Roaring Goons — Roaring Moon / Dudunsparce for Portland

Hey everyone! It's Charlie and I'm back with another article. While I skipped out on the Milwaukee Regional Championships, I will be in Portland for the last North American Regional of the year, as well as at NAIC. In my last article, we discussed the impact of Budew and how it's completely warped deck building. Itchy Pollen's ability to initiate an Item lock at no cost on a free-Retreating, Buddy-Buddy Poffin-searchable Basic Pokemon is truly insane. Out are the days of Arven's staple status and in are the days of Jacq and Brock's Scouting appearing in high counts in Evolution decks.

We've also seen the success of more Noctowl -based strategies, including a Regional win for Raging Bolt ex in the hands of Christian LaBella. After spending a lot of time playing Raging Bolt in this format, I certainly understand why it's in such a good spot right now. Noctowl can find you powerful Supporter cards like Crispin early on, and Fan Rotom can find the Noctowl itself on the first turn, forcing your opponent to combine Itchy Pollen with an Iono if they want to attempt to prevent you from using Noctowl. If you do get access to Noctowl, baby Raging Bolt is an absolutely incredible attacker right now and can immediately put pressure on evolving Basics and Stage 1s on your opponent's Bench. We saw this throughout top cut, as LaBella took down Brent Tonisson's Gardevoir ex in Top 8 and Makani Tran's Dragapult ex in the finals.

We also saw the introduction of other Noctowl-based deck strategies, most notably the Sylveon ex and Flareon ex deck that many of my friends took to Milwaukee. Ian Robb took the deck to Top 8, falling to Makani in a close game 3, but if he won that match, there's a good chance he could've taken it all the way. Fellow writer Isaiah Cheville has just released an article talking about the deck in full detail, so if you'd like to learn more, I recommend you check that article out after this one.

Today though, I'd like to talk about a quite unique deck that performed well in Milwaukee, and that's Roaring Moon / Dudunsparce . Aidan Khus took this deck to 17th place, so it's obviously pretty strong, but when you first look at it, you might be confused. What synergy do these two Pokemon have, you may ask?

Great question! Roaring Moon is a relatively efficient attacker, with its Vengeance Fletching attack dealing 70 damage base, plus an additional 10 damage for each Ancient card in your discard pile. We've seen this as the featured attacker in Ancient Box decks of the past, but those decks featured significantly more Ancient cards, including Pokemon like Koraidon and Flutter Mane that we don't see here. Many of those spots have gone to the maxed out 4-4 Dudunsparce line. We choose to include so many Dudunsparce because drawing large amounts of cards gives us access to more Ancient cards early. How long it took to ramp up Ancient Box's damage has always been its biggest issue, and Dudunsparce fixes that by providing insane draw options. You can even find a bunch of Dunsparce on the first turn using Fan Rotom, which gives you the chance to draw an obscene amount of extra cards as early as turn 2. You also can never deck out if your opponent doesn't have a way to discard cards from your deck, which is a very nice perk.

However, with such a large space commitment, the only reasonable cut is all the terrible Ancient Pokemon you played in the past. This significantly reduces the deck's damage cap. Aidan Khus's list theoretically caps out at 280 damage, but that's if you have every Ancient card besides a single Roaring Moon in your discard. Notably, this means you'll never be able to reach for OHKOs on the format's biggest Pokemon, like Dragapult ex and Charizard ex . Instead, the deck aims to 2HKO all of them, as 160-170 damage is very reasonable to hit in the early and mid game. Combined with effectively an infinite supply of Roaring Moon to attack with and infinite card draw with Dudunsparce, this deck is very annoying to deal with.

This concludes the public portion of this article.

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