Hi everyone! This is Elena from Gaia Storm TCG and welcome to another article here at CCG Castle. In case you didn’t know about it, the Players Cup II –an official online event hosted in Pokémon TCG Online- has already started and players from all over the world are ferociously competing to get the best result possible. To provide some additional context, the Players Cup is a competition in which everyone with a PTCGO account and an associated Pokémon ID can participate. The idea is that players are given the possibility to play 50 online tournaments and earn points depending on placements, being 5 the maximum punctuation: 8 people face each other through best-of-1 eliminatory rounds. Of course, the question that arises is… what to expect when playing the Players Cup? And the answer is very simple: coins.
One of the main reasons of all this is no other than the predominance of Arceus, Dialga & Palkia Tag Team. ADP has been played heavily since it was released last year in Cosmic Eclipse and now, the deck seems to be as consistent and powerful as a strategy can possibly get. ADP has virtually everything and with the release of Boss Orders, winning is easier than ever. Turn one, you set your field; turn 2, you use Altered Creation, turn 3 and turn 4, Boss order for Dedenne and Crobat (normally in that order) and that’s it, the game is yours. Just as easy as that.  It comes as no surprise that ADP is, by far, the most played deck of the format and given that it requires such an easy combination of cards it is currently the safest and the strongest deck in a best-of-1 environment.
And here is when the coin cards start to appear. Teching against ADP is not a very viable option because the deck is so powerful that it can beat even its counters (which I guess are Decidueye or Lucmetal) without many problems. The only real way of getting an advantage in the pairing is preventing ADP from using its GX move… and how do you do it? Yes, with old good Crushing Hammer. In fact, Crushing Hammer’s efficiency goes beyond just ADP as most of the other meta decks –except from Centiskorch- rely on manually attaching energies every turn. As such, flipping heads on Eternatus VMAX and Lucmetal can completely turn the tables around.
But Crushing Hammer is not the only card that requires flipping coins. Turbo Patch is also getting a lot of traction lately because it is a hammer counter in a way and has the potential to enable surprise attackers out of nowhere. While some decks struggle to find room for Turbo Patch, a couple of copies are currently being used in Eternatus and ADPs. And then, we can also find other strategies running Pokémon Catcher, yet another flipping card. In fact, there are some very aggressive versions on ADP that solely focus on “catchering” Pokémon on the bench without relying on Boss Orders.
So there we go, a best-of-1 metagame where coins have a lot to say. If you are planning to play the tournament, be prepared to live some situations where everything will be decided by a coin flip. Let’s see if this changes once Champions Path becomes legal. But for the moment… I wish you luck with the coins! Thanks for reading!