Team Omar

Some call it the Secret Florida Deck. Others call it Sablelock (Sablock), Sabledonk, Sableye Honchkrow, or Sableye Garchomp. Does it win by donking? Does it win by locking your opponent? Does it win by starving them of resources? Does it win by controlling their hand? Let’s just say that it wins by making the opponent lose!

I’ve not seen the deck around here, but I can say that it is causing a bit of a stir on the interwebs. There are a bunch of people discussing this deck in various places. Let’s go through the list. No, not the decklist, yet. Here’s the list of who’s talking about the deck:

1) People begging for info about the deck that took 2 of the top 4 spots in Florida and was seen topping at other states.
2) People like Curry/Silvestro that obviously played the deck, but don’t want its secrets made public.
3) People that have played against the deck and either got donked or annoyed to death.
4) Trolls

Now we can add “5) Team Omar” to that list.  I’m not going to pretend that I know the deck.  I just want to fan the flames a…

Last month, I posted talking about my Shuppet Donk Deck. The lists posted there didn’t take any of the HeartGold SoulSilver cards into account. To be honest, there isn’t a whole lot that HGSS brings to the deck. There is only one real big thing that HGSS allows this deck to do, but it’s enough to keep the deck alive and not fade out.

Oh, speaking of fade out, there’s a Pokemon in HGSS that has an attack named “fade out.” Isn’t that what Shuppet’s main attack is? Let’s take a closer look.

Dunsparce (from the GS set) is a 50HP basic Pokemon that can do 20 damage and return itself (and all attached cards) to your hand. Shuppet’s main attack does 30, so why would we want to sacrifice 10 damage in a donk deck? I can think of a few reasons: weakness, resistance, and attack cost.

When I say weakness and resistance, I’m not talking about Dunsparce’s (or Shuppet’s). If you play the deck well, they will never be attacked. I’m talking about the defending Pokemon’s weakness and resistance. In the past, if you played Shuppet against a Psy resistant foe, you might be in trouble.…

I brought my/Ava’s Shuppet Donk deck to test with Team Omar last night. I know that some people just hate the idea of Spiritomb AR in a Shuppet deck, but I wanted to see if it could help against SP. I think I played 4 matches, and 3 of them were against different SP decks. If I recall correctly, I only won 1 game. Even that one was questionable, because (for testing purposes) we replayed an early risk I took that would have resulted in a loss for me.

The funny thing is that I found all my matchups to be fairly positive. I feel like Shuppet should get completely owned by SP, but with the right Spiritomb start, I can stall the opponent enough to get a few early KOs. If one of them happens to be a Dialga G, it might just win me the game. As it was, I only did well against the fighting-heavy SP mainly due to weakness. I did pretty well against Abdi’s SP deck, too, until he realized exactly how my deck worked. Then Dialga shut me down. I had a really close and odd match with Omar (who reminded me…