Crushing the Competition With Iron Thorns ex

Hello everyone! Ever since it won the 2024 World Championships, Iron Thorns ex has done well at a few tournaments, but hasn’t gotten any victories. However, the metagame has changed significantly since that major tournament in Hawaii, and Iron Thorns’ deck lists have adapted to suit it. The Initialization Ability is still enough to shut down most of the decks in the Standard format and buy you enough time to KO your opponent’s key support Pokemon and win the game before your opponent is able to set up!

While Iron Thorns ex initially looks like it would be slow out of the gate, Fernando Cifuentes’s winning list made some big innovations by playing four copies of Pokémon Catcher and Prime Catcher as the ACE SPEC instead of Legacy Energy. While Legacy Energy initially seems strong, as it forces your opponent to go through all four Iron Thorns ex, having the option to chase down and KO your opponent’s setup Pokemon is very important while they are struggling under Initialization. While you can play a high count of Boss's Orders to simulate this effect, your Supporter for the turn is often taken up by finding other cards, such as Professor's Research, Arven, Judge, or Colress's Tenacity. While Pokemon Catcher is on a coin flip, being able to combine it with other Supporter cards makes it worth it to play in this deck. Prime Catcher fills the same role as Pokemon Catcher, but gives you the guaranteed option at any point in the game.

One of the big things Iron Thorns ex has going for it is that it is the only deck that is currently able to use Lost City, letting you send your opponent’s important Pokemon into the Lost Zone. Lost City is also very important against the Dusknoir decks, as they need to bump the Stadium, otherwise their Dusknoir line gets sent to the Lost Zone when its Cursed Blast Ability gets used. None of the other decks are able to fit Lost City, or have more pressing Stadium options they need to play such as Area Zero Underdepths or Temple of Sinnoh. Lost City is also very important to play against any deck that includes Mimikyu. You can only KO an opposing Mimikyu by using Canceling Cologne. I have wanted to cut Canceling Cologne from the deck for a long time since its only purpose is to break through Mimikyu’s Safeguard Ability, but as this deck immediately folds to a Mimikyu without it I think you have to play it.

My Iron Thorns deck list hasn’t changed too much with the new set releases, but I have put some thought into a bunch of the card counts and I think if I were to submit it for a tournament right now this is what I would go with!

This concludes the public portion of this article.

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