Raise your hand if you are building a deck for the STS on the East Coast.  Then you probably understand what I am about to say.  I bet you looked at the deck that you have played is great because it has beaten every challenger, right.  But as soon as you start to think about battling with the big boys at the STS, then you start to look at your deck and start to get paranoid about your deck being beaten by an archetype or your deck's weakness.  For example here is a deck I have used for about three months now:

3x Growlithe
2x Arcanine
3x Seel
2x Dewgong
3x Jigglypuff
2x Wigglytuff
3x Magmar
2x Lapras
14x Fire
11x Water
3x DCE
3x Super Potion
3x NGR
3x Switch
3x GOW

I thought at first this was a good deck because it beat a water/electric deck, but I started getting scared of raindance and haymaker decks.  So at school, instead of doing my homework, I made this chart on what the weakness, strengths, and resistance of the pokemon in archetypes are.  Here it is:

Type                                 Weakness                                    Strength                                    Resisitance
Fighting                           Psychic/Flying                           Normal/Electric                                 None
Grass/Flying                            Fire                                    Water/Ground                                  Ground
Water                               Electric/Grass                                 Fire                                            None
Electric                              Ground/Fighting                             Water                                         None
Psychic                             Psychic/Normal                             Psychic/Poison                             None
Normal                                Fighting/Ground                          Psychic                                      Psychic
 

Notice almost every type is in an archetype, except fire and grass.  No archetype has a distinct advantage over grass, so I picked them.  People ask me, if I am so scared of archetypes, why not pick one, but every archetype has an edge over the other.  I picked to make a static effect deck that has grass and poison in it.  Poison has a weaknessto Psychic pokemon, but psy pokemon are usually used for stall so i am not worried, then I created this deck:

3x Rocket Ekans
2x Dark Arbok
3x Grimer
2x Muk
4x Weedle
3x Kakuna
2x Beedrill
2x Scyther
24x Grass Energy
3x DCE
3x GOW
3x Super Potion
3x NGR
3x ER

Two types of weakness, one type of energy.  This proves useful because there is no energy problems and there is no chance that a fire and psychic deck will appear.  Try doing this strategy with water, normal/flying, and grass pokemon.  Well thats all I have to say. Use this advice wisely.

Jake Reeder
poke@charlotte.infi.net