Slaying the Dark Dragon — Countering Charizard ex’s Dominance

Hey everyone! It’s Charlie and I’m happy to be back with another article. I recently competed in the Orlando Regional Championships, where I played an Ancient Box list inspired by the list in my last article focused on Roaring Moon and Koraidon . It was only one card different from Jake Ewart’s 2nd place list (I included three Ultra Ball instead of the Lost Vacuum) and felt quite strong and powerful throughout the tournament. However, we saw Liam Halliburton take Jake down in the finals with a Charizard ex list only one card different from Tord Reklev’s EUIC winning list. Some may think after watching that match that Charizard ex is favored into Ancient Box, but the matchup is much closer to 50-50 in practice (Jake took down Luke Morsa 2-0 in Top 8). It would have been quite a bold call to go into Orlando with a deck that had a bad Charizard matchup after its EUIC dominance, and I think Jake, myself, and other players of the deck proved that Charizard is very beatable.

However, this begs the question: is Charizard so strong that it’s nearly impossible to counter? As someone who loves to play hard counter decks to top meta threats, it’s a bit odd I’d choose something with only a 50-50 matchup into the deck that would clearly be the #1 most popular choice among players that weekend. My answer to that question is what I’ll be exploring in this article: how do we slay the nearly infallible beast that is Charizard ex?

Analyzing Charizard ex

Charizard ex is an absolute enigma of a card: incredibly high HP, a strong typing and generally good Weakness, and an extremely efficient attack that gets stronger as the game progresses. Radiant Charizard was one of the best Charizard cards ever the moment it came out, but Charizard ex almost immediately blew it out of the water. Why has this card become such a dominant force in the meta that has now won all four major events in the BRS-TEF format?

Raw Strength

As I alluded to earlier, Charizard ex is simply unmatched in raw power by any other Pokemon in the game. Nothing else has such a strong combination of stats in a convenient package like Charizard does, giving you the freedom to fill the rest of your deck with powerful support like Pidgeot ex and Bibarel. Built in Energy acceleration? Check. Damage scaling as your opponent takes Prizes making 300 an incredibly reachable number? Check. All you really need is a way to get one Charizard up and one support Pokemon up, and your deck is pumping out huge damage from one of the highest HP Pokemon ever. There are ways to try and combat this, namely immunity like Mimikyu has or not taking Prizes to reduce their damage, but that directly contradicts your most common win conditions.

Powerful Support

Once Arven became the main engine that powered Charizard ex, we had a backbone that could reliably set up Pidgeot ex alongside your Charizard ex, which pushed the deck over the top. Quick Search is a ridiculous Ability and gives you access to basically any play you could imagine, with its only weakness being only getting you one card. Fear not though; Bibarel is here to save the day! Tord’s list included both Pidgeot and Bibarel, letting you fill your hand up to five cards before using Quick Search and enabling basically any combo imaginable. In a format without Path to the Peak, defending against both Bibarel and Pidgeot at the same time is just impossible. Talk about tough to disrupt!

Counters to its Counters

Charizard ex’s biggest weakness in the last format wasn’t Grass-type Pokemon, it was Snorlax Control decks! Since Charizard was forced to play multiple liabilities like Manaphy and Jirachi, Control had an easy win condition right in front of them if they could pick it out with Erika's Invitation or Echoing Horn. But nowadays, Charizard lists are very prepared for this strong archetype and now claim to have a favorable matchup against them. Inclusions like double Professor Turo's Scenario and a Team Yell's Cheer give you access to potentially quad Turo and triple Boss's Orders plays in the same game, which is almost always more than enough to defeat these concepts. Pair that with the fact C0ntrol can struggle into some of the other meta decks and can barely afford to play more counters for Charizard and you have a formidable beast that may find its toughest matchup to be the mirror match.

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!