Articles

Two Great Options for Cups: Lycanroc Lucario Zoroark & Espeon Garbodor

After Portland, I realized that the deck I used has way more potential than other people seems to realize. I played an auto-loss (Attacking Hoopa) in my ‘win & in’ round which stopped me from getting to day two, but with a couple tweaks that matchup has become positive. My other loss was to BuzzRoc with Lucario and Elixirs, but again I have tweaked the list to solve that matchup. Lycanroc Lucario Zoroark is my top pick for Brazil at the moment and I definitely will play it on Saturday for my cup.

Espeon is also an amazing deck; in fact, I tried to build it for Portland in the last five minutes before deck list submission ended, but couldn’t get it ready in time. Now that it is known to be a strong option the deck loses some power, as people will be playing higher counts of Field Blower and other techs like Mewtwo or Mew EX. Still, this does not stop the deck from being a great option. All fighting variants are positive matchups, Zoroark Lycanroc is positive, Hoopa is outright easy, and the one rough matchup (Golisopod Zoroark) is easier with the Tauros tech.

In this piece, I focus on how to play these decks and the popular matchups, rather than talking as much about the lists. This is because my list for Espeon is only two cards off of Xander’s winning list and the Lucario Lycanroc Zoroark list was already covered for the most part in a different article. In an effort to save words I am going to shorten Lycanroc Lucario Zoroark to LLZ for the rest of the article.

Before I get into the piece I want to make it clear that I talk a lot more about LLZ than I do Espeon since I have put most of my testing and two Regionals into the deck. This piece has about 3,000 words on how to play the deck well. Even if you have not played a single game with it, this article should be enough to bring you up to being able to play the deck well enough to make cut a Cup. I understand most people are in this boat since I originated the deck only about two weeks ago.

I’ll start with LLZ, here’s the list I am going to play this weekend:

private accessYou must have a Stage 2 Membership or greater to see the rest of this post. If you don't have a Stage 2 account, you can Sign Up for one here.