Charizard Dominates San Antonio — The Broken Deck?

Hello everyone! Recently my team and I attended the San Antonio Regional Championships and dominated the tournament. For whatever reason, this tournament was massive, with almost 2000 players. I played Charizard ex with Pidgeot ex and made Top 4, narrowly losing to Azul with the same 60, who won the event. Caleb tied his win-and-in with the same 60, meaning that we nearly got the trifecta of Top 8s once again. Charizard is an extremely strong deck, and the list that we played was highly refined.

We decided to play Charizard partly because of how good of a deck it is, and also because it is strong against Miraidon ex, Mew VMAX, and Lost Box. We also teched for the mirror match with Vitality Band and Justified Gloves. However, Charizard has lots of sketchy and close matchups, such as Gardevoir ex, Giratina VSTAR, Chien-Pao ex, and Rapid Strike Urshifu VMAX. Furthermore, the Snorlax Stall matchup is abysmal, and our list had no way to beat it.

Things got hairy for me as I faced Snorlax in the first round and the second-to-last one. Luckily, I did not lose to anything besides Snorlax in swiss, so I was able to barely squeak into Top 8 with an 11-2-2 score. I was annoyed that both ties (to Giratina and Charizard mirror) were due to my opponents hitting the perfect cards off Iono to two, but that is part of the game.

It turned out that Charizard was the most represented deck at the tournament, following recent trends. After this, Charizard will certainly have a target on its back, but it remains a great deck. A strong player will be able to outmaneuver opponents even in the slightly unfavorable matchups. Although the deck seems linear as it has limited attacking options, Charizard’s easy access to Pidgeot’s Quick Search opens up lots of room for clever plays and thinking ahead. I would say that the deck is fairly skillful. Sometimes you have to rely on Iono’s disruption though, which feels like an unreliable strategy.

This concludes the public portion of this article.

If you'd like to continue reading, consider purchasing a PokeBeach premium membership! If you're not completely satisfied with your membership, you can request a full refund within 30 days.

Each week we post high-quality content from some of the game's top players. Our article program isn't a corporate operation, advertising front, or for-profit business. We set our prices so that we can pay the game's top players to write the best content for our subscribers. Each article topic is carefully selected, goes through multiple drafts, and is touched up by our editors. We take great pride in our program!