My point is merely that the continuum has shifted more back toward “parallel players” from “interactive games” (Now, unlike many of my peers, I have no interest in characterizing that as good or bad it is merely where we are in my eyes). Now, obviously, it isn’t a perfect parallel-other decks play ways to deal with each other in SM-on still. It’s almost as if you’re playing in parallel to each other, rather than in opposition. By contrast, SM-on is more about executing a “broken” strategy and winning the game more quickly than your opponent. This is a major reversion from just a few weeks ago, as Worlds featured one of the more “interactive” formats that I can ever remember: decks played very differently depending on what you needed to deal with on the other side of the table. The 2019 Standard format is in an odd spot where it seems like many decks are trying to execute a strategy entirely independent of what’s happening on the other side of the board. Nevertheless, Trade is a wonderful deck-thinning and draw mechanism that makes the deck pretty impervious to many of the problems other decks currently face just trying to get off the ground. It’s still the broken card we all know it as, but now it just lacks some of the tools it had previously (mainly, Puzzle). To me, in a format with many players bemoaning the lack of consistency options, I think Zoroark- GX is positioned incredibly well. Without further ado, let’s take a dive into it. There are a few Zoroark concepts to look at, then I’m going to offer lists for a testing gauntlet, since I think we’re getting too close to Philadelphia to have some of these decks go completely unmentioned. First off, I want to talk through how the different entities in the format right now “interact” with each other-it’s one of the better sections I think I’ve ever written for UG, so I hope you’ll read it before getting to the lists. My brother Alex will be here later this week with his debut article, going over the events of Melbourne in more detail as someone who was in the room, but I’m going to take a run over some of the decks from the format today. Vikavolt/Rayquaza took home the title Down Under, and perhaps that’s not surprising, as the new format seems to be shaping up as a battle of broken Abilities (given Garbotoxin has retired to Expanded, this is not a surprise itself). We saw that event feature myriad decks with some level of success, but it’s not really any surprise given this rotation is the biggest shake to the Standard format in many, many years. It’s a pretty wild place! We saw the first major tournament of the SM-on format play out in Melbourne this weekend, and it was over early enough (bless the time changes) to affect some of this weekend’s Cup metas. To be honest, I hadn’t planned on putting any time into this Standard format at all at this point, planning to favor Expanded, but with Oaks so not-far-away, I concluded that simply wasn’t a viable option for content coverage and spent my weekend getting up to speed on the new Standard format. Lo and behold, I discovered myself! I suppose it’s a good thing that I was doing that. Well, as I was writing the inaugural Friday Flyer last week, I took a peek at the schedule to see who was writing this week.
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