What’s up, Cut or Tap readers! My name is Jon and I’m extremely happy to be writing for the site again.

Since we last talked, I have attended two major events: St. Louis Regionals (which was an absolute disaster of a tournament for me for several reasons) and Australian Intercontinental (where I got second place). In this article, I will go over my experience at the Australian Intercontinental and my opinions of the Standard Format moving forward into other events, such as the Brazilian Intercontinental coming up very soon. With that being said, let’s get right into it!

Pre-Tournament

Going into Australia, I hadn’t really prepared that much, or rather as much as I should have. St. Louis was just the weekend before and all of my testing partners were practicing for that instead, because they wouldn’t be attending Australia, so most of my testing had gone into St. Louis. Well to tell it short, St. Louis was quite a disaster for me as I finished 4-3-drop playing Mega Gardevoir. The day after I flew back from St. Louis, I was leaving for Australia so I didn’t have much time to build Standard or gather my stuff for it in general, so that left me scrambling. My solution to this was just gathering a bunch of competitive cards, putting them in a box, and building decks in Australia.

When I arrived in Australia I immediately went sight seeing. You can’t just go to Australia to play Pokémon, so the first two days of my trip were dedicated to going around the city and taking an all-day guided tour. After that, I immediately buckled down and began testing. I met up with my good friends Tanner Hurley and Connor Pedersen on Friday morning, and as the Masters were playing, we were testing our butts off. The first deck we messed around with was Turbo Darkrai, as I thought I would be playing it going into the event . My deck choice was quickly changed as I managed to not win a single game with the deck against Mega Mewtwo and Decidueye/Vileplume. In the middle of the day, another American player – Joey Ruttiger – had joined us to help test. He was sold on both Mega Mewtwo and Decidueye/Vileplume just as Tanner and Connor were. All three of them had convinced me that one of those two decks was the play, so we primarily tested those.

Testing had shown that both decks would be great plays, and it was just personal preference at that point. I was leaning more towards Decidueye/Vileplume as it seemed to be better in my opinion. Alex Hill was having success in Day 1 with Decidueye/Vileplume and he hooked me up with his list so I had an idea of what I probably wanted to play. (For those of you who don’t know, in London Alex gave me his list for Vespiquen Zebstrika which I wussed out of playing. After his success with the deck, he constantly reminded me of how I need to listen to his meta calls. He was doing well on Day 1 so I figured this was a good time to start.)

Flash forward to Friday night, and the testing group had broken up except for Joey and I sitting in the lobby of the Pullman Hotel. We were both set on Decidueye/Vileplume and had a list that we liked. It was Alex Hill’s list, minus the Unown and adding the Trevenant EX. The idea behind Trevenant EX was that most decks don’t play Olympia, so trapping something in the active like a a Hoopa EX can be very strong as you can use Decidueye’s ability to pick off Pokémon on your opponent’s bench. After finalizing the list, we said goodnight and got some sleep before the long day ahead of us.

For those of you who don’t know the list, here it is:

Decidueye GX/Vileplume

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