How to Beat Snorlax Stall with Tier One Decks!
Hello everyone! Recently, Snorlax stall has seen a spike in popularity online and at major tournaments alike. This archetype received a major buff with the reintroduction of Counter Catcher, and now it is terrorizing casual and competitive players equally.
After making Top 8 at LAIC, Snorlax has just won the Gdansk Regional in Poland. The deck is interesting as it operates vastly differently than every other deck in the format — this causes difficulty for other players when trying to figure out how to deal with it, and it will greatly punish you for any misplays.
Snorlax stall has a dirty little secret, however; it is actually a bad deck. If every player knew how to play against it, it would rarely make Day 2, and it would never make Top 8. In this article, I will go in-depth on understanding the Snorlax stall deck. This will greatly help you learn how to beat it, and I will also discuss its matchups, and how you should play against it as some of the more popular decks in the meta.
Most decks have a decent chance of beating Snorlax, and there are many that will have a positive win rate once you learn the matchup. Many of the Tier 1 decks have a contentious matchup against Snorlax and rely heavily on playing correctly against it.
The LAIC List
For reference, here is the Snorlax list that made Top 8 at LAIC.
This is fairly standard as far as stall decks go. If your opponent is playing Snorlax stall, you should expect all of these cards.
Some lists also play Crabominable V, so be wary of that. Crabominable V gives this deck a way to beat an opposing Pidgeot V, as well as a high-HP tank that can apply pressure and mill important resources. I would personally play Crabominable V in the deck, but many lists do not include it. The winning list from Gdansk plays Crabominable V, which helps massively in the mirror and against any deck with a means of infinitely recovering resources. Other than that, and a slightly different Supporter lineup, the lists are practically identical, besides one copy of Spiritomb — another tech for the mirror, among other things.
Playing Against the Deck
Similar decks have seen play in the past, but it has been a while. Even this deck has been considered unplayable until recently; Erika's Invitation and Counter Catcher are the cards it needed to start seeing success. This deck aims to trap something that isn’t threatening in the Active position and whittle away its opponent’s resources; of course, Snorlax cannot attack without Energy, so it applies pressure with Miss Fortune Sisters, Sidney, and sometimes Giacomo. In comparison to other decks, this pressure is rather tame as they aren’t attacks, and have a chance of failing. All of its ways to apply pressure involve using its Supporter for the turn, so it is rather limited by that as well. In the early-game, Snorlax will need to use Supporters like Arven, Avery, and Iono to set up and stabilize, however, those disruptive Supporters can permanently get rid of crucial resources, so they are powerful and dangerous.
This concludes the public portion of this article.
If you'd like to continue reading, consider purchasing a PokeBeach premium membership! If you're not completely satisfied with your membership, you can request a full refund within 30 days.
Each week we post high-quality content from some of the game's top players. Our article program isn't a corporate operation, advertising front, or for-profit business. We set our prices so that we can pay the game's top players to write the best content for our subscribers. Each article topic is carefully selected, goes through multiple drafts, and is touched up by our editors. We take great pride in our program!
