A Christmas Tree(s) Special — Two Trevenant BREAK Variants for Expanded and a Whimsical Bonus

eHey everybody, it’s Charlie and I’m super happy to be back with another article. I finished my first semester of college and have taken to playing some Pokemon to celebrate!

I cannot stand the current Standard format; it’s simply too stale, full of Basic Pokemon, and centered around bad cards like Crushing Hammer. I took a look at Expanded and was pleasantly surprised to see a much healthier format! While powerful Standard decks like Arceus and Dialga and Palkia-GX get plenty of upgrades to be even better in Expanded, a few old favorites can confidently take them on. In this article, I’ll go over two very different approaches to one of my favorite decks of all time: Trevenant BREAK!

I have probably had more success with Trevenant decks in my career than anything else (save maybe Tapu Bulu-GX / Vikavolt, but it’s close) and have earned a Day 2 / Top Cut placing every time I played the deck. There was a period of time in which I kept a Trevenant deck sleeved up for over a year and simply put it in my bag whenever I planned to attend an Expanded tournament. The deck was so powerful in so many different formats; Item lock, spreading damage, and heavy disruption are timeless mechanics. However with new card releases, Trevenant decks have fallen out of favor in recent times. While the threat of Trevenant is always looming, never before has it had as many options / different ways to play it as it does now!

This first list is a much more “standard” way to build a Trevenant deck; it is full of the classic disruption cards and features some new additions that I’ll go into in a moment. This list is very similar to the one Blaine Hill released in his last article; I have been playing with it a lot and made a few small changes after many games. Here it is:

Expanded Trevenant

Since this list is so close to Blaine’s, I highly recommend you go read his article for a great explanation of how it works. I’ll explain the few changes that I made:

One Mimikyu CEC

I added in a Mimikyu to make both the Mewtwo and Mew-GX and the Naganadel and Guzzlord-GX (in Garchomp and Giratina-GX decks) matchups even better. While the Garchomp and Giratina-GX matchup is fine overall, this one inclusion should save you any headache if more lists start to include Naganadel and Guzzlord-GX as a Trevenant counter. A lone Naganadel and Guzzlord-GX is extremely hard to deal with, assuming they’re able to use Special Charge to return two Double Dragon Energy into the deck at some point during the game. I’ve also been facing a lot of Mewtwo and Mew-GX on the ladder recently and wanted an easy answer to the deck. I think Mimikyu is worth the one spot for the amount of value it can provide.

Three N and One Flare Grunt

I flipped the Supporters around because I felt like I was rarely using Team Flare Grunt when I had it in hand and only used VS Seeker to play it. I tried a list with four copies of N as well; N is extraordinarily powerful in pretty much every deck and especially good here in both the early and late game. N is almost never bad to have, so adding more copies was a no-brainer for me.

Two Psychic Energy and Two Mystery Energy

I added the extra Mystery Energy to have an additional out to retreat a Pokemon if needed. Opponents won’t be able to play down any Enhanced Hammer so I wouldn’t worry about it getting removed too much; Honchkrow-GX is the only issue and you should be able to deal some damage in order to activate Mimikyu. I wanted a ninth Energy, but can’t find a good spot for it in this list. It’s a good idea if you can work a ninth Energy in here, but for now I think this count will get the job done.

I think this deck is incredibly strong and one of the best decks in the format right now; check out more of Blaine’s article for good descriptions of the deck’s matchups. However, I think we can have a little more fun with this…

This concludes the public portion of this article.

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