Oh Yea, Rage for Me

Hey everyone! It's Charlie and I'm happy to be back with another article. Staple cards like Radiant Greninja have been dominating the format for almost three years, and it's finally time we say goodbye to them. Our new format only includes cards from the Scarlet & Violet series, giving us one contiguous design block of cards to work with. This should hopefully lead to a healthy and interesting meta for the foreseeable future!

However, we notably dropped from 16 legal sets to eleven with the rotation of Brilliant Stars, Astral Radiance, Pokemon GO, Lost Origin, Silver Tempest, and Crown Zenith. This drops the legal card pool from about 2,671 cards to about 1,971. While not an exact metric, fewer cards to work with almost always means that the strategies become less intricate. Synergy of cards printed years apart (whether or not they were intended) oftentimes results in some of the best decks we've seen. All the Regulation D Special Energy (Aurora Energy , Powerful Colorless Energy , etc.) combined with Lugia VSTAR wreaked havoc on the format for nearly seven months before they were rotated. A more recent example of an interaction I'd guess was unintended is PokéStop and Night Stretcher . The combination of this insanely powerful Stadium card with an Item that allows you to retrieve two of the most important card types you'd discard with PokeStop itself enabled decks like Banette ex / Dusknoir , Charizard ex / Dusknoir , and Ceruledge ex to play hyper-aggressively knowing they had four Night Stretcher for recovery.

Bridging Design Blocks

Oftentimes, these strong combinations straddle design blocks, which coincide with the release of each major game. The most striking one was the release of Arceus and Dialga and Palkia-GX in Cosmic Eclipse immediately followed by the release of Zacian V in Sword & Shield. While these came out in back-to-back sets, they were designed in different blocks, which generally means there was a fundamental difference in what cards they were intended to work with. ADP was designed to fit into the end of the Sun & Moon era, while Zacian V was likely designed with many future cards in mind. Before Scarlet & Violet, the game designers stated in an interview that they worked hard to bridge this gap a bit more, giving the example of Gardevoir ex from Scarlet & Violet being designed with Kirlia from Silver Tempest in mind. This was certainly very welcome, as I don't think many players saw Gardevoir as an unhealthy or poorly designed deck throughout the past two years.

The Scarlet & Violet block did come with a design goal, which was to emphasize comebacks in games. The first sign we saw was the introduction of Iono , but the effects continued to pile up: we got Reversal Energy , Counter Catcher , Defiance Band , Defiance Vest , and much more. It all came to a head with Shrouded Fable, which brought us Fezandipiti ex and Dusknoir (the ladder of which is barely a comeback card). It became increasingly beneficial to go behind in Prize cards in order to take advantage of all these powerful effects. Lastly, the biggest major change we've seen recently is Budew from Prismatic Evolutions. We still saw the success of aggressive decks, but slower strategies could now slow the game down enough to set up multiple Stage 2 Pokemon. Now, we're seeing the rotation of a ton of cards that helped out aggressive decks, including Radiant Greninja, PokéStop , and Trekking Shoes . Whether or not aggressive decks are able to rebound still remains to be seen, but now all our cards are from a design block focused on emphasizing slower decks and comebacks.

Enough of that, though. When building for a smaller card pool, what's the most important factor? In the many times I've had to build for post-rotation formats, one thing has been clear: simplicity is king. With less cards to work with, complicated strategies will become much less consistent. We see this right now with decks like Dragapult ex ; the loss of Lance is a drastic blow to an archetype that was once the epitome of consistency. Are new Dragapult lists relatively consistent? Yes, but it feels extremely different than it did just a few weeks ago. Most archetypes that I've played with have proven to be less consistent than I hoped, and that continues to bring me back to the simplest options.

For my last historical example of the day, two deck that epitomize this perfectly are Ho-Oh-GX / Kiawe and Pikachu and Zekrom-GX / Judge . The former is as simple as they come: play Kiawe, power up Ho-Oh-GX, and attack until you win! The ladder took advantage of the fact consistency was weak across the board in the format. While it had multiple Dedenne-GX , Electromagnetic Radar , and Volkner , everything else was limited to weak Pokemon search like Pokémon Communication . By just setting up the Lightning attackers that were easy to set up and putting your opponent to a low number of cards, you could sometimes just sit back and watch their own deck fall apart.

This concludes the public portion of this article.

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