The Bird is Back — I Should Have Played Pidgeot Control for NAIC

When I first made this Pidgeot ex Control deck a couple weeks ago, I thought there was no way it was actually going to be good. Pidgeot is harder to set up than it used to be and the opposing meta decks are too powerful and varied.

I started by forming a strategy to counter each and every one of the meta decks and figuring out what cards I would need to do so. Unsurprisingly, this ended up taking a lot of deck space. There were inevitably going to be many cards that were useless in a good portion of matchups, which is always how it goes with anti-meta decks. The rest of the remaining slots went towards consistency, as the deck needs to set up Pidgeot in order to navigate through its menagerie of one-of cards.

My expectations for this dubious looking deck were about as low as possible. When I first started testing the deck, it won a lot of matches. There was no stopping Pidgeot Control against most of the meta.

Then we got to Dragapult ex. This matchup proved to be the biggest hurdle. While not insurmountable, any strong Dragapult player was going to be difficult to defeat. The Dusknoir version had, well... Dusknoir, and the non-Dusknoir version had multiple copies of Professor Turo's Scenario. This sketchy matchup, combined with the deck's overall newness and fragility, scared me off playing the deck for NAIC. This was one of my biggest regrets of the tournament.

Even without the important rotated pieces like Forest Seal Stone and Rotom V, this deck was still somewhat consistent at setting up Pidgeot ex. Utilizing some combination of Arven, Fan Rotom, Rare Candy, and / or Technical Machine: Evolution, the bird was able to establish its commanding presence. You didn't need a Pidgeot in play on turn 2, or even turn 3 or 4 in slower matchups. All that matters is that Pidgeot shows up eventually. Nearly every matchup was won once Pidgeot ex hit the board. This deck also highly relied on Cleffa as a consistency piece. Cleffa was able to slot nicely into the deck and sufficiently fill Rotom V's shoes.

Setting up Pidgeot is the only constant in this deck's strategy. Other than that, its game plan varies wildly from matchup to matchup. Due to the strength and variety of the top meta decks, it takes a lot of tech cards to take down all of them. This feat would be impossible without the existence of Redeemable Ticket, a godsend card for Control that effectively removes the limitation and variance of Prize cards, which otherwise would entirely nullify a deck like this. With Arven and Pidgeot's Quick Search, it's rather easy to search out all of the deck's important pieces before using Redeemable Ticket, ensuring that nothing too critical gets sent back to the Prizes. Of course, this deck can just play two copies od Redeemable Ticket in case one is Prized, or if you accidentally re-Prize something useful after the first one. In some games, you may need to use a Redeemable Ticket early in order to establish your board and respond to pressure. After that, you can use the other one if you need to.

This deck basically does no attacking compared to previous builds of Pidgeot Control. Our goal is to lock our opponent and eventually they will deck out. However, the way in which we accomplish this differs depending on the matchup. The main exception to decking the opponent out is the Raging Bolt ex matchup, where we may end up taking all of our Prize cards with Noivern ex.

Here's my current list. It has already gone through lots of tweaks and revisions, but I'm not sure if it's completely optimal yet. The main consideration is to add a tech or two for the Dragapult ex matchup.

This concludes the public portion of this article.

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