Expanded Trevenant & Dusknoir-GX — Playing It, Beating It, and What’s Next

Expanded is fun to play as a change-up from Standard. While we won’t be seeing anymore sanctioned Expanded events in the format this season, it’s a good idea to tinker around in this diverse format from time to time.

Next season’s festivities should resume the format in full force and barring any bans, there’s one deck that should be on everyone’s mind: Trevenant and Dusknoir-GX. This deck is very good and certifiably toxic with Milotic and Ace Trainer. It happens to be linear to play too, a plus if you’re great at sequencing. Today I’ll be talking about the deck itself and any potential changes, along with any new cards to be released that help it out — playing it as well as beating it with other decks and strategies.

Ever since the siphoning in of Item-based draw cards in the Pokemon TCG such as Acro Bike, Battle Compressor and Trainers' Mail, these sequencing-heavy lock type decks have been made viable. These decks are able to achieve a lock as early as the first or second turn. For past examples, see Mewtwo and Mew-GX / M Rayquaza-EX, Vileplume / Decidueye-GX, Vileplume / Vespiquen and Zoroark-GX / Peeking Red Card, among others. This deck is the most recent iteration of the archetype using the now-limited control-style card pool of the Expanded format. You’ll be using Milotic, going down on Prizes, then use Ace Trainer, followed by Trevenant and Dusknoir-GX’s Night Watch attack to shuffle away two of your opponent’s three cards at random. Other gimmicks like Horror House GX with Gengar and Mimikyu-GX are played for the potential to put your opponent down to zero cards, forcing them into top deck mode.

Let’s start with the most recent iteration of this deck, an updated version of Alex Garcia and Pablo Meza’s creation in the hands of Justin Bokhari, Will Jenkins and Isaiah Bradner at the Illinois Regional Championship (1st, 5th and 18th respectively). This list is closely related to Meza’s own Top 8 list from Texas Regionals about a month prior. The most notable omission is Trainers’ Mail, something that the group removed in favor of techs and the newly introduced Quick Ball.

Trevenant and Dusknoir-GX Expanded Deck

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