The Temporal Ice Age – Chien-Pao ex Post Rotation!

Hey PokeBeach readers, your favourite Chien-Pao ex-enjoyer is back writing another article for you! Temporal Forces Prereleases have been taking place worldwide, and we have already had a plethora of City League Tournaments happening in Japan using our post-rotation format. With our Standard format coming to a close, I thought I would start getting you prepared for tournaments in our upcoming new format! Today I am going to go over my favourite deck, and one that I think is primed for success; Chien-Pao ex. If you want a super in-depth guide to the deck and some example plays check out this article I wrote a couple of months ago. For this article, I am mainly going to be focusing on how rotation affects the deck and why its position has strengthened.

What Does the Deck Lose and Gain?

One of the main reasons Chien-Pao ex is a strong deck post-rotation is that the deck loses almost no cards from its current iteration.  The only commonly played cards the deck is losing are Cross Switcher and Battle VIP Pass — while these are core cards to the deck’s current strategy, two cards are coming out in Temporal Forces that are debatably upgrades for the deck that will easily replace them; Prime Catcher and Buddy-Buddy Poffin .

Prime Catcher is one of the strongest cards ever printed in my opinion, and is tailor-made for Chien-Pao ex. Cross Switcher has been a core strategy for the deck and when paired with Canceling Cologne to shut off Manaphy‘s Wave Veil Ability, the deck can wreak havoc on opponent’s boards. With Prime Catcher we can consolidate this combo from three cards to two and also open up three additional spots in our deck list to include more powerful cards. While Prime Catcher does limit us to one gust a game instead of the two that Cross Switcher enables, it was always difficult to pull off multiple Cross Switcher-plays in a game. Normally we would only aim to use the combo once a game, and having it easily accessible on one card is a huge boost for the deck.

Switching out Battle VIP Pass for Buddy-Buddy Poffin weakens the early game slightly, but dramatically increases the deck’s consistency for the rest of the game. The three Pokemon we can’t grab with Buddy-Buddy Poffin are Radiant Greninja, Chien-Pao ex, and Iron Hands ex, but the only one of these Pokemon we would consistently be grabbing off a Battle VIP Pass turn one is Radiant Greninja. For Chien-Pao ex and Iron Hands ex, we normally grab them when we are ready to attack since we don’t want two-Prize liabilities on our board. When going second we can use Irida to grab the Radiant Greninja, or hopefully draw a copy of Nest Ball or Ultra Ball to grab it as well. One of the problems the deck currently has is if you don’t draw Battle VIP Pass turn one then it is hard to get our ideal board of multiple Frigibax and Bidoof. This is especially a problem when going first since we can’t play Irida. Now, if we falter a bit turn one we can find a Buddy-Buddy Poffin and stabilize our board at any point in the game.

The other card that Chien-Pao ex gains from Temporal Forces is Ciphermaniac's Codebreaking . This card is a reprint of an effect we’ve had in the past, most recently on Mallow during the Sun & Moon era. This Supporter seems perfect for the deck and has massive synergies with Bibarel, Radiant Greninja and PokéStop. As long as you have one of the three you effectively can search your deck for any two cards. Imagine all the strong combos you can grab, Baxcalibur and Rare Candy, Prime Catcher and Canceling Cologne, or even a Superior Energy Retrieval when you need it. The card is also fantastic at playing around Iono — while the deck does play Bibarel, sometimes it is susceptible to falling prey to Counter Catcher and our opponent combining that with an Iono. With Ciphermaniac’s Codebreaking, we can pre-emptively put game-winning cards on top of our deck. Imagine how strong it is to know you are going to draw Irida or Superior Energy Retrieval no matter what! In my testing with the deck, this card has been super strong so far!

This concludes the public portion of this article.

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