Hey, TCMG crew. Wallysson here again with another major review.
This time we're talking about the Turin Special Event, the first big event with Chaos Rising legal here in the West. The tournament came right after Indianapolis and ended up making the format a lot more interesting before NAIC.
I didn't do a full review of Indy, so before getting into Turin I want to talk a bit about Cerys Jones' result with . I think it's important to go through it because her title explains a lot of what came after in Turin.
Before these events, a lot of people were already looking at as the main deck of Chaos Rising. And it makes sense. The deck is strong, consistent, has several versions and adapts really well. But Indy and Turin showed that maybe the format isn't that simple.
Alakazam won Indianapolis. won Turin. picked up steam. And now NAIC is coming in looking way more open than it seemed a few days ago.
Indianapolis Recap: Cerys Jones and Alakazam
The big highlight of Indianapolis was Cerys Jones' Alakazam.
The deck already had some really good things going for it in this format. It's a single-prizer deck, draws a lot of cards and trades prizes really well against several two-prize decks. The problem was always Dragapult.
When Dragapult starts using Phantom Dive and knocking out two small pieces in the same turn, the game gets really complicated for Alakazam. You lose resources, lose tempo and still fall behind in the prize trade.
What made Cerys' list interesting is that it tried to solve exactly that. She didn't show up accepting Dragapult as a bad matchup. She brought a plan to actually disrupt Dragapult, using and .
Elgyem helps deny manual energy attachments early in the game. That forces Dragapult to lean more on to attack. And when Dragapult needs to put together stadium, energy, supporter and attack every single turn, the game starts to get a lot less comfortable for it.
That's the part I liked most about the list. It doesn't look like a tech added just to say there was an answer. It looks like a well-thought-out choice for the field she expected to face.
And that changes Alakazam's value a lot. The deck was already good against plenty of stuff. If it can also turn Dragapult into a more controllable game, then the deck becomes a much more serious pick.
If you want to understand this list better, I recommend watching Celio's video with Cerys. She explains the idea behind the deck really well, the reason for the Nighttime Mine + Elgyem package and how she built the plan against Dragapult.
