Welcome back, Cut or Tap readers! There have been a few Regionals in the past few weeks, including Gdansk and Lille, which have shaken up the meta quite a lot by introducing the newly successful archetype Bannette, and also cementing Regidrago as a force to be reckoned with. With the Latin America International Championships (LAIC) right around the corner, the Stellar Crown format is shortly coming to a close. While many people are currently preparing for LAIC, I have been preparing for the Sacramento Regional Championships which will take place in about two weeks, and will be played in the brand-new Surging Sparks format. 

In my preparations, I have mainly been focusing on Pidgeot Control, which is what I will be primarily discussing in this article. I will be talking about some of the new cards that Control can play from the new Surging Sparks set, how to play certain matchups, and provide the list that I would currently bring to the event.

Firstly, Pidgeot Control is a deck whose success relies a lot on the meta and being able to have a strategy or plan for every single matchup, so it is important to know what new archetypes will be seeing success in the Surging Sparks format. So far from what I’ve seen, the cards from Surging Sparks are very underwhelming for the competitive scene. The only two new decks that I could see having some level of success at a higher level are Archaludon ex and Pikachu ex, but I don’t suspect that either of these will see almost any play at the top tables of larger events. If anything, Pikachu ex could see some success in a Lost Zone Box build, but I also doubt that this will be very good considering the number of changes you would have to make from the current, streamlined versions of Lost Zone Box. If these do see any play, Mimikyu should be able to take care of these matchups quite easily. To conclude, I don’t really see too much changing from the Stellar Crown format meta, unless the results of LAIC produce a significant change. 

New Cards

Although most of the cards from Surging Sparks are competitively underwhelming, I found a surprising amount of “control” cards when I first looked through the set. So, I’m going to go over all of the significant ones that I found, which I believe could have some potential.

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