Chandelure and FUN

Hey guys back again. Hope everyone has been doing well and having fun at Cities! I have not been able to make any yet, but I’ll be heading to one, if not two, this weekend. I have been playing as much as I can to prepare, and my testing has focused around three decks, Chandelure, Magnezone/Eelektrik, and Truth. I think these three decks are the best decks in the format, with Zekrom coming in at (a distant) fourth.

None of the other decks in the format look to pack the same punch or versatility of the aforementioned decks, and therefore I do not think have as much of a place. I hate filler so let’s go:

Chandelure

I really did not look too much into NVI before it came out, so when I saw Chandelure for the first time I got pretty excited. It looked to have so much potential: three counters anywhere and you can do it with more than one a turn! And you can still attack! And Tropical Beach is kind of in the format! Everything seemed to fit in my mind for it to be a top contender and so I immediately went to make a list.

I looked at some sites to see if anyone had posted ideas or lists for Chandelure, and I could only find one: Aaron Curry’s thread on HeyTrainer, then with only a few posts. I got more excited at this because I thought I had realized the potential of this card before the most, but alas in the past few weeks more and more people have caught onto the awesomeness of the card.

Since I first started looking at Chandelure almost a month ago now (since after Regionals), I have followed HeyTrainer’s Chandelure thread and might be one of the only people to have, for better or worse, read every single post on that thread (haha). My lists of Chandy have morphed and changed so much since testing it, and I am still not sure anyone has found the “ideal” build for it.

I will go into a bunch of the different variants of tried, comment on a bunch of lists, and what has and hasn’t worked for me. Hopefully this will give you guys inspiration to try these and other partners with Chandelure, as I feel it is a very versatile card that can be abused in a variety of ways.

First up, let us take a look at Chandelure/Yanmega, something that I have not seen a list for on the internet yet: