White Arceus – Punching Out the Format with Slaking V

Hello to all PokéBeach readers! Here’s Gabriel Semedo again with another Pokémon TCG article and this time I’m going to talk about Arceus VSTAR / Slaking V / Blissey V or “White Arceus”, which was the deck I developed together with the champion of the Porto Alegre Regional, Dalton Acchetta.

After many Regionals and even a Worlds Championship in the SSH-ASR format, this format came to an end with the Baltimore and Porto Alegre Regionals, in addition to the Bilbao Special Event. I played in the Porto Alegre Regional and got another Top 64, the third consecutive one since the return of official tournaments. It’s not the worst possible result and I managed to score points, but the truth is that I was confident that I could do well because this time I had created a deck together with my training partner Dalton Acchetta which I was really enjoying as I had the best and coolest answers to the main decks in the metagame. Unfortunately, bad luck situations took me away from the chance to move forward in the competition, but luckily I wasn’t wrong about the deck and Dalton played with the same 60 cards to become the Porto Alegre Regional Champion with the unprecedented Arceus VSTAR / Slaking V / Blissey V deck.

In today’s article, I’m going to tell you from the beginning the entire creative process that Dalton and I went through to develop the new idea, then I’m going to do a deck analysis, so get ready and good reading.

How the Deck Idea Came About

During most of my preparation for the Regional, I spent playing only with the metagame decks and the other part was exploring some variants of Turbo decks, based on Mew, Radiant Greninja and Scoop Up Net. Unfortunately, I didn’t find any Turbo deck that I liked 100% — there was always something missing to be perfect. The turbo variant that came closest to being my choice for Regional was Turbo Gengar VMAX and I did an article about the deck here on PokéBeach, so I’d recommend reading that too. As for the metagame decks, Arceus VSTAR / Inteleon is still my favorite deck and I feel comfortable playing against everything, even though I know it will always be difficult matches.

After testing a lot of ideas and ending up coming back to Arceus VSTAR / Inteleon a week ago from Regional, something I already knew very well that could happen and that’s why I was already well prepared with the deck, my training partner Dalton Acchetta also told me that he was exactly on the same situation. With six days to go before the event, we trained together with two other players, Lucas Matheus (Top 16) and Lucas Jordão (Senior Champion), and there we came to the conclusion that to beat Origin Forme Palkia VSTAR it was often necessary to play with only one Pokémon to the Bench. During an intense best of three against Lucas with him using Origin Forme Palkia VSTAR and me with Arceus VSTAR / Inteleon, I managed to win with luck, as I couldn’t bench Sobble so as not to increase the damage, meaning I only had an Arceus VSTAR in the active and another Arceus V on the Bench, preferably with Big Charm attached. Using a good number of Supporters and two copies of Pal Pad to recover a few more copies into the deck allowed me to play this way, even if I took a high risk of not being able to get the necessary resources.

While it’s not the ideal way for an Arceus VSTAR / Inteleon to play, I felt it was the best way to get the win if the match is balanced from the start, with neither player having bad hands. Keeping that in mind, the thinking was that against Origin Forme Palkia VSTAR I would be playing with several fewer cards in the deck, as benching Sobble means easy Prizes for the opponent and more damage for Origin Form Palkia VSTAR to Knock Out Arceus V.

Dalton already had some similar thoughts, that playing without Inteleon or Bibarel could be a real option like Arceus VSTAR / Duraludon VMAX does.

Arceus VSTAR / Duraludon VMAX is pretty decent and proof of that is Stéphane Ivanoff’s 2nd place in the Bilbao Special Event with the deck, but we were after something different, so Tuesday Night before the event we made another call to discuss some ideas about Arceus VSTAR / Inteleon without Inteleon. A few minutes after starting to discuss, Raissa Arruda (2nd Place) enters the call, hears our idea, and as soon as we finish, she suggests Slaking V as a good option to insert into the deck. It was from then on that the deck took a totally original shape, as now it has great offensive power too, capable of Knocking Out a VSTAR Pokémon with Powerful Colorless Energy or Choice Belt. With the new ideas, the deck is now able to withstand the most damage in the format with Arceus VSTAR, Tool Jammer and Cheren's Care, and has the ability to KO the best Pokémon of the format with an attack of Slaking V and Blissey V. After the idea main deck successfully created, the challenge was over the remaining days of the tournament to find the best 60 cards to support the idea the way we wanted. The analysis of the final list that brought me a Top 64 and took Dalton Acchetta to the title can be seen below:

This concludes the public portion of this article.

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