The Grand Finale — A Last Look at the Meta Before Worlds

Hello PokeBeach readers! Isaiah here, and I am happy to be writing another article for you all. Last time, I talked a lot about how I believe Ting-Lu ex has a place in the current Standard format, and even now, I still believe that is the case.

Meta Overview

As it stands, Arceus VSTAR is still one of the most hyped up decks for the 2023 World Championship, largely thanks to its versatility as a card that can be partnered with just about anything, and, as a result of this fact, Ting-Lu ex is potentially in a great spot to succeed in a format where its success seemed highly unlikely.

With a deck like Ting-Lu ex potentially having a chance because of the bizarre status of the meta and this following the success of Rapid Strike Urshifu VMAX / Inteleon VMAX at the North America International Championship, it is quite evident that a good meta call is potentially more impactful now than it has been for most of the rest of the season. As such, if anyone were to want to succeed at the World Championship this year, it is imperative that they understand the metagame almost perfectly, and with so many decks in the format, having a perfect grasp on everything may prove to be quite difficult.

With that being said, the focus of this article is going to be on taking a deep dive into what decks I consider to be some of the best decks in the format and how one should consider addressing each possible deck for the World Championship. The aim of this article is to be universally useful as a guide to all players for the World Championship, whether they are competing or spectating, so, without further ado, how about we start off in Tier 1.

Tier 1

Gardevoir ex

I want to preface this by saying that these Tiers will not necessarily be ordered, largely because I do not feel fully confident in any order that I could give these decks, as all of them feel about equally good, and I feel like deliberately organizing the decks in a specific way would be doing the other decks a disservice by making them seem better or worse than they may actually be.

Gardevoir ex is certainly the number one deck in the format when it comes to considering the hype around the deck. As a friend of mine put it recently, Gardevoir ex was certainly the most underrated deck in the Scarlet and Violet format, but in the Paldea Evolved format, the deck is the most overrated deck.

Now, this is not to say that the deck is not good or anything like that, far from it. If anything, the deck is deserving of the hype that it gets because, after all, the deck is genuinely absurd. With formidable attackers like Zacian V, Gardevoir, and even Cresselia, Gardevoir ex decks are able to completely take over any game that they play as long as they are able to get things going, as the deck is relatively high maintenance when it comes to getting everything set up.

As clunky as the deck may be in the early game, however, it is perfect at using Iono to swing the pendulum back in its favor to pull ahead against decks that easily can get ahead of it, such as Lost Zone decks. Unfortunately, this is also where the problems begin, as Gardevoir ex is by far the most heavily targeted deck in Standard, meaning that niche techs such as Box of Disaster have started to pop up to beat this perceived best deck in the format.

This concludes the public portion of this article.

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