Muddy Water — Garbodor and Greninja for Madison Regionals

Hello PokeBeach fans and subscribers! I’m back again to talk to you about my top deck choices for an upcoming Regionals, and how they do against the current meta. In my last article, I talked about M Mewtwo-EX for Roanoke Regionals and it ended up doing very well getting two Top 8 placements and bubbling cut at ninth Place. Unfortunately, due to the new Garbodor, Mega Mewtwo decks are now dead, so that won’t be what this article is about. This time we’ll explore a couple different Garbodor variants and Greninja BREAK, but first I’ll briefly go over my testing and tournament history with the two decks.

Testing and Tournaments

Greninja

I started testing Greninja immediately after Guardians Rising came out. I saw that Sylveon-GX was doing well in Japan and it was getting a lot of hype. I knew that it would be one of the decks that beats Sylveon and my testing showed that to be true. I would say I tested against Greninja more than I have tested it, but that’s because I was trying to make Rainbow Road work and to be fair, it started off well in testing. Its biggest problem other than losing to itself was it had a terrible Greninja matchup. The only tournament history I have with Greninja is when I won a League Cup with it, but I have tested it enough and understand it well enough to talk about its place in the current meta. Two of my friends also got Top 4 and second at a League Cup recently with Greninja and I got to see how well it worked for them in this meta.

Garbodor

The first two ways I tried out the new Garbodor was with Vespiquen and a straight Tapu Lele-GX  variant with Crushing Hammer and other disruption cards like Team Flare Grunt, Team Skull Grunt, and Delinquent. Both versions did not test too well and got absolutely obliterated by Sylveon. I also was consistently beating Garbodor decks while testing Rainbow Road so I gave up on it for a bit. Then one of my friends won a League Cup with the Drampa-GX version of Garb and I got intrigued again. The next day was another League Cup so the night before I talked to my friend Kidd Stark who had won the League Cup and my friend Jando Luna about different versions of it. I might have played Kidd’s list straight up but I didn’t own any Team Magma's Secret Base and only one Drampa, so that wasn’t an option. Jando was talking to me about an Espeon-GX version of the deck which seemed interesting. So, I decided to play a combination of the two lists with the cards I had.

It ended up working out better than I expected, I went 5-1 in the Swiss rounds. I played out my last round against a Greninja to gain information about the deck since we would both make it into Top 8 with a win, loss, or tie. I got destroyed, without Magma Base and more Drampa it was hard to get any early Knock Outs. On top of that, my only Drampa was prized and he drew so well that he hardly had to play any Items. Also, he was able to use Field Blower and Giant Water Shuriken twice to KO my Garbotoxin Garbodor the turn after I got it up, so there really was no chance for me. I lost in Top 8 to friend and fellow PokeBeach writer Caleb Gedemer. He was playing a Trevenant / Garbodor deck which I had beaten twice earlier in Swiss, but I made a crucial mislay in game three by promoting the wrong a Pokemon which might be the biggest reason I lost. Here is the list I played for the Cup.

Greninja

Strengths

One of Greninja‘s biggest strengths has always been that it’s a deck with zero Pokemon-EX (and now Pokemon-GX as well) in the deck. Meaning unless someone is using an attack that spreads damage to more than one Pokemon, you don’t need to worry about someone taking more than one Prize in a turn. Something else incredible about the deck is Frogadier‘s Water Duplicates attack. It allows for a more fluid setup of your Pokemon and is one of the biggest reason it can be successful as a deck that you need to evolve three times in to get to your strongest Pokemon. Another amazing thing about this deck is that Greninja has two great attacks that only cost one Colorless or Water Energy to use and an insanely good Ability on Greninja BREAK. Let’s not forget that once you evolve into Greninja you also get free Retreat which makes this deck run even smoother once it’s up and going.

Weaknesses

Greninja’s biggest weakness has always been itself, and what I mean by that is sometimes the deck just bricks because it relies entirely on setting up multiple Stage 2 and “Stage 3” Pokemon. The other thing that gives the deck trouble is that it is slower and takes time to set up, which means faster decks can sometimes win by just out-speeding you if you don’t set up well enough and draw good when it counts. Luckily the current format has slowed down a bit thanks to Garbodor and that makes it not as much of a worry as it was in the past. Another problem is Ability-lock, lucky for us we now have Field Blower and that makes Garbodor less of an issue, but Hex Maniac is still problematic. Now with Tapu Lele-GX, Hex is much easier to get at the right time as well. The last biggest issue with this deck is prizing Frogadier, prizing two or even one can be devastating. I would say it’s not as bad in this slower format but it can always be a huge disadvantage to Water Duplicates for less than three Frogadiers.

This concludes the public portion of this article.

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