Countering the Counters: How to Adapt with Lugia VSTAR
Hello everyone! We’re only at the beginning of what could be a long stretch of the Silver Tempest meta, and yet we’ve already seen a remarkable spread of decks in our tournament results thus far.
When this format began at the LAIC, things were somewhat normal. Lugia VSTAR proved to be a top contender, and it dominated the opening event, both in meta share and in results. At the LAIC, Lugia VSTAR made up over 50% of the Day Two meta, with that percentage getting even higher if you break things down further into Top 32, Top 16, or Top 8. Without a doubt, Lugia VSTAR was the deck to beat — and that’s exactly what people did. Fast forward to the most recent set of Regional Championships in Brisbane, Stuttgart, and Toronto, and the meta at the top looks completely different! In the three Top 8s of those Regionals, Lugia VSTAR only made up five of the 24 spots, which is fewer than the number of Top 8 spots it had at the LAIC alone. The overall meta share of Lugia VSTAR didn’t drastically decrease at those Regionals, so what happened instead?
Whenever a deck has the kind of success that Lugia VSTAR did, you can safely assume that it will have a target on its back going forward. Typically, you aren’t going to go into an event with a bad matchup against what will presumably be the most played deck in the format, and so it becomes a question of whether or not the targeted deck is strong enough to still win in such an environment. In the case of Lugia VSTAR, the lists that had come out of the LAIC, even after being slightly innovated in the week after, had some massive weaknesses that could be — and were — exploited. While some players still did manage to do well, the end result was a wide variety of Lugia VSTAR-countering decks making their way into the Top 8 of our recent Regionals.
If you aren’t a Lugia VSTAR player, then the recent results probably look incredibly cool. I seriously doubt anyone had Frosmoth vs. Flaaffy as their prediction for a Regionals finals, let alone the additional top placements of Durant, Vikavolt V, Articuno, and Gengar! On the other hand though, if you are a player who has been running with Lugia VSTAR, these results are a bit terrifying. With the exception of the Mew VMAX decks, all of the other Top 8 decks had some way to counter Lugia VSTAR, if they weren’t an outright counter deck like Yveltal Control. And now that the results are public, those strategies aren’t necessarily rogue anymore; everyone can know about them, and I would expect players in Arlington to utilize them to ensure that they have a strong matchup into Lugia VSTAR.
Of course, if there’s one thing that Lugia VSTAR can do, it’s adapt. The Lugia VSTAR + Archeops combo has the advantage in that it can utilize any attacker in the Standard format if it wants, which gives it a lot of options for taking on any potential counter. In addition, since some of the Lugia VSTAR counter decks we’ve seen so far take advantage of certain aspects of the Trainer lines found in most Lugia VSTAR lists, you can adapt to those by changing things in a way so that those counters are no longer as effective. In this article, I’m going to be taking a look at what kind of things folks have been brewing up to counter Lugia VSTAR, and show you how you can adapt your lists to protect yourself against those counters.
How People are Countering Lugia VSTAR — and How to Counter Them
When it comes to strategies to beat Lugia VSTAR, there isn’t just one dominant strategy that you’ll have to deal with. Instead, there are a wide variety of strategies that can exploit the weaknesses of your average Lugia VSTAR deck. The most common right now seem to be either Energy denial, Special Condition spam, Ability-lock, or use of safeguarding effects to stop Lugia VSTAR’s attackers. I’m not going to go over basic things like using Dunsparce to literally cover Lugia VSTAR’s Weakness, but I do want to go over how you can counteract each of these more refined anti-Lugia strategies.
Energy Denial
With little Special Energy recursion in the format, one of the easiest strategies to counter Lugia VSTAR is to run them out of Energy. That’s the idea behind the various Yveltal control decks — use Cry of Destruction over and over again, until your opponent can no longer attack. Even if the Lugia player can Knock Out Yveltal every turn, they won’t have enough Energy to take all of their Prizes so long as Yveltal can continually use Cry of Destruction. Even if the Yveltal player does miss a turn of attacking, they can get rid of Energy through Flannery, Sidney, and Crushing Hammer to even things out. Once the Lugia VSTAR player runs out of Energy, it’s simply a matter of waiting until they deck out. Using Stoutland V can accelerate your KO pace by a turn, but that still isn’t quite enough to outpace the Energy discarding effects of the Yveltal deck unless they have a slow period at some point.
This concludes the public portion of this article.
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