Terapagos is one of the most exciting decks I have played in a long time. The skill expression it has, and the ability to win almost any game, is really what made me fall in love with the deck. I most recently placed Top 8 at Louisville Regionals, and today I will be going over everything you need to know about the deck.
When preparing for this event, I wanted a deck that was incredibly consistent. I really don’t like going to major events with decks that are considered “brick” risks, and Terapagos was a deck that I knew did not have consistency problems. I actually was testing Palkia a little after Stephane Ivanoff most recently got Top 4 at Dortmund, but I was running into some early game consistency issues with it. I also felt like it had fewer overall routes versus some decks that I expected to be big, like Raging Bolt and Lugia. Both of those matchups felt very uncomfortable for the deck, and that’s when I started testing Turtles.
I and one of my testing partners and former World Champion, Rowan Stavenow, began working on Turtles, and it felt like it had one of the most balanced matchup spreads overall. Now balanced matchup spreads can be a good and bad thing. The good thing is that you feel like you can beat anything. However, the negative of this is that your deck’s matchups not being polarizing can cause for variance to go against you in 50/50 matchups. Some decks, like Michael Davidson’s Lost Box, took exceptional matchups against a large portion of the format, but an almost unwinnable Regidrago matchup. He ended up dodging all Regidrago at Louisville, en route to a 2nd place finish.
It’s actually really interesting to think about. Do you want to play a deck that can beat and lose to anything? Or, do you want to play a deck that will decimate some matchups, but completely roll over to other ones. I personally think it’s about how risky you want to be, and where the metagame is landing. For example, most people cut Manaphy at Louisville, and Regidrago was not seeing a large amount of play, which made the decision to run Lost Box a strategic “low-risk, high-reward” play.
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