Unless you’ve been living under a rock in the Pokemon TCG, you’ve no-doubt heard the hype of trainer-locking and its newest proponent, Vileplume from the new Undaunted expansion. Not only does the hype seem founded, but in the fallout of the 2010 World Championships, Dialga G LV.X is rapidly growing in popularity as a sea of imitators (myself included) try to capture the success of Yuta Komatsuda’s winning deck.
With Battle Roads coming up, and these two monsters sure to be popular choices, everyone seems to be forgetting about a certain flaming chicken that’s angry at having lost his spot when Double Colorless Energy was released. Cue obligatory history lesson here.
Almost overnight, when LuxChomp gained Double Colorless Energy as a great source of ammo for Garchomp C’s “Dragon Rush”, Blaziken FB went from one of the most feared Pokemon of the most powerful deck in the format to a faded memory that was used more as a tech than anything else, and not very often at that. With all of the hype surrounding Dialga G as the new “big” tech for LuxChomp, it’s ironic that what it replaced was actually its greatest counter.
Blaziken FB is, in short, one of the best disruptors in the new format, and almost a perfect counter to both Vileplume and Dialga G. The main draw is, of course, its “Luring Flame” attack. Gusting in a Pokemon and burning it was originally the favored method of having free snipes with Dragon Rush, but here it would serve the purpose of actually drawing up your main concerns.
With Blaziken FB LV.X’s Poke-Body “Burning Spirit”, you can easily one-shot either of the above threats the turn after Luring them up, and unless they use Warp Energies or Poke-Turns in Dialga’s case (which would allow other bodies anyway, so putting the pressure on your opponent to make that choice is a good move), there’s nothing they can do.
In fact, Blaziken FB is so versatile for this purpose that it can function as a great tech in BOTH VileTomb and LuxChomp for countering each deck’s respective threat. Other possibilities are there as well, such as teching Blaziken to work alongside Mewtwo (as a way of luring in their Mewtwo counter, such as Drifblim, Honchcrow, or again, Dialga G and decimating them before they’ve adequately built up enough to counter Mewtwo), or just as a tech in ANY of the lower-tier SP decks.
The beauty of Blaziken is that all of the talked-about strategies in recent sets do not affect Blaziken’s usefulness whatsoever. The tanking decks like Steelix Prime and DialgaChomp can both lose their main proponents in one shot when encountering Blaziken, and the same can be said for the newly-talked about Scizor Prime. Umbreon, while not as often talked about as Scizor, is also contained when using the base level of Blaziken FB to gust and burn without having the Poke-Body yet.
To say that Blaziken FB is a flexible tech would be an understatement. A line of 1/1 and two Fire Energies for security is easy enough to fit into any type of deck if you have a problem with Dialga, Vileplume, or anything else that Blaziken has the ability to counter (in fact, the only matchup it might hinder you on would be against Gyarados). That said, give the fighting chicken some love. If Trainer-lock and Dialga G’s rising popularity are any indication, it will be a solid answer to many of these metagame hazards.
