Hello everyone! This is Elena from Gaia Storm TCG and welcome to another article here at CCG. Not one but two Regionals took place this past weekend at the same time: Standard format was played at Harrogate (UK) and the unpredictable Expanded was the environment in Anaheim (USA). What happened and what won in both categories? Let’s take a look at the latest results of the game.
Starting with Harrogate Regionals, it was one of the largest regionals in Europe up to date. In a stage of the format where the metagame is already well stablished it was not a surprise that many players opted to counter some of the most popular strategies. As such, there was a considerable presence of decks like Shuckle Sceptile or Stall whose objective was to surprise those running top meta decks. It was precisely a very unique deck the one that reached and won the finals: Zoroark Gyarados. Yes, you heard right! Piloted by Philip Schulz, Zoroark (once again, how very unexpected) climbed to the top in combination with Burning Shadows Gyarados. At a cost of a single DCE, this water type Pokémon is able to hit for tons of damage when some Magikarps are in the discard pile, which is the perfect way to solve Zoroark’s struggle of pulling out big Knockouts in one attack. Not to mention the fact that it can completely wreck Blacephalon GX, one of the most used decks, in a second.
On the other side of the world, Anaheim regionals concluded with the victory of Jimmy Pendarvis (one of the most successful players this season) and his Zoroark Eggs Deck. Expanded is basically a wild territory where everything can happen and, as such, the top 32 was diverse indeed but Zoroark proved once again that it doesn’t matter how many times Pokémon tries to balance it, the dark Pokémon is just too strong for the game. With the infinite draw power of Exeggcute, VS Seeker to recycle resources and the capacity to display different styles (raging from aggro to control) in the same game, it was not a surprise that it reached the first position once again. In an environment with Trevenant, Vespiquen, Groudon and Buzzwole, Zoroark. The fact that two Zoroark variants obtained the winner title in two environments as different as Expanded and Standard show that the only thing that will stop Zoroark from winning over and over is a direct a ban from Pokémon.
I believe that the game is currently in a very interesting state right now with a wide variety of available options to play at high level while we wait for the next big expansion, Team Up. In February, no doubt, the meta will change again. Thanks for reading!