The Best Deck to Beat Lugia VSTAR
Hello all PokéBeach readers! Here is Gabriel Semedo again with another Pokémon TCG article and this time I’m going to talk about one of the most successful decks in the matchup against Lugia VSTAR; Galarian Weezing / Flying Pikachu VMAX.
The Crown Zenith collection arrived and I thought things would change a bit, but according to the Orlando Regionals results, nothing has changed and Lugia VSTAR remains by far the best deck in the format. I was hoping that the Lost Box deck with Raikou V, Zamazenta, and the new Tool Sky Seal Stone could finally stop Lugia VSTAR, but in the end, this deck didn’t even do a good job and the best Lost Box deck was the version focused on single-Prize Pokémon, with Amazing Rayquaza and Amazing Raikou.
Beating the BDIF
Since things continue as they were before, I decided to go a little deeper into the decks focused on beating Lugia VSTAR and do some research on the most successful decks in the matchup against it. For this, I used the data provided by the Limitless sites that account for the results of face-to-face and online tournaments. After doing this analysis and identifying the decks with the highest win rates, I decided to test them to identify their strengths and weaknesses.
Most would say the best deck in the format to beat Lugia VSTAR is Yveltal Control, but to the surprise of some, Yveltal Control decks are not the best, in fact, Lugia VSTAR is winning this matchup more and more — Yveltal Control is now a well-known deck with no surprise factor, and Lugia VSTAR players are learning how to play the matchup more and more.
According to the research I did with the Limitless results and then doing some test sessions, I was able to identify two decks that are off the radar of the metagame but that have positive results, specifically in the matchup against Lugia VSTAR. These decks are Arceus VSTAR / Flying Pikachu VMAX / Tapu Koko VMAX and Galarian Weezing / Flying Pikachu VMAX / Aerodactyl VSTAR. The Limitless website provides some lists of these decks used by some players, some with potential and others which, in my opinion, are poorly assembled.
That’s when the idea for today’s article came up — what would be the result of taking these two decks and using my vision and knowledge about deckbuilding to prepare my versions of these decks, with the objective of beating Lugia VSTAR and playing at least toe-to-toe against the rest of the metagame, still tweaking all of that to get the consistency needed to use the deck competitively.
In this article, I will only focus on the Galarian Weezing / Flying Pikachu VMAX / Aerodactyl VSTAR roster, and I will do a card-by-card analysis as each piece of this deck deserves an explanation and plays an important role. If you want to know more about the Arceus VSTAR / Flying Pikachu VMAX / Tapu Koko VMAX deck, let me know in the comments and I’ll be back in the next article with a full analysis of that deck too!
This concludes the public portion of this article.
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