Making the Case for Roaring Moon ex

Hello everyone! 2024 is almost upon us and tons of Pokemon tournaments are happening soon, with three Regional Championships scheduled in January. The Paradox Rift format is still interesting, with tons of decks to look at and explore. In this article, I will examine a deck that was incredibly hyped upon the release of Paradox Rift but has since become fringe at best: Roaring Moon ex.

Roaring Moon ex has two powerful attacks for various situations, both costing two Darkness Energy and a Colorless Energy. Frenzied Gouging takes a guaranteed Knock Out on your opponent’s Active Pokemon at the cost of 200 recoil damage. Calamity Storm is a much safer attack, doing 100 damage plus another 120 if you discard a Stadium card in play. When you combine these with 230 base HP, it’s easy to see why Roaring Moon ex had a lot of eyes on it.

Roaring Moon ex saw a ton of hype as a turbo deck, using Professor Sada's Vitality to power up multiple attackers and use either Frenzied Gouging or Calamity Storm as early as turn one going second. The deck uses PokéStop as its main engine, along with Dark Patch, Battle VIP Pass, and Cross Switcher. The hype has settled down, and Roaring Moon ex mostly sees play now as a tech attacker in Lost Zone decks, which use Mirage Gate to power it up, but I still believe that the turbo version of Roaring Moon has potential.

The main struggle the turbo version of Roaring Moon had initially was how linear its strategy was. Since it only had one real attacker, it struggled against anything that could trade well against it. Charizard ex ended up being a tough matchup since it could attack with Charmander and KO a Roaring Moon that just used Frenzied Gouging. Gardevoir ex ended up being a very tough matchup thanks to Gardevoir retaining its Energy when it attacks, so even when you take a KO on their Gardevoir ex, your opponent is never obligated to put another two-Prize Pokemon into play that turn. Players tried to incorporate Brute Bonnet and Ancient Booster Energy Capsule to both give Roaring Moon ex more HP and have a solid one-Prize Pokemon to attack with, but Charizard ex decks play too many Lost Vacuum to make Ancient Booster Energy Capsule a viable option for defense, and Brute Bonnet ended up being too resource-intensive to use as either an attacker or a Bench-sitting supporter.

Players found a solution to these issues by playing Water Energy and Energy Switch, letting you attack with Radiant Greninja‘s Moonlight Shuriken. This gives you a new plan of attack against those Stage 2 decks, since you can KO all of their Basic Pokemon before they get the opportunity to evolve. However, once players caught on that Roaring Moon decks were capable of attacking with Radiant Greninja, most of them would bench Manaphy to prevent Moonlight Shuriken from wiping their board.

Playing this package came with its issues as well. Energy Switch wasn’t an amazing card to include in Roaring Moon decks, since you rarely had excess Energy in play that you could use. You can play Canceling Cologne to get around Manaphy, but playing Water Energy didn’t solve the issues the deck sometimes had with consistency. With these problems in mind, this is the Roaring Moon list I have been enjoying recently.

This concludes the public portion of this article.

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