Gardevoir?! I don’t have an addiction! YOU have an addiction!
But seriously, I cannot stop playing this deck post-rotation – it is so powerful, and very fun and rewarding to play, especially with the addition of Munkidori from Twilight Masquerade. While I thought the deck was well positioned for NAIC, I ended up playing Lost Box instead, as I felt people were respecting it much less than Gardy, so I could capitalize on that aspect. Both decks ended up being fantastic calls, making up all of the Top 8 in Masters. I wanted to take this article to go through my thought process of building Gardy lately, as well as how I reflect on these decisions from locals.
After NAIC, I took a bit of a break from playing Pokemon, but I was still thinking about it, and mainly about Gardy. Nothing from Shrouded Fable really felt like it made the deck unplayable for Worlds, as many have implied on Twitter/Youtube. Because of this, I started analyzing stream games and lists from the top performing NAIC Gardy lists, and two of them stuck out the most: Henry Brand’s and Henry Chao’s. Interestingly, they both aim towards the same endgame, setting up double Munkidori, but both of them also showed less reliance on TM: Evo, and cut the Drifloon package.
Brand included Squawkabilly, which provides a consistent draw in the early game, and complements Rare Candy. The Squawk and Seize Ability allows you to make aggressive pushes in the early game, providing threats to your opponent so they ignore the Squawkabilly until you can fix your board with Turo.
Chao took more of a slower, control-type approach, with Hyper Aroma as the ACE SPEC and double Flutter Mane to spread a bunch of damage and finish off certain matchups with a TM: Devo play to wipe their board. As I mentioned, both lists cut Drifloon, which was an interesting decision, as it removes your OHKO potential, but gives you a ton of spaces to put tech cards in and surprise your opponent.
Early Cups
After looking at these lists, I started to get ready for Cups in the area at the start of July. So far I’ve played in four and gotten two wins, a 2nd place and a Top 8. One of the wins was with Dragapult Pidgeot, but the rest of the placements were with Gardy.
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Great article and appreciate the thought processes!