Trial and Error in Ultra Space: A Method to Finding New Ideas from New Sets

Set after set, and time after time, players do the same old thing: They notice a few particularly flashy cards, test the ever-living Arceus out of those cards, and go worse than a 50% win record at a Regional Championships.

How does this happen? Researching cards can never hurt you, and testing is almost always a good use of your time when preparing for a big tournament; so why is it that some of the most studious players in the game have the most consistently awful performances? Nine times out of ten, it’s because they have the wrong method!

In today’s article, we seek to put you on the right track to set analysis, testing, implementing, and even dumping your pet decks from new sets. To do this, we will be using the latest release, Forbidden Light, as our primary example; however, the lessons in today’s article should apply to any new set, and the examples included won’t be exclusively limited to Forbidden Light.

The Method to New Set Playtesting

Here is how I think players would be best served in approaching any new set. It’s a fairly straightforward five-step plan, but it encompasses everything you should be doing when it comes to testing new cards:

• Step 1: Review the Entire Set (know what the cards do!)
• Step 2: Separate Enhancers from Cores (know which cards are helpful additions and which are the centerpieces of new archetypes)
• Step 3: Playtest (theorymon and practice)
• Step 4: Evaluate (consider the results of your theorymon and practice)
• Step 5: Commit (actually make your selections for your big tournament)

Before we get too deep into explanations for each step, I should clarify some important things to keep in mind when reading them:

• Overall, this method is designed to help you test many new ideas at once. Practically speaking, all but the worst sets should make you curious about multiple possibilities, which means you could easily be testing a new deck.
• This method is designed to be followed chronologically. However, once a step has been completed, you do not need to start working on the following step immediately. In fact, in some cases you would be best served by ignoring new ideas entirely, especially if your most immediate major tournament does not allow the recent release. Playtesting immediately is just as valid an approach as waiting to playtest.
• The last two steps are specifically focused on evaluating and choosing between your competing choices. Visually you can think of this whole process the same way you would a water filter: take out the nastiness so that all you’re left with is pure, clean water!

Step 1: Review the Entire Set

[cardimg name=”Zygarde ” set=”Forbidden Light” no=”71″ align=”right” c=”none”][/cardimg]

Our first step in the method is not actually formal testing so much as it is thorough review of the new set’s card pool. I very deliberately include “entire” as part of this point because it is easy to miss several good cards while obsessing over the hot staples and hype cards.

Returning to Forbidden Light, several cards jump out to us as being obviously strong and powerful. These include [card name=”Zygarde-GX ” set=”Forbidden Light” no=”73″ c=”custom”]Zygarde-GX[/card], [card name=”Ultra Necrozma-GX ” set=”Forbidden Light” no=”95″ c=”custom”]Ultra Necrozma-GX[/card], [card name=”Lysandre Prism Star ” set=”Forbidden Light” no=”110″ c=”custom”]Lysandre Prism Star[/card], [card name=”Diancie Prism Star ” set=”Forbidden Light” no=”74″ c=”custom”]Diancie Prism Star[/card], and [card name=”Malamar” set=”Forbidden Light” no=”51″ c=”name”][/card]. Similarly, other cards should appear abundantly awful to the average competitive player, such as [card name=”Clawitzer ” set=”Forbidden Light” no=”26″ c=”custom”]Clawitzer[/card]. Yet somewhere between the obviously good and recognizably bad cards are several others that require a bit more metagame knowledge or imagination to be good. One such card that instantly jumps out to me is [card name=”Zygarde ” set=”Forbidden Light” no=”71″ c=”custom”]Zygarde[/card]. 60 damage for a single [card name=”Fighting Energy” set=”EX Ruby and Sapphire” no=”105″ c=”name”][/card] against Ultra Beasts will not break the metagame and its Earth Aura Ability makes it only worse. If you pair this card with [card name=”Mew” set=”Fates Collide” no=”29″ c=”name”][/card] as well as [card name=”Choice Band” set=”Guardians Rising” no=”121″ c=”name”][/card], you can copy Zygarde’s Peacemaker attack to deal a whopping 180 to opposing [card name=”Buzzwole-GX” set=”Crimson Invasion” no=”57″ c=”name”][/card]! While I’m not saying this will end up being the optimal Buzzwole-GX mirror counter, I do think this is a possibility several players would overlook simply because they are obsessed with making a Malamar / Ultra Necrozma-GX deck. In summary, avoid the tunnel vision and learn to expand your vision.

Speaking of tunnel vision, reading scans of the latest Japanese set can be helpful, but they can also really mess with your proper understanding of new cards as they fit into a format. Oftentimes when a new set comes out in Japan, our international metagame has not yet fully developed, meaning that your eye is not yet trained to be looking for the cards most relevant to the context of the next post-release tournament. Additionally, we sometimes see important cards held back for a set or two, such as [card name=”Alolan Ninetales” set=”Burning Shadows” no=”28″ c=”name”][/card] (originally released just weeks after Japan’s Guardians Rising set and not part of their version of Burning Shadows). Luckily, whether you heed my warning to digest new cards in the proper context, or still want to test new ideas as early as possible, PokeBeach’s scans are a great resource to do both.

Step 2: Separate Enhancers from Cores

So, you’ve looked through a set and have a feel for every card. Now what? In the second step of our method to testing new sets, we separate the cards that improve pre-existing decks from the ones that are central to new concepts.  We will call these cards ‘deck enhancers’ and ‘deck cores’. Both types of cards are essential to growing a format, but for your purposes, they will have two very different endgames in advancing your strategic advantage over your opponents.

• Enhancers can influence as many as all decks — or as few as one! Forbidden Light is full of Ultra Beast-themed enhancers. Lysandre Prism Star is a strong card in Fire decks, so you can be reasonably sure that this set will heavily improve a few concepts. However, because there are zero useful new-draw Supporter cards featured in Forbidden Light, there won’t be many universal enhancements made to decks (the way [card name=”Tapu Lele-GX” set=”Guardians Rising” no=”60″ c=”name”][/card] made everything better a year ago.)
• Cores are the foundational cards for new decks, and they require you to look back at other sets in order to think of good combinations for them. However, cores are just as often immediately paired with other cards in the set, such as Malamar being paired with Ultra Necrozma-GX. Since Ultra Necrozma-GX can deal massive amounts of damage at the price of constantly discarding Psychic Energy, you naturally want to run it with Malamar which, through it’s ability, will maximize your long-term damage output. Not all core combos are this obvious, but in recent history the obvious decks have mostly been very strong, so keep your eyes on them!

Why is it necessary to separate these two kinds of cards from each other? For starters, the way we test and evaluate the two types is different. Furthermore, as testing new ideas is usually a multi-person activity, the more knowledgable you are about the function of the cards, the easier it will be to communicate with and understand your fellow players.

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Step 3: Playtest

[cardimg name=”Malamar ” set=”Forbidden Light” no=”51″ align=”right” c=”none”][/cardimg]

No matter what, the optimal approach to working with new cards involves playtesting. It may seem like common sense to playtest your zany new ideas, but often, as soon as a new idea is constructed, many players skip this step entirely or do it, but poorly invest their time. Let’s go into detail on how you can effectively playtest new cards and learn how to avoid the two most common time management mistakes:

• Mistake 1: Players don’t spend enough time testing a new deck or card because they give up too quickly on their pet idea. Maybe they had bad matchups, or maybe they had a few unlucky games, at any rate, players prematurely give up on an idea. What makes this particularly disappointing, if not outright disastrous for your tournament season, is that you might actually have found a format-breaking concept, but failed to follow through with the hard work needed to succeed with it. In theory, the answer to this dilemma is simple: play more games! Unfortunately, there is no magic number of games to play before you can determine whether your idea is good or bad. You need to use the most essential, valuable elements of testing: a good opponent, careful criticism of both players’ moves, and constant evaluation of whether your results are consistent or the result of mere luck. I can’t help you with the first two, but at least when it comes to consistency, you will find that if your matchups with top decks deal out the same over time, then it isn’t just a coincidence that you’re always winning or losing.
• Mistake 2: Players can spend too much time on sweet new decks or techs. Usually this takes the form of what some people call the sunken cost fallacy, or the mistake that because you have invested a lot into something bad, you need to continue investing more resources into that bad thing. For us players, time is an incredibly valuable resource before an important tournament, so the key is to identify when your cool new deck is beyond hope. My way to determine a deck’s effectiveness is a mix between theory and testing results.  I theorize the way some matchups should “obviously” go in my mind, and then play out the ones I feel need further investigation. If I’ve come to a solid determination that the deck I am testing is not good enough against the spread of popular decks, then I will abandon it entirely. Nevertheless, you should only cut off a deck when you’re reasonably sure that it’s beyond all hope, or else you come right back to the problem of under-investing time!

In the end, spending the proper time on a deck or tech is all about balance, which leads us into our next point:

Step 4: Evaluate

After any good period of playtesting is an equally important period of evaluating results. In order to evaluate your results properly, you need to consider not just the games you won, but also how you won those games, and what decks you beat. For instance, a lazy player could see their sparkly record of 20 wins on the Pokemon Trading Card Game Online as an unqualified success, whereas a veteran player might question success even after a hundred games! That is because of our earlier point: playtesting results are less about quantity and more about quality. Much the same way that you should be impressed with a B+ in advanced calculus over an A- in basic arithmetic, so too should you be more impressed when a deck has an 80% win record against its worst matchup than a 100% win record against theme decks.

Not surprisingly, evaluating the effectiveness of deck enhancers is a much different process than evaluating deck cores. With deck enhancers, you are trying to see if your intended goal in using the new card is achieved, while with deck cores, your goal is to discover whether the very deck-concept itself is viable. In turn, it should be even less surprising that the testing and evaluating of enhancers is a more narrow process. Cores on the other hand can take a while to reveal themselves to be truly good deck choices for big tournaments, as well as demand a lot of faith from you, the deck builder!

Throughout my years of competitive playing, I have mentally charted out ways to determine if I am actually getting effective results in my testing of new techs and decks. Below is my attempt to put some of those mental flowcharts into words:

Evaluating Deck Enhancers (specific)
Example: [card name=”Giratina” set=”XY Black Star Promos” no=”XY184″ c=”name”][/card], to help beat the [card name=”Greninja BREAK” set=”BREAKpoint” no=”41″ c=”name”][/card] matchup

• Did I test this card enough against the matchup or matchups it is intended to help beat?
  • Possible answers: “Yes, it tilts an otherwise poor Greninja matchup in your favor”; “No, it either makes no difference or does not help you enough.”
• Did I test this card enough against other matchups to determine if there are unintended downsides to running it?
  • Possible answers: “Yes, Giratina’s heavy retreat cost makes it a poor starter, and its Dark-type weakness makes it a surprisingly brittle defender against Zoroark-GX” ; or “No, Giratina’s retreat cost is irrelevant due to how many [card name=”Float Stone” set=”BREAKthrough” no=”137″ c=”name”][/card] I run.”
• Are there any special applications of this card that I could take advantage of strategically?
  • Depends on the type of deck you are running, but you could situationally use Shadow Claw offensively if teched into a deck with [card name=”Psychic Energy” set=”EX Ruby and Sapphire” no=”107″ c=”name”][/card]. You could also from time to time put Giratina up against a Fighting-type attacker in order to exploit its Resistance to Fighting.

Evaluating Deck Enhancers (general)
Example: [card name=”Cynthia” set=”Ultra Prism” no=”119″ c=”name”][/card] (as a general draw card option)

• Did I test this card enough period in order to tell that it’s universally useful?
• Is this general enhancer card the best at what it does in the whole format?
  • In Standard: Yes, Cynthia is unambiguously the most reliable, consistent, and powerful shuffle draw card.
  • In Expanded: Cynthia is among the more reliable and consistent shuffle draw cards, but [card name=”Colress” set=”Plasma Storm” no=”118″ c=”name”][/card] is usually more powerful.
• Does this card’s in-game benefits outweigh the lost opportunity to run other powerful cards?
  • In Standard: Cynthia is not a powerful a draw card as [card name=”Professor Sycamore” set=”Phantom Forces” no=”101″ c=”name”][/card], and lacks the disruptive capabilities of [card name=”N” set=”Noble Victories” no=”92″ c=”name”][/card], but it is the most conservative, resource-friendly draw card in the format.
  • In Expanded: Except in limited circumstances, Cynthia is either outclassed by another Supporter or Pokemon card, or otherwise not worth dedicating four slots in your list.

Evaluating Deck Cores
Example: Malamar

• Does this even work as a deck?
  • Answer: Yes!
• Have I been structuring this deck the right way?
  *This answer can be a lot more uncertain. Oftentimes when a deck first comes out, people play it in a winning yet sub-optimal way, but when a particular player or group comes along, they could innovate its structure to make it truly great. Malamar decks will depend heavily on setting up, meaning that an optimal list build could mean the difference between winning or losing.
• Follow-up to the previous question: are my peers (friends, League goers, testing group, mentors) reviewing my new idea, or am I just all on my own?
  • “Hey man, I hate to break it to you, but you really, really need to run multiple [card name=”Brigette” set=”BREAKthrough” no=”134″ c=”name”][/card] in this thing!”

Step 5: Commit!

[cardimg name=”Ultra Necrozma-GX ” set=”Forbidden Light” no=”95″ align=”right” c=”none”][/cardimg]

It’s one thing to test a good new deck; it’s another thing to prepare multiple good new decks and feel torn about which one you should use. Throw one or two really good pre-established decks into the mix, and you might be at risk of losing sleep before your next Regional or International Championship! Here is some general advice on when to use a new deck in place of an old one.

• First, any new deck you use will naturally have a bigger surprise factor than the older archetype. Even when the new deck is an obvious combo of cards like [card name=”Malamar ” set=”Forbidden Light” no=”51″ c=”custom”]Malamar[/card] with [card name=”Ultra Necrozma-GX ” set=”Forbidden Light” no=”95″ c=”custom”]Ultra Necrozma-GX[/card], you will be bound to play against a lot of players who have not done their due diligence to learn about the cards in Forbidden Light.  Perhaps they should have read the portion of this article in front of the paywall.
• Second, consistency is king, especially in an event with hundreds of people, so defer to the more reliable deck in tough spots. Don’t confuse “old” with “consistent” or “new” with “inconsistent”, though, since a new deck could easily have greater potential for draw and search power consistency. [card name=”Volcanion-EX” set=”Steam Siege” no=”26″ c=”name”][/card] decks have been around for nearly two years at this point, yet the moment [card name=”Zoroark-GX” set=”Shining Legends” no=”53″ c=”name”][/card] came out, it was instantly more reliable than almost any Volcanion variant. Guess that’s just the power of the Trade Ability!
• Third, don’t be deterred by a few bad testing results the night before the big tournament. Your playtesting and evaluation of the new set might not be perfect, and may have even had a blind spot or two, but as long as nothing too serious throws your findings into question, just accept your couple of losses as a worst-case scenario. That’s not to say you should stick with a bad deck; rather, it’s saying that because you’ve worked hard in your preparations, which included an analysis of the sunken cost fallacy, you shouldn’t be as fearful of your decisions as other players.

You’ve tested hard. Now stick to your guns and go play boldly!

Conclusion

With this simple methodology, you can now have some pretty great answers to complex issues when it comes to mastering new sets. Whether you want to create a whole new deck, or just add a hot new tech to a pre-existing deck, you’ll be reviewing the new set with skill, sorting the card choices carefully, play-testing in a balanced manner, evaluating your progress wisely, and ultimately committing to the right call for you.

Have any questions about this five-step method? Want some advice about how you’re handling the testing of a new concept from the latest Forbidden Light expansion? Just post a reply to this article’s thread in the message boards.

Thanks for reading, and best of luck!

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