Public Enemy #1 — Beating Grimmsnarl at NAIC
Hello PokeBeach readers, Isaiah here and I am happy to be writing another article for you all!
Last time, I talked about my group's successful Eevee Box deck that we played at the Milwaukee, Melbourne, and Portland Regional Championships. As we enter the Destined Rivals format, I do not have super high expectations for this deck to continue to succeed, but I certainly have high hopes.
One of the biggest issues that the deck is going to have to face is Team Rocket's Watchtower, which stands to shut down your Noctowl engine, crippling your deck in its entirety. Honestly, though, this is a bit more manageable to handle than the deck's other big issue, which is the format's new big bad: Marnie's Grimmsnarl ex. After seeing the deck's success at Champions League Aichi, I assumed the deck would be pretty good, but I think that both I and many others figured the deck was just good and not great, but I certainly was proven wrong.
Marnie's Grimmsnarl is a truly unbelievable deck, easily capable of overrunning most decks in the format with the combination of Froslass and Munkidori. The deck is just capable of so much more than most other decks that have preceded it, and it is certainly powercreeping the format around itself. Funny enough, Eevee Box has one of the best "natural" solutions to Marnie's Grimmsnarl ex of any deck, being Leafeon ex, but it frequently is not enough to even actually solve the problem. When there is a deck that feels so good that it is convincingly beating its counters, especially a card that feels like it is as hard of a counter as Leafeon ex's Moss Agate is, it's hard to believe anything is even capable of beating it, but there certainly are plenty of decks that can at least make a match close, which is about all that you can reasonably hope for.
In this article, I want to take a look at ways we can actually beat Marnie's Grimmsnarl ex, but before we do that, we have to briefly discuss how the deck works.
How does Marnie's Grimmsnarl ex work?
The core concept of this deck is extremely basic, essentially functioning as a spinoff of the already decent Munkidori / Froslass deck, but Marnie's Grimmsnarl ex stands to solve the deck's biggest issue: an attacker. Now that the deck has an efficient attack (that conveniently also uses the same Energy as Munkidori requires for Adrena-Brain), the deck is able to put on some meaningful pressure in most matchups, giving the deck the possibility to completely run over the opponent with relentless Shadow Bullet attacks while also having the inevitability of Munkidori and Froslass together.
Shadow Bullet in particular is also an insane attack for the deck, synergizing very well with the general idea of wanting to use a lot of spread damage. It is extremely easy for this deck to take a lot of multi-Prize card turns and board wipes, making setting up frail boards with low HP Pokemon feel like a losing strategy.
One deck that would normally seem like it has a pretty good matchup into Marnie's Grimmsnarl ex is Gardevoir ex, but of course Marnie's Grimmsnarl ex is a Darkness-type Pokemon, meaning that it's extremely easy to blow up a Gardevoir ex for little work, often paired with a double Knock Out on Drifloon, Scream Tail, or even Ralts. Instead, this matchup is unbelievably hard as the Gardevoir ex play (though not unwinnable) and requires a pretty dedicated deck list to actually feel good about the matchup.
Marnie's Grimmsnarl ex also has one of the greatest setup packages of all time, in Technical Machine: Evolution and Spikemuth Gym. The former, as you probably know, is a great card that is being used in a ton of decks right now, but in Marnie's Grimmsnarl ex the card feels even better because the deck does not like playing cards like Ultra Ball while also needing to set up multiple Evolution lines. Spikemuth Gym, though, is the card that ties the whole deck together. Thanks to Spikemuth Gym, setting up the Marnie's Grimmsnarl ex line is unbelievably easy. Need Marnie's Impidimp? The card is functionally Artazon. Need Marnie's Morgrem for a slow setup? Just go find it! Perhaps the most powerful, though, is being able to search for Marnie's Grimmsnarl ex, which is both useful as a follow-up to Technical Machine: Evolution, but it is also massively impactful with Secret Box in the deck. From a hand of Arven and at least two cards that you are willing to discard, you can Arven for Secret Box, and then use Secret Box to go and grab Rare Candy, Spikemuth Gym, AND a follow-up Supporter! With this option, the deck is incredibly consistent at producing a turn 2 Marnie's Grimmsnarl ex when it goes first if it wants to.
On top of all of this, Spikemuth Gym is also specific to only Marnie's Pokemon, meaning that no other deck can use it except for the mirror match. The card is truly the perfect card for the deck, and it is easily one of the best Stadium cards released since Scarlet & Violet. With the amount of natural upsides that the deck has, it is hard to see where it has natural downsides, but there are a couple, so how about we get started by exploring the first big downside: speed.
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!
