Have you missed me? I am excited to be writing again. In the traditional Cut or Tap style, there will not be much of an introduction; all meat, no fluff. This article explains how to build Giratina and play Giratina. I believe it is the best deck in the format and hopefully after reading this article you will understand why.

Table of Contents

– General deck building and strategy

– Audio file of entire article

– Deck list

– List explanation

– Potential inclusions

– How to play each matchup

– Changes for Silver Tempest

– Nov 7th updated information and new Silver Tempest deck list

– Conclusion

General deck building and strategy

When playing any deck that uses the lost zone engine, the primary concern should be resource management. In a normal game, this type of deck will lost zone around 10 to 15 cards, which should not be taken lightly. This means your decklist needs higher counts of many cards than would typically be acceptable. You want the highest counts manageable of each resource to minimize the dreaded situation with Flower Selecting where you think to yourself “If I send either of these cards to the lost zone, I will lose the game.” For this reason I tend toward a high Energy count in Giratina. I played Giratina at SLC Regionals recently and after 15 rounds I had zero scenarios where lost zoning something off of a bad Flower Selecting lost me the game. The reason for this is that I played extra copies of essentially all resources in the deck. 14 Energy is a good number to aim for, a 3-3 Giratina line is likely the minimum, 4 Mirage Gate is a must, and 2 Boss’s Orders is mandatory.

When you first start playing the deck it feels like you have an uncomfortable level of control over the game. You will be removing resources left and right, with no way to recover them. That is why it is so important to give yourself draw power that is not reliant on sending cards to the lost zone. Take advantage of Radiant Greninja starting on turn one to give yourself the ability to hit what you need by discarding resources that can be recovered (Basic Energy, recovered through Ordinary Rod). A rule of thumb I have for myself is that Capture Energy are for the lost zone. I will send Capture away rather than Psychic or Grass the large majority of the time. Another great way to gain control of the game is to take advantage of Oranguru whenever possible. If you have the room to use Oranguru to put a bad card on top of the deck before a Flower Selecting, it can be a great way to eliminate some variance. You cannot always use Oranguru for that purpose, but I find myself making that play a lot of the time in the mid-game. Above all else you want to be very wary of lost zoning Grass and Psychic Energy when using Colress or Comfey because attacking with Giratina usually means lost zoning at least one of them.

You will need to practice the lost engine a good bit before you are comfortable playing these type of decks, but you can somewhat consistently control how a game goes once you have this skill. A big part of giving yourself that control is prize checking early on. Specifically you should check for the following (in order of priority): all Energy cards, Mirage Gates, Ordinary Rods, Lumineon V. If you have a notepad, write down which of those cards are prized; doing so will play a big part informing each Flower Selecting and Colress use. There are other cards that are good to check for, but it’s hard to check for all six prizes. Another huge skill for this deck is sequencing. The main mistake I believe players make is not using Concealed Cards early enough. I like to use Greninja before I lost zone anything because it puts two cards in my hand before I have to commit to permanently losing any resource. The hotly debated topic of using Comfey or Colress has been interesting, but in my view you should always Colress first unless you are hoping to draw a different Supporter off of Flower Selecting.

On a side note, I placed top 64 at Salt Lake City Regionals. I played rather poorly at the event; in fact worse than I have played at any event since tournaments started happening again, due to my own personal shortcomings. The point I am trying to make is that top 64 is a really solid placement for the deck considering I made several misplays throughout the tournament. If that does not convince you, let me remind you that Nick Moffit placed third with the deck. He should have won the event in my view, but I will explain that later.

Below is an audio file where I read this 10,347 word article for those who do not have the time to read that much information.

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