What’s up with it Cut or Tap readers, I just came fresh off of a 3-4 drop finish at Madison Regionals, and even though I had an awful day with the deck I’m convinced it is still a viable deck for the meta and deserves to see more play! Buzzwole lists are pretty difficult to beat, but I have a list that I think can go even or better against Buzz. Not much you can ask for besides that with how poised Buzzwole is right now, so I think it’s fair to go even. Before getting into the sauce, let’s go into the Hoopa history.

Hoopa started out with some strong performances at Regionals and the Oceania International Championship, but people were ignoring the deck so I took Hoopa to Portland with some friends and we all made Day 2 with the deck. That alone shows that in the correct meta, the deck can destroy anything in front of it. I was not aware of heavy Baby Buzzwole in decks going into Madison, or I would’ve prepared for this by attempting to win the prize trade instead of trying to run my opponent out of Hoopa outs. With eight or more answers to Hoopa available in Buzzwole right now, I actually think that Hoopa lists need to cut down on Hoopa a little bit! While this does take away from the deck, I think as long as you are getting rid of outs for your opponent that you only need one Hoopa. This is something that I’ve tested a little bit to decent results and I’ll share what I have later, but let me get into some more about the Madison list.

Hoopa for Madison

This deck has great matchups against Zoroark variants, Malamar variants, and Greninja, with an iffy Buzzroc matchup. I expected Buzzroc to have one Baby Buzz and one Super Rod, so I thought if the deck has only 5 Pokemon who can OHKO a Hoopa, let’s just set the Hoopa list up for the bare minimum it needs to beat the other three big plays (which is pretty much just 4 Hoopa, Tina promo, and Oranguru UPR) and then the rest of the deck can be catered for the Buzzwole matchup. This gives us the greatest odds of defeating every tier 1 deck, and as long as we avoid scrubby lists we should be good for the event! It helped that Malamar was hyped so much, because that matchup is as close to 100/0 as it gets and I fully expected to see 3 or more during the day.

I sent Caleb Gedemer my matchup spread, he put it into a spreadsheet, and Hoopa was the best deck by leaps and bounds. That was all I needed to see to know that I was going to pilot the deck to 1st seed 9-0 going into Day 2, and from there whatever happened didn’t matter.

Here’s the list I went for, thanks to Tye Pellechia, Frank Percic, Hunter Butler and Hayden for working on it with me.

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