I don't usually rush through the ranked season. Unfortunately, my schedule is quite tight in the coming days, so I thought I may as well start right away and see how far I can go.

This ended up being my fastest ranked climb in Pocket to date, moving from the bottom of Ultraball 4 to Masterball (with retention) on day 1 of the ranked season.

Honestly, I struggled a bit at first, winning only 1 game for every 3 games played. It was the same regardless of the deck: Lucario-Hitmontop, vanilla Altaria, Suicune-Baxcaliber, Sceptile, Manetric.

This went on for ~10 games until I switched to Zoroark.

With a few lucky win streaks, Zoroark was able to breezed through most of Ultraball 4 and a fair bit of early Masterball.

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This deck is basically the standard Zoroark deck with a couple minor tweaks:

Replaced Pokemon Center Lady with Big Malasada. Having fewer supporters means a lower chance of bricking.

Ran 2 copies of Bombirdier, which makes drawing into them way more consistent. It also reduces the chances of leading with Darkrai (which is how I lost most of my Zoroark games). Plus, if you lead off with one of the Bombirdiers, you may luck out and draw into the other one for the free retreat.

No Giant Cape and Lucky Ice Pop: Zoroark is all about being fast tempo and consistent. The extra survivability does nothing to help with this deck's game plan.

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Some observations about the meta:

• So many Miraidons and Sleep Altarias. Make sure you can handle these two decks.
• Chingling is underutilised in Ultraball. You can play stage-2s with no impunity. (This is not the case in Masterball, but thankfully Zoroark doesn't care about Chingling 🤷)

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Edit:

The seasonal ranking has been released:

For Zoroark's winrate, just subtract 4 from games won and 8 from games lost. That brings us to 25 wins against 11 losses - a winrate of 69.4%.