The Final Stretch — Making Last Minute Preparations for Worlds
Hello PokeBeach readers! Isaiah here, and I am happy to be writing another article for you all! Last time, I discussed Giratina VSTAR and how I thought it could be a good off-meta pick for the World Championships in Hawaii this year. Since writing that article, I have unfortunately moved on from playing the deck, but I still do not think the deck is bad. The flaw that I found was that the deck struggled a little more with Regidrago VSTAR than I initially hoped that it would, and with the release of Shrouded Fable on Pokemon TCG Live causing a massive surge in Regidrago VSTAR’s popularity in online events, I feel like playing the deck is a bit too risky with a less than perfect Regidrago VSTAR matchup.
The ongoing development of the metagame in online tournaments has revealed significantly less surprises than I initially anticipated. Although Regidrago VSTAR has been performing well, it has not met my expectations. However, this lack of success could possibly be attributed to the amount of anti-Regidrago VSTAR decks that have started to see play. The biggest case of this being Raging Bolt ex which has been tearing up online events, largely thanks to its favored Regidrago VSTAR matchup. At this point in time, it seems like everyone just wants to beat Regidrago VSTAR, but just doing that is not the way to win the tournament. With that said, it is certainly the best first step, so how about how we look at how some of the top decks are able to beat it.
Public Enemy Number 1: Regidrago VSTAR
It is no surprise that Regidrago VSTAR is just the deck to beat for this event. In my opinion, it is the best deck in the format, and it is pretty easy to see why. Much like Mewtwo and Mew-GX, the deck just has nearly limitless options being able to insert attackers for pretty much any situation. Not just that, but the deck also has access to the early game consistency engine of Teal Mask Ogerpon ex , then using Energy Switch as an extremely efficient form of Energy acceleration to power up all of the deck’s most powerful attacks. Finally, the deck really comes together with Regidrago VSTAR’s Legacy Star VSTAR Power, giving you instant access to any resource that you could possibly want during a game. Want another Prime Catcher ? Easy. Need another Energy Switch to attack? You got it. Have an atrocious hand and just need a Supporter to get going? Legacy Star can do that too. The Ability truly feels like one of the most overpowered Abilities ever printed on a Pokemon card at times, basically giving the deck a “do whatever you want” button once per game. The key attackers for Regidrago VSTAR are Dragapult ex and the newly released Kyurem, both of which allow you to cripple the opponent’s setup very early in the game. For example, against Charizard ex decks, you can deny them ever putting Pidgeot ex in play thanks to Phantom Dive onto a Pidgey. Or maybe the opponent failed to establish a Manaphy on their first turn, well, now they just lose the game on the spot because of Kyurem’s Trifrost. The combination of these two attacks in particular gives the deck so many possible lines to close out the game in unique ways, or you can even just use Giratina VSTAR or Raging Bolt ex to chase one-hit Knock Outs.
This concludes the public portion of this article.
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