I believe Fighting Garbodor is the best deck in both formats.
This concept came to me from Kian on the way back from a league cup. Landorus and Buzzwole are both excellent in this Expanded meta because the spread easily takes double KOs on Night Marchers, while it hits weakness on Zoroark GX. In Standard, again you smack Zoroark GX while shutting Trade down, but gain other positive matchups against top tier options like Buzzwole Lycanroc (because Buzzwole is weak to psychic types) and Gardevoir. The matchups are definitely there; on paper the deck is an amazing meta call.
Making it work ‘in practice’
The good news is that in practice, Buzzwole Garbodor also works well…But it only works with a specialized list and a pilot who understands resource management well. Right from the jump Garbodor is a challenge because Garbodor-based decks are inherently far less consistent than other options such as Zoroark variants. This means the main goal should be to focus the deck around consistency and avoiding techs. What need is there for techs when you already have positive matchups against the entire top tier? A major advantage Buzzwole has, as opposed to Drampa, is needing a single energy to attack (rather than three). Sure Drampa can attack for one energy, but Buzzwole can continually attack with a single energy and win while Drampa would fall flat on it’s face without using Berserk at all.
Finding the right supporter line up is probably the most crucial part of developing this deck. Which subpar supporters to include and which to leave out is ambiguous; the overall supporter count is as well. For this deck, it is much safer to lean on the side of more draw cards. Finally, I had to make a good way to use the Trashalanche Garbodor with the deck. In Expanded this can mean a couple different things that I will cover later on in the article. But to start, this is my Standard Buzzwole Garbodor list
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Played this at a Cup yesterday. Was going to play the Frank Percic Memphis list anyway, but seeing this article was a welcome surprise and rubber-stamped my choice. I only went 2-2 drop (I always drop when the juniors finish so my son’s not waiting around too long) but the deck played really nicely when I didn’t start Kartana (which happened three times in a row at one point! Such a waste…).
Beat Zoroark/Lycanroc twice – Garbotoxin is massive here as you suggest – lost to Golisopod/Zoroark 1-2 but they were fantastic games and I might have won (we both made a couple of giant misplays). Lost to Xerneas Break – there’s always a good player at UK league cups running Xerneas! – which I think is a tough matchup as they’re not reliant on abilities really and if you can’t build a big Buzzwole quickly then your early damage output isn’t enough to stop them building giant damage, and they hardly use items (Brigette, Geomancy, attack). In the second game of the set I went after his Leles, which felt like a more efficient use of my attacks, and also stops him Geomancying, and actually had game in hand, but he N’d me to nothing and I couldn’t get back on track, so took a one-sided L.
Anyway, thanks for another great deck. I ran the Lusamine/Max Potion version and 100% believe it was the right choice. I only used Lusamine once but it was massive when I did, and found myself constantly wanting the max potion in hand, so I might add a second one as Buzzwole often takes a big hit that doesn’t quite kill it. (On that, rainbow on Buzzwole is dangerous as it takes him in 180 range, which Golisopod can then reach, as I found to my cost!).