Lucky 1st place finish with Gothitelle at Surrey's Battle Roads Tournament - Part 3

Top Four vs. Trevore Read (Bearplume)
Game 1
Trevore was essentially running a Ross structure with four Beartics as the headline attacker. I knew going into the match that it was a good match up for me, just because I believed that Gothitelle had the advantage in being able to play trainers and hit over the wall.

The first game actually turned out to be quite the chore as we both failed to set up for the first 15 minutes or so. I dropped Tropical Beach early in the game and we both made ample use of it, although I think Trevore probably came out ahead, being able to play most of his cards to set up Vileplume early and Beaching for precisely one card almost every turn.

Lucky 1st place finish with Gothitelle at Surrey's Battle Roads Tournament - Part 2

Round 4 vs. Sam Park (Magneboar)
There were only five 3-0s left in the tournament, which meant that I was essentially sitting at the head table with people who might be top cutting. Sure enough, I get paired with another familiar face. Above me in the table were Christian and Trevore. Christian was a super keen Pokemon player who only started recently. He accompanied me to Tukwila and was inspired to build his own Zekrom deck. He had already played a BR just the day before in Redmond, WA and was doing very well this tournament. Trevore arrived on the mainland with a large group from Vancouver Island and, well, you’ll see what he’s playing below.

Lucky 1st place finish with Gothitelle at Surrey's Battle Roads Tournament - Part 1

After the BR at Tukwila, I took my Gothitelle deck and tweaked it slightly. The big change to the deck was the addition of a single Switch. I tried out a few other changes but most of them didn’t stick. Mostly, I swapped around the draw supports a bit and called it a day (in fact, when I was writing up the list, I was actually surprised that I was no longer running four Sage’s, but I shrugged and trusted that I must have had a good reason to do so at some point).

Saviour?

How to Play Like a Pro

New article by yours truly up on Pokegym.net: http://pokegym.net/forums/showthread.php?t=155087

Here are the key points:

The Set Up
Typically, you should be seated at your table and ready to start well before the judges declare the start of the round. However, even if you're not ready, you still get two minutes to shuffle and set up at the start of the game.

Canadians Invade Tukwila, Washington! 4-2 Battle Roads Report - Part 2

Lunch Break - Jasmine's BR Report
It seems that every time we doing a Pokemon tournament, we wind up eating Subway. This was no difference as we ended up sharing a footlong meatball sub (Happy Gilmore's favourite!) and sharing the details of our matches so far. Jasmine was running a troll deck that she called Bomberman. It was an all or nothing deck that was relatively stress free. After World's, Jasmine decided that she didn't want to play competitively anymore and had started helping out by judging the local tournaments. But since we were outside our area, I had built a "it's no big deal if I lose" deck for her.

Canadians Invade Tukwila, Washington! 4-2 Battle Roads Report - Part 1

Last week we had our first battle roads in Vancouver and I went a terrible 2-3 with my ZPST. For whatever reason, the deck (which set up T1 or T2 90% of the time during testing) decided that it only wanted T3 and T4 set ups, which ended with me racking up a wonderful losing streak against two Reshiphlosion decks to start the day. To make the matter worse, a Kingdra/Yanmega (no Magnezone) deck, which was an autowin for me, took first place.

Deciding that the deck had failed me for the last time, I rebuilt my fragile Gothitelle deck. I was planning to run it during the next local BR in October, but then Christian mentioned that there was going to be a couple of BR events in Washington this weekend, just three hours south. Since Christian was already planning to make the trip, my wife Jasmine and I decided to tag along for the fun.

We left the house at 6am in the morning to make the trip and arrived at Tukwila with plenty of time. We ate a quick breakfast at Jollibee's, which I was familiar with from a business trip to the Philippines last winter, and bumped into a local family of Pokemon players: Joey and his father Jonathan. Joey was a top ranked Canadian player as a Junior and still did consistently well as a Senior, having earned an invite to Worlds last season and having won BR in Vancouver last week. His father Jonathan was more of a casual player, but he's no slouch, having won at least one BR and top cutted in other premier tournaments.