First Look at Deck Ideas for Pokémon 30th Celebration
Hey everyone, today I am here to talk about the 30th anniversary set coming very soon, and how I have been testing some of the cards so far.
First card is Alolan Exeggutor, which is a fun new card for grass decks to improve the matchup against one-prize decks. 400 HP for 3 Energy, with Meganium in play and doing 150 damage and healing 50, can be hard for multiple decks to deal with. It can help against Festival Lead, Slowking, Alakazam, Zoroark and, in hindsight, most things. It is going to be interesting to cook with, since it is also a one-prizer. My first thought was to use it with Hydrapple instead of more Ogerpons, because we can use it as a tank to protect our energies while also improving our matchup against oneprize decks and Moltres.This is how I decided to build it, relying on the Dudunsparce Draw engine instead of Ogerpon. This also makes us able to run Buddy Poffin since almost anything is searchable from it.
The next few cards I want to talk about are Volbeat + Illumise in combination with the new Mew ex and Unown. I think those cards work extremely well together and have endless possibilities, but first let me explain why I chose to combine those.
Volbeat can find 2 benched Pokemon going first, but getting it into the Active has always been quite hard to do. With Mew ex, we can attach Telepathic Energy to Mew and find Latias ex, which leaves us with an easier way to get Mew into the Active, which now can copy Volbeat. On top of that, the energy is not wasted and can be used on Mew ex the following turn to copy whatever we need to attack with
Now that we already play Volbeat, we can easily include Illumise. Illumise says that weakness applies 3x. This makes it so our Unown can hit 3x weakness against Dragons, with Clefairy ex in play. This KOs Drakloak for 2 prizes, and with Gladion we can also do 120x3 damage against Dragapult ex. Besides that, Moltres also applies 3x weakness; whether it is with Mew ex or Moltres itself, we can do 330 with 1 energy. That KOs Dragapult in one hit and applies a ton of preassure against Excadrill.
Unown is the 3rd new card in this list and is one of the best cards from this set. Being able to KO Budew for 2 prizes very early is game-changing and applies a ton of preassure against Dragapult. The other thing is that if Dragapult adapts to this and plays a faster build, maybe with Candies, we can use Frillish to slow them down, hit 3x weakness and use Dusclops to KO their Budew. Dusknoir, Dusclops, and Gladion are our 3 cards that benefit Unown and help it secure key KO’s against almost anything if we can hit the combo turn, and that is why I choose Secret Box as the Ace Spec.
Dudunsparce and Dusknoir both allow us to use Wondrous Patch on our active Mew ex if needed in the early game after we used Volbeat. We can retreat into either and use them to then pivot into the same Mew ex.
Mew ex can also copy Wellspring Ogerpon's Sob or Torrential Pump for 3x Weakness against Dragapult, giving us endless cool combos. I decided to include 4 Mew ex and 4 Telepathic, because going first and starting that combo gives us a big head start and makes our deck consistent enough to function and apply pressure on turn 2.
I decided to exclude any tools for now, since I could not find anything worth including, but Secret Box still felt like the best Ace Spec for this combo style deck.
That's one of my first Mew ex decks, and many more to come. I am also working on a similar version but with Dragapult instead of Dudunsparce/Dusknoir.
Pikachu ex is a cool card allowing us to basicly use Trolley on an attack, as of now I havent built a deck entirely around it, but I think it cool be a decent inclusion in any Slop Box variant to ensure consistent boards early. The same goes for Mew ex in a deck focused on Wondrous Patch and various attackers which I have a few cooks on its way for some upcoming deck profiles.
Some other attributes that I find very cool and interesting about Mew ex is that we can now turn basically any 3-prize Pokémon into a 2-prize Pokemon instead. That makes cards like Mega Absol, Mega Lopunny and Mega Lucario a little more interesting to work with. We also enable Wondrous Patch, which I think can be really cool with Mega Absol for a potential turn 1 or 2 Claw of Darkness.
In a Dragapult Mirror, attacking with Fezandipiti on the second turn going first is really strong, but applying 3 energies is often too much, and it becomes a lot more situational doing so. Now, with Unown in the format to counter Budew, we could see this play become a little more interesting, especially when we can use Mew ex to copy Fezandipiti ex and then follow that up with a Phantom Dive. Think about it like this. We go first and attach an energy to Mew ex. The next turn we evolve a couple of Drakloaks and use Crispin on Mew ex to snipe with Fezandipiti ex. After that, we evolve into Dragapult ex and use Mew ex to now Phantom Dive instead. I know this is not going to be common and we don’t always draw this well, but what I wanted to say is that Mew ex is going to be a cool card in Dragapult too.
Devolution Espeon is another cool gimmick to get back into the game, but I think getting it off consistently and at the right time is going to be hard to do. Froslass Munkidori is the obvious deck to play it in and with Secret Box to find Counter Gain. My biggest issue with this is the rise of Patrat and now Unown too, which is not fun when we attack a lot with Budew. I think there could be a cool deck with Frillish instead or Mew ex to copy either, but I haven't yet experimented with it, but I will in the next few weeks.
Scraggy as a cool pokemon to make Turn 1 "Judge" disruption more consistently is quite interesting and also a card I could see being used in decks with Pecharunt ex. It could also be fun with 4 Watch Tower. Maybe this could lead to a Mega Scrafty Rogue deck 😉
Mega Scrafty also discards a random card from the opponent's hand!
There are many other gimmicky cards, which I will give a try next week, but these are the ones I have worked on and wanted to share what I cooked so far. Stay tuned for more decks very soon!
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