Savage Sponge (psychic, electric)
by Jack Savage
Queen Mary
Long beach, CA
7/22/2000
222 people in my age group (11-14)
I finished first place and went 7 wins and 1 loss in the Swiss.



Hi guys, I figured I should send in a small STS report since I won the 11-14
age group tournament. It was by far the largest, most fun, and most
stressful tournament I've ever been in. I didn't take any notes (doh!), and
I'm crap with names so I won't bother to attempt a round by round style
report, but I will comment on the metagame, the finals, and whatever other
stuff I think of before submitting this :).


The Metagame:
The following is just my opinion, if you disagree please e-mail me at
altivec@pacbell.net.

The metagame theory I had come up with before the tournament was composed of
around 30%+ haymakers (due to fast speed and easy learning curve of the
deck), an equally huge if not bigger group playing some form of
wiggly-centric deck, and with the rest being made of either odd-ball decks
or less popular and/or harder to play archtypes. The main problem I had when
making a deck was finding the right mix of pokemon to beat haymaker, sponge,
and turbo wiggly (in my opinion, the most dangerous decks). This is why I
opted for an altered sponge, beating haymaker is as strait forward as
psyburning everyone, beating sponge is just a matter of playing better, but
wiggly was the problem. Wiggly is fast, but it has a couple of major
problems:
#1: It's painfully vulnerable to energy removal/super energy removal thanks
to it's reliance on wiggly and often scyther.
#2: It's very vulnerable to decking, chansey stalling + a couple of nightly
garbage runs, won me many games vs wiggly.
#3: if it doesn't oak early, it dies hard.
Simply by adding appropriate trainers (energy removal, rocket sneak attack,
and nightly garbage run/item finders) I was able to get my deck to beat
wiggly very easily. The only pokemon with a good way to hurt this deck is
mime, but anyone playing mime is at a serious disadvantage with so many
hitmonchan/jiggly players running around. In the end, it came down to sponge
minus the lickys with ditto instead.


My Deck List:
Pokémon (14)
2 Chansey
2 Ditto
4 Scyther
3 Electabuzz
3 Mewtwo (Movie Promo)

Trainers (30)
4 Professor Oak
3 Energy Removal
3 Super Energy Removal
4 Computer Search
2 Gust of Wind
3 Item Finder
3 Rocket's Sneak Attack
3 Scoop Up
3 Nightly Garbage Run
2 PlusPower

Energy (16)
4 Double Colorless Energy
6 Lightning Energy
6 Psychic Energy


Pre-tournament:
I got to the ship at about 9:15, but thanks to my invite, I got to wait in
the short line and got in by 10:30 or so. I quickly went down and got
registered, threw my new STS tee-shirt on over my  pokeybun shirt
(sluggy.com), and wandered around looking for my friends. After meeting up
with everybody (minus Matthew who we later saw in the tournament), I did
some last minute deck altering to my friend's decks, and we waited in the
"line" (meaning: shoving impatient crowd) to get down stairs and get to our
first round matches for a little too long, if my memory serves, we didn't
even get downstairs til 12:05 or so.

Main tournament (8 rounds):
Sigh, I really should have taken notes, but by the time I though I had a
good chance of making top 8 (7th round, 6-1 record), I was way too tired and
was lacking a pencil/paper. Not too much sticks out in my mind besides my
first round loss, which was due to a disgustingly poor draw of a single
promo mewtwo vs a jigglypuff, I could have probaby still won if it was't for
my first turn oak providing me with a scyther and four DCEs, and various
useless crap... I was beaten down within 5 minutes by a pair of wigglys.
Round two and on just worked for me, no really bad draws, and some pretty in
my favor match ups (standard haymakers, badly built wigglys, raindance,
etc). No one I knew made top 8 besides me, Francisco lopez did OK with 20th
place, good for you dude, you can thank me for convincing you not to play
magmar and to go with The Buzz. :-P

Top 8:
Thanks to the article at http://www.wizards.com/pokemon/, I was able to find
the names/decklists of my opponents in the finals.

Quarter-Finals: (Derek Bowling with haymaker)
I had the advantage, in all of my playtesting, standard haymaker loses to
sponge 9 out of 10 games. This was for the most part no different. Very late
in the game (45-60 seconds left), I needed to get the judge to call time on
my turn, so using the method my opponent had during the earlier part of the
game, I sorted my discard pile and then played a nightly garbage run for a
grand total of around 50-55 seconds, I then looked over my hand and time was
called on my turn and he lost due to having drawn fewer prices. His friends
and himself decided to argue with the judge and call me a cheater... sigh...
Of course there was a judge standing over us the whole match, so anything I
did that was cheating would have been caught, at the very worst, I abused
the rules.
Match picture at: http://www.wizards.com/pokemon/LA00/images/41.jpg -- Upper
left side

Semi-Finals: (Daniel Nino with cool haymaker that reminds me of my own :-)
Again, I had the advantage and I won this game without a whole lot of
trouble. He was a cool guy, we joked about my previous game and Derek
Bowling's anger, nothing particularly special about this game.

Finals: (Kody Barret with interesting wiggly/stall)
This was a hard, close battle. We both had a bad start, but mine was good
enough that I was able to recover and take the lead. He was pretty cool and
kind of funny. Later, while we were standing around waiting to do the awards
ceremony, he decided to go on an insane (but funny) rant about doing 12
diggers in one turn to kill a chansey... this got laughs from me, a blank
stare from the 10 and under champion (Joseph Viray), and an argument from
Andrew Marshal (15+ champion).
Match picture at: http://www.wizards.com/pokemon/LA00/images/48.jpg -- I'm
the guy on the left with the long hair

Award Ceremony and later:
The awards were long, boring, and flashy. It was probably just me, since
everyone else seemed extremely happy over winning and content with having to
pose for the press (I think they were the press, I don't even know). It
sucks that it took so long to get over with, by the time I got to take the
medal off and leave, all of my friends had left :(. Damn no
goodbyes/congrats. Oh well. I made off with a medal, 36 total packs, a cap,
a binder, a shirt, and a soon to be delivered jacket.


Special thanks to:
All my opponents who didn't act like sore losers
King's comics 1 and 2 for being cool places to hang out and play pokemon :)
My brother Jesse for scoring 3 free passes to pokemon the movie 2000 (sucky
movie, nice promo though)
Wizards for hosting a pretty well run tournament considering how many people
were there (I don't have an exact number, but I'm guessing around 700-800)
Big thanks to my mom, my little brother Jesse, the guys from king's comics
II (Francisco, Matthew, Robert, Osualdo [hope I'm spelling that right...])
and anybody I forgot to mention, for cheering me on during the finals!
No thanks to me for not keeping notes and waiting til Monday to write this.


Later,
Jack Savage
altivec@pacbell.net