United States of United Wings

In 2014, the XY: Phantom Forces expansion was released, featuring a litany of meta-defining cards and deck archetypes. One of those, of course, was Night March. Night March was an attack that did 20 damage for each Pokemon with Night March in the discard pile. In total, there were three Pokemon with the Night March attack. This strategy ended up dominating the game for two years, with countless tournament finishes. In later years, the archetype was reprinted a couple times. You may know the reskins as Lost March or Mad Party, but neither of them were anywhere near as competitively viable as Night March was.

Now, once again, the concept is reborn as United Wings from Paldea Evolved. And just like old times, the attack does 20 damage for each United Wings Pokemon in the discard pile. Surely, nearly a decade later, this damage output does not hold up compared to the power creep of other cards? Wrong. United Wings is a deceptively strong archetype from the new set, thanks to the unique characteristics of the three United Wings Pokemon. First up is Flamigo, which can instantly search out the rest of the Flamigo from the deck. This conveniently puts them straight into your hand to be discarded via Professor's Research or Ultra Ball.

The other two United Wings Pokemon are Wattrel and Murkrow, which “coincidentally” cover almost every relevant weakness in the meta. The card designers knew what they were doing with this one. Normally with this deck’s damage output, you would not expect to OHKO anything with a lot of HP, but hitting for Weakness enables easy one-shots on many top-tier Pokemon. With this straightforward lineup of United Wings Pokemon, you can feast upon opposing Mew VMAX, Lugia VSTAR, and Gardevoir ex decks, which happen to be three of the top meta-defining decks at the moment.

However, you may notice one exclusion from that list of meta decks. Lost Zone decks, particularly those utilizing Sableye, are a real problem for United Wings. I’ll elaborate on this a bit more later, but that matchup is horrendous. This is the main downside of the United Wings deck, but a similar issue didn’t seem to matter much for Gardevoir ex in the Scarlet and Violet format.

After a bit of testing and revision, I am currently at a rather straightforward list for the deck. That said, the format is still in its infant stages, so there is potentially more work to be done with the deck. Here’s my current list.

This concludes the public portion of this article.

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