

To start things off, here is an abridged unordered tier list, omitting a lot of the more obscure and/or fringe decks in the format: In my previous article, “ Between a Rock and a Hard Place,” I spoke briefly about how the Battle Styles meta was shaping up, but this time around I intend to go a bit more in-depth. In order to do that, let’s take a look at the meta itself. With this philosophy in mind, the next part of our approach is to take a look at what decks in the format fill this criteria the best. I also value consistency quite a bit for the Best-of-1 and Single Elimination structure of phase one, so I recommend minimizing techs, aside from things that may turn auto-losses into playable matchups, such as teching an Aegislash V into Arceus and Dialga and Palkia-GX / Zacian V to make the Decidueye matchup playable. I think the best way to approach your Tournament Keys is to play a deck that scores quick and easy wins while having few bad matchups - such as Arceus and Dialga and Palkia-GX / Zacian V.


I covered a lot of my thoughts on how to approach a Players Cup in an earlier article, Looking Forward, so in the interest of simplicity, here is a quick picture of how I would approach phase one, Tournament Keys. However, next week (April 26th) marks the start of everyone’s favorite quarterly event, the Players Cup! With that in mind, let’s take a look at how the meta is shaping up going into the fourth Players Cup. Hey everyone, Isaiah back with yet another Standard format article! Not a lot has happened in the Pokemon TCG world since my last article, barring Japan’s announcement of the contents of their upcoming sets, both of which will be featured in June’s Chilling Reign outside of Japan.
