Twin Evils — Two Ways to Abuse Weavile

Hello everyone! This is Grant and I am excited to be bringing you this piece about Weavile! With Garbodor from BREAKpoint out of the format, it looked like there were no checks to powerful Abilities in Standard. That is, until a few clever players thought to use Weavile from Ultra Prism — and to a lesser extent, Weavile from Burning Shadows — to counter them. In this article, I’ll be going over two decks that utilize the newer of the two. Evil Admonition is a ridiculous attack that single-handedly cripples many of the current meta decks.

Ideally, you’ll be OHKOing threats with Evil Admonition, or at least trading evenly with Pokemon-GX by 2HKOing them. Since opponents can play around a straight Weavile deck by not playing down any Pokemon with Abilities, you’re going to want to give Weavile a partner that can dish out early pressure. Let’s start with the list I used to Top 8 my most recent League Cup:

Weavile / Buzzwole

Decks utilizing Shrine of Punishment have caught on quite a bit recently because they are great at tearing apart Vikavolt and Zoroark-GX decks. This version uses Weavile as a harder counter to decks with Abilities, though it takes a slightly weaker matchup to other Shrine decks. This is essentially an anti-meta deck, though it uses Pokemon that are inherently powerful in their own right, so it stands a chance against just about anything.

This list is similar to the one that did well in Brazil. My friend Eddie and I were testing this deck a lot online. His list runs Acro Bikes. We theorize that at least one of the Brazilian players played against Eddie online, saw how good the deck was, and then a group of them showed up to the Regional with it. While saying that the two of us invented the archetype might be a bit conceited, the similarities in our lists were too numerous to be coincidental.

Three Buzzwole

Baby Buzzwole does a decent amount of damage for just one Energy, especially considering the amount of damage modifiers that Buzzwole gets. With Shrine, Professor Kukui, Diancie Prism Star, Choice Band, and Beast Energy Prism Star, a regular Sledgehammer can do up to 140 damage! Buzzwole’s first use is as an early-game attacker that puts on loads of pressure against just about every other deck.

Since this deck doesn’t include any Pokemon-GX, your opponent can’t play around Sledgehammer’s boosted damage. That’s Buzzwole’s second use. When your opponent goes down to four Prizes, use that opportunity to take as many Prize cards as possible with the boosted Sledgehammer. After that, Buzzwole gets progressively more useless as the game wears on, so you want to get as much mileage as you can out of the three copies early on.

4-4 Weavile

A 4-4 line seems quite heavy, but you want to attack with several Weavile in a row in some matchups. In a deck that is relatively lacking in draw power, running a thick line of Weavile improves consistency. This is especially important against Zoroark and Vikavolt. You will probably use at least two Weavile to attack in every other matchup too, since there aren’t a whole lot of other attacking options in this deck.

Don’t forget about Icy Wind! It can deal decent damage with modifiers, and it puts the opponent to sleep. Sometimes that is more useful than Evil Admonition.

2-2 Magcargo

The main problem I’ve found with Shrine decks such as Buzzwole / Garbodor and Malamar is that they lack draw power and thus are inconsistent. Magcargo solves this problem to an extent. Smooth Over followed by Instruct, Kukui, or Lillie helps find the pieces necessary to stream attackers every turn; or, if you don’t have a way to draw a card, you can just use Smooth Over to set up your next turn.

Slugma‘s Magma Ring is a decent utility attack as well, especially against Fire-weak Pokemon like Metagross-GX and Golisopod-GX. After Kukui, Choice Band, and Weakness, Magma Ring does 120 damage plus Shrine!

This concludes the public portion of this article.

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