Dragapult ex / Zoroark ex and Its Great Matchups

Hello to all PokeBeach readers! Here's Gabriel again with another Pokémon TCG article, and this time I want to talk about the innovative Dragapult ex / N's Zoroark ex deck used by Stéphane Ivanoff at the North America International Championships to place 17th out of 3,812 players.

The reason I'm writing this article is because I've been working on a Dragapult / Zoroark list since before the Santiago Regionals in May, but I didn't have as much courage as Stepháne to take this new idea forward, and I didn't do all the necessary testing to use the deck in a major tournament. I did use Dragapult / Zoroark in some local tournaments and had good results, but I ended up choosing my safe option of Gardevoir ex for Santiago. I didn't do very well, so I regretted a bit not taking the risk with Dragapult / Zoroark. At that time, Destined Rivals hadn't been released yet, so there was no Shaymin and therefore N's Darmanitan was still very good.

In any case, I'm happy that a great player used the deck and achieved great results with it. It gives me a lot of confidence in the deck, and even more motivation to write an article about this new combination. At first glance it seems simple, obvious, and even a bit boring, but in practice it has a lot of advantages, especially against big metagame decks like straight Dragapult ex and Gardevoir ex. It will also be interesting to compare the list used by Stéphane with the list I was testing for Santiago, which was my last tournament of this season, because there are small differences between the two lists despite the theory being the same.

Why Dragapult with Zoroark?

In short, I see two main strong matchups for this combination in this metagame — straight Dragapult ex and Gardevoir ex — and these matchups provide most of the case for playing this deck. Against straight Dragapult, you have a faster and more consistent deck than the opponent; you draw more cards per turn and therefore you're more efficient. You evolve faster, attack faster, and waste fewer resources, since in theory you both have practically the same resources but you will be drawing 20% or 30% more cards than they will. Against Gardevoir ex, N's Zoroark ex can Knock Out Gardevoir ex with one attack, which is obviously very good and adds to your advantage.

I came up with this idea by accident back in early May. I was playing around with creating lists, and I wanted to put together a super consistent Dragapult ex deck. I wanted to draw more cards than my opponent and feel like I was playing with the old Zoroark-GX. I remember that one of the challenges I set myself was not to use Fezandipiti ex, because I felt that I was losing a lot of games due to the two easy Prizes it offers to the opponent. Ever since my article about N's Zoroark at the end of April, I've been wanting to cut Fezandipiti ex from my lists, but to do that I knew I would have to improve upon Zoroark's draw power even more.

I made some lists with different permutations of N's Zoroark ex, Dudunsparce, and Dragapult ex — that is, I put together lists for Zoroark / Dudunsparce, Zoroark / Dragapult, and Dragapult / Dudunsparce — all of them without Fezandipiti ex. In the end, N's Zoroark ex with Dragapult was the most consistent combination, not only because of the metagame issue mentioned above, but also in several other aspects that will be explained throughout the article.

This is a combination that highlights Dragapult ex's strengths, but also highlights its weaknesses. Every matchup where straight Dragapult ex struggles, Dragapult / Zoroark often struggles even more, though the trade-off is that in the matchups where straight Dragapult has an advantage, Dragapult / Zoroark will have an even stronger advantage. Matchups like Raging Bolt ex and Gholdengo ex are even more unfavorable than for straight Dragapult, but Dragapult / Zoroark has better matchups into Gardevoir ex and straight Dragapult, which I would say are two of the most important matchups in the format.

This concludes the public portion of this article.

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