Cynthia’s Garchomp — Boom or Bust?

Hello PokeBeach readers! Isaiah here, and I am happy to be writing another article for you all. Last time, I talked about one of my favorite decks in the the new Destined Rivals format, Marnie's Grimmsnarl ex. Over the course of the next few weeks after I wrote that article, I worked quite a bit toward making the best deck list that I could for the deck with some of my friends. Ultimately, I ended up submitting the deck for the North America International Championship, where I started 7-1-1 with the deck, but due to a vast series of unfortunate events and perhaps partially because of my play, I finished 7-5-1. I do think that the deck and deck list that I played were pretty strong, but one of Marnie's Grimmsnarl ex's fatal flaws is that the deck is quite poor at getting into games where it is behind unless the opponent's board has a glaring vulnerability to Budew, but unfortunately I was never really able to grab onto those vulnerabilities in a meaningful way thanks to the deck's natural inconsistencies. Overall, the rest of my group of friends did reasonably well with the deck, too, but the event left a lot to be desired.

Now that the North America International Championship is over, the fun part of the season actually begins: Preparing for the World Championship. As one does, I started my preparation for the event by scrolling through the event results of the North America International Championship to see if I could find any decks that I had previously not considered among the standings. Last year, doing this led myself and many others to discover the Regidrago VSTAR archetype that ended up dominating the metagame for over six months following last year's North America International Championship. This year, I am not so convinced that we will have a deck as dominant as Regidrago VSTAR ended up being, but I have swiftly found a few interesting cases. One of which, Armarouge / Ethan's Ho-Oh ex, was covered by fellow writer Zak Krekeler in a previous article, but the other deck that caught my eye was Cynthia's Garchomp ex. Not long after I learned to play the game, the iconic Garchomp / Altaria deck debuted in Dragons Exalted, so Cynthia's Garchomp ex with Cynthia's Roserade being a direct copy of it was appealing. Before the North America International Championship, I had seen people talking about this deck before, but I had little interest in trying it myself, but seeing Fabian Pujol's success gave me hope that the deck is good. I wanted to use this article as more of a review of the deck as a whole rather than an in-depth guide about it, as I still do not know if I am skilled enough at the deck to talk about niche plays. With that said, I do believe that my skill as a player puts me in a position where I can reasonably explain why I believe the deck is good, and more importantly point out its flaws, without being too biased.

Cynthia's Garchomp ex: The Pros

Consistency

If there is one thing that this deck is good at, it's setting up. Cynthia's Gabite is an unbelievable piece of a consistency engine, effectively setting up your board for the rest of the game and finding you a consistent stream of attackers. This type of Ability has always been pretty useful in the past, but it has always been contingent on setting up enough of a board to chain several of them. Past decks with similar Abilities usually have not been super great at getting the first Stage 1 in play, usually because they have not had enough good Basic Pokemon search. However, in 2025, we have Arven, Buddy-Buddy Poffin, and Technical Machine: Evolution. With the help of this powerful trio, it is extremely easy to, on your first turn, get out multiple Cynthia's Gible and also evolve them into Cynthia's Gabite. On the following turn, you can now extremely effectively swarm a bunch of other Pokemon while also producing an attacker, which is not something that other similar decks in the past have been capable of. Speaking of attackers, Cynthia's Garchomp ex is also a huge part of why this deck is so consistent. Corkscrew Dive, the attack you will be using most of the time, allows you to draw cards until you have six in your hand, meaning that you can efficiently assemble combos for future turns while continuing to put on pressure.

400 HP and 320 Damage

This deck is probably the closest deck in the game to just being an actual stat check for the opponent. the majority of decks that exist in Pokemon are just physically incapable of beating this deck because they cannot handle a 400 HP Pokemon that is capable of doing 320 damage with the help of some Cynthia's Roserade. Cynthia's Power Weight is just an unbelievable card, to be honest. Not only does it give your Cynthia's Garchomp ex 400 HP, which is absurd, but it also gives your Cynthia's Gabite 170 HP and your Cynthia's Roselia and Cynthia's Gible each 140 HP, which pushes them all out of range of Iron Hands ex's Amp You Very Much, essentially making it impossible for Joltik Box to ever have a reasonable chance of beating you. Normally, Joltik would try to run over a deck like this, which is pretty slow, by using Amp You Very Much to grab the first few Prize cards and then scrape by the last few, but because of Cynthia's Power Weight, this becomes completely impossible.

The deck's damage output while having this amount of HP is also such a crazy added bonus. 130–160 damage with some Cynthia's Roserade to boost up Corkscrew Dive makes two-hit Knock Outs easy, and with the extra HP from Cynthia's Power Weight, it is much more likely that you will actually have the time to power up Draconic Buster and take massive one-hit Knock Outs, annihilating many of the format's top threats, such as Dragapult ex and Marnie's Grimmsnarl ex.

Can Play Munkidori

At this point Munkidori has made a name for itself as one of the most powerful cards in Standard, so it is natural that any deck that reasonably can play Munkidori probably should be playing the card, but the caveat there is that not every deck can play the card. With that being said, it is pretty easy to fit it into Cynthia's Garchomp ex thanks to Corkscrew Drive being so cheap and the existence of Crispin to allow you to attach in two different places in a turn if necessary. With Munkidori, you effectively have extra copies of Cynthia's Roserade in play to keep pushing for higher damage numbers when necessary. It makes taking a one-hit Knock Out on Gardevoir ex possible when it was not previously due to Resistance, and it also opens up healing our 400 HP body, which is obviously very, very good.

While the deck boasts fantastic strengths, it's not without its weaknesses, and you need to be prepared for them if you are considering using this deck.

This concludes the public portion of this article.

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