Oceania Internationals has concluded and Zapdos won the tournament, which is completely unsurprising considering eight of the best players in the game played it. I underrated Zapdos at first. The deck was mediocre in testing because I was using, and playing against, the Japanese lists which ran far worse. Now that Zapdos is the king that needs to be slain, I am excited to talk about a couple decks that have a favorable match up against it. In this piece I cover ZoroRoc variants, and Malamar variants, which make up the bulk of the piece. The rest includes the updates for the rouge decks Darkrai Zoroark and Alolan Muk Garbodor.
Think I’ll start off with a Malamar skeleton to give you guys an idea of what all my variants start from.
| Pokémon – 12 | Trainers – 30 | Energy – 10 | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 4 | Inkay | 3 | Cynthia | 1 | Nest Ball | 8 | Psychic | ||
| 4 | Malamar | 4 | Guzma | 4 | Mysterious Treasure | 2 | metal or more psychic | ||
| 1 | Marshadow (SLG) | 3 | Lillie | 3 | Acro Bike | ||||
| 1 | Giratina (Lost Thunder) | 1 | Erika’s Hospitality | 4 | Ultra Ball | ||||
| 1 | Tapu Lele GX | 1 | More Draw Supporter | 1 | Rescue Stretcher | ||||
| 1 | (Ultra or regular)Necrozma GX | 3 | Switch | ||||||
| 2 | Viridian Forest | ||||||||
Four spots are up to preference and there are 8 remaining slots.
The first thing I am opposed to in the current meta is playing Jirachi. Most players are going to be playing card like Absol, Alolan Muk, and Ultra Necrozma to counter the jirachi strategy. For St. Louis it seems like relying on Switch and Koko with higher counts of trainers is a better call than relying on Jirachi.
Ultra Necrozma is not actually a staple for the deck right now which is why I include the ‘more Psychic or 2 metal’ part of the Skeleton. Having a GX focused deck is not great with all the Zapdos out there and only having a single Ultra Necrozma is unattractive to some because it’s less consistent in it’s use. There also needs to be one GX in the deck that can one-shot because you will not beat ZoroRoc without one. At least one of the Ultra or regular Necrozma is what best fills that role, but if you prefer to play a Marshadow (instead of, or to suppliment) I can get behind that as well.
At the least eight draw supporters is acceptable for a non-Jirachi list. I strongly prefer nine and try to play nine in all my non-Jirachi lists, but you can opt for the occasional dead draw to fit in another card.
What I do with those slots
Option 1 (Giratina all day)
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