Hello everyone, I hope I’ve found you all well today! The last time we spoke was shortly before Collinsville, where I did a bit to classify each of the expected decks. If I recall correctly, every deck that I mentioned in that article saw some degree of success but, somewhat unsurprisingly, the winners of the weekend seemed to be Stall Decks and Trevnoir. Stall was by far the most represented archetype in day two, and certainly the one with the best conversion rate. A small camp of very good players known to many as “The Lab” opted to pick up and perfect the Trevnoir deck which, despite being an exorbitantly strong archetype, was still quite flawed going into this weekend due to the fact that top players truly had not yet taken this deck to the lab (pun intended)! Summative of these circumstances, we saw Justin Bokhari take down the event with a Trevnoir list that I’d go so far as to call perfect, even overcoming a finals match up versus Eggrow. These notions spell some clearly ominous ramifications for the expanded format, and many are calling for Trevnoir cards to get banned, but I’m not yet certain that is necessary; I hope no one quotes me on that! My good friend and teammate, Nick Robinson will be around at some point shortly, in order to spend some time talking in detail about the various ways to counter Trevnoir, so I won’t be stealing any of his thunder. Instead, I’d like to talk about the Cut or Gas deck from this weekend: The Mew FCO/Cramorant V/Counter Box deck that we’ve affectionately been calling Cramylad, after Marc Daly.

For those unaware, I started a team about three months ago called Team Gas. Prior to Dallas regionals, Nick and I began working with Hunter on a variety of decks which ultimately culminated in most of both teams playing the Roxie TinaChomp deck in Dallas. Dallas regionals contributed to the formation of the “Cut or Gas” agreement, ramifying our partnership for Collinsville, and my tenure writing for Cut or Tap! Going into Collinsville, the team was once again set on breaking the metagame. When I started with the deck, the focus was on Sudowoodo BKP, as we found it to be a central tool in combating the metagame, while not participating in such a fragile metagame ourselves. While the techs continued to change a bit, I did all I could to consolidate the deck’s engine, and the result was an immensely consistent list for an archetype that had previously failed to ever make an impact (presumably because of how inconsistent it was). Frank Percic is responsible for the discovery of Cramorant V, which does so much to combat all of the smaller support pokemon EX and pokemon GX, especially in tandem with cards like “Roxie’s Weezing,” and Galarian Zigzagoon. Beyond those core fundamentals, the team settled on two lists that differed rather tumultuously. I’ll dance around these differences no more, and get into the two lists.

First is the list that Nick Robinson and I played, netting us both a Top 128 finish:

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