Counter Decks for Empoleon, Mag, and GG

[jazee]

I'm a new player but absorbing as much info as fast as I can. It appears, on average, the most successful decks center around Empoleon, Magmortar or Gardevoir & Gallade, correct? These are the decks I'm hearing are winning tournaments. I've started playing with only 2008-2009 format (D&P) based decks. I'm not sure if the format change is going to effect which decks are dominant, but I'm assuming these three will still be contenders.

I've read some posts about counters for these decks. The problem is the threads can be long and make the decks sort of works in progress with everyone throwing in their two cents. A rarely find a post at the end of the thread where the person who started says something like, "Thanks for all the advice. I tried everyone's advice and after playing various versions of this deck, I found this combination to work best overall when playing against so and so"

Is there a place where people post counter decks that have been tweaked and tested and tweaked and tested where you can just look up the deck you want to counter?

I guess that would take a little of the fun out of deckbuilding but I'm sure it is rare for someone to use a published deck without tweaking at least a couple cards to their personal preference.

Essentially I'm looking for lists of the best "base decks" to test against the top 3 dominant decks. Or in other words what are the best resources out there other than this thread (without having to ready hundreds and hundreds of posts and try to piece it all together?

http://pokegym.net/forums/showthread.php?t=76019

Is there any consensus yet on if there may be a new upcomer as far as a new dominant archetype in the D&P only format aside from these 3?

 

[butlerforhire]

I'm sure this is going to get locked or deleted since it does not follow the forum guidelines, however I will answer some of your questions before either of those happens so that hopefully you can get something constructive out of all this.

First, there is never, ever going to be a singular, definitive "counter" deck for anything. In fact there is never going to be any sort of set-in-stone-as-objectively-superior list for any sort of deck, no matter what people may claim. There are so many variables that affect what a deck is able to do, from differing metagames to player style to crucial in-game decisions to sheer luck/chance to match-ups, that you're never going to find a place here or anywhere else on the web that has absolutely air-tight, perfect, uncontested, invincible, definitive deck lists. You WILL be able to find some pretty rock solid stuff though, and there are instances where certain builds are going to be noticeably superior to others. The link you provided actually is the best you're going to find as far as something like that goes (a "compendium" of sorts filled with sample listings of popular decks). I would use it to get ideas, as well as this deck forum, and go from there. Just don't expect to find some holy shrine filled with perfect lists that are ready for anyone to just take them and turn into gold.

The whole point of this forum is for people to add their two cents, as you say. That is obviously how some of these monstrous decks come together into their final, optimal forms. Although it may be time consuming to actually read through all of the posts in some of the threads you'll find here, you can learn a lot by doing that. Just seeing lists alone is not going to do you any good. Explanation, speculation, debate, evidence via playtesting, etc. are all things you'll find if you dig into the posts and go beyond a mere list search.

As far as top tier decks go for next format, there has been a lot of speculation over Kingdra, Magnezone lv. X, and the Pixie trio (Azelf, Mesprit, Uxie and their level X forms). You can look around these forums for a lot of other deck ideas people have come up with, although these three seem to be the hottest items. GG is likely not going to be the same force it was this season due to its loss of Scramble and DRE, but it will surely still be around. Empoleon will also be hurt with the loss of Scramble but that is not crippling and it will also certainly still be around, possibly gaining a new damage-spreading water comrade in Kyogre. Magmortar took a hit with the rise in Empoleon recently and with Kingdra to worry about as well, I don't know how popular it will be. It and Leafeon lv. X were not an uncommon sight at Nationals though and that is still a viable deck choice, especially since Leafeon lv. X resists water.

 

[jazee]

Awesome post. You hit the nail on the head.

I have to admit this isn't the first time I posted something that someone commented was not in conformity with the forums subject contraints, but the thing is, it should just be moved then. If locked or deleted, they should suggest which forum is better suited. I always look at the topics of all the forums closely before posting. I couldn't determine one that was more appropriate than this form.

No one else needs to reply, again, you confirmed some of my suspicions and summarized everything quite nicely. A side note relating to some of your comments - I was going to comment in that thread about getting Gardevoir banned for Worlds. I was going to say, doesn't luck of the draw and player's decision making ability prevent any one deck from being dominant? Just because one type of deck is winning a lot of tournaments doesn't mean it is the end all and be all of decks. A big factor could be that it just happens to be a popular decks amongst top players. If all the top players thought more individually and more top players played what is termed as 'rogue' decks instead of playing it safe and following the heard, maybe the variety of decks that win the tournaments would increase??

Anyway, that's just a side though going off on a tangent...

 

[butlerforhire]

There are a lot of reasons why Gardevoir/Gallade dominated this season, including:

- amazing synergy between those two main cards and Gardevoir lv. X, both of which conveniently stemmed from the same evolutionary line (Sonic Blade + Bring Down is just one example of this synergy)
- extreme versatility (able to OHKO, target the bench via Bring Down, copy opponent's Supporters, lower anything's HP down to 50 which then puts that in KO range from any attacker in the deck, lock Powers, punish a comeback with Dusknoir's attack and Power, OHKO opposing Gardevoir's with Breloom + Moonlight Stadium if you're talking mirror, etc.)
- ability to cripple most of the other decks in the format with one simple and difficult-to-break combo (Wager + Psychic Lock)
- ability to make a comeback easily (via Gallade and Scramble)
- ability to make an opponent's comeback extremely difficult (Dusknoir limiting their bench/getting rid of their main attacker via Warp Point/punishing them with its attack for taking prize cards, the aforementioned Psychic Lock/Wager combo, Gallade + Cessation Crystal, Jirachi ex's Shield Beam, etc.)
- efficiency in 30-minute Swiss rounds (a lot of people have complained about the ease with which a GG player can legally stall to win on prizes due to this time limit, which frustrates a lot of people even more due to the 1-game-only nature of Swiss.)
- self-sufficiency (Telepass sets you up at double the opponent's rate, virtually every card in the deck is easy to abuse and with few drawbacks or stipulations)
- solid match-up against virtually any deck other than an explicit GG-counter, which are frequently not decks that do well against other things in big tournaments

Basically all of these reasons have proven too much for a lot of people to resist. It is hard to argue against the assertion that it is the most potent deck in the format right now and so players that want to win and get ratings/invites etc. and do not care about things like originality or thinking outside the box put all their money on it.

Fortunately, next format is looking to be one that is not completely dominated by any one deck, at least based on what we know from LA and IFDS spoilers, the current DP-on pool, and all the word-of-mouth going on around these boards. One of the main reasons I think people hated HP-on towards the end when GG took over is because of the way that pre-DP cards such as DRE and Scramble that CLEARLY were not intended to be abused by the all-around more powerful DP cards (as compared to everything that came before) indeed DID get abused by them. In previous formats, the cards that could use DRE and Scramble generally were nowhere near as powerful as DP-on stuff like Empoleon and Gallade. The 2x weakness was a bigger factor then as well. It's sort of like with DP-on, the best Pokemon ended up like hybrids of "regular" and Ex Pokemon minus the big drawbacks to Exs (2 prizes given up, incompatibility with DRE/Scramble, inability to be readily searched for) and plus new things like a minimized custom weakness. There is an article somewhere on this board that talks about the phenomenon of 'power creep' from the beginning of this game until now and DP-on essentially is the apex of all that creeping. This is a pretty nice thing in my opinion as long as the format is DP-on and the playing field is more equalized (because everything gets the power creep benefit), but when you still have stuff like DRE/Scramble in the format that make already powerful cards way more powerful than they were obviously designed to be (I'll be proven wrong only if they reprint DRE/Scramble), the playing field gets really skewered, not to mention half of the available cards become totally obsolete (almost NO Pokemon from Holon Phantoms to Power Keepers have seen any play as of late, because they simply cannot compete with the power creep that has gone on beginning with DP).

 

[Banette EX]

You also forgot about these reason:

+ Its the least skilled deck in the format,due to the amount of combos we have avaliable now.
+ the Mass amounts of people playing it,if 70% of the meta is playing the deck,it only makes sense it wins majority of the events it shows up.
+Limited card pool in the beginning,which made for this deck to shine over anything else that was half decent.
+Double Rainbow and Scramble.They werent meant for this format,the reason the deck was extremely fast.Lucksack when it was Gardilade.

This deck has single handed ruined a complete format ,youi cant really blame the deck,its on the players also.If you compare look at the decks that were winning events early in the season and to ones later in the season,you see it decreases and only one deck remains constant. Gardilade/Pl0x/GG

Also,Magmortar isnt played unless with Support now and Empoleon is like Magmortar earlier in the season.

The best deck to play now vs the field besides Pl0x/Gardilade is Dev0 L0ck,but nobody knows of it,or would be willing to put their placing on the line to do it.

 

[jazee]

Has anyone printed scans of Legend Awakens cards and tested some decks against GG, PLOX, etc. to see if the LA release has cards to fairly easily counter them? A lot of people are talking about AMU, but getting 3 Lv.X cards on the board isn't an easy/fast task.

 

[Prime]

I did build AMU with scans, but I didn't test it against Gardy/Gallade. I found it hard to get 3 lv.X out consistently.

 

[jazee]

Has anyone thouroughly tested Legend Awakens decks (using the scans) against GG/Pl0X to determine if GG will be done after LA comes out? I need to know what to sink my money into as far as LA. Guess I better set aside some time.

Back to back posts merged. The following information has been added:

That's what I thought about AMU when I saw the cards. It is getting a lot of hype but from people I think that haven't tested yet. Everyone goes gaga over cards with incredible attack power. Who needs something like a 150 or 200 attack when most of the time, you need only 80 to knock the card out within 2 turns or less depending on if it already suffered bench damage before coming out. Now if you could spread the extra attack to other cards, then having a card that did 150 or 200 attack damage would be very valuable.