Is Mill Back? — A Look at Great Tusk Mill
Hey PokeBeach readers, Ciaran here with another article for you today! Hopefully you’ve been seeing success at your tournaments and you’re ready for rotation. Today, I want to look at a deck that might be flying a bit under the radar right now: Great Tusk. I want to go over what an ideal build might look like, how to play the deck, and its position in our upcoming meta.
Winning by deckout is the least common win condition, and it’s rare that we have a deck in the meta that uses milling as its main focus. We have seen success from Snorlax recently, but that’s more of a control deck. Durant saw some fringe play during the 2022-23 season, peaking with a Top 4 at the 2022 Brisbane Regional Championships, but we have to go all the way back to the 2011-12 season to find our last true Tier 1 mill deck, which focused on the Durant from Noble Victories. They even printed a Heatmor to directly counter the card! Similar to that Durant, Great Tusk can mill four cards a turn, but only as long as you play an Ancient Supporter during that turn.
Milling your opponent to zero cards in deck isn’t easy. If they can take a Knock Out every turn, you will simply run out of time. Assuming we can get a minimum of six Land Collapse attacks off, that’s only 24 cards milled, and between setup, initial draw for turn, and Prize cards, our opponent will start the game with 46 cards in their deck. If we subtract the 24 from our minimum mills, that still leaves 22. Now, our opponent will have to play and draw cards to get set up, so they will help us mill along the way, but we still need to find ways to buy extra turns for Great Tusk to get as many Land Collapses off as possible. Let’s start by going over the most successful Great Tusk list from the recent Champions League Fukuoka, so I can show off how the deck does what it does.
Top 16 Champions League Fukuoka List
Pokemon
First, let’s take a look at the Pokemon lineup. I think the four copies of Great Tusk are self-explanatory — it’s going to be our main attacker — but there are a couple of things I want to point out.
Land Collapse takes two Colorless Energy, so we can satisfy the attack cost using Double Turbo Energy, but more interestingly, we can also use any type of Basic Energy. This opens up opportunities to play interesting tech Pokemon. Great Tusk’s second attack also has some utility. It does 160 damage for four Energy, and while this seems trivial on the surface, it actually has some use cases. Most opponents will limit the amount of Pokemon they have in play, and won’t expect you to attack for damage. If a deck like Chien-Pao ex has only one Baxcalibur in play, you can take it out to buy yourself time. You won’t use this attack often, but it’s important to be aware of it as an option.
This concludes the public portion of this article.
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