Should You Tech For Bad Matchups?

In this post we elaborate whether you should add tech cards for bad match-ups that your deck inherently has. We will also walk through an example.

Note: A bad match-up is one in which you generally are not expected to win without specifically planning for the bad match-up.

What are ‘Tech Cards’?

Tech cards are specific card(s) that ultimately assist your deck against specific match-ups.

In order to ensure your deck is still consistent and optimized it is crucial to ensure that the tech cards added do not influence your ability to perform with the deck at an overall level as these are specific cards for specific match-ups which might not always be relevant.

• Tech cards help against specific match-ups and not the overall meta.
• Tech cards should only be run in low counts to avoid impacting consistency and optimization of your deck.
• Tech cards are not always relevant in every match that you play.

Decision making when selecting ‘Tech Cards’?

Tech cards provide you with a way to provide answers to specific threats and/or mitigate risks that you are exposed to in your standard 60-card deck. Your decision in researching / adding / utilizing tech cards in your deck scales with your competitive ability to draw into the cards you require and predicting the meta game that you might be exposed to at tournaments.

In order to understand the decisions making, you need to be familiar with:

• Basic to advanced knowledge of the competitive meta game;
• Understanding the strengths and weaknesses of your deck;
• Understanding the available cards within the allotted block of cards that are tournament legal;
• Why you may need to use tech card(s); and
• In which scenarios would the tech card(s) assist you in.

There are five-points to consider when concluding on a decision to include a tech card or not;

1. In what circumstances does the card / combination of tech cards become viable and is this possible on a consistent basis?;
2. How popular is the bad match-up deck expected to be?;
3. Does the addition of the tech card(s) expose me to any other mechanics in the meta-game and does that exposure justify the inclusion of the card?;
4. Does my 60-card deck suffer in terms of overall game-play, consistency and/or optimization through the inclusion of these tech cards?; and
5. Does the inclusion of the tech-card swing the match-up into my favour on a major success level (>55% of the time)?

If you are answered No to any of the above then you should really consider your options available and ensure detailed testing is done to justify the inclusion of the card.

If you answered No to multiple of the above then we recommend that you put specific research into predicting the share of decks that the bad match-up will constitute at the tournament.

• If it is likely that the bad match-up will be a majority of decks played in the tournament; it is then advisable that you elect to field a different deck if it is within your means.
• If the bad match-up deck is not predicted to be in the majority of decks played at the tournament then this might already be safely mitigated and you should direct your research into other more prevailing decks that you might be playing against.

 

IMPORTANT NOTE: With every set, sub-set and/or special set that is released the depth and applicability of tech card(s) could change. This is part of the ever revolving meta in the Pokémon TCG. We ensure up-to-date coverage on all things TCG related so ensure you read through our Competitive News and Competitive Guides to stay on top of everything!

 

Walking through an example of whether ‘Tech Cards’ would help against a bad match-up?

In the below example we are factoring in the following assumptions:

• The deck we are playing is the SWSH Era Regi’s deck
• The research of the meta-game and predicted popular deck at an upcoming tournament is that of Goodra VSTAR. 
• Our goal is to place as high as possible in the tournament and we are open to changing our deck / sourcing new cards.
• The default position of Regi’s vs Goodra VSTAR is that our deck generally is significantly unfavoured and is a bad match-up.

With the above assumptions in-mind we have a few decision making activities to embark on to reach a final conclusion on whether we should introduce tech card(s) at all and what to do after.

In order to include the additional of tech cards we need to ensure that these sufficiently win against the Goodra VSTAR match-up. As at the time of writing (being early 2023) there are no cards within the Standard tournament format list that allow for regi’s to tech directly against Goodra VSTAR. Because of this we would ideally look to playing a different deck.

Assuming that Goodra was on the lower side of popular decks (i.e. a fair share of the meta-game but not dominating the form) the following is our decision making considerations about adding tech cards for this Goodra VSTAR match-up.

1. As there are no cards to tech against this specific match-up and we still wanted to play this deck we would focus our attention to adding tech cards against other match-ups.
2. We want to improve the perform-ability of our deck against the other bad match-ups and turn those into higher net win rates to counter the loss that we could experience against Goodra VSTAR.
   1. An example of the above would be to add a copy of Yell Horn to beat the stall tactics of Eiscue.
3. If the only bad-match up was against Goodra VSTAR we would continue to proceed and play the deck at the tournament as we safely added tech cards against the other decks that we could encounter and as such remained competitive given the greater field.

Final Note on Competitiveness of Decks

You do not need to beat every deck to perform at tournaments, you need to ensure that you are competitive across the fields of decks that could be fielded at tournaments. This is important as each deck has their own match-up spreads and to advance in tournaments is to be competitive across all options. 

It is up to you as to what you want to consider the relevance of a deck is in a meta-game for it to be a popular / major deck that you would run into in a tournament. We generally consider this to be any deck that has more than 10%-15% weighting in a meta-game.