Pokeballing: Moving on to the Future

Changes to the Play! Pokemon Modified format for the 2013 tournament season have been announced.
Effective: 9/1/2012
In the interest of maintaining a healthy tournament environment, Pokemon Organized Play removes older sets from the Modified format at the beginning of each new tournament season. Each rotation challenges existing players to create new strategies while enabling new players to get into Organized Play with a minimal investment.
The 2013 season will be starting on July 9th so that players can get an early start on working towards the 2013 Pokemon World Championships, but in order to avoid confusion we will rotate sets on the more familiar date of September 1st.
The 2012 Pokemon World Championships being held on August 10th–12th in Waikoloa, Hawaii, will use the 2012 format and rules as are currently listed.

Its finally happening this September, we are rotating to a Black&White on format for the Pokemon TCG. This means that sets from Call of Legends (referred to crap set by me and my friends) to Heart Gold/Soul Silver, will no longer be used in the tournament scenes.

This changes the landscape of the current meta so much, as we will be losing alot of good Pokemon, Trainers and Supporters as well as Special Metal and Dark Energy. Japan is already in this format and if you have read my previous blog's you know that their meta is drastically different then what we have seen on this side of the world. Big decks such as Zekeels don't dominate the format like they do here, with stage 2 decks being able to shine.

The cardpool we are losing is probably one of the most significant to our game in a long time. Cards like Junk Arm, Pokemon Collector, Sages Training, Professor Oak's New Theory will bid the game farewell allowing cards like Cheren and Bianca to be used to their full potential.

The big thing I wanna discuss right now is the loss of two special energy, Dark and Metal. Special Dark and Metal energies have been in the Pokemon formats since their initial release back in December of 2000. For twelve years players have been able to incorporate these unique energies into their strategies and these cards have been in some powerful decks in those years (Dark Tyrannitar/Dark Electrode, Durant). While Dark decks will be able to live without the aid of Special Dark, the only real Metal deck that's played right now is Durant. Durant suffers greatly from this loss as the combination of Eviolite and Special Metal made those ants impossible to one shot for most decks. This rotation plus the release of Heatmor and the forthcoming release of Tool Scrapper will be the final nails that make Durant unplayable.

For Dark decks however the opposite will occur, as the playability of these decks will continue to be on the rise. The lack of Special Dark means that we have more room for Basic Dark energy which will fuel Dark Patch even more and Dark Claw will fill the void left by Special Dark's plus power ability.

We are about to embark on a much needed format change that will hopefully fix all the bugs this one had. If Japans Nationals are any indication of what we can expect (http://www.propokemon.com/deck-articles/japan-national-championships-winning-deck-info) then I for one am very excited for whats coming.