The Secret to Chien-Pao

Hello everyone. The North America International Championships have just concluded, leaving us with some surprising results — I don’t think anyone was expecting the two finalist decks to be Arceus VSTAR / Duraludon VMAX and Rapid Strike Urshifu VMAX / Inteleon VMAX, yet nevertheless here we are. Most competitive players are now looking ahead to the World Championships, which is the only major event taking place until Regionals resume in September. We are entering the off season for the competitive circuit.

My group and I performed quite poorly at NAIC despite testing efficiently and playing what I believed to be the best deck, Gardevoir ex. Me, I double-bricked two rounds that should have been easy wins. This was frustrating, but there’s nothing that can be done about unplayable hands. I also played against two Arceus decks that were built to counter Gardevoir, which were tough matchups. Overall, I ended 5-3-1, which was disappointing, but I still managed to get some Championship Points. I considered writing about Gardevoir for this article, but instead, I chose to go with the deck that was our second choice for NAIC: Chien-Pao ex.

Chien-Pao is a rather high-maintenance deck, but it is extremely strong and has just enough options to let it keep up with the top meta decks. I think Chien-Pao is slightly better positioned now than it was before, as Arceus decks had a strong showing at NAIC and always seem to be favored by American players. Arceus is particularly weak against Chien-Pao, with its only real win condition being to get lucky with disruption.

So far, Chien-Pao has been considered a mid-tier deck that nobody thinks much of. The average lists for the deck are quite bad, though there was an interesting turbo list that showed up at NAIC and took a few Day 2 spots, including one Top 16. It focuses on PokéStop to see more cards, go fast, and enable the Cross Switcher / Canceling Cologne combo. This version is intriguing, but it’s not the one that I cooked up, so I won’t be discussing it today. Here is my current list:

This concludes the public portion of this article.

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