The Meta Trifecta

Not so long ago, a new deck was all the buzz. ReshiBoar had hit the scene. The combination of the mighty white dragon and the giant man-bear pig formed together to create a deck that could dish out the damage with the speed of a blue hedgehog. It seemed as if this was our new top meta deck and many people were experiencing different feelings.

Many cried out “Yes, a fast powerful deck!” and began to build it as quickly as they could. Others worried about a counter and looked towards our favorite 4 armed friend Machamp and his elephant buddy Donphan.

Then came a new answer out of the sea, a deck that came from last format but never had the chance to shine until now. Riding on the shell of Blastoise, Floatzel and the giant turtle tank stood their ground and dared the Inferno Fandango duo to come at them.

Many players were quick to jump behind and support the fighters of the sea, including myself. We had a counter for the new meta it seemed.

Sadly, despite that rather… over exaggerated intro, it seems the parade of BlastWeasel is already coming to a quick halt. The Pig King Emboar saw a much more useful partner in the floating steel cyclops that is Magnezone Prime. As you may have seen in my Battle Roads Report where I ran the new water type menace, Magnezone was able to make short work of my deck and even hit my basic for 740 HP to add to the humiliation.

Your probably famaliar with Lost Burn by now but just in case let’s recap. Lost Burn runs for one Electric Energy and one Colorless. What it does is, you send as many Energy cards from your Pokemon as you want to Lost Zone, multiply the number sent by 50, and that’s how much damage you do.

Fill the deck with fire energy and Emboar can easily pile on damage for Magnezone to dish out. Meaning you can easily hit 100 for 2 ENERGY! Not many things could withstand that attack. Oh wait, your Reshiram can? Okay. For one more energy 150 is coming your way. Not fun, right?

Now you take Blastoise and consider his x2 weakness to Electric. An easy 2 energy knockout for 200.

So where does that leave us? Well:

• Blastoise can beat ReshiBoar.
• ReshiBoar can beat DonChamp if the set up is right and it can hit first.
• MagneBoar can easily take out all 3 of the above.

DonChamp

Donphan seems to be the only current answer to the Lost Burn Crisis but even it might not be enough. MagneBoar has the speed advantage in terms of energy set up but running 2 Stage 3 Pokemon slows it down just enough if Donphan can hit quick. Which easily makes SpeedPhan a contender.

The basic list of DonChamp Skeletons usually look a bit like this.

The basic idea of the deck is a simple set up of 2 attacks that gets ready in a hurry to hit hard. I could go into detail but there’s other articles around here as of late that could explain the details better than I could.

BlastWeasel

Next up is BlastWeasel. Basically the idea is to set up Blastoise from UL and Floatzel from the same set.

Blastoise can snipe any Pokemon for 100 for WWCC, and the only cost is picking up the 2 Water energy back into your hand. Then next turn you put one back on Blastoise for turn, and use Floatzel’s Water Acceleration to attach an additional energy to him for the turn.

Blastoise then has “Wash Out”, which lets you move the energy to him, and then your all set to attack again! Rinse and repeat every turn. A simple idea that’s easy to set up. My personal deck list is below.

As I said before, this deck seemed to be the light facing the shadow that was ReshiBoar until Magnezone decided to rear its ugly head. Now I’m not so confident in running this at Nationals.

ReshiBoar

Lastly that brings us to ReshiBoar. The duo had seen a lot of fanfare upon its arrival but now seems a bit less than best compared to the power of Magnezone Prime, although in my eyes this deck still has speed over Magnezone.

Again, the idea, if you still don’t know, is to use Emboar to fuel Reshiram up with Fire Energy for heavy damage. The basic deck idea usually goes as follows:

You’ve seen the decks. You’ve seen the match ups. One question remains:

Which path will you choose?

I’m interested to hear what you all decide to run this year.

While these seem to be the top decks you’re likely to see in Indiana, don’t forget many players are always experimenting with new and quirky Rogue’s that might just get the jump on you!

Good luck at Nationals everyone. I hope you all do well. Even if we can’t all win, we’re trying our best, learning, and having fun. Feel free to say hello if you recognize me there. I’ll be playing in Masters. Hopefully I’ll see a lot of SixPrizes T-Shirts in the crowd.