type. It doesn’t OHKO every Fighting type Pokémon, because they aren’t all Psychic weak, but most of them are weak to it, and it still overpowers the ones that aren’t Psychic weak. Sceptile ex d also has the advantage of easily OHKO’ing Lugia ex and Latias*, the only two frequently played cards that can OHKO Rocket’s Raikou ex with a Buffer Piece attached.
Now, the problem with Buffer Piece is that it only lasts one turn, and there are cards out there that deal 100 damage every turn. As well, you may want to reduce damage anyway to hopefully allow two straight attacks with the same Raikou. If you’re playing an opponent that does 60 damage a turn, and you can play two Buffer Piece in two turns to allow for two attacks with the same Raikou before having to switch to another one. More so the issue is the cards that do 100 damage each turn, and to help deal with them we can add Quagsire d to retrieve your Buffer Pieces. Quagsire also works with the Giant Stump/Holon Farmer combo to allow for even more usage of your Buffer Pieces
Anyway, here’s a list:
Pokémon: 27
3 Rocket’s Raikou ex
2 Sceptile POP4
2 Sceptile ex d
2 Grovyle d
3 Treecko d
2 Quagsire d
2 Wooper d
2 Nidoqueen d
1 Nidorina d
2 Nidoran d (F)
4 Holon’s Castform
1 Holon’s Magnemite
1 Holon’s Magneton
Trainers: 25
4 Holon Transceiver
3 Holon Mentor
2 Holon Researcher
1 Holon Adventurer
1 Holon Farmer
3 Giant Stump
3 Buffer Piece
3 Windstorm
3 Rare Candy
2 Balloon Berry
Energy: 8
4 Darkness Energy
4 Rainbow Energy
Unfortunately, this deck is very tight on space. I would have liked a 4th Treecko, a 4th Mentor, a second Adventurer and maybe another energy or two, but other cards had to be included over them.
The strategy of the deck is to attack with Raikou, keep it from getting KO’d with Buffer Piece, retreat it to another with Balloon Berry, and then move all the energy up to the fresh Raikou with Sceptile’s Energy Trans. Using Quagsire’s Poke-Power, both Buffer Piece and Balloon Berry can be re-used, and once you’ve accumulated a couple of damage Raikou’s or spent Quagsire’s on the bench, you stump them away and search them out again with Nidoqueen. You only need to pull off a Quagsire every few turns, so there’s no rush to find one of those after a stump if you time it right. Raikou’s power also works very well with stump in that it will force your opponent to discard all of their “dead cards” on the bench, meaning they will have nothing to put up as a decoy, and so will be forced to put up something like Metagross DX or a half-built stage one.
Despite the lone adventurer for supporter-based draw, this deck should have little issue finding what it needs with Holon’s Castform and Nidoqueen d. 2 Holon Researcher should insure a fast Nidoqueen each game, while Castform fills your hand with 3-4 cards per turn. The only basic you want on your bench that isn’t delta is Raikou, which you can easily get away with just one of at the beginning of the game.
Two Sceptile ex d are included because in some matches you will be forced to attack with them more than Raikou. If you don’t need one for the match you’re in, you’re best off not putting it down, as it takes away from your Quagsire/Raikou space. The Poke-Body of Sceptile ex d is a non-issue for Raikou, as you will have more than just three energy on Raikou anyway, but it is a big deal for opponent’s Pokémon ex, and it will make it harder for them to get built and KO Raikou. The issue between Sceptile’s Poke-Body and Raikou is made even less significant by the fact that if you want to be attacking with Raikou, you shouldn’t have Sceptile in play, and if you’re attacking with Sceptile, you’re not attacking with Raikou.
I’ve included a large number of Transceiver/Mentor to make Delta Drawing with Castform easier and more effective, and two Holon Researcher because it searches everything except Sceptile POP and Raikou, especially important is that it finds your Nidoqueen which will fetch you everything else. The Farmer is needed to retrieve Raikou, Sceptile ex d (and pre-evolutions), and the Quagsire line. The three Giant Stump are necessary because you will be required to play it several times to recycle Raikou and Quagsire. Buffer Piece is necessary to protect your Raikou’s from OHKO’s, and Windstorm is necessary to get rid of opponent’s stadiums and Cessation Crystal, but also to remove your own Giant Stump so you have room for damaged Raikou’s. Balloon Berry is played over Switch or Warp Point because you can retrieve them with Quagsire. It’s necessary to play switching cards because you will be doing a lot of switching to save your damaged Raikou’s, and do not want to have to be spending two energy cards each time to do it.
The deck has 9 energy that can be attached to Castform, including one that can be searched by Mentor, and all of the energy in the deck except the Magnemite cause Raikou’s Power to activate. Sceptile can move all the energy except the Darkness Energy and the Magnemite. 5 Holon’s double energy are included because they can be moved with Sceptile, and allow you to recycle your darks to be used again with Raikou, and activate its power at the same time. Generally, you just want to activate Raikou’s power because if your opponent has something active, that’s what they have allowed you to attack. If you activate Raikou’s power, you’re forcing them to give you something that they didn’t want to. Sometimes this isn’t the case and your opponent is forced to attack with something they don’t want you to attack, but a lot of the time hitting something that your opponent has on the bench is not what they want you to do.
The Holon’s energy are really good in here as they do three things for you. They activate Raikou’s power, return energy to your hand to allow you to re-attach them to Raikou to use its power again, and they provide a 20 damage boost to Raikou’s attack. Darkness energy is interesting because it actually provides the same effect as a lightning energy on Raikou. The difference though is that Darkness activates the power, so Darkness is the choice.
Deck (8/10): The build is tight, and it hurts certain parts of your deck. Your consistency and search are all very high, but with only one adventurer to rely on, this may take a long while to get all the necessary cards if you’re forced to attack earlier than expected. Also, even with the six holon pokemon, I feel like the energy count is a bit too low, especially when it comes to castform-attachable stuff. You might have wanted the fourth rare candy also, but other than those things, you did fine here.
Creativity (4/5): Wow, this is pretty cool! I think that you not only revived Raikou ex effectively, but you also found a neat deck for Sceptile POP4 to be a part of. Repetitive Buffer pieces almost guarantee that your opponent will not get the OHKO on Rocket’s Raikou ex. The Darkness type was also exploited, but not necessarily to the extent it could have been, and the dog does little damage. Great going, though.
Card Use (5/5): Who says you have to play Raikou in a lightning deck? Your abuse of the power is simply phenomenal, and you also have a great way to keep the attacks going. You protect yourself two-fold vs most fighting cards out there, thanks to Psychic and Grass type Sceptiles. Conservation of energy, plus some pretty darn cool tricks, give you a top score here.
OVERALL: 17/20
After both narrowly losing to their opponents, Pooka narrowly defeats Slimeygrimey! To put this competitive nature into perspective, no match this tournament was decided by more than three points, so fantastic going to all sixteen competitors.