Hey, what’s up everyone! SmartTCG here. I hope many of you are enjoying a little break from real life major events. League Challenges and League Cups are quickly approaching, and I am excited to hop back on the grind for the 2024-2025 season! It always feels a little weird playing events for the next season in July, when the World Championships for the previous season happens in August. I think this is going to be one of the biggest – if not the biggest – seasons we have seen ever in the competitive TCG, and I know many of you are motivated to get started.
The North American International Championships (NAIC) most recently concluded, and the metagame has been shaken up quite a bit. Today, I am going to be diving into a deck that I think a lot of people wrote off heading into NAIC. Charizard ex has been one of the best decks for quite some time, however with Twilight Masquerade releasing, many thought Charizard’s time at the top might be coming to an end for the time being. However, I think the deck is actually just as good if not better in this format, than it was in previous ones.
With decks like Dragapult ex being hyped up heading into NAIC, it seemed like it scared off many people from playing Charizard. I honestly can’t blame people for overhyping Dragapult after its dominant performance in Japanese events leading up to NAIC. The deck was doing truly incredible, and its results were showing it was a Tier 1 deck. However, in the western world, it appeared the metagame was heavily shifting to anti-Dragapult before we even saw the first major event happen in a TPCI held event.
This is the power of social media and online events. With pre-Covid events, it felt like the metagame progressed much slower because there was less data being found. However, with there being online events practically every day, the metagame has begun to develop really quickly. This led to people recognizing Dragapult’s strengths and over-teching for the deck, which has caused the deck to fall off in success and popularity. This has given Charizard a lane to actually be really good again.
NAIC saw two decks see much higher success than the rest of the field. Those two decks were Lost Zone Toolbox and Gardevoir ex. Both of these decks dominated the event, and have little reason to fall off in popularity moving forward. This actually works quite nicely for Charizard, as the deck has favorable matchups into these two decks.
Let’s take a look at my current list.
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