The Hero’s Spirit — Palafin ex for Baltimore

Hello PokeBeach readers! Isaiah here, and I am happy to be writing another article for you all! Last time, I wrote a comprehensive recap on my experiences at the World Championships, including the Regidrago VSTAR deck list played by myself, fellow writer Charlie Lockyer, Ian Robb, and a few others. In that article, I also discussed what decks I felt would be the best going forward and how the format is going to adapt for the Baltimore Regional Championships before Stellar Crown flips the format on its head. I also made a point to highlight that Regidrago VSTAR will continue to be the best deck in the format, but noted that I felt that Miraidon ex, Roaring Moon ex, and Raging Bolt ex (also known as the “2-2-2 decks”) were bound to see an explosion in play rate following their success at the World Championships and their favored matchup into Regidrago VSTAR.

While the format has a lot of other decks, I do expect the combined meta share of the 2-2-2 decks and Regidrago VSTAR to be over 50% of the meta at the Baltimore Regional Championships. Historically, metagames that feel this centralized are the easiest to break open, so I have spent most of the last few weeks trying to do just that, and while some of my ideas have not been as successful as I had hoped, one deck that I think has a legitimate chance is Palafin ex.

When the card was revealed, I, like most others, realized that the deck probably was not good yet, but any card that can do 250 damage for one Energy could easily become good eventually given the right circumstances. A few months later, and I think that Palafin ex is finally bound to have its moment in the spotlight as a counter to the 2-2-2 decks and as a deck with a remarkably strong Regidrago VSTAR matchup. First, though, how about we take a look at what goes into a good Palafin ex deck list.

How Do We Build Palafin ex?

Palafin ex, despite just being a Stage 1 Pokemon, is pretty convoluted to setup because of its Hero’s Spirit Ability, which states that you cannot put it into play without the effect of Palafin‘s somewhat convoluted Zero to Hero Ability, which only allows you to put Palafin ex in play by swapping it with Palafin after Palafin moves to the Bench. After doing this, you will then have to get Palafin ex back into the Active Spot again to actually be able to attack with it, and its attack also makes it so you cannot attack with Palafin ex during your next turn.

With the amount of switching needed for this deck to work, building the deck becomes a bit more complicated. When the deck came out, the best option was to shove a bunch of Switch into the deck and maybe a few Kieran as some backup options with some extra utility, but it was not great. Then, Pecharunt ex came out in Shrouded Fable and changed everything. Now, instead of needing at least one if not two copies of Switch, it is easy to use Pecharunt ex to switch in Morpeko, which then has free Retreat Cost and can allow you to promote Palafin ex again so you can attack with it. Then, you can also use this same combo to reset Giga Impact to attack on successive turns.

This concludes the public portion of this article.

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