A Guide to Gardevoir ex

Hello everyone! Looking forward to Worlds, I have no idea what to play, and I’m sure many other players are in the same boat. At NAIC, I played Gardevoir ex after testing it extensively. It’s no secret that Gardevoir ex is widely regarded as the best deck in format. It was the most-played deck at NAIC and almost certainly will be for Worlds as well. Although my NAIC run was not good, this monster of a deck always remains on the table as a potential option. Gardevoir ex is an incredibly strong deck and has options to deal with most matchups and situations. It’s a difficult deck to counter, and when it works as intended, it will nearly always win.

Why Gardevoir ex?

Prior to NAIC, I was playing with various versions of Gardevoir ex. The one I liked the most was a purely consistency-focused build, forgoing most techs that you see nowadays, however, in the days leading up to the tournament, I was talked back into including the tech cards. In theory, they seemed incredibly valuable… During the tournament, I felt like the deck was more high-roll and luck-based than I would have liked. I lost more games to completely bricking than I had ever had at any tournament in my entire life. On the other hand, I also had a lot of games where I set up well on turn two and completely obliterated my opponent — when that happens, you don’t need the techs, so it makes sense to try and make that happen as often as possible.

All prevalent Gardevoir ex lists play some techs and embrace the high-roll nature of the deck. Doing this is fine, as you’re still left with a strong tier-one deck. Personally, I don’t want the disaster of NAIC to ever happen again, so I personally would not play these lists. Here’s the list I played at NAIC:

My NAIC List

This list isn’t too different from normal, with the main thing being a fourth Rare Candy and no Reversal Energy. In testing, I always wanted to get turn two Gardevoir ex, so it made sense to max out Rare Candy, however, Rare Candy skips Kirlia, and multiple Kirlia are needed to stabilize, therefore, aside from the initial Gardevoir ex, the other copies of Rare Candy aren’t good until later. Later in the game, the Rare Candy are helpful to enable various plays, and they make the deck more resilient after Gardevoir lines get KO’d.

The basic strategy of the deck looks rather straightforward. You want a bunch of Ralts on turn one, and you want to Rare Candy one of them into a Gardevoir while evolving the rest into Kirlia on Turn 2. This lets you attack with Gardevoir or Cresselia while also having a stable board on turn two, and you will win basically every game where this happens. Although this game plan is simple on paper, you end up making lots more gameplay decisions than you would probably expect. Gardevoir ex is a deck that noticeably tests fundamentals such as sequencing and making game plans (as opposed to less-involved decks such as Arceus VSTAR). Luckily, the deck is good enough to both forgive some mistakes as well as pull off strategies as you envision them.

Here‘s a standard build of Gardevoir.

And here is my current build. This is similar to what I had been testing and what I wish I ended up playing as a list for Gardevoir ex. It’s not too crazy or out of the ordinary. I’ve basically swapped out the techs to have a more consistent and aggressive build.

This concludes the public portion of this article.

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