The Peony Experience — Learning the New Way to Play Miraidon ex

Miraidon ex has taken off in popularity big time since the 2024 season started in September. For every major tournament, Miraidon ex can be expected to be a Top 3 deck, so players must be ready to face off against it. Miraidon ex is notorious for its lackluster conversion rate, yet in each tournament, there are one or two lucky Miraidon ex players who spike a huge finish, and it ex has won multiple tournaments, almost always finishing with a Top 8. The deck is also infamous for being one of the least-complicated decks in the meta, and it gains a reputation of being a high-roll deck that relies on good luck from Electric Generator. As is normal for strong meta decks, Miraidon ex does not have the best on-paper matchups but makes up for it by being fast, strong, and consistent… in other words, it is a neutrally good deck.

Miraidon ex’s Place in the Meta

Since Paradox Rift introduced Iron Hands ex, Miraidon ex spontaneously gained a lot of power with this new option. To play into Iron Hands ex more heavily, some lists have switched to a consistency engine based around Peony, while others stick with the traditional build using Professor's Research and Path to the Peak. Both lists have seen great success at tournaments, but the winds of change are slowly setting in, with the Peony build gaining more and more influence with each passing day.

My group and I decided to play Peony / Miraidon ex at the recent Charlotte Regional Championships; I was not the biggest fan of this deck decision, but I started off well at 5-0-2, and, unfortunately, I lost and tied my two win-and-in matches for Day 2. Playing the deck was an interesting experience; it is a deck that aims to explode with speed and power, applying overwhelming early-game pressure and running opponents off the board. This deck is easily capable of taking two Prize cards on any given turn, allowing it to Prize trade with most decks, using its speed to gain an advantage. On the other hand, sometimes you open with a bunch of Lightning Energy in your hand and can’t do anything at all!

I think it is worth learning about this deck due to how popular it is, and after playing it, I find there is quite a lot to discuss.

Previously, there was this binary idea of Miraidon ex being either the Peony version or the Professor’s Research version. Interestingly, the Miraidon ex that made Top 4 at Charlotte was playing three copies of Peony and Research each. This makes you think of a hybrid build, but the rest of the deck was built like a typical Peony list, therefore, it is more accurate to describe it as a Peony / Miraidon ex deck with three Professor’s Research. I think the Top 4 list and my group’s list have a lot of good ideas, and as usual, the best list probably lies somewhere in between the two lists — this is easier to see after the event has concluded.

This concludes the public portion of this article.

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