With both Worlds and the Anaheim Open only a few days away, I thought it would be beneficial to devote an entire article to the most hyped deck to come from Burning Shadows, Gardevoir GX. I think that Anaheim is going to be filled with a lot of different decks, not just a sea of pink, and I don’t think Gardevoir GX is necessarily the best deck or the perfect play (although it may well be!). The format is too open and undefined, host to too many good decks with a diverse set of strengths and weaknesses...

Hey guys, The World Championships are less than a week away, and the entire Pokémon community seems to be excitedly trying to see what the best decks are with the addition of Burning Shadows. Pokémon.com has published their own piece with what they expect to be the most likely successful ones. Their assessment of the best decks seems to be similar to my own: that Burning Shadows is not going to add too many new archetypes to the format...

I think that the very first thing to do once a new set drops is assess all of the top decks from the recent past and see which of them remain relevant. Part of this assessment involves figuring out what new cards fit into these old decks, and part of it involves measuring new powerful cards versus the old decks – you ask whether a new hyped archetype, like Gardevoir GX for a current example, is going to be too much for Old Deck A or Old Deck B to handle.

Hey guys! At the time of writing, Liverpool Regionals is on the horizon. It’s a bit of a strange tournament: it’s in the pre-Burning Shadows format that we all know and love, but the Championship Points count for the new season. Because of that, it’s a great way to get ahead in the Championship Point race. During the 2016-2017 season, players with early successes could take advantage of a “snowball effect” where a quick lead in Championship Points could get you a travel stipend handed out after the first quarter of the season.