Adapt and Overcome – The Future of Dragapult ex Without Pidgeot ex
What’s up everyone! It’s Charlie and I’m happy to be back with another article. I recently took some heat for my last article on here where I wrote about why I thought Dragapult ex was a terrible deck, and that article was published the day after Ryuki Okada won Dortmund Regionals with the deck. While poor timing, I still think all the points I made in that article are valid and Ryuki made some big changes to the core of the deck that made it so strong. The biggest change he made was cutting Pidgeot ex from the deck and replacing it with better cards, like more Drakloak, a thicker Dusknoir line, and a simpler consistency engine based around Tatsugiri. This lets you allocate all your Rare Candy to Dragapult ex and Dusknoir instead of to Pidgeot ex, which makes setting up attackers much easier.
Okada’s Winning List
Let’s take a quick look at Okada’s winning list:
Dragapult ex list I had ever tested before this one, this deck has incredible speed, power, and consistency with its early attacks. Dragapult ex is at its best when you can use Phantom Dive on the second turn of the game, allowing you to take better advantage of its 320 HP by getting off multiple attacks with the same Dragapult ex. If you can’t Phantom Dive on turn two, you risk getting too far behind, losing many of your Dreepy and Drakloak to opposing Phantom Dive or even Kyurem‘s Trifrost, or if you have Dragapult ex in play, allowing it to take a hit and then being forced to commit resources to a Dragapult ex that will only attack once. This deck is by far the best when you’re building up damage counters over time, and for that to work, every single Phantom Dive counts.
The more I think about it, maybe the issue with Pidgeot ex in Dragapult ex for me is priorities. Setting up Pidgeot ex and a Phantom Dive attack on turn two truly felt like an impossible task, but maybe that was never the intent? I recently revisited the list I talked about in my last article and played more games with it, specifically trying to not set up Pidgeot ex until I had my Phantom Dive ready. I had a bit more success, albeit still not as much as with the non-Pidgeot ex version. Pidgeot ex felt like a strong luxury card or insurance policy on my board state if I was to be disrupted by Iono or Unfair Stamp and need to find something specific next turn, but rarely like the only reason I was still in the game. Fezandipiti ex oftentimes felt like it was offering more value, as simply getting some card volume back into my hand after losing a Dragapult ex was great. As I explained in my last article, card volume is much, much more important with Dragapult ex than it is with Charizard ex due to Infernal Reign. Cherry-picking a single card out of the deck will rarely guarantee me a new attacker, but seeing six or seven cards with Fezandipiti ex and Drakloak gives me a much better chance at that attack. Add in something like Tatsugiri and you can dig for a specific Supporter you might want; Arven will usually find you pieces needed for your attack, and Crispin can help you get a Dragapult ex out of nowhere. All in all, this package may not get you the exact card you want 100% of the time like Pidgeot ex will, but it’s lightweight, fits into your deck easily, and gives you way more card volume and access than a Pidgeot ex engine would.
Personally, I think Okada’s list is unbelievably good. Once I started playing with it, I realized this version of Dragapult ex fixed almost every single issue I had with the deck; adding so much aggression in place of the Pidgeot ex.
This concludes the public portion of this article.
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