blog The ways of Expanded: The most healthy and diverse format in a while?

The ways of Expanded: The most healthy and diverse format in a while?

Hello everyone! This is Elena from Gaia Storm TCG and welcome to another article here. Today, I wanted to talk about something that many players consider important when competing in a trading card game: variety. After all, it is not funny to always encounter the same decks all over when preparing for a tournament. It is actually quite interesting to see the sharp contrast there is currently between the two official formats, Standard and Expanded. While standard is gradually becoming more and more centralized every day, Expanded has reached a point where so many different strategies can win a tournament, making it a much more interesting and dynamic environment.

 

As far as Standard is concerned, different large international events were celebrated across the globe this past two weekends, from SPEs in Europe and LatAm to a Regional in Brazil. If you take a look at the decks that made the top cut in all these events you can see that there is almost no variation and that everything was reduced to three main decks: Lightning, Zoroark and occasionally Blacephalon. As I have already argued before, for me both Pikachu Zekrom and Zapdos Jirachi variants both form part of the same archetype rather than being completely independent strategies and are positioned in the clear top of the format. In the second step of the ladder it is no surprise to find Zoroark Fighting for its capacity to lock Jirachi at the same time that is deals effectively with some big lightning GX attackers. Blacephalon is the least played of the decks that made its way to the positions although it has a strong Zoroark match up and can play close against Jirachi/Zapdos sometimes.

 

Now, let’s move to Greensboro and Toronto Regionals (Expanded) to see how different the format is. In both tournaments there were 5 different decks among the top 8 cut and almost 15 different strategies in the second day, which sounds incredible. The best part about this is that there is not one single deck that truly stands over the rest and every strategy has it opportunity. The comparison with standard is quite obvious. Also, in contrast to the progressive centralization of standard metagame, the environment in the second expanded tournament changed drastically from Toronto to Greensboro in just one week time. Whereas in Toronto Trevenant and Night March dominated, in Greensboro old decks saw a rise like good old Drampa Garbodor and Zoroark variants. As said before, that means players needs to make an effort trying to pick one strategy among all those different possibilities. The pairings and capacities vary widely between, say, Hitmonchan Wobbuffet, PikachuZekrom, Rayquaza, Celebi Stall or Zoroark. Because of this, Expanded is currently a very interesting dimension with room for lot of innovation and surprises. No doubt that with the arrival of Unbroken bonds the standard metagame will experiment a change once again but, until that point, players will have to keep preparing to beat lightning and Zoroark in the tournaments.

 

So if you are already a bit bored of playing with the same decks over and over, try some expanded fun instead. Thanks for reading!