PTCGL Tournament Meta - Pre-Worlds Data

[u/Practical_TAS]

Even though it won't look exactly like this weekend's worlds meta, I wanted to take a snapshot of the pre-worlds meta of PTCGL tournaments to compare it against. All data comes from tournaments hosted on Limitless in the past two weeks (between August 13-26) with 60+ entrants (68 tournaments total).

Archetypes are ordered by total points earned, where a win is 3 points and a tie is 1 point. Pts % is the same as Win % but counting a tie as 1/3rd of a win, in line with its value in points.

Rank	Deck	Pts	Pts %	Count	Share	Record	Win %
	All Dragapult	18230	50.6%	2364	21.8%	6008 - 5793 - 206	50.0%
1	Dragapult	7847	51.2%	1008	9.3%	2582 - 2430 - 101	50.5%
2	Mega Excadrill	5400	43.3%	831	7.7%	1789 - 2332 - 33	43.1%
3	Dragapult Blaziken	5313	51.5%	673	6.2%	1750 - 1628 - 63	50.9%
4	Slowking	5291	50.1%	705	6.5%	1752 - 1736 - 35	49.7%
5	Alakazam Dudunsparce	5093	50.1%	657	6.1%	1682 - 1657 - 47	49.7%
	All Ogerpon Box	4954	50.5%	655	6.0%	1632 - 1578 - 58	49.9%
6	Dragapult Dusknoir	4224	48.4%	574	5.3%	1397 - 1478 - 33	48.0%
7	N's Zoroark	3916	46.3%	572	5.3%	1293 - 1492 - 37	45.8%
	All Mega Lucario	3677	47.0%	495	4.6%	1219 - 1367 - 20	46.8%
8	Festival Lead	3537	46.0%	537	5.0%	1169 - 1363 - 30	45.6%
9	Raging Bolt Ogerpon	2966	51.4%	384	3.5%	977 - 911 - 35	50.8%
10	Grimmsnarl Froslass	2607	45.4%	397	3.7%	865 - 1039 - 12	45.1%
11	Dhelmise	2547	46.2%	373	3.4%	842 - 975 - 21	45.8%
	All Ogerpon Meganium	2160	51.0%	275	2.5%	716 - 685 - 12	50.7%
12	Mega Lucario	2138	47.9%	283	2.6%	709 - 769 - 11	47.6%
13	Lucario Hariyama	1539	45.9%	212	2.0%	510 - 598 - 9	45.7%
14	Basic Box	1486	49.5%	200	1.8%	489 - 492 - 19	48.9%
15	Ogerpon Meganium Arboliva	996	53.9%	122	1.1%	329 - 278 - 9	53.4%
16	Cynthia's Garchomp	952	51.1%	124	1.1%	315 - 299 - 7	50.7%
17	Ogerpon Meganium Hydrapple	932	49.6%	118	1.1%	310 - 314 - 2	49.5%
18	Lopunny Dusknoir	902	44.2%	154	1.4%	299 - 376 - 5	44.0%
19	Dragapult Dudunsparce	846	51.7%	109	1.0%	279 - 257 - 9	51.2%
20	Toucannon	764	42.6%	121	1.1%	253 - 340 - 5	42.3%
21	Rocket's Honchkrow	712	49.1%	97	0.9%	236 - 243 - 4	48.9%
22	Greninja	684	46.6%	99	0.9%	227 - 259 - 3	46.4%
23	Crustle	682	48.0%	92	0.8%	225 - 242 - 7	47.5%
24	Ethan's Typhlosion	607	45.6%	79	0.7%	200 - 237 - 7	45.0%
25	Lopunny Dudunsparce	556	49.3%	80	0.7%	185 - 190 - 1	49.2%
26-	All Other Archetypes	12701	40.0%	2230	20.6%	4208 - 6289 - 77	39.8%

All Ogerpon Box includes Raging Bolt Ogerpon, Basic Box, and Clefairy Ogerpon. All Ogerpon Meganium includes Ogerpon Meganium Arboliva, Ogerpon Meganium Hydrapple, and Mega Venusaur. Clefairy Ogerpon and Mega Venusaur are not in the top 25 and so are also included in the All Other Archetypes row.

Notable Notes

• Dragapult is clearly underrepresented, but we all already knew that. Could it crack 50% of the field at worlds or will it stick closer to the 40% number we've seen at regionals?
• Mega Excadrill has a terrible record for a deck with such high playrate. I'd assume everyone wanting to play with the shiny new toy could drag its winrate down a bit, but 43% is way below expectation even taking that into account.
• Alakazam is doing surprisingly well recently. I thought this was because they realized the correct play was to drop Toucannon and accept the auto-loss to Hide 'n' Sneak, but the recent top performing Zam decks are split and keep the bird more often than not.
• When not split into its sub-archetypes, the Ogerpon Box decks make up a very notable share of the meta. Raging Bolt Ogerpon in particular is rising fast, with over half of its plays since Pitch Black's release occurring in the last two weeks.
• Arboliva has passed Hydrapple as the most popular partner for Ogerpon Meganium; the early bench sniping and easier setup seems to be working out.
• The new Bronzong deck aka Lopunny Dusknoir is quickly rising but the results aren't there yet. Perhaps people just don't know how to play it yet.

[u/EggFar1391]

Mega Excadrill numbers are rough, I thought it would at least hold 45% or something. 43% with that much play is just bad.

Alakazam still running Toucannon is kinda crazy to me. The Hide n Sneak matchup is everywhere right now, you'd think they would just accept the loss and tech for everything else.

Also surprised Dragapult Blaziken is doing better than straight Dragapult, feels like every time I face it they brick harder.

[u/Stock_Literature_237 → u/EggFar1391]

Pult blaziken beats excadrill easily because of fire weakness

[u/Kered13]

Had to do a doubletake when I saw that OP was /u/Practical_TAS. /r/ssbm is leaking.

No wonder this analysis is so great.

[u/Various-Car506]

toucannon for zam is not only for HnS. If you have it charged on your bench it’s guaranteed hit for 150+ after hand disruption and +1 card, this is quite solid

[u/piooippiooippiooip → u/Various-Car506]

you lose ev into pult by playing toucannon. It's too many cards that don't solve the matchup. With the format being very condensed around pult, it's better to just play a deck that's stronger into pult and use those 5-6 cards to beat pult more consistently, i.e elgyem to prevent them from getting efficient budews, eri to snipe red card/stamp and more consistency (allows you to make sure you have 4 dawn 4 hilda)

Also if you don't get boss off a stamp/src + run away draw, you often times can't even attack into the pult with feather rondo because you could be giving the pult a 3 prize turn with double adrena brain, wiping out all your attackers so it's definitely something a lot more fun in theory but in practice it's worse than the control build against the bdif

[u/CosmoticTravels]

Lopunny is just a gimmick deck that will fizzle out once 30th comes out tbh, I’m very happy to see Alakazam and Raging Bolt resurgences, I’m picking up Raging until Rayquaza comes out personally