Directions on how to differentiate Voter Input over other comments:
-Read carefully through each deck.
-Title your post as "Voter Input."
-Tell me which deck right off the bat deserved the win.
-In a few sentences, tell me why that deck deserved the win, and the other deck didn't.. Remember, this is a 1 v. 1 format, meaning that you aren't choosing the best of four, but the best of two...twice.
-Use some grade at the bottom of your post to rationalize your decision - preferably the system I've been using this whole contest.
~~~Drrty Byl VS Yellowlob~~~
Drrty Byl
The Metal Parrot
18 Pokemon
4 Piplup L9 DP
2 Prinplup MD
3 Empoleon SF
1 Empoleon LV.X
1 Beldum L.9 LA
1 Metang L.22 LA
1 Metagross L.58
2 Baltoy GE
2 Claydol GE
1 Azelf L.55 LA
26 Trainers
4 Bebe's Search
4 Roseanne's Research
2 Professor Oak's Visit
3 Buck's Training
2 Cynthia's Feelings
4 Super Scoop Up
1 Night Maintenance
4 Rare Candy
2 Energy Pickup
16 Energy
4 Call Energy
6 Water Energy
2 Metal Energy
4 Metal Energy (sp)
The strategy behind this deck is to continuously disrupt the opponent's ability to set up or attack, while dishing out steady damage with a well-shielded bird. Disruption is accomplished with the Empoleon-Metagross combo. Empoleon SF's "Imperial Aura" Poke-Power and "Whirlpool" attack slow the opponent's ability to attach, and ultimately, attack. Metagross' "Magnetic Reversal" Poke-Power makes it possible to lure up and destroy the opponent's bench fodder (CLAYDOL!) and further slows inbound attacks by forcing the opponent to waste attachments and retreat or sacrifice Pokemon. Empoleon Lv. X's "Supreme Command" Poke-Power adds to the disruption by forcing cards from his/her hand. Azelf makes it possible to run a small, yet effective Metagross line, and also fetches prized Empoleon Lv. X. Claydol's "Cosmic Power" is a consistency staple. The heavy Piplup count is to make starting with the bird easier. Metagross also helps to cover weakness as an attacker in a pinch.
Buck's Training builds draw consistency and helps dish out slightly more damage, making the ever popular 130 stage 2 HP a 2-shot affair. Super Scoop Up, Energy Pickup, and Rare Candy make it possible to pick up a damaged Empoleon and lay it back down. Night Maintenance makes it possible to retrieve a kaput Empoleon Lv.X or Metagross.
Call Energy is an obvious consistency move, and the supporting Empoleon/Metagross lines are built to accommodate its C cost. Special Metal Energy is particularly important part of the deck, and couples well with Empoleon's first attack, "Steel Wing", which reduces damage to Empoleon by 20, making it difficult for the opponent to deal considerable damage. Special Metal obviously also works on Metagross.
Yellowlob
4x Piplup (DP)
3x Prinplup (DP)
3x Empoleon
2x Magnemite
1x Magneton
2x Magnezone
1x Magnezone lvl x
2x Baltoy
2x Claydol
1x Spinarak
1x Ariados
Pokemon: 22
4x Special Metal
1x Metal
4x Water
4x Call
2x Lightning
Energy: 15
3x Roseannes Research
4x Bebe’s Search
2x Cynthia’s Feelings
2x Buck’s Training
4x Rare Candy
4x Super Scoop Up
2x Warp Point
2x Night Maintenance
Trainers: 23
Strategy: Using Empoleon’s Power and attacks, with support from ariados and magnezone to abuse them, take advantage early game when they don’t have energy and tank your empoleon to the end.
Abusing empoleon: Empoleon has a built in synergy between its attack and its power, so energy control (of your opponent) is taken care of for the most part. This is further enhanced by ariados, meaning your opponent will be retreating not quite as often.
Empoleon also has extreme tankability, being steel type and using steel wing. It also has massive HP. So to abuse these, special metal is added that can be regulated by magnezone lvl x. you can also move off the metals to a new prinplup, scoop up your active, then play the empoleon back onto the new prinplup.
Scoop-up to reuse its power and prevent Kos. Buck’s to add that extra oomph empoleon needs.
Also, in cases where damage is needed, Magnezone can clean up, moving all the metals to him so that he can do 90+, making up for empoleons lack of damage.
Magnezone also gives free retreat, to bypass ariados and to get new prinplups out to evolve.
Preliminary opinion:
Lists:
Drrty Byl's list is clearly superior to Yellowlob's, but unfortunately for him, it's not superior enough to get him out of the 8 range (near the 9 range). Consistency is very nice, but not as nice as it could be, while a lack of reliable switching is a problem. 8/10.
Yellowlob, on the other hand, barely got into the 8 range. Although his list was fine, consistency felt shaky, and the techs seemed a bit difficult to setup. 8/10.
Creativity:
Both ideas seem to be on the "above average" tilt for me. Drrty has an intelligent gust method, while Yellowlob's Magnezone makes his birds free retreat, and thus makes swarming easier. Both neat ideas, but not absolutely shocking. 3/5 for both.
Card Use:
Ah yes...This is a pain.
The Poke-Power and the second attack seem to go hand in hand, so I'll focus on those as a shared criterion. On one hand, Drrty makes the impact of Emperor Aura/Whirlpool much more potent, by being able to gust things up via Metagross. On the other hand, Yellowlob makes it more reliable through free retreat (not to mention a couple Warp Points).
Neither of them abused Steel Wing much at all, but they both tried to make its damage output better via Buck's Training. Both receive 3/5 here for prelim grading.
TOTAL:
Drrty Byl: 14/20
Yellowlob: 14/20
Both sent in good entries. Drrty Byl's list is clearly better...But...Yelllowlob's concept appears to be overall more effective. This is so close, in fact, that had (hypothetically speaking) either of them thrown in a 1-0-1 tech of the other's concept, then he would've won.
I view this as possibly the closest match of the entire contest. Right now I'm calling it a tie until further notice.
~~~Pidgeotto Trainer VS BloodDraek~~~
Pidgeotto Trainer
Pokemon 23
4 Piplup dp
2 Prinplup dp
4 Empoleon SF
2 Baltoy ge
2 Claydol ge
2 Cresselia md
2 Cresselia x ge
2 Unown Q md
1 Unown G ge
1 Unown P md
1 Chatot md
Trainers 23
4 Bebe’s Search
4 Roseanne’s Research
4 Oak’s Visit
4 Rare Candy
4 Super Scoop Up
3 Night Maintenance
Energy 14
4 Call
4 Metal sp
6 Water
Empoleon SF. At first I thought its power could be used on the bench, and was thinking of Starmie/Mr. Mime. That combo is a large part of a deck with Pluspowers etc., and when I found out that it would also need lots of switches to be using Empo’s power (yeah even in addition to SSUs), I decided against that.
The power being needed in the active spot forces us to use Empoleon’s weak attacks, which is alright since it has one of the strongest powers the game has ever seen. The most efficient attack is the first one, the 40 and 20 defense. The 2nd attack will certainly be used, but it does the same amount of damage essentially (40 and 20 defense vs 60 straight) and only does more on a flip which often won’t matter when it’s our koing move. So we’ll focus on the first attack. With 1 Metal, this can potentially be a 30 defense, very solid. 40 is so weak though. 4 hit ko the many 130 HP guys? The perfect compliment to a card that simply doesn’t do enough damage is Cresselia x. If you’re mainly doing 40, you don’t need a Pluspower once in a while, you need it basically every turn. This looks kind of pathetic, all this to improve our terrible attack power?, until we think of Empoleon’s defense again. This is even more complimented by Cresselia. Cresselia with some 90 HP guy that’s just going to get ko’d in 1-2 turns easily won’t buy you more turns of not being ko’d. A 130 HP guy with defense +30? Now that’s different. 2 Cresselia out means (until you get to ko range) an effective defense of 50?!?! Now that’s making a significant difference in the game. Cresselia is absolutely perfect for guys that do little damage and take a lot of hits without being ko’d and Empoleon fits that mold EXACTLY. I really want to stress that, the deck may not look so techy or sparkly, but that’s because I really believe these 2 Pokemon are just perfect compliments, and doubt a better partner for Empoleon could be found.
Everything else should look self explanatory, your basic (but proven very good) Claydol/Supporters/Call engine to get those Empoleons and Cresselia out. Once you get those going, your opponent will find it hard to deal with decent attack power (with Cresselia), very, very strong defense and having to skip their energy drop multiple turns a game. And all this from a guy that will usually only want 2 energy to attack and has the sol
The deck doesn’t have many techy tricks, since Cresselia fits it so well and techier tricks like the Starmie/Mime just are going to take too much space. 4 SSU because the power is SO broken (I’ve thought this long before this contest). SSU is also great with tanks like Empoleon, especially ones with not too much energy, and 2 isn’t very much. 3 NM because I may want even more than 6 Empoleon over the course of the game, when they have one prize left you can retreat for more Empoleons and get more of his power which could slow them down enough to win. (How many games have all of us had where we are certain to lose next turn UNLESS they don’t have an energy to play, now you can make them miss that easy last move). They might ko Empoleon 5 times and you’ll still have 2 more powers instead of one and that could be the difference. Or, they ko Chatot and 4 Empoleon and you have 3 powers at the end. With only 2 energy to get attacking, this retreat and swarm with more powers strategy should definitely work in an endgame.
I’ve learned Uxie is great, but I like Chatot in a deck that can fit Calls to get setup.
The Unowns may make you scratch your head. The Unown Qs are mainly for Cresselias. Unown G is for placing damage counter, special conditions etc. decks. Empoleons natural defense doesn’t work there, so Unown G is a natural ally and just one can be SSU’d and NM’d multiple times. Unown P looks strange in theory, but is a metagame play I thought was worth it. It’s always helpful to look at the metagame when you think about a deck, so what’s big right now? Kingdra and AMU. Kingdra looks great for this. Your 60 gets reduced by 30 id 130 HP.
...and then 20 removed? Nice. AMU looks like trouble though. Your power will be GREAT against it, but your 40s won’t 2 hit ko, and you’ll have no damage counters to move. (Yes, you can do 40 and then 60, but that 3rd energy drop when they’ll ko a lot is huge and your swarms will run out much quicker.) So… we can use Unown P as essentially a Pluspower. Since all the AMU x’s have 90 hp, the 10 extra is perfect for making 2 hit kos, which should give us the victory (since the power will basically make impossible repeated 1 hit kos from them).
Energy is pretty standard, thought about 1 Psychic, but I like as many Waters as possible for Prinplup dp. Those 10s will be nice to manipulate with Cress later. I don’t see attacking with Cresselia coming up much, Empoleon is much more efficient.
Thanks.
BloodDraek
Disuptive Rush
pokemon: 20
4-2-3/1 Empoleon (3 SF, 1 MD)
2-2 Claydol
1-1 Palkia Lv.X
2 unown q
1 Azelf LA
1 Chatot MD
energy: 14
4 call energy
4 Special Metal Energy
6 Water energy
trainers: 26
4 bebe's
4 roseanne's
4 Rare candy
4 switch
4 Super Scoop up
2 Speed Stadium
2 Wager
1 TMTS2(devoluter)
1 Night Maintenance
Strategy
You want to get an empoleon SF out as early as possible along with a prinplup and piplup on bench. With super scoop ups you can consistantly use empoleon sf's pokepower. Palkia Lv.X offers more board control. The tech of empoleon MD is for when you use palkia Lv.X to bring up something that you don't want to die (heavy retreat for example) so you can snipe their bench. 4 Switches because unown Qs aren't enough when handling palkia Lv.X. 2 Speed stadium for extra draw power which the deck needs, and palkia can fetch it if you are unlucky enough to start with him. Azelf to take important stuff out of the prizes and of course chatot for bad starts(uxie not for this deck IMO). Everything else is pretty self explanitory.
[[[I will post my preliminary opinions here tomorrow]]]
