Flying High With Lugia

Hey PokeBeach readers, Ciaran here with another deck breakdown for you today! It feels like this season has flown by for me, and I only have a few tournaments left before I have to shift my attention towards Worlds! For the time being, I am still focused on our current format, and the meta has started to settle. Charizard ex has proven itself to be the clear number one, but no other deck has really emerged as a clear number two. To compete in this format, you need to be able to hold your own against the popular dragon, and today I want to cover one: Lugia VSTAR.

If you look at my tournament results from last season, you can see I was quite the fan of Lugia VSTAR! Archeops has one of the strongest abilities ever printed and it enabled the deck to play a plethora of interesting attackers. Our current format lacks a strong rainbow type Energy such as Aurora Energy that made Lugia so strong in the past, but the deck is still capable of playing multiple unique attackers due to Archeops‘ Primal Turbo Ability.

While Lugia VSTAR went from being one of the strongest decks we have ever seen to being a Tier 2 staple the past year or so, I think the deck is still capable of putting up big results. The main thing holding the deck back is its consistency, but whenever the deck can set up it is one of the most powerful in the entire format! It is able to take advantage of powerful single-Prize Pokemon such as Cinccino and Snorlax, and put on pressure early with a bulky 280 HP Pokemon VSTAR.

Lugia is also one of the simpler decks to play in the format, with a fairly linear play pattern that lets you ramp up your play with the deck very quickly! There are some intricacies, which I will cover, but for the most part you should be able to just pick up the deck and see success quite quickly! In our next set, Twilight Masquerade the deck will gain access to Legacy Energy, so getting some reps in with the deck now will pay off in our next format!

The deck has also seen fairly low metashares since EUIC so it is lower on the radar of decks people are teching against. Outside of Iron Hands ex there aren’t many cards Lugia is scared to see. Future Box is the deck that abuses Iron Hands the best, but it has been kept in check by its poor Charizard matchup. Chien-Pao ex decks are probably where you have to worry about seeing Iron Hands the most, but they are unable to Knock Out a clean Lugia VSTAR due to the absence of a damage modifier like Iron Crown ex . Outside of Iron Hands the deck is able to incorporate single-Prize attackers after the initial Lugia VSTAR to control the Prize trade which is super powerful in this format!

We have also seen Lugia trending upwards lately. The deck has seen some success at Regionals across the world, with one taking a Top 8 spot at both Perth and São Paulo Regionals. This just shows that the deck is capable of going deep in large tournaments and should be a deck on your radar!

This concludes the public portion of this article.

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