Introduction:

Hello everyone! For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Adler Pierce, and I am a player from Columbus Ohio as well as a member of Team Gas. With Charlotte coming up in a couple of weeks, I thought it would be a good opportunity to share a little bit about the deck I piloted to a top 32 finish as I believe it is still a very strong play moving forward.

Why Stall:

I have always been a huge fan of stall and control variants for a couple of reasons. The major one being that I like having a lot of control over the game. With copious amount of resources, the games can go on for a very long time which allows me to navigate towards one of several win cons. Playing aggro vs aggro matchups (like turbo dark mirrors) can often feel very high roll which I strongly dislike. The second main reason is people misplay A LOT against stall. Its hard for the opponent to know all the tools at your disposal and over the course of a long game there are more chances to exploit any mistakes your opponent might make.

This stall list is a little bit different from the other lists that were played. In my mind, there are around four main types of “stall decks.” You have Regirock based versions that usually utilize Sableye and basic dark energy, Shock Lock, Bunnelby/Oranguru/Giraffe/Hoopa/Counter Energy Attackers (see John Mostowy’s limitless page for a good example of these) and then the deck we will be looking at today, Wall Stall.

I was initially interested in Wall Stall after Boston Moreland piloted it to an impressive 8-0-1 Day 1 at Dallas before an unfortunate DQ due to a deck list error. I assumed that many people would completely forget about how strong his deck was just because of this DQ, and so I started to theorymon a list a couple weeks before the tournament started.

One issue that I see a lot of people, including myself, running into in expanded is simply choosing a deck. With the card pool going back all the way to Black and White in 2011, there are so many deck possibilities and tech possibilities that you can play. Navigating through this field can be daunting and so I like to start in the more abstract by choosing the matchups I want to be strong and weak. In preparation, I hopped on limitless and started looking through the placements, decks, and overall meta break down. With aggro decks being played in such high numbers, I wanted to take a favorable matchup there. One important assumption I made about the aggro matchup was the player base would be split between Turbo Dark, Zacian variants, TinaChomp, and Snorlax VMax. This made me feel a little safer about taking a mediocre matchup to one of these variants as it probably would not be played in very high numbers. I also wanted to make sure to have answers to EggGrow seeing that people love the deck and it had 2 top 8 finishes. Finally, there was a lot of hype surrounding Ultra Necrozma, so I knew I wanted to have an answer to that. For my poor matchups, I felt like TrevNoir was too gimmicky (I was VERY wrong about this) to perform, and since Tropical Beach was a limiting factor, stall decks that had “harder” resource management (think Sableye/Stoutland/Bunnelby/Oranguru). I remembered back to Boston’s list and felt like it had the perfect matchup spread to deal with what I expected to be the meta.

While the other versions of stall were played to higher finishes (John Mostowy’s top 4 finish and Zac Cooper’s top 8 finish), I believe this version has a lot of merit moving forward as it has favorable matchups against some of the unfavorable matchups of the other stall decks. The wall stall list below cannot lose to EggGrow, traditionally a very poor matchup for other stall variants, a safer dark matchup as you have larger bodies that can stick around for several turns and aren’t reliant solely on dolls or small HP basics such as Oranguru, and a safer TrevNoir matchup because of your ability to bench pokemon like Zacian and Regigigas, both of which cannot be one shot by the TrevNoir, giving you several turns to draw out of the combo.

The List:

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