Today I am interviewing Lorelei Pang. I have personally known Lorelei ever since I was the first person to play against her back when she joined our league that met at the Champaign Public Library. She was playing Sablelock, I was playing Kyogre & Groudon Legend, and I was lucky enough to beat her! Ever since then, Lorelei's smile and cheerful attitude has been a major part of our small Pokemon community here in the C-U area, and we're sad to see her go this year.
Without further ado, here is the interview!
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Where are you from?
I'm from a suburb of Chicago called Aurora. It's the place they filmed the movie Wayne's World. Have you seen Wayne's World?
How old are you?
I am twenty-three years old.
Where did you go to school and what did you major in?
I went to the beautiful and illustrious The University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign for computer science.
Where do you currently reside? How often will you come down and visit us for our weekly tournaments?
Still in Aurora. I'm planning on visiting at least a couple of times, but the first priority is to find a job, and my second priority is to hold that job. It's hard to afford Pokemon cards without a source of income.
Can you tell us about your history with the game? When did you first start? When did you first get competitive?
So one boring summer day in 2009, my friend asked me if he can borrow my Pokemon cards. Ironically, he had been in Japan during the 90's Pokemon craze, so he had nothing to participate with when his neighbors pulled out their old cards to make decks out of. So I joined in, and my other friends joined in. While I try to be chill, sometimes I'll just get super competitive about something, and I had another friend who was the same way. So I looked up guides and stuff online, found the meta decks, and then discovered he had done the same. It kind of became a Cold War of Pokemon until we graduated high school and he quit playing (I won).
When I got to the beautiful and illustrious University of Illinois, I met up with an old childhood friend, Alan Johnson. I mentioned going to the local Pokemon League to explain that I would be incredibly busy that day, but Alan was actually interested in going. So we went, built more competitive decks, and I suppose the rest is history. All the way until I moved away of course.
How many times have you tried for a Worlds Invite?
Have you ever gotten that feeling where you get up in the morning, and you think to yourself, "Yeah, I'm going to get out there and make the world my burrito! There are people I have never met, food I've never eaten, places I've never been, things I've never done, and today is the day to LIVE!" And then at three in the morning you realize you've been watching Netflix all day? That about sums up my Worlds aspirations.
What's the best you've ever done at a tournament?
Top 4 at the 2011 Missouri Regionals, baby! I had the absolutely genius idea (if I say so myself) of teching Blaziken FB Lv. X into my Vileplume/Gengar deck. Not only is Luring Flame incredibly irritating under Item-lock, but the fire typing helps VileGar's two worst matchups in Steelix and DialgaChomp. I could write a whole article on why that worked out.
Nowadays, when people are building old VileGar decks, the go-to tech is Blaziken FB Lv. X. I get all teary-eyed just thinking about it. My brain-child is all grown up now!
(You can read Lorelei's tournament report from that event here.)
(You can read Lorelei's tournament report from that event here.)
Are there any big matches from your career that stick out to you?
The funniest one was Top 16 against Jason Klacynski at the 2012 Illinois States, right when Mewtwo EX started its reign of terror. I absolutely hated that format so I was ecstatic when I discovered Quad-Terrakion. [You would] run four of the most irritating anti-meta card, a ton of ways to stream them, and a million ways to keep your opponent from playing Pokemon. It exemplified everything wrong with the game.
So when my deck ran into Jason's Vanilluxe/Vileplume, an Item/Paralysis-lock, there was literally nothing I could do. Add in that I'm literally only running four Pokemon, and I mulliganed eleven times before I experienced the joy of draw/pass 'til game.
Oh, and the cherry on top was that it was the featured match. I think that video's still on TopCut's YouTube channel if you dig for it.
Do you plan on still playing the game next year? Will you still go to tournaments?
I hope to be able to judge or otherwise help out for local tournaments. I have to drive a minimum of forty-five minutes to even find an unsanctioned league all the way up here in not-Champaign-Urbana, so keeping up with the metagame and playing for fun isn't quite worth the effort. Especially since I cannot stand playing online.
What is your favorite card of all time?
Pidgey POP4 12/17. Just look at him! He don't care what you think! He'll just stroll right on past your Seismitoads and Mega Rayquazas and just dare you to take a wrong step. And if you do, so what? He don't care!
What is your favorite deck of all time?
DialgaChomp. I absolutely love the level of skill the existence of that deck brought to the metagame. The deck did not have a clear-cut win condition, but it was particularly good at disrupting enemy strategies. So every single matchup became a skill matchup and a serious war of attrition. It absolutely punished linear strategies and forced you to think several moves in advance to both play and play against.
What was your favorite format of all time?
The one right before Lysandre's Trump Card rotated (Editor's note: the card was banned). Hey, if I wanted to have fun thinking, I'd be studying and getting better grades, not playing Pokemon.
Do you play online?
I'm a spacial/visual kind of guy, and I learn with my hands. I can't deal with not being able to physically interact with cards. Also, different cards catch your eye in different ways. The way the colors shine, the foil patterns, stuff like that. It absolutely does not translate to the computer screen, where every card is uniformly bright.
What do you do outside of Pokemon?
There's a life outside...? Oh, like other card games? I play Yugioh too. I only have to drive forty minutes to play that.
What do you think of the general state of the game? Is it in decline?
It's slowly recovering from the biggest slap in the face the format has ever received. If they could tone down the ridiculousness of big basics or make more ways to punish their use, I think this format could be A-okay. I'm a little upset they chose not to reprint Shaymin EX [in a tin] though. Pokemon's low price point was one of the most attractive things about it.
What would you do if Pokemon suddenly stopped existing?
I would cry. A lot. That's a lot of money I could have spent on Yugioh!
What is your favorite Pokemon?
Glaceon is pretty cool. Seems like the sort of Pokemon I could just sit and chill with.
Any shoutouts?
Shoutouts to everyone I leave behind at the beautiful and illustrious University of Illinois! Brandon Flowers, Andrew Weiss, Daniel Bernstein, Damien Hardy, Lucas Selig, Robert Williams, and of course to the amazing Charles Randall! And also to Richard Vanmanisone, Carver Warning, and The J-Wittz, YouTube Sensation, for making my first year of competitive Pokemon one of the most memorable!
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Thanks for the interview, Lorelei!
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Glossary:
Mulligan- To start the game, each player draws seven cards and selects a Basic Pokemon they find there to start with as their Active Pokemon. Sometimes however, a player will find themselves with no Basic Pokemon, and this is called a mulligan. Then, the player has to shuffle their hand back into their deck and try again. Each time they do this, their opponent gets a chance to draw an extra card (they must draw all of the mulligans at once).
When Lorelei mulliganed many times against Jason Klacynski, she was giving her opponent a huge advantage by letting him draw many extra cards. This was, however, a risk you took when you played a deck like Lorelei's. Lorelei's Quad-Terrakion deck played four Terrakion and nothing else, meaning that in a sixty card-deck, she only played four Basic Pokemon! For this reason, it isn't so crazy that Lorelei mulliganed so many times in the featured match.
DialgaChomp- Dialga/Garchomp was a deck that was played upon the release of Garchomp C Lv. X, and the deck continued to exist until both Dialga G Lv. X and Garchomp C Lv. X saw rotation. The deck could tech in Palkia G Lv. X, Luxray G. Lv. X, or even Blaziken FB Lv. X. The deck had lots of options and had almost 50/50 matchups against any deck, meaning that a skillful player could pilot it very far. It was, however, a very difficult deck to play.
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Thanks for the interview, Lorelei!
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Glossary:
Mulligan- To start the game, each player draws seven cards and selects a Basic Pokemon they find there to start with as their Active Pokemon. Sometimes however, a player will find themselves with no Basic Pokemon, and this is called a mulligan. Then, the player has to shuffle their hand back into their deck and try again. Each time they do this, their opponent gets a chance to draw an extra card (they must draw all of the mulligans at once).
When Lorelei mulliganed many times against Jason Klacynski, she was giving her opponent a huge advantage by letting him draw many extra cards. This was, however, a risk you took when you played a deck like Lorelei's. Lorelei's Quad-Terrakion deck played four Terrakion and nothing else, meaning that in a sixty card-deck, she only played four Basic Pokemon! For this reason, it isn't so crazy that Lorelei mulliganed so many times in the featured match.
DialgaChomp- Dialga/Garchomp was a deck that was played upon the release of Garchomp C Lv. X, and the deck continued to exist until both Dialga G Lv. X and Garchomp C Lv. X saw rotation. The deck could tech in Palkia G Lv. X, Luxray G. Lv. X, or even Blaziken FB Lv. X. The deck had lots of options and had almost 50/50 matchups against any deck, meaning that a skillful player could pilot it very far. It was, however, a very difficult deck to play.
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