It’s Still You! — Charizard’s Identity Crisis in a World of Budew
Hello PokeBeach readers! Isaiah here, and I am happy to be writing another article for you all! Last time, I discussed Archaludon ex, including discussion about why I wanted to play it in San Antonio if I had gone to the event and also how the deck has potential going forward in this format. Now that we have had a bit of time to play the new format with the ever-present Budew, there is a lot to be said about where things can go for a lot of the format’s best decks. Slower archetypes with strong late-games like Dragapult ex and Gardevoir ex are the clear winners of the set with so many of the best decks in the format dramatically slowing down, giving these archetypes that may have been considered too slow to be great a new way to match pace with everything else. A lot of the format is choosing to go second right now, too, so Lugia VSTAR has gained a lot by consistently getting to go first and execute its game plan before its opponents, provided it is not stopped by Budew and/or Spiritomb.
As for the losers, there is not deck that has lost as much as Regidrago VSTAR has in this format, changing from a year-defining titan to being a deck that is probably barely Tier Two thanks to the introduction of Budew. Initially, I was optimistic that Regidrago VSTAR would be surviving Budew, but the more I see, the worse I feel about the likelihood of that happening. Another deck that has taken quite a massive hit is Charizard ex. Previously, this deck has been something of a comfort pick for me, being the perfect answer to formats where I do not really like anything else, but in this format, I wonder if the deck is capable of taking that role anymore or not. Budew is clearly an issue for any deck that is reliant on Rare Candy, and Charizard ex is probably the most reliant on Rare Candy of any meta-relevant Stage 2 that has been released in the last few years. This is mostly because, when compared to Kirlia and Drakloak, Charmeleon is a pretty terrible card with very little functional purpose, so you basically just have to play Rare Candy or completely shift the deck in a way that causes it to lose the identity it has held for the last few formats as being the most reliable Rare Candy Stage 2 deck in the last decade. For a baseline on this discussion about Charizard ex, how about we start with my friend Michael Bio’s 14th Place Charizard ex deck list from the San Antonio Regional Championship.
Pidgeot ex combo deck that was impressive to watch when played at the top level, and extremely difficult to beat for most archetypes in the format. As the format started to pick up pace, this went from being a powerful way to play the deck to being the only way to play the deck, and while that is not necessarily a bad thing, if this strategy ever became ineffective, problems would exist for the deck. When we worked together on the deck list that Michael played for San Antonio, we recognized that this game plan is by far Charizard ex’s biggest strength right now, so we wanted to make sure that his deck list was as good as possible when going first, committing some extra space to Item search cards like Buddy-Buddy Poffin and Nest Ball where other players would remove them from Precious Trolley deck lists. The unfortunate reality that one has to face, though, is that building to go first is much less valuable in the new format now with the problem of likely never getting to play a lot of these items when you cannot play them with Arven on Turn Two if needed thanks to the threat of Itchy Pollen. This is where Charizard ex finds its first of many issues in the new format.This concludes the public portion of this article.
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