Hey! My name is Arkimedes, I am from Europe. I have played the Pokémon TCG since it first came out. I have played competitively for about a year. I love the thrill of using a new rogue deck against an unexpecting opponent.
pokemon-paradijs.comThis is not article about Milotic or Rayquaza from Supreme Victors as the title might have suggested. This article is about disruption and the empty hand mentioned in the title is your opponents’. The main way of accomplishing this is using Exeggutor from Legends Awakened.
Its first attack, “Psychic Strategy” forces you and your adversary to shuffle your hands into your decks and each draw as many cards as the other player had. This is obviously a powerful technique for disruption since it can potentially give your opponent a hand of zero cards while you may grab a bunch. In order for this to happen, you need a bit of setup, though.
Minimizing your own hand
Since the focus is on disruption, you want as few cards as possible in your own hand when using the attack. You can build your deck to achieve this goal in a variety of ways. Firstly, you don’t want to risk filling up your hand with a lot of supporters that you cannot get rid of. Therefore, you may want to have quite a bit of focus in your trainer line on actual trainers like Great Ball, SP radar, Pokédex handy, PlusPower and maybe even Pokéball. Pokémon Communication is also a great card to run but slightly more risky since you need a Pokémon in your hand to run it.
Basically the idea is just that you can get rid of these cards when you need to. A card that I personally really like to run is Night Teleporter, which allows you to flip a coin. If heads, you may shuffle your hand into your deck and search for any 1 card. This allows you both to get key cards in important situations and cut down your hand when you need to. You may want to attach a single energy card to Exeggutor before emptying your hand to make it able to retreat during your next turn.
pokemon-paradijs.comOf course, you want to run supporter cards too. There are many great supporters in the format at the moment including Pokémon Collector, Bebe’s Search and many more. Cyrus’ Initiative is great to run to help destroy your opponents’ hand after she has drawn into a couple of cards. The question is how to get rid of these in a turn where a supporter has already been played.
Regice LA’s power “Regi Move” allows you to discard 2 cards from your hand and if your opponent has a basic Pokémon active you may make her switch it with one of her benched ones. While the switching effect may be decent, the discarding is what you really want. This can help you get rid of 2 unwanted cards from your hand (this could also be evolution cards that you cannot play since you don’t have the basic in play or just played it from your hand).
Banette from Platinum has a power which allows you to basically discard as many cards as you want. It is a stage one so it is a bit harder to get in play than Regice but will allow you to get your hand to 0 nearly 100% of the time. Which one you run is basically a question of how many supporters/evolutions you play. It is pretty essential to get your hand down to 0 (leaving your opponent with 0 cards in his hand after the attack). Although 1 or 2 cards also seems good, you have a much bigger chance of locking him with 0 cards.
Notice that you may want to play Broken Time-Space so you can evolve Exeggutor as soon as possible, since the disruption doesn’t make sense if your opponent has too much in play already. This is especially true if you run Banette too, since you can evolve both in the first turn you may play trainers.
Keeping your opponent down
pokemon-paradijs.comAfter reducing your opponent’s hand to zero cards she gets to draw once. There is really not much to do about this, except hope that she doesn’t draw Uxie or something to search for it. After this initial draw, however, you can do things to prevent her from coming back into the game.
Chatot G from Supreme Victors is a good card for this. It allows you to rearrange the top 4 cards of your opponent’s deck which should keep her stuck for a while. Notice that if you give her any cards to search for anything, the top 4 cards will not be at the top any more, since she has shuffled her deck. As mentioned, Cyrus Initiative is good for keeping your opponents’ hand down too.
Attacking
The last thing you need now is knocking your opponent out before she comes back on her feet. You have devoted a big part of your deck to disruption, meaning that her deck is probably more powerful in direct combat than yours. Therefore, her Pokémon should be Knocked Out before she can unleash this power. You need something that hits quickly and hard.
pokemon-paradijs.comWhich attacker to use is really up to you, but I like Blaziken FB LV.X. It hits for 80 with 1 energy and energy gain, and the extra damage in return shouldn’t be that much of a problem since your opponent probably won’t overpower you at this stage of the game. If you run Blaziken you can use many good things of the SP engine. Chatot G should already be in your deck and you can use power spray to keep disrupting your opponent (making her not get Uxie’s ability – also if she draws it as the first card after the disruption).
You can use Crobat G which is pretty good in this deck since it is easy to get rid of when trimming your hand and helps your extreme offense after you have disrupted. Cyrus’ Conspiracy is also great to search for things like power spray (to prevent uxie), scoop up (for Blaziken, Crobat, or Chatot) energy gain for Blaziken, energy for blaziken, supporters like another Cyrus’ Conspiracy or Cyrus’ Initiative to disrupt your opponent’s hand further. Hopefully you will destroy your opponent without her ever getting back into the game.
The List
I am not posting a decklist here, since I think it should be up to each player to build her own version of every deck. I have suggested some ideas and you will probably not use all of them. The deck should consist of about 15 Pokémon, 4-10 energies (pretty big interval, but it depends on which attacker you use) and the rest trainers supporters and stadiums.
Conclusion
This is a pretty fun deck to run. This is especially true when your opponent has no idea about what she is facing. I am going to be honest and say that it is probably more of a rogue deck than it is a guess at the new BDIF. However, it is a fun deck to play and can put up a good fight against most decks. With this article I hope to make you think about Exeggutor as a disruption card and why you think it does or doesn’t work.
yeah great job, this deck seems like it would be really fun to play
good article, interesting deck idea!
Welllllll… I'm not going to say much about this, because frankly I got quite a scare seeing the picture thinking someone was about to leak Illinois S.D. (Shhhhh JPNGallade!) But I will say one thing… If they lose the flip and do anything along the lines of Phanpy>BTS>Donphan>Fighting Energy, or Horsea>Rare Candy>Kingdra>Water, then it doesn't matter how small their hand is, they just roll your slow set up and low HP basics. The solution is either Smoochum HGSS or Ambipom G. Peace.
I played someone with a flygon/eggs build and it worked well. Use exeggutor until flygon is fully set up. and a great supporter to use is lookers investigation because you can choose to draw 0 cards.
Wow, that's pretty cool.
What about Giratina LV.X? I know it's a bit harder to get in play but if you have it before using Psychic Strategy and the card your opponent gets is not a search Supporter or an Uxie (which you might as well Power Spray) then they'll have to choose between attacking or using the card they got (that could be a key card).
Actually it has been ruled that you must draw at least 1 card with Looker's. Just one of the confusing Looker's rulings in existence :P
Nice article Arkimedes! I'm actually pretty glad you didn't post a list, so people can work on this deck concept themselves.
Chatot G sounds really awesome for this strategy. You don't want your opponent to topdeck into an Uxie or something of that nature.
It's definitely an interesting choice. You can go with it, I just find it's attacks too expensive.
You must draw at least 1. But drawing 2 turns into 0 with Regice.
team galactic's wager
Thanks man
I would just like to say that you have one of the coolest names. thats all
Well, I didn't mean it to attack but just for the body. It can be tough to retreat without WP/Switch in your hand, though. On the other hand, you can run the Let Loose Giratina and reduce your hand with it.
exeggutor is really disrupting your self………lol. Cards that rely on 50/50 chance only help half the time.
It's funny how we are all working on deck's when they hit this site, we should all just make the same deck and play it everywhere yeahhhhhhhhh…………………………………………….
50/50 chance? I beg your pardon? If you are using “Super Eggsplotion” you are playing this deck wrong. Giving your opponent zero and drawing up to 10 yourself on turn 2 is the most broken thing in the format right now.
Interesting concept. o3o =] It's like…. Sablelock on steroids but with less donk. o3o I like it. =] I think I might mix this concept in with my version of sablelock I'm going to construct. =]
night teleporter OMG
uh.
judge?
huh didnt notice it like that……….Cant all see things the same unless we learn them first. Rite? but thank you for the input….cap
My friend played 2 or 3 times during this season a deck named Glaceon.exe. Nerf opponents hand to zero in T1 with Exeggutor after using Night Teleporter, Drawers, Looker, or something. Tech Mesprit and main Attacker line, Glaceon lvX, kept opponent on power lock on most of the games. He were 2nd on some BattleRoad tournament. Cannot remember his other(s) standigs. It seemed to be fun deck to play. I'm looking forward about comments in this article.
You must draw at least 1 card. “Draw up to X cards” means “Draw 1 to X number of cards” in TCG.
lol, thanks.
Well, Im glad you like it that much, but i wouldn't call it the most broken thing in the format :)
Although it can be extremely disruptive if played right.
I'm glad I've inspired you to try it. I hope you have success with it.
I guess I find it pretty hard to bench it yeah. Also, I want to use psychic strategy asap.
I am not really that worried about opponent attacking after psychic strategy btw. It is more of a problem if he draws into cards that let him get back on his feet.
Well, if its their only pokemon in play, where do I move the energy :P
I think a kingdra or donphan could be beaten. But this deck coudl use other main attackers than blaziken. Donphan could be another main attacker for instance.
Thanks :) It is.
i like the idea of using slowking HGSS. an infinite chatot g to keep control over your opponent. seems useful here
Yea I know, it's not so specific… But it's the same concept as Claydol. :P
Yea, but I find if you run a 1-1 Giratina Let Loose X line with 2 Lv. Max and you build your deck not to count on your GiratinaX's Tentacle Poke Body then it works nicely. =] But that's my opinion.
They'd have to top-deck a TGW or a Judge. And if they do, then they get to play a few cards, but then you can use Psychic Strategy again. Another good card to use with this is Ralts but I forget which set it's from… It's the one that with 0 energy lets you rearrange the top 5 cards of either player's deck.
But if you'd read the article, you'd know exactly what it was about… Almost the whole article talked about the psychic strategy while not once did it mention its second attack… Did you read the article at all? o-o
Thanks man =]
that's a good idea to mix up power lock with 0 hand… It stops Uxie and Claydol. Nice idea! =] What's your opinion on playing an Amphy in there too to spread dmg when they use Supporters? Is it worth it to run the extra evo line?
Yeah it is true exept for a few things. It is an evolved pokemon so it is a bit harder to set up. Also, you only get to peak at 3 cards. Sometimes 4 is not even enough to find 1-2 crap cards to give them, so I imagine you often will look at 3 cards that all are pretty good (say uxie, pokemon collector and bebes)
you could also go the other way around: run flygon x to deck them, draw as many cards as possible, then use executor to completely deck them…
That's a really good idea! I don't know how easy it would be to pull that off, but it's creative thinking.
I wasn't referring to Judge breaking the decks strategy….I was referring it to the guy above who said TGW. Why anyone would use TGW over Judge is beyond me.
Yeah, I thought about something like that, but the problem is that they draw “up to” that ammount of cards, so they can just choose not to.
LOL My friend and I built this deck a year and a half ago, the only problem is the inconstancy. We would pull it off very minimally and just couldn't get it to work for us.
It has become a lot more consistent since then :) Many new cards that help it work.
Haha! Oh ok fair enough. My bad man :P
Also, sharpedo can be used. You flip two coins, if both are heads, your opponent discards his entire hand.
I love using it against people who draw almost their entire deck on the first turn.