Articles

Planning Your Season to get an Invite and Pittsburgh Plays/Meta Analysis

Introduction

Hello, Cut or Tap readers! With the 2024 season starting soon, and the meta looking fairly similar to the Paldea Evolved format, I thought I would take a look at how I plan to get my invite this season, as opposed to looking at the top decks for Pittsburgh, Barcelona, etc. In this article, I will cover a breakdown of Best Finish Limits at all levels of events, how different combinations of these can add up to 600 points, and what playstyles will most likely result in these finishes. I will also be going over my plan for the season, as well as some cost analysis of how I decide on what events to go to. At the end, I will go over what I expect the Pittsburgh meta to look like, and what I believe some good plays are. This article is useful for people of all levels looking to go for their invite this year, although it mainly looks at everything from a North American standpoint; a lot of the ideas and mapping work for other regions, just needing fewer total points from each level of event and fewer total points for the invite.

Best Finish Limits

Best Finish Limits, or BFLs for short, are a limit on the number of placements a player can get from a certain type of events. For the BFL, it will take your best finishes from throughout the season. This season’s BFLs are six for League Challenges, six for League Cups, six for Regionals/Special Events (these are combined into 1 BFL) and no BFL for International events. With these BFLs in place, it means you can get a total of 390 points from local events. This total isn’t feasible for everyone, as each event can only have one winner, and there are a ton of players in some areas. 

After upgrading to Stage 2 you will see the rest of Piper Lepine’s article, a PTCGL friendly deck export at the bottom of the article, and an audio recording of this article by Andy Hyun:
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