Standard Budget: haxorus / Metagross

[SprayAnPray]

Pokemon

• 4 Axew
• 3 Fraxure
• 4 Haxorus
• 2 Jirachi (Doom Desire)
• 2 Remoraid
• 2 Octillery

Trainers

• 1 Professors Letter
• 3 Level Ball
• 2 Super Rod
• 4 Trainers Mail
  
• 3 Rare Candy
• 2 Ultra Ball
  
• 2 Switch
• 2 Lysandre
• 2 Pokemon Center Lady
• 4 Birch
  
• 3 Wally
• 1 Assault Vest
• 1 Float Stone
  
• 2 Muscle Band

Energy

• 4 Double Dragon
• 3 Fighting
• 3 Metal

The main strategy is to get the stage 2s out by at least turn 3, and then start hitting for big damage. Jirachi is there to stall by grabbing cards I need or scaring off powered up attackers.

Without big ticket items such as Shaymins or VS Seekers, what are some improvements that you can spot?

Cheers in advance

 

[Emperor]

Haxorus is good enough to be the only attacker in this deck. Metagross isn't bad, but is isn't great either. It does have access to Bronzong (Phantom Force) for energy acceleration and the Metagross with Double can do some gimmicky things with stacking multiple damage boosting or damage reducing (incoming damage) tools onto itself, but Haxorus is a better card: It has 10 more HP and can do 130 base damage without needing to have 11 cards in your hand - unlike Metagross - for 2 energy. Plus it can boost its own damage output to 230 which can knock out any Mega pokemon and Pokemon EX (except Wailord EX), which also makes being hit by energy removal cards less of an issue.

-3-2-3 Metagross
-4 Double Colorless Energy
-1 Professor Letter
-2 Heavy Ball

+1-1-1 Haxorus
+2-2 Octilerry
+2 Ultra Ball
+3 Level Ball
+2 Super Rod


Full focua on Haxorus requires running 4 copies of it and seeing as you're utilising a large Wally count, it is worth testing out quite a thick evolution line to ensure that Wally will always have a live target and never be a dead card. Octillery is a decent replacement for Shaymin EX; it only lets you draw upto 5 cards, but it can be used every turn, unless of course you're hit by Hex Maniac or some other form of ability lock. Leval Ball grabs everything except Haxorus and Ultra ball can get that. with Metagross gone you can now ditch the DCE. 2 Super Rod to recover Haxorus and any of it's previous forms as Haxorus is very important to the deck, 2 seems necessary incase a couple of it or one of its previous forms are prized.

Perosnally i'm not a fan of Roller Skates especially considering the only other form of trainer based draw power is Tierno, which isn't the strongest draw card in the format, but if you feel like it's working for you then you can keep it in the list.

 

[SprayAnPray]

Cheers for that mate, running 2 main attackers was always an issue but I'd stuck with Metagross to cover Haxorus' fairy weakness (Which was fairly popular in ptcgo)

The roller skates and tierno were only used because you never wanted to remove cards from your hand when Metagross was out, and the skates allowed me to still bump up my hand size after I'd used a supporter.

Now that keeping a constantly big hand isn't an issue, I'll likely drop both the tiernos and the skates in for some more heavy draw support (Sycamore or Birch?) and some other stuff

 

[SprayAnPray]

So the initial list has now been updated to a more Haxorus themed deck, looking for more thoughts on this though

 

[BastarMax]

Muscle Band - not STANDART format

 

[mordacazir]

First thing: muscle band isn't Standard anymore, so instead, you could use 1 level ball and a float stone, just for some consistency.
Second: A parellel city or silent lab in your deck could be very handy to disrupt your opponent. Drop a pokemon center lady and a letter for that.