Alright, let me begin this article with a pledge: I will not be writing about LuxChomp again. While I still believe LuxChomp to be the best deck in the format, I feel like writing more about it would really just be like pummeling a dead horse at this point.
If I opt to play in Regionals, I see no reason for me not to simply play it again. The same skeleton for the deck works, and then you just plug in whatever tech options you feel most comfortable with based on your play style and what you expect your metagame to be.
So what am I going to write about? Vilegar? Nope. Gyarados? Not the traditional one, no. LostGar? Nope. Anything SP? Nope.
Instead I’m going to touch on a sampling of various “rogue” decks. Some are in the merely theoretical state, where as others I’ve tested quite a bit. I’ll be sure to touch on that for each specific deck, of course.
On deck, we have the following decks:
1. Magnezone Donphan
2. Gyarados Lock
3. Magnezone Vileplume
4. Palkia Lucario
5. Mamoswine
1. Magnezone Donphan
| Pokemon – 234 Spiritomb AR 4 Magnemite SF #66 3 Magneton SF #42 3 Magnezone Prime TM 1 Magnezone SF #6 2 Phanpy HS 2 Donphan Prime HS 1 Uxie LA 1 Azelf LA 1 Unown Q MD 1 Regirock SF |
Trainers – 194 Pokemon Collector 3 Bebe’s Search 2 Twins 2 Judge 2 Stark Mountain 1 Broken Time-Space 1 Rare Candy 2 Expert Belt 1 Warp Point 1 Pokemon Rescue |
Energy – 188 Fighting Energy 6 Lightning Energy 4 Warp Energy |
This is a variation of the old Magnezone Prime Regirock deck. I found 2 Regirock to be a bit unnecessary, especially with the SF Magnezone. If you really feel the need to run 2 Regirock, then make a cut somewhere, but I found it really cluttered the bench and gave way to a lot of targets. Donphan is used to help offset your Machamp game, and your LuxChomp game.
It gives the deck a bit of speed to it. Either a player focuses on stopping Donphan (this applies mainly to LuxChomp) or they focus on dealing with the Magnezone set up. LuxChomp in particular has a serious issue trying to deal with both.
A Belted Donphan can really chew through their deck. It makes it so much tougher for them to pick apart your set up. Of course, it clunks the deck up a little bit, but having access to a secondary attack is never bad when you take into account that you will sometimes have “off turns” where you don’t have energy in play for Magnezone to really be a profitable attacker.
If you liked the Magnezone Prime deck for States, this is an interesting variation that helps improve your LuxChomp game, and gives you a bit of an edge against Machamp. The Warp Point/Rescue/Rare Candy “splash” is mainly intended as a toolbox to Twins into.
Normally you’d prefer Palmer’s Contribution, but I like having Rescue as a Twins target so you can get the Pokemon back immediately rather than having to potentially wait 3 turns to get it back (3 uses of Supporters).
