Good Today, Good Tomorrow — Dragapult ex Before and After Rotation
Hello everyone! We’re into the last stretch of the season before we get hit by the Standard rotation, which will finally bring to a close the Sword & Shield era of the Pokemon TCG. It was a bit of a rocky run, with the first part of the era being frankly terrible to play (not to mention being during that whole global pandemic thing), but with the latter half being among the best that the Pokemon TCG has had to offer. While most of the format has moved on to be more ex-focused, we will nonetheless be losing some important cards. In addition to the attackers, the Radiant cards, such as Radiant Greninja and Radiant Charizard, will all be leaving us, as will the entire Lost Zone engine, Double Turbo Energy, Forest Seal Stone, and some nice Trainers. We do still have some time left before the rotation hits, so we’re in a bit of a weird time between looking to the future and making sure we’re prepared for tournaments in the present.
I will say, I’ve been relatively happy thus far with the new Prismatic Evolutions format. Even if we did only get a card or two that were playable, Budew has done its job and slowed the format down enough to make games a little bit less abrupt. In my last article, I went over the impact of the newly released Budew, and how it would affect many of the Standard-format decks in the meta. One of the decks I highlighted as particularly benefitting from the addition of Budew was Dragapult ex, as it is an archetype that is well set up to take advantage of the early-game Item lock. Dragapult ex has gone through a number of different iterations since being released, starting with Dragapult ex / Lost Zone Box and Dragapult ex / Pidgeot ex; a refinement to a stronger build in Dragapult ex / Dusknoir; and, more recently, the cool anti-meta build of Dragapult ex / Iron Thorns ex. With the release of Budew, however, most Dragapult lists are returning to the Dusknoir build, as it is the one that best takes advantage of Budew’s Item-lock attack. The Budew build helps give the deck a bit of the best of both worlds, as it slows down the game similarly to the Iron Thorns list to help give you time to set up an overwhelming board while also letting the deck use the explosive Dusknoir plays that help put it over the top. In this article, I’m going to be taking a closer look at that deck and how it plays in the current meta.
There’s also a second reason I want to go over Dragapult ex: in addition to being a strong pre-rotation deck, it is also one of the best decks to play in the post-rotation format. Dragapult ex doesn’t lose all that much from the rotation, and its strong attacking strategy is great into a relatively unexplored meta. Of all of those important cards that are leaving, relatively few of them are in Dragapult ex decks to start with, so it’s fairly easy to adapt the lists from pre-rotation builds to post-rotation ones. For those of you who aren’t going to a major event in this quarter, it makes a lot more sense to look ahead a bit so you can try to gain an advantage heading into the new post-rotation format. Of course, for those of you who are, you don’t want to ignore the current format, lest you put yourself at a disadvantage. The nice part about playing Dragapult ex is that you can effectively prepare for both formats at the same time; that is, you don’t necessarily have to sacrifice your performance in the current meta in order to practice the deck you might be playing in the future. On the contrary, having that kind of continuity can pay dividends going forward.
My Current Dragapult ex List
The future is coming soon, but for now let’s start with the Dragapult ex deck of today’s meta. My current Dragapult ex list is pretty similar to the one I put in my last article, with only a small change, adding in Temple of Sinnoh to improve the Lugia VSTAR matchup. Here’s the list:
While I went over this deck a bit in the past article, I’ll do so in more depth here. The Dragapult ex line is a full 4-4-3 line, as you don’t want to be going any lighter than that in a Budew meta. While most Dragapult decks have been trending this way anyway, especially the Iron Thorns builds, it’s a clear departure from the slimmer 4-2-3 lines that you might have seen in some Dragapult / Dusknoir lists in the past. The Dusknoir line itself is still fine at 2-1-2, as it’s a bit less important to evolve up manually. Radiant Alakazam is also still the Radiant of choice, as it gets even stronger with Budew. You can use it to move away the extra 10 damage from Itchy Pollen, which can come up a lot against evolving Basics with 70 HP, or you can use it in the mid-game in conjunction with Itchy Pollen to better take advantage of any turn you might try to buy with Budew at that point. For Budew, you want two copies, not one, as it’s quite important for this deck’s strategy when going second, and you don’t want to find yourself at a big disadvantage because you prized it.
This concludes the public portion of this article.
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