Hit Fast and Delay Your Opponent’s Game — Suicune V / Energy Removal

Hello to all PokeBeach readers! I’m here with another Pokemon TCG article. This time I’ll talk about my lovely Suicune V but now with Energy removal cards like Crushing Hammer, Team Yell Grunt, and Fan of Waves instead of the broken Ludicolo.

We are in a period where the metagame has stabilized and we already have a good idea of ​​which decks are the best in the format. Single Strike Urshifu VMAX, Rapid Strike Urshifu VMAX , Suicune V / Ludicolo, Mew VMAX, Jolteon VMAX, Leafeon VMAX, Zacian V, and Ice Rider Calyrex VMAX have been among the top decks for a long time and have already proven themselves worthy of being in that position. They all have a mix of good and bad matchups between them, so I see all these decks as balanced. With so many competitive decks as an option, it’s harder and harder to find any power that’s effective against them all, but the good old strategy of removing the opponent’s Energy cards has proven effective once again in the game.

The idea of my article and list came after a big tournament that I reached the finals with 59 cards from my original Suicune V / Ludicolo list from three months ago, when I realized that Ludicolo wasn’t as good as it used to be. This Pokemon can be broken in some matchups, but in others my opponent’s lists have already adapted to it. In some cases just being able to attack consistently with Suicune V is enough. This brought me back to the idea of using Crushing Hammer and other Energy removal cards. When I built Suicune V / Ludicolo the first time, I initially built a skeleton List for Suicune V / Inteleon. With the available slots, I started to tinker around some ideas and Energy removal was one of them. With success around Ludicolo I kept the Crushing Hammer variant away in the back burner, but now I think the time has come to bring it back.

With the help of Drizzile and Inteleon to search for Trainer cards, plus as the metagame is filled with decks that use Special Energy and play only a few Energy cards, such as Dragapult VMAX, the goal is to take advantage of the consistency and speed of Suicune V to attack fast and delay the opponent’s game by removing their Energy from the board.

Suicune V / Hammers

Deck Overview

In this format the first and second turn are extremely important. If you play Sobble on the first turn, then you have Drizzile on the second turn, so you’ll pretty much have whatever card you want in your hand. The same goes for when you attack — if you can’t attack in the second turn, you are already way behind in the game. The whole deck idea focuses on these two turns, both your first two turns and the opponent’s first two turns. Regarding your first turns, I’ve already said a lot, just put to the Bench as many Sobble as possible and attack with Suicune V from the second turn until the end of the game while you flip some Crushing Hammer to make your opponent miss an attack.

Most decks in the Standard format aim to do the same thing, which is to use a strong attack in the second turn and try to draw the six Prizes in about three to four attacks — so you’ve probably heard someone say that in this format whoever starts the game has a lot of advantage. In fact, what this person said is correct, because if all decks have this same game proposal, then whoever starts the game won’t win the game if by chance he misses a card. In the current format, most decks are pretty consistent and miss their plays very little, so in practice, the player that starts out gets the upper hand most of the time. With that in mind, my goal is to have a way out of this situation, putting a way to diminish the opponent’s advantage when he starts the game. If the opponent starts the game, he needs to attach an Energy in order to attack on the second turn, then Crushing Hammer has the power to remove that Energy, bringing the advantage back to your favor.

This concludes the public portion of this article.

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