Arceus VSTAR: Was It Secretly Good This Whole Time?

Hello PokeBeach readers, I’m back again! Last weekend, Brent Tonisson, James Cox, and I participated in a Conquest match — the main tournament format of Hearthstone, but for Pokémon — for $1,600 against Isaiah Brander, Jon Eng, and Regan Retzloff. We ended up winning the match in a close Game 9! Per the rules of the format, we had to bring five decks and get a win with all five of them. You can still play a deck after it has lost, but once you win with a deck, it is gone. Hearthstone uses classes to prevent players from doubling up on decks. There was a rule in place preventing us from doubling up on decks, so the five decks we chose to play were Gardevoir ex, Giratina VSTAR, Snorlax Stall, Mew VMAX … and Arceus VSTAR! The Arceus deck was the most wacky one in our lineup, but it managed to get a win against the American team’s Snorlax Stall deck thanks to the PTCGL timer! In testing for this match, the Arceus deck felt like it had a ton of potential even outside of the Conquest format. In this article, I will be going over why we decided to look at Arceus, what made us decide on the deck, and how I would play it for an open tournament.

Why Arceus?

The thing that made us initially think about Arceus was Mike Fouchet’s post on Twitter with a table with each deck’s Day 2 win rates against each other for major events. This didn’t seem too special at first, but he later posted each deck’s overall Day 2 win rate. Arceus VSTAR ended up at number one, which was shocking, as it hasn’t seen much success being played by anyone other than Makani Tran in this format. On the surface, it is very puzzling as to why Arceus is a good deck right now — when you look at the list, it’s just Arceus VSTAR, Bibarel, and Path to the Peak, with a 1-1 line of Regigigas VSTAR that occasionally manages to attack. Because of this, the deck can’t attack with anything other than Arceus VSTAR for most of the game, and 180–200 damage seems quite weak compared to the rest of the format.

However, James and I quickly discovered that this was all the Arceus deck needed to be successful. It turns out that many decks just can’t deal with a 280-HP Pokémon taking two-hit Knock Outs on everything while constantly under a lock from Path to the Peak!

This concludes the public portion of this article.

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