Crushing the Competition With Iron Thorns ex

[PMJ]

Hello everyone! Ever since it won the 2024 World Championships, Iron Thorns ex has done well at a few tournaments, but hasn’t gotten any victories. However, the metagame has changed significantly since that major tournament in Hawaii, and Iron Thorns’ deck lists have adapted to suit it. The Initialization Ability is still enough to shut down most of the decks in the Standard format and buy you enough time to KO your opponent’s key support Pokemon and win the game before your opponent is able to set up!

While Iron Thorns ex initially looks like it would be slow out of the gate, Fernando Cifuentes’s winning list made some big innovations by playing four copies of Pokémon Catcher and...

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[Steen]

Iron Thorns was a deck that caused everyone to panic and have a cancelling cologne as a tech for a month, but other than that I have to say it is pretty hopeless.

It slows down Charizard, Raging Bolt and Regidrago while only really being a hard counter to Gardevoir, Lugia, and Miraidon. If your objective is to slow down evolution decks, you might as well replace the lost cities with Dusclops/Dusknoir to hit certain damage benchmarks since you're only working with a 120 Volt Cyclone.

Unironically I say steer clear of this deck even with Raging Bolt being insanely popular, cause Bolt still has many other ways of accelerating to itself, and Zard only needs two energy and two prizes taken to start one-shotting Iron Thorns.

 

[MarlinRimes]

Klawf/LZB/Control: