It’s summer now, so you decide to go camping. While you are camping, there happens to be a dragonfly that keeps bugging you. Then, the dragonfly effortlessly uses Sonicboom on you for 70 damage!!!
That’s what happened at the Canadian, Mexican, and US Nationals. The bug was everywhere! So today, I’ll be talking about the many uses of the $60 card we call Yanmega Prime.
MegaZone
First and foremost, we’ll talk about the most popular Yanmega variant, MegaZone, more formally known as Yanmega/Magnezone. The deck’s main strategy is to whip out Yanmega early on to put pressure on the opponent.
You then use cards such as Judge and Copycat not only to (in the case of Judge) disrupt your opponent, but to trigger Yanmega’s “Insight” Body as well, allowing it to attack for free.
All the while you’ll be building up a fully powered Magnezone Prime, which not only features the powerhouse attack “Lost Burn”, but also has the Poke-Power “Magnetic Draw”, which allows you to draw cards until you have 6 cards in your hand. The combination of these two Pokemon give you a fast and consistent deck. Here’s a skeleton list:
| Pokemon – 163 Yanma TM 3 Yanmega Prime TM 3 Magnemite TM 1 Magneton TM 3 Magnezone Prime TM 2 Cleffa HS/CL 1 Tyrogue HS/CL |
Trainers – 23-283-4 Pokemon Collector 3-4 Rare Candy 3 Pokemon Communication 4 Judge 4 Copycat 1-2 Professor Elm’s Training Method 2-3 Professor Oak’s New Theory 3-4 Junk Arm |
Energy – 1010 Lightning |
TOTAL: 49 – 54 cards
Tech Options
That leaves some room for a few techs
Rescue Energy: This card allows you to recycle the dragonfly to constantly annoy your opponent. National Champion Justin Sanchez used it in his list.
A 4th Yanma: This works perfectly with the card above; if you have a Yanmega Prime active with a Rescue Energy attached to it, you can bench the extra Yanma so when the Yanmega gets KOed, you can automatically have a new Yanmega. You can easily stream your Yanmegas with these two techs.
Pachirisu: This is an interesting tech. Pachirisu’s Self-Generation Power allows you to attach 2 Lightning Energy from your hand to him, without taking up your turn’s attachment.
Why would this help? Because it would fuel Magnezone’s Lost Burn attack very quickly, which is very helpful when your up against powerful Pokemon like Donphan, Machamp, Emboar, and opposing Magnezones.
Grass Energy: One or two Grass Energy can really help when you’ve used all your Judges and Copycats or if you’ve already used your supporter for the turn.
Spirtomb TM: At first glance this tech seems very strange, but if you look closely enough, you’ll see the synergy between this Pokemon and Yanmega and Magnezone.
Magnezne’s Power allows you to draw cards until you have six cards in your hand. Spiritomb’s Power tells you to have your opponent shuffle their hands into their decks and draw six cards. Yanmega’s body says that he can attack for free if you and your opponent have the same amount of cards in your hands. See where I’m going with this? It’s a pretty neat trick to pull off.
Stage 1s
Next up is Yanmega/Zoroark/Donphan, more commonly known as Stage 1s. The strategy of the deck is like that of the old SP Toolbox deck; you figure out what deck your opponent is playing, and you find the counter to it.
The National Runner-Up Champion (in the Masters Division) Kyle “Pooka” Sucevich and Senior National Champion David Richard used this deck. Here’s a skeleton:
| Pokemon – 17-193 Yanma TM 3 Yanmega Prime TM 2-3 Phanpy* 2-3 Donphan Prime HS 2 Zorua** 2 Zoroark BLW 2 Cleffa HS/CL 1 Tyrogue HS/CL |
Trainers – 22-273-4 Pokemon Collector 2 Professor Elm’s Training Method 3-4 Pokemon Communication 4 Judge 4 Copycat 2-3 Professor Oak’s New Theory 2-4 Junk Arm 2 Pokemon Reversal |
Energy – 8-115-7 Fighting 3-4 Double Colorless |
*I personally use the Call of Legends card.
**Preferably the McDonald’s Promo.
TOTAL: 47 – 57 cards
Tech Options
Depending on if you use the lower count or the higher one, you can potentially throw in quite a few techs, although I only have 2 Tech Options as of right now.
Bouffalant BLW 91: The Affro Buffalo will score many revenge KO’s with his “Revenge” attack when your comrade has died. The Masters National Runner-Up (Kyle S.) used it in his build.)
Grass Energy: Just as in Megazone, a couple of Grass Energy will help you get out of tight situations.
The deck is sorta tricky to play, but as Pooka and David Richard proved, it is definitely a good one.
Yanmega/Kingdra/Jirachi
Our next deck is Yanmega/Kingdra/Jirachi. Franco already wrote a great article about this deck here on SixPrizes not too long ago, so I won’t go into much detail. The main strategy is to snipe with Yanmega’s “Linear Attack” while using Kingdra’s “Spray Splash” power to spread damage around the field.
You then use Jirachi’s “Time Hollow” attack to grab multiple prizes by devolving your opponent’s Pokemon. Yanmega and Kingdra together can kill Magnemites, Gastlys, and opposing Yanmas in one turn as well. As for the skeleton, I will just put a link here to go to Franco’s article, as he did a fine job with it.
ZPS
Our 4th deck is ZPS. Although the Canadian and Mexican National Champions did not run it, Yanmega Prime is still a highly favored tech in ZPS. It not only gives the deck better late game, but it also serves as a decent Donchamp counter, due to the Fighting resistance.
In case you don’t know, ZPS focuses on grabbing the donk, meaning that it uses a lot of resources at the beginning of the game. If it doesn’t donk, however, it starts to fizzle out, which is why Yanmega is used. Here’s a skeleton list:
| Pokemon – 15-194 Zekrom BLW 2-3 Pachirisu CL 2 Shaymin UL 2-3 Cleffa HS/CL 1 Tyrogue HS/CL 2-3 Yanma TM 2-3 Yanmega Prime TM |
Trainers – 19-252-3 Pokemon Collector 3-4 Pokemon Communication 3-4 Dual Ball 4 Junk Arm 2-3 Pokemon Reversal 1 Switch 1 Professor Elm’s Training Method 3 Judge 2 Copycat |
Energy – 14-1612-14 Lightning 2 Rescue |
TOTAL: 48-60 cards
Tech Options
If you don’t max out everything here, you can add in 12 extra cards!!! Here are some tech options:
- Unown DARK + Darkness Energy: Now at first glance this may seem like a very strange inclusion, but it is actually very helpful. You see, it’s extremely hard to get a Zekrom, a Pachirisu, a Shaymin, and 3 energy in your opening hand. That’s 6 of your 7 cards!!!
It is much easier to get a Zekrom, a Collector, and 2 Lightning in your hand. If you Collector for a Pachi, a Shaymin, and Unown DARK, you can use Celebration Wind on the Self-Generated Lightning Energy onto Zekrom, and the use Unown DARK’s power to grab a 3rd energy (which would obviously be Darkness).
- Defender: Defender not only protects you from damage your opponent will do to you, but it also protects you from damage you do to yourself, meaning that with 2 Defenders on Zekrom, Zekrom will take no recoil from Bolt Strike.
Now there are other tech options I know, but they would require removing Yanmega, and then this deck couldn’t be put on the list.
Now the final Yanmega variant I’ll be talking about today is outright rogue. That’s right, it’s the Junior National Champion Xander’s deck, Ursaring/Yanmega/Vileplume/Roserade/Sunflora. This very strange deck actually has a lot of synergy.
Teddiursa’s “Fake Tears” attack says that if you flip heads, your opponent can’t play any Item cards from their hand, and it dedeucts 30 damage done to Teddiursa. That allows you to have early Trainer Lock while your building up your Vileplume.
After you build up Vileplume, you can easily attack with Yanmega (due to Insight) while you’re building up your Ursaring Prime. Now Ursaring only does decent damage when he has damage counters on him, so you’d run Rainbow Energy to trigger the bear’s “Berserk” Body.
Since you’re already running Rainbow Energy, you can bring out Roserade, and when you attach a Rainbow to her, you can use her Energy Signal power, which either Poisons or Confuses the defending Pokemon. But since Rainbow Energy counts as any energy, you can Poison and Confuse your opponent.
Sunflora is there to search out all the Grass Pokemon in your deck (Yanmega, Vileplume, Roserade, and more Sunfloras). Well that was a mouthful! Here’s what I believe would be a good skeleton (since it’s a rogue, I can’t really prove it to you):
| Pokemon – 29-304 Teddiursa CL 3 Ursaring Prime UL 3 Yanma TM 3 Yanmega Prime TM 2 Oddish UD 1-2 Gloom UD 2 Vileplume UD 2 Roselia UL 2 Roserade UL 2 Sunkern HS 2 Sunflora HS 2 Cleffa HS/CL 1 Tyrogue HS/CL |
Trainers – 18-214 Judge 4 Copycat 1-2 Professor Oak’s New Theory 2-3 Pokemon Collector 3 Rare Candy 2 Pokemon Communication 2-3 Professor Elm’s Training Method |
Energy – 7-92-3 Rainbow 3 Double Colorless 2-3 Grass |
TOTAL: 54-60 cards
If you don’t max all the cards out, you have a little room for techs. But since there’s already so much going on here, I’ll only go into detail for one of them, and I’ll just list a couple of others you may want to toy around with.
Tech Options
- Bouffalant: The Affro Buffalo is back, and I believe that this guy could help you on your rogue ride. Since your running DCE, it’ll be pretty easy to revenge your fallen comrades with this dude. Cha-ching!
So like I said, I’ll list some other fun options here: Zoroark (your runnin’ DCE, right?), Manaphy (instead of Cleffa) since you have some many donkable Pokemon, and Switch.
So there ya have it, folks. The Ultimate Guide to Yanmega. The dragonfly is very versatile, and as Nats proved, very good. It accounted for 13 of the Top 16 in Masters.
The card is very much like Luxray GL LV.X and Garchomp C LV.X, in the facts that it has the same HP, is very speedy, can snipe, and has low energy costs (just ‘cuz of its Body, but same thing). Thanks for reading, and I’ll see ya next time. Bye! :D
Check out my website at http://dcdane.webs.com/ !!!
