Greetings friends, I told y’all I would be back with another piece in about a week and boy am I excited! We’re only a couple of days from the most prestigious event of the season and literally 1 day away from having to submit Deck lists for us Day 1 worlds competitors. I haven’t been this excited for an event in quite sometime, and think the weekend will be filled to the brim with fun and surprises. This is the most I’ve tested for an event in quite sometime and cannot wait for Day 1 to begin.

Preparing for this event has been very fun for me, but ultimately any deck choice has to be meta dependent and getting inside the heads of my fellow Day 1 competitors has proven somewhat challenging. The ARG results of this past weekend have complicated the read a bit as well because I’ve heard everything from “My Day 1 play is ruined and I must change it!” to “The event is irrelevant” so I’m not entirely sure how to interpret the events impact on the upcoming tournament.

Before the event, I’m certain most players did not consider Gyarados AOR as a threat and we’ve found ourselves in an all too familiar sounding conundrum after being forced to acknowledge the deck as still viable: Do you play a counter? Gyarados has always been the type of deck that can absolutely breeze through a tournament X-0 if not accounted for, but as soon as anyone gets a whiff of its viability, out come the Tapu Koko and other obscure counters like those I mentioned here before Seattle Regionals when we last had to acknowledge Gyarados as a legitimate threat.

Something I do know is that I’ve narrowed my weekend down to two potential decks I’ll be playing for the event. As I’m writing this I’m still not entirely certain which deck I’ll play, and if I’ll even play the same deck for Day 1 and 2, but I’m very certain my decision is between these two concepts: Gardevoir-GX and Drampa-GX/Garbodor. We have the reigning BDIF of last format versus the new comer out of Burning Shadows. I’ve definitely played the most games with these two decks and certainly believe them to be the strongest contenders. However, grinding out the last couple of spots of the deck has proven difficult when trying to read a very undefined metagame. The following are exact lists of what my Worlds options look like so far along with everything I’m considering for the last couple of deck spots.

This article — “The Final Countdown” – Last Minute Thoughts on Gardevoir-GX and Garbodor/Drampa-GX for Worlds 2017 — was originally published on SixPrizes.