This article goes over my current Toad Zoroark list, why the deck is still strong, and how to play the important match ups. Tomorrow there will be another article from Hunter Butler on Blastoise Wails.

On my trip to Denver I started the weekend explaining to my friends that I was tired of Expanded and would avoid going to any more Expanded events. By the end of the weekend I was more exited to play Expanded than Standard because of our realization that Seismitoad is still an excellent play. Big shout out to Bevin Tran for the inspiration. After the Lusamine ban players all but forgot the deck exists, which means those Pokemon Ranger, Oranguru and other techs are not in most lists. All the recently successful decks have a hard time against Toad for one reason or another, which means it is well positioned as a play for Daytona.

Assuming two players are playing each deck perfectly, Drampa Garbodor can rarely take a game against Toad. Oranguru is the root of the game plan with it’s item recovery, but there are several strategies I cover in this piece which can eliminate many issues that seem worse than they are.

ZoroGarb has been, and continues to be, a favorable match up because of techs like Parallel City, Sudowoodo, Faba, Field Blower, Enhanced Hammer, and Team Skull Grunt. Initially it seemed like the match up could be close, but now that ZoroGarb lists are not built to be prepared for Toad, it is hardly a competition. The reality is that without a Guru, ZoroGarb will almost always run out of resources before taking six prizes.

The DDG crew came up with a counter to Blastoise in the past through multiple Counter Catcher for dragging up Blastoise repeatedly. Without items, it’s hard to move Blastoise to say the least. Having two or more Counter Catcher in the list will make this match up favorable. Not to mention that if the Blastoise player has not achieved an Archie before a Quacking Punch happens, they lose the game pretty much every time.

Toad is not good again because of some new card to makes the deck better or a combo that was previously unnoticed; toad is good again because the meta is perfect for it. With that being said, there are a handful of ideas in this article that it seems players have missed. If I could go to Daytona, there’s approximately a 100% chance I would play the deck and use this list:

Seismitoad Zoroark

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