This tournament will be standard format, but with Zacian V banned. (Explanations below)

I've been thinking of running some anti Zacian V tournaments for a while now, to see how it affects the meta.

This tournament will be free to enter.

It is recommended that you join the TwoFootNinja's Testing Grounds Discord server, however that is not required for playing in the tournament.

Prizing:

Prizing will be 30 Vivid Voltage PTCGO packs, provided by myself. Pack donations would be happily accepted and really appreciated.

Distribution will be distributed as follows:

• 1st: 10
• 2nd: 6
• Top 4: 3
• Top 8: 2

My reasons for thinking that Zacian V is too powerful being:

• More health than the average Pokémon V which makes it too difficult to ko (most common being 200 or 210)

• More damage than any other Pokémon V (next highest is 220 but discarding 2 energy)

• Cheaper attack cost than any other card we've previously had that dealt 230 damage (usually 4 energy)

• Downside of the attack is too easy to bypass just by playing a switching card

• Ability is much too powerful for acceleration of energy and drawing cards at the same time, allowing the deck to run with very minimal draw supporters or no support Pokémon, as well as having Metal Saucer as an additional way to easily get powered up quickly

• (These reasons may sound petty but do make a big impact on various cards in various situations, before adding in buffs with cards like Cape of Toughness or Vitality Band)

All of these combined make the card ridiculous and far stronger than almost any card we've seen before with not enough counters (fire would be a counter but you can just play Coating Metal Energy). To further explain my point, since the card has been released we've always had a top meta deck that uses Zacian V as it's attacker and never any other metal Pokémon. Also in tournaments that Tablemon has been running for post rotation, Zacian V by itself was consistently the most popular deck and also the best win rate deck by a large margin. Currently in the format 2 of the strongest decks are ADP Zacian and Lucmetal Zacian which to me is clear that Zacian V is more of a problem than ADP, and also since we've never had a problem with ADP particularly until Sword and Shield base set was released.

Keep in mind that this is purely for testing purposes, and I am personally curious to how the meta will change without Zacian V.

In a format without Zacian V, I would hope to see more of a variety of decks that currently can't be played due to crippling weakness to metal or Zacian V and new archetypes forming, or just more interesting variants of decks that use Lucmetal or ADP instead of just Zacian V.