Hi, first-time writer for Cut or Tap here. I’m Brent Tonisson, and I am a player from Sydney, Australia who plays a lot of tournaments. I finished Rank 1 for Championship Points in the 2024 Season, and got 2nd at the recent Latin American Championships.
Preparing for a major tournament may seem like a daunting task, but fortunately there are predictable patterns and ways to cut corners to become more efficient with your testing time. In this article, I will go through multiple stages of the preparation for an event, and how you can become better at them, ultimately improving your expected result at major Pokemon tournaments.
Reading the Metagame
For most players, the main focus shouldn’t be on metagaming and mostly should be focused on improving as a player in general or specifically at the deck you are going to play. From a mathematical perspective, if you want to make Day 2 at an event, the win rate you need is significantly higher than the win rate of any deck into a given field, and the gap between a good and bad meta-call will often be much smaller than the gap that needs to be made up from good decision making. This means that sticking with a relatively strong meta deck and ignoring any meta factors is often a wiser decision than trying to optimize for the meta for any given major event.