Third Time’s the Charm? Analysis of Snorlax from Lille
Hey everyone! It’s Charlie, and I’m happy to be back with another article. As the first item of business, it’s important I talk about how I, yet again, wrote an article about how Dragapult ex with Pidgeot ex was a terrible deck, and, yet again, was shown up by Clement Courbois, who took the deck to the finals in Lille. This happening twice in a row is absolutely hilarious, in my opinion, especially for a deck that didn’t have too many placements outside of the top ones. I do still believe that the Pidgeot version of the deck is terrible. Fortunately for you guys, though, this article isn’t about Dragapult!
In Lille, we saw one really interesting deck place in the Top 16, and of course it came from the world’s most notorious control player, Sander Wojcik. Unlike most of his decks, this one looks a lot more standard at face value, as it’s just the Block Snorlax deck that has seen a ton of success over the past couple years. However, it’s missing one very important card: Rotom V ! Rotom has served as Blocklax’s main draw engine for its entire existence. Since you never plan on attacking with Snorlax or anything else, you can take advantage of Instant Charge every single turn, slowly building your hand up to a ridiculous size. Without Rotom, Snorlax would often struggle to use powerful Supporters every turn, allowing you to get board-wiped after your opponent escapes Block only once or twice. But with Rotom, if your opponent is locked in the Active Spot for a few too many turns and needs to play a Supporter like Boss’s Orders to escape it, your massive hand will almost certainly have a response in it for next turn. This draw engine has proved so powerful that Snorlax players were willing to put a 190-HP liability on their Bench, providing an easy escape and two Prize cards.
Sander disagrees, and has claimed that Rotom is too much of a liability to have in play. How do we build a Snorlax deck with enough powerful draw to replace Rotom V? Sander’s list included lots of new cards; here it is for reference:
Four Snorlax
Snorlax is obviously your main “attacker,” as you keep it in the Active Spot at the end of most turns. Its Block Ability prevents your opponent from retreating, which forces them to play a switching card or bring a Pokemon other than Snorlax into your Active Spot to retreat. Basically every deck in Standard has some sort of support Pokemon you can exploit, such as opposing Rotom V, Lumineon V , Manaphy, or anything else that isn’t used to attack. Also, most decks have a very limited number of switching cards, so if you can remove all of them, you have a great chance to win. 150 HP is very strong, and the addition of Bravery Charm or Hero's Cape can make Snorlax into quite the tank against low-powered attackers. As long as this stall deck is good, Snorlax will be the core of it, so four copies is the bare minimum.
Two Mimikyu
Our secondary wall is Mimikyu , which gives us a Pokemon with Safeguard to stay safe from Pokemon ex and Pokemon V. Mimikyu can take on entire decks by itself, or at least force them to look for alternate attackers to get through it. Furthermore, Mimikyu is only worth one Prize card, so if your opponent KOs it, you can re-establish another without taking a huge loss. Mimikyu may not have Block, but it’s really hard to Knock Out and can be a win condition against many decks filled with Rule Box Pokemon.
This concludes the public portion of this article.
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