The Lathe — Manufacturing a New Way to Play Raging Bolt

Hello PokeBeach readers! Isaiah here, and I am happy to be writing another article for you all! Last time, I did an in-depth review of the recently popularized Cynthia's Garchomp ex deck from the North America International Championships. I didn't mention it at the time, but I was interested in how Cynthia's Garchomp would do at the Japan National Championships, which happened about two weekends ago at the time of writing this. I thought that the deck certainly had potential to do well, but I was not sure if it actually would. Unfortunately, it had a really, really rough weekend, and none of them made it into the Top 32, which was the threshold to obtain an invitation to the World Championships from that event. Fabien Pujol actually did attend that event and play Cynthia's Garchomp ex, but he had a pretty rough run at the event and did not even make it to the second day. While Fabien Pujol did not have a great weekend, some interesting things came out of the weekend. It was the first major tournament in the world with the upcoming Black Bolt and White Flare expansions legal, so a lot of players had their eyes on how cards like Jellicent ex, Genesect ex, and Eelektrik might impact the metagame, and wondered what impact Trainers like Air Balloon and Hilda could have on deck building.

Overall, the results of the Japan National Championships were unsurprising. A lot of Gardevoir ex, Marnie's Grimmsnarl ex, and Dragapult ex toward the top, with scattered Joltik, Charizard ex, and Gholdengo ex throughout the rest. The one true surprise was Raging Bolt ex, though, which was the most played deck in Top 32. I was blown away when I saw this. Raging Bolt is certainly a good deck, and I would never act like it is not, but it has had generally unimpressive results in North American events lately. Because of these lackluster results, I would not have seen such an overwhelming success rate coming.

It's important to note that a huge influence on its success is the fact that the Japan National Championships had a bit of an odd tournament structure. On Day 1, it's just a normal best-of-1 tournament, but on Day 2, the event is very different. It is best-of-3 — the only Japanese event that plays like this — but it also has a five-match-point system based on the number of games you win and complete. If I recall correctly, it is five match points if you 2-0 your opponent, four if you 2-1, three if you 1-0, one if you lose 1-2, and zero if you lose 2-0. In Japan, there are also no ties, with games in progress first being decided by Prize cards and then by a sudden death game if necessary. I would love this system to be implemented in non-Japan regions, but that will likely never happen. It greatly benefited faster decks at the Japan National Championships, most notably Raging Bolt.

As you probably understand, Raging Bolt is a very, very fast deck, easily capable of doing 210 damage on the first turn going second, and having a damage ceiling as high as 420 damage on the first turn in conventional deck lists (although reaching that high might be a bit unrealistic). Thanks to this natural speed and explosive nature, it is very consistent for Raging Bolt to finish all three of its games in situations where decks like Gardevoir ex may struggle. Gardevoir ex in particular likes to win matches 1-0 when it can because of the length of its games, but in the structure of the Japan National Championships, playing this way is not rewarded as much as finishing more games is. It's more beneficial to lose one of your games to make sure the third game finishes. Otherwise, you're spending your entire tournament counting by threes while Raging Bolt is counting by fours and fives.

Also, I am sure many readers have experienced the awkward situation where you won Game 1 and then lost Game 2 during time, leaving you unable to play Game 3 and taking a tie. In Japan, this situation can happen, but instead of taking the tie, you are forced to play a sudden death game to decide the third game and resolve the set. When these situations happen, it's advantageous to be playing a faster deck so you can take your first Prize as soon as possible. Gardevoir ex and Dragapult ex are terrible at doing this, and there is no deck in Standard that can take its first Prize card as fast and as easily as Raging Bolt.

Gardevoir ex is also one of Raging Bolt's worst matchups, so as Gardevoir ex gets worse in this format, Raging Bolt gets better! With this in mind, I'm sure the success rate of Raging Bolt starts to make much more sense. During Day 1, you can get lucky and push through with Raging Bolt, but you can also play something else and switch to Raging Bolt for Day 2 to capitalize on this advantage. Regardless, it should not be surprising at all that Raging Bolt has seen really consistent top-end success at both this year's Japan National Championships and last year's, mostly because the system is so heavily biased in its favor.

There is one other surprising aspect of Raging Bolt at the Japan National Championships, though. Eight out of nine of the deck lists were extremely traditional Noctowl builds, which makes a ton of sense, as that is what conventional wisdom would suggest is the best option. However, the single non-Noctowl deck list not only did the best of any of the Raging Bolt decks, it also produced one of the most impressive tournament runs of all time, going 17-0 to win the tournament, a nearly unprecedented feat that will probably not happen again for a long time, if ever.

Once I learned this, I became much more interested in a style of Raging Bolt that I had previously written off as being pretty poor. A couple of days after that event concluded, one of my local players chose to bring this style of Raging Bolt to my weekly league and I played a few games against him, and while I was kind of destroying him in those games, I was getting quite lucky and he was getting quite unlucky, so I chalk at least some of it up to that. These games gave me the insight that I needed into how the deck generally functioned and what it was capable of. All of a sudden, I became extremely interested in the deck. After a day or two, I decided I would put extensive time into trying this new build. After my games, I landed on this deck list, which is extremely close to the list from the Japan National Championships.

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!