Unshrouding the Worlds Format – Shrouded Fable’s Impact and My Worlds Preparation Process
Hey everyone! It’s Charlie and I’m happy to be back with another article. After NAIC ends, we enter the “dog days” of the Pokemon TCG season where we have no major events until the World Championships. Unlike last season when the gap was a bit over a month, the gap between NAIC and Worlds this year is over two months! This gave me a nice opportunity to take a brief break from Pokemon after an intense end to the season, which was refreshing. Now that it’s July, it’s time for the most intense parts of Worlds preparation to begin!
Last season was the first World Championships since 2015 that no new cards were introduced to the card pool, so there were many fewer new things to explore than there are this season. The only “new” deck that saw significant success at Worlds last year was Miraidon ex, piloted to Top 32 by Sejun Park and Andrew Mahone. This deck was, clearly, already strong, but underdeveloped prior to the event and preyed on a favorable field of Arceus VSTAR and Giratina VSTAR decks. Compare this to 2019, where we saw an entirely new main expansion in Unified Minds and an early rotation of four impactful sets that effectively created a new format from scratch for Worlds. 2019’s rotation was extreme, and we saw Mewtwo and Mew-GX take down the tournament with many other brand-new decks making the Top 8.
This year, we are closer to the middle ground, getting a new mini set in Shrouded Fable and not rotating any cards out. The closest we’ve had to this before was in 2022 when Pokemon GO released before Worlds and introduced a few new impactful cards. The biggest additions were PokéStop and Radiant Charizard, the former finding its way into some turbo archetypes and the latter inspiring Ross Cawthon’s genius Top 16 list focused around Inteleon and Radiant Charizard alone. The big question this year is will Shrouded Fable be as impactful as Pokemon GO was? From what I’ve seen on social media, it appears most people think a few of the new cards will have an impact, but not a massive shakeup like we’ve seen in the past at some Worlds. Personally, I think we will see quite a large shakeup of the meta at this event as Shrouded Fable is full of impactful cards that change how the best decks play.
Top Five Cards from Shrouded Fable
I’ll share my top five cards from the new set below; these have been my favorite new inclusions in decks and I think all five will see massive success at Worlds. In particular, I think Shrouded Fable is full of exceptional role-playing cards. I don’t see the new Darkness-box deck seeing much success, but there are tons of amazing cards in the set that fill important niches, counter some of the best decks in the current Standard format, and overall change how the game is played going forward.
Five: Pecharunt ex
Pecharunt ex is a cool new card. Its Ability allows you to move one of your Benched Darkness Pokemon to the Active in exchange for poisoning it. While this can be seen as a downside, we also got Binding Mochi, which says that your Active Poisoned Pokemon hits for 40 more damage. This is one new way to boost Charizard ex‘s damage output in the early game, allowing you to reach 220 damage before your opponent has taken a Prize card and without something like Maximum Belt . It can also be paired with cards like Morpeko to offer a free pivot to your entire board, similar to Keldeo-EX + Float Stone from back in the day. This does take up two Bench spots, but in decks that are light on Bench sitters, a pivot option like this can be strong. For Charizard ex specifically, Pecharunt ex offers an almost foolproof way to beat Snorlax lists from the past as you can constantly move Charizard ex back to the Active and attack their Snorlax. You’ll need other ways to deal with Mimikyu of course, but we have a few new options for that as well that I’ll talk about later. Unfortunately for Charizard ex, however, Snorlax block can play cards like Cornerstone Mask Ogerpon ex to give Charizard ex even more of a headache. Overall, Pecharunt ex is a cute card that plays its role nicely in Darkness decks.
This concludes the public portion of this article.
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