Inside a Rogue Mind: Working with Crawdaunt and Milotic

Intro

Hello everyone, my name is Grant Manley and I am beyond thrilled to be writing for PokeBeach! I am a first-year Masters Division player from North Carolina with a knack for creating and playing unusual decks. Personally, I always like employing out-of-the-ordinary strategies in games I play, and Pokemon is no exception. In this article I’m going to talk about two of my most recent rogue decks, and how they work in the current format as well as the Boundaries Crossed to Roaring Skies format.

The first of these rogues is something you mayt be familiar with by now, Seismitoad-EX/Crawdaunt. This is a disruptive deck that I used to take 2nd place at the North Carolina State Championship. The aim of the deck is to use a variety of disruptive cards to clear your opponent’s side of Energy, for good. This allows that omnipresent pest, Seismitoad-EX, to methodically sweep right through your opponent’s side with no opposition. This is all done while denying Items from your opponent. This makes the games go easier, and your opponent more frustrated.

The next rogue I am going to discuss is a crazy take on Exeggutor. I didn’t think of it until after States, but it is just as fun, just as annoying, and possibly just as effective as Seismitoad-EX/Crawdaunt. This deck plays similarly to your standard Exeggutor deck, but opts to use a strategy involving Milotic and Life Dew instead of things like Dragalge and Genesect-EX. It can effectively lock your opponent by using Blockade, Hypnotoxic Laser, Team Flare Grunt, and repeated uses of Life Dew.

Seismitoad/Crawdaunt

The States List

How It Works

As I briefly explained earlier, the aim of the deck is to disrupt your opponent’s energies. This is made possible by the plethora of disruptive Items along with Crawdaunt and AZ. Seismitoad-EX‘s Item Lock just compliments the whole disruption idea very well, and limits the opponent’s ability to recover from the barrage of energy removal cards. With this strategy, most decks can be shut down fairly easily.

Card Choices

Most of the card choices are simply heavy counts of things used to consistently execute the deck’s strategy. However, there are still some interesting choices that I’d like to go over.

Xerosic

Xerosic is such a valuable card for almost any deck in this Toad-infested format. I included it primarily to counter Garbodor. If the Garbodor player gets a Float Stone on Trubbish before you Quaking Punch them, Garbodor can cause serious problems by locking Crawdaunt‘s ability. Xerosic can also be used to remove opponent’s Special Energies or Tools when needed. You can use it to remove a Head Ringer from one of your own Seismitoad-EX, but AZ and Super Scoop Up can also accomplish that.

4 AZ

Four AZ probably seems like overkill, but it is actually one of the most helpful cards for this deck. It gives the deck quite a bit of mobility in the Toad “mirror”, and allows you to reuse Crawdaunt many times. It also allows you to switch and/or heal your active Seismitoad-EX if you need it to. I like to think of it as a wild card, it can essentially be a Max Potion, a Switch, or a Team Flare Grunt (by picking up Crawdaunt and evolving another Corphish).

3 Crushing Hammer and 4 Enhanced Hammer

Originally, this deck ran 4 of each hammer, but I trimmed a Crushing Hammer to make room for the Xerosic. This is simply because I theorized that Enhanced Hammer would be more useful as a 4-of. I’m sure you could flip the counts of hammers and the deck would still work fine.

Hypnotoxic Laser

I’m sure a lot of you are wondering what is up with the single Hypnotoxic Laser. I admit that the single Laser seems rather silly, but I do have reasons for including it. First, I didn’t go with a heavy Laser count like most Toad decks simply because it’s unnecessary for this deck. The deck doesn’t need to do a lot of damage, because my opponent is ideally doing no damage at all. If the deck works, it’s removing energy efficiently and doesn’t need to worry about damage output outside of Muscle Band. If the deck isn’t working, it will lose anyway.

I included a single Laser as an out to Sigilyph, should you run into any of those. Ideally it should help against Aegislash-EX and Suicune as well, but they are usually paired with Steel Shelter or Rough Seas, which negate Laser. Additionally, the Hypnotoxic Laser is also useful against Hawlucha and Leafeon. If you can use Laser against Leafeon on the same turn you hit it with a Quaking Punch (with Muscle Band), it will be knocked out from poison going into your turn after you Quaking Punch a second time. Against Hawlucha, if it is asleep and cannot retreat, it will also be knocked out going into your turn.

Matchups

Yveltal EX

Theoretically, Yveltal-EX based decks are bad matchups because Yveltal can keep accelerating Darkness Energy from the discard pile. After testing, I found this is not really the case. With four Enhanced Hammer, you can effectively deny their Double Colorless Energy and prevent them from doing any real damage. Additionally, any benched EXs they have are free Lysandre prizes, unless they have Darkrai-EX out. It isn’t easy to get out the sole copy of Darkrai-EX under Item lock. On top of that, even if the Yveltal-EX player finds Darkrai-EX, they would have to waste their precious energy attachment just to retreat.

The Garbodor version is just a more clunky version of straight Yveltal-EX against Seismitoad-EX/Crawdaunt. The Yveltal-EX/Garbodor player has a one turn window to get a Float Stone on Trubbish. If they cannot do that, the matchup gets tipped instantly in Seismitoad-EX/Crawdaunt’s favor. Even if they can do this, you still have plenty of time to find the Xerosic. If, and only if, the Yveltal-EX/Garbodor player gets a Float Stone on Trubbish early and you cannot find Xerosic, then the matchup becomes unfavorable. Crawdaunt becomes useless due to Garbodor‘s ability and Yveltal-EX can easily roll right through the deck.

This concludes the public portion of this article.

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