Thunder Six Feet Under — Spiritomb in Standard

There’s hope for non-GX Pokemon decks out there–a little. A Spiritomb-centric build gained some momentum at the end of last season, but never really broke out other than a few Top 8 placements; the lists varied greatly, too. These days the format is dominated by Pokemon-GX, and for good reason! The closest thing we have to a non-GX in the mainstream metagame is Malamar with Spell Tag and a Giratina focus. That happens to be this deck’s worst enemy, but we’ll get into some ways you can counter that. Other than that deck, Spiritomb stacks up very well against Tag Team Pokemon-GX because it can reliably two-shot them with massive damage. By utilizing Froslass, you can punish Reshiram and Charizard-GX by using Jirachi and Zebstrika to keep things flowing smoothly throughout the game. This deck is reminscent of Zapdos decks that were made victim of the rotating of Nest Ball which was the main engine of those decks being both an out to bad draws and the way to get your attackers out. While Zapdos might be better than Spiritomb in a nutshell, Professor Elm's Lecture can’t grab it, so Spiritomb beats it out for the better archetype in this current Standard format.

Anguish Cry is a great attack because it can do a lot for a little. On its own it can do up to 160 damage if you have all five of the available damage counters on you. However, Hustle Belt can crank that up a little more; it pushes you to 220 damage for just one Energy! Building Spite gets you to the point where you can do all this and Rainbow Energy can speed up the process. There’s no non-GX deck out there that can do this much damage reliably with a non-GX Pokemon itself. Using Shrine of Punishment can finish and starts up Knock Outs that are even further out of reach! As with any Rainbow Energy-playing deck, there’s a lot of sick options you can play in addition to your main attacker to fill in any gaps that you might have.

Non-GX Ultra Beast Pokemon are notorious for strong one Energy attacks and this deck welcomes almost all of them with open arms. Even Pheromosa and Buzzwole-GX is a great fit in this deck for its Beast Game GX to gain a Prize advantage in certain situations. It’s matchup with Malamar decks playing Spell Tag is very poor, but there are ways to bolster it up to a winnable level. The Malamar matchup has been a barrier for many non-GX decks, but with this one’s matchups against almost everything else being as great as they are, there’s hope that this could be a top-tier contender yet. Let’s hop to it with the list!

This concludes the public portion of this article.

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