The Top of the Pack

Hola 6P! My article got a bit delayed from its original date due to the recent earthquake that hit Mexico City. I don’t want to go too much into that, but I did post a mini update on my hiatus over on my YouTube channel if you’d like to know more.

Putting that past us, Hartford Regionals is this weekend and we seem to have a very clear metagame I believe. At least… for the Standard format.

Trifecta of Success: Hartford’s Top 3

pokemontime.tumblr.com

Putting it bluntly, there are 3 very clear decks at the top of the pack: Gardevoir-GX, Golisopod-GX and Ho-Oh-GX. Everything else, based on League Cups and Bremen Regionals, seems to be just a tad behind these 3. Sure, Alolan Ninetales-GX, DeciTales, VikaBulu and the other Garbodor variants can compete. However, they lack the raw power and strength that the aforementioned trifecta contains. Looking ahead to Hartford Regionals, I would definitely recommend choosing one of those 3.

Why are these decks so ahead of the pack though? Let’s break it down.+

Gardevoir-GX

First off, Gardevoir-GX, the World champion (and also my favorite of the 3). Its most recent iteration includes Sylveon-GX, giving it access to a much better GX attack against anything that’s not named Garbodor. It also gives the deck a much more reliable consistency boost than the previous singles of Alolan Vulpix and Diancie, with the attack Magical Ribbon.

No more VS Seeker means chaining Supporters is a lot harder than before, so the 3 cards you choose are more likely to stay in your hand. Even if they don’t and you keep getting N’d, that’s less late game Ns your opponent will have access to. Aside from consistency and the GX attack, Sylveon can also apply early pressure by dealing a constant 110. Gardevoir-GX deals 20 less damage on a Pokémon that doesn’t have energy, for the same FCC cost, so Sylveon’s damage output off of a Stage 1 is a welcome addition to the deck.

In Bremen, only one Gardevoir-GX deck made it all the way to Top 8. However, it was not the Sylveon version of the deck.

To summarize: 1HKO potential, two great GX attacks (which conveniently counter the other top 2 decks to an extent) and great consistency for a Stage 2 deck with Sylveon, Tapu Lele and Octillery.

My current Gardevoir-GX/Sylveon-GX list looks like this:

As always, consistency is key. Perhaps a 1/1 Stage 1 line is not the ‘by the book’ definition of consistency, but the inclusion of Sylveon is quite impactful and I’ve always felt comfortable with a 1/1 Octillery line (as per my Top 8 at Worlds 2017 Gardevoir list). Acerola and 3 Professor Sycamore are the stand out cards. You could easily make the switch to 4 Professor Sycamore to maximize consistency once again.

Golisopod-GX

Next up, we have Golisopod. It’s most common (and best partner) is, of course, the two different Garbodor. This deck is arguably just as good, if not better than the other 2 because of how versatile it can be. You have a Stage 1 attacker with incredible synergy with two of the best Supporters in the format (Guzma and Acerola), it deals insane damage for a single energy, denies Abilities and has a soft Trainer lock all wrapped up into one consistent package. Top that off with the ability to use Rainbow Energy and thus tech in cards such as Tapu Fini-GX for it’s great GX attack. Other techs I’ve seen or run into are Espeon-EX and Gumshoos-GX.

The loss of VS Seeker doesn’t seem to have hurt this deck too badly. Not having the option anymore each turn on whether to Acerola or Guzma is mitigated by the fact that it is very simple to start dishing out a lot of damage very quickly.

In Bremen, we saw this deck take first place over another Garbodor variant. Tapu Fini-GX was the tech card of choice, but I’ve seen Espeon-EX get used there as well to great extent in order to cripple Stage 2 decks after they’ve set up. Having already used Golisopod/Garbodor at Ft. Wayne Regionals and finished in the Top 32 there, I’m leaning toward this as my deck of choice for the event. This is what I have currently sleeved:

A bit different from the Bremen-winning list by Marc Lutz. I’ve found 3/3 Golisopod is definitely nowhere near enough for me to be comfortable. 4/3 was already sketchy for m,e as it doesn’t give you absolute maximum odds of pulling off a turn 2 First Impression, hence the decision to go up to 4.

Tapu Fini-GX is a Fire deck counter with its great first attack and also GX attack seems like an obvious inclusion. However, I’ve also considered running a 1/1 Gumshoos-GX line because, as Xander mentioned in his Monday article, it can punish players who don’t immediately target it and is pretty good against Ho-Oh-GX and Gardevoir-GX.

Ho-Oh-GX

Finally, we have Ho-Oh-GX. Kiawe is an extremely strong card on turn 1 (and pretty bad afterward), allowing such a Pokémon to be powered up immediately. By rushing prizes with Ho-Oh and cleaning up with Salazzle-GX, every deck you go up against will be very pressured to not miss a single beat in order to prevent you from executing your strategy. Kiawe is what makes this deck able to compete with the others, as going the Max Elixir + baby Volcanion route would probably be too slow in this metagame.

The great synergy between Ho-Oh and Guzma makes this deck shine, but one of its downsides is that after you’ve Knocked Out a Tapu Lele-GX or rushed prizes early on, early Ns can really slow you down. You don’t thin your deck too much in the beginning of the game, thus with 35+ cards and only drawing 2-3, it can be difficult to set up Salazzle to clean up or keep up the Guzma chain to attack with Ho-Oh.

The extra support brought by Turtonator-GX, Volcanion-EX and baby Volcaion just adds more utility to an already great deck, and I love that the most succesful Ho-Oh-GX list at Bremen was using 4 of them. For the deck to function as optimally as possible, you want a Ho-Oh-GX and a Kiawe on turn 1. Ideally you don’t want the Ho-Oh-GX active, but with 4 copies of Ho-Oh-GX, and 4 copies of Ultra Ball, plus 3-of each Tapu Lele and Kiawe, that’s some pretty good odds of you getting what you need on turn 1. The thing is however, even though 4/4/3/3 could look very similar to 3/4/3/3, Tapu Lele is essentially as if you were playing 6 Kiawe, where as Tapu Lele can’t bring Ho-Oh-GX to he fray, hence why I think 4 is mandatory for maximum consistency and odds of hitting the turn 1 combo.

Another great inclusion, which I think is key and was probably missing from the Japanese Worlds lists, is Oranguru. The support it provides to the deck is key in being able to keep up after you’re off to a great start and your opponent tries to throw every N they have at you, in order to slow you down. With Garbodor decks being inherently good matchups, and those being the only ones able to deny you of your Oranguru usage, it’s a staple for sure in my book.

Here’s the list I currently have sleeved for Hartford:

We saw the Top 8 list use Po Town as a way to increase damage output onto evolution decks, but I really don’t agree with that. Even though it clearly worked well for Benjamin in Germany, Choice Band seems too good not to have 4-of in this deck. It provides the late game win condition against Gardevoir-GX, your toughest matchup, by allowing Salazzle to take the last 2 Prizes, and it also allows Ho-Oh-GX to take KOs without having to rely on having a Volcanion-EX or two, ready on the bench and their respective fire energy in order to Steam Up.

Aside from that, the low N count might seem strange, but this deck doesn’t benefit from N at any stage of the game, and it’s mostly there for the rare late game scenarios in close games where you need to deny your opponent resources.

The Next Tier: Secondary Contenders

ctconventions.com

Drampa/Garb

Now that we have seen the decks at the top of the pack, let’s take a quick look at an outlier, and one that may be able to compete with these 3 but is simply less popular: Tord Reklev’s peculiar mix of Drampa-GX/Garbodor with an Espeon-GX and Espeon-EX sprinkle on the side:

Tord is probably the best DrampaGarb player in Europe, and arguably the World, with only Sam Chen fighting for said title. For Bremen, he was able to come up with a very peculiar decklist by adapting DrampaGarb with a 1-1 Espeon-GX line with a much more useful GX attack than Drampa’s for such an offensive deck, and Espeon-EX to help deal with Gardevoir-GX decks. The new 2/2 Garbodor split between GRI and BKT is also another adaptation he made in order to improve its Gardevoir matchup.

I’m not sold that this version of Garbodor is better than a straight Golisopod/Garbodor deck, especially seeing the final result of the tournament. However, this and all the other Toolbox type of decks certainly have an appeal and a sort of surprise factor in their favor, which can sometimes outright win you games.

Alolan Ninetales

Another deck which I think has potential to compete with the top 3 is a pure Alolan Ninetales strategy, but more focused on spreading damage and devolving with Espeon-EX, over taking 1HKOs with Blizzard Edge against Stage 2 decks. This strategy reminds me a lot of a very old school deck, Rock Lock, from way way back in the 2004 – 2005 season.

As can be seen, the deck still conserves the ability to dish out 1HKOs on basics and Stage 1 GXs thanks to the maxed out counts of Choice Band, Aqua Patch and DCE, but it gains a different win condition by having Po Town, the 3 Tapu Koko and Espeon-EX to devolve and take multiple prizes at once by devolving the big Stage 2 Pokémon. This is the deck I’ve spent testing a little bit more, and it’s really tight in space as ideally, I would want 4 Po Town, 2 Rescue Stretcher and a second Octillery in order to ensure the Devolution strategy works well. However, I also want to give myself the best odds of keeping with the great 1HKO potential Ninetales-GX has and which is also sometimes necessary to eliminate a really big threat in the Stage 2 matchups.

Conclusion

pokemonscreenshots.tumblr.com

There are a plethora of other viable decks at the moment, including Greninja, Metagross-GX, Vikavolt/Tapu Bulu-GX and even Xerneas based decks, both the BREAK version and the Rainbow Force one, have taken the spotlight a little bit as viable options in today’s metagame.

Having said that, I’m 100% confident that even though there are some very powerful decks, none are as powerful as the top 3. They are all very unique decks but have clear selling points as to why they are ahead of the pack, and some of the outliers such as Alolan Ninetales or even Greninja can usually compete with 1 or 2 of the 3, but then they take a hard loss to the other one.

Not only are those decks powerful, but simply because there is an expected field of 700 players, and it’s the first big Standard tournament of the season, I expect them to be the most popular.

It’ll be interesting to see how quickly the metagame responds to the results of Hartford, as Vancouver is only 2 weekends after the event and it will be significantly smaller in size. This could allow for a potential ‘metagame counter’ to be developed, but more likely than not, 2 weeks is not enough time to do so.

And with this, I will close out today’s article. As always, thanks so much for reading, and if you have any feedback, feel free to leave a comment or send me a tweet over at @tablemon. Gracias y hasta luego!

…and that will conclude this Unlocked Underground article.

After 45 days, we unlock each Underground (UG/★) article for public viewing. New articles are reserved for Underground members.

Underground Members: Thank you for making this article possible!

Other Readers: Check out the FAQ if you are interested in joining Underground and gaining full access to our latest content.