So I know I said a while back that I wouldn't be doing as much writing on Pokémon League play any more due to my waning interest in Standard, but I may have been made a slight liar by a recent decision made by my League and the other professors to introduce a quasi-formal GLC League to our normal Sunday rotation.
Assuming that the GLC League works out for this "first season" - which will last from today, at the beginning of April, until the tail end of June - we will regularly have Gym Leader Challenge play occurring alongside our normal Standard play.
As GLC is a format I am much more interested in, this works out to mean I will in fact have a steady flow of Pokémon games to write about. This slightly throws off a plan I had where I would try to go out on some of my Sundays to a different card shop in the area to play FFTCG, but I may still try to make that happen. Though this month will prove to be a little odd due to the Easter holiday on my next off-week, as my family want to get together and do something that day.
But I digress. I have Gym Leader Challenge to write about.
And while this would be the point where I would break into my typical headings to talk about each of my games individually, this week I'm not doing that for one main reason:
All three games played out more or less the same way. I used my Fairy deck - one of these days, I'll find a site I can use to upload my Pokémon deck lists the way I have Moxfield and Materia Hunter for MtG and FFTCG - and each game was ground to a practical standstill.
My first two rounds were against Colorless decks, and my third was against a Fire deck. In all three games, I played a highly effective stall strategy, using Robo-Substitute and Lillie's Poké Doll to keep my opponents from taking many prizes, getting obscenely lucky off of my Florges's Wondrous Gift flips to get the dolls back when they got KO'd and drawing them through Slurpuff's Tasting so that I wasn't stuck in a loop where I couldn't find any new cards.
Unfortunately, I had difficulties landing my various mill effects through my two main Supporters, Team Rocket's Handiwork and Miss Fortune Sisters. In my first game, I used Rocket's Handiwork numerous times but only ever hit a single heads with each use. In my second, I used Miss Fortune Sisters to great effect, but again only got one or two cards with each use. And in the third, I simply did not find my mill Supporters. I made use of Rocket's Handiwork maybe twice, but most of my resources were focused on getting around the fact that my opponent got set up in such a way that they had consistent attackers set up, so I needed to work around getting rid of their offense.
What this ultimately boils down to is that in my first two games, I came rather close to milling my opponent out. In my second, specifically, my opponent was down to three cards as we went into the last turn of the game, thanks to my whiffing my only use of Team Rocket's Handiwork and getting the double-tails.
My final record for today was going 0-0-3, which while nice that I was technically undefeated, I was somewhat disappointed that I had gotten so close to winning in two of my three games but just couldn't finish the job. This disappointment has prompted me to go and pull out a copy of Bellelba & Brycen-Man, a win-con from my deck's original incarnation, to give myself a third "win condition" card, one that has a guaranteed flat rate of mill. Once I figure out what comes out of the deck to make room, that will hopefully prove to be a change that gives my deck the last bit of juice it needs to take reasonably consistent wins.
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