Several 'Dream League' Cards Revealed, Including Special Full Arts!

Flygonite

Meta/budget player
Member
We have energy recycler, lana's fishing rod and pal pad by the time we get both Clay and Excadrill. That's enough recovery, the attack is not risky at all. You are meant to turbo into items with Clay, discard the rest of filler cards, use Excadrill attack to the point you can use Eleventh Hour Tackle comfortably.
 

Wechselbalg

brb
Member
My boi Excadrill finally getting some love <3 The deck concept is decent, mostly because you can actually attack with it before getting down to 3 cards (as opposed to Hippopotas) and with Diancie that alone can OHKO 2 (most likely) popular archetypes and Reshizard is also a 2-shot, except it will play lots of healing so not really. Giratina also walls it because of the resistance and can KO it back.
 

Flygonite

Meta/budget player
Member
As for the art, the card looks badass. May possibly build a deck with it and Clay since I really love the art and really love the concept of Clay as a supporter.
 

Skeleton Liar

サーナ~
Member
Do hope these character rares stick around for a bit instead of getting immediately torpedoed when Swish's TCG begins in December.
You know they’ll be tossed aside after this set. Because we can’t have nice things continue, and clearly we deserve Rainbow Rares to continue instead.

Pessimistic sarcasm aside, it’s most likely just for this set. But maybe if the response to these CHR’s is positive (which I think it is) and perhaps if sales are good, they’ll revisit this concept in future sets. It would definitely be nice if they did. The artwork for these cards have been top notch!
 

snoopy369

Aspiring Trainer
Advanced Member
Member
You could just play 4 brock 4 lusamine 4 pal pad, etc.
You hardly need 4 of the two supporters, 2 is enough. Pal pad maybe will need a bit more until we're able to usefully retrieve item cards, but USUM Oranguru can get them if nothing else.
 

rewster1

Aspiring Trainer
Member
You hardly need 4 of the two supporters, 2 is enough. Pal pad maybe will need a bit more until we're able to usefully retrieve item cards, but USUM Oranguru can get them if nothing else.
Well, I mean if you thought it was risky, 4 of makes sense. I would almost never play 4 lusamine in a deck though, and 4 brock only if I wasn't playing lusamine and was doing something destructive like this.
 

jamashawalker

Ikouze!
Member
I imagine here a crazy deck concept.

Concept of the deck is to play this Excadrill, and try to get your whole deck into the discard pile, never having more than a few cards in it. Play Pal Pad, and IIRC there's a more recent trainer that lets you put item cards into your deck (this might be a supporter, I don't recall). Play those plus Brock's Grit and you can pretty much determine what your next turn's draw will be, or at least close to it, constantly sticking around 0 cards. Maybe include Oranguru also, alternate attacking with Resource Management and Excadrill. Would make the deck _super_ consistent once you got down to few cards in deck, obviously that would take probably too much time for this deck to really be all that good but... maybe with some stall concepts it would be playable? Stall plus ability to KO Pikarom and Dark box decks?

As soon as Excadrill was announced, I immediately built a deck around Zebstrika+Excadrill+ Clefairy doll. Very similar idea to yours, just get your deck down to zero cards then keep recycling Clefairy doll back into the deck. With 4 clefairy dolls and everyone most likely switching over to great catcher, you'll find that you can keep up the prize race while thinning your deck down very easy. The problem though is consistently recycling Excadrills. Running a high count of Brock's Grit was great but during the end game it became very hard to keep them rolling. I'm positive though someone is going to figure out the best way to play this archetype because it is a pretty good Pokémon :)

BTW, Clay is NOT good with Excadrill. Maybe I built the deck the wrong way to play with Clay, but I ended up discarding waaaay more than I wanted to. Hapu turned out to be significantly better being able to grab anything I needed.
 

Flygonite

Meta/budget player
Member
You probably built it without Lana's Rod and Lure Balls, because using those two together along with Clay guarantees you don't need to use Brock's Grit to recover anything, and Clay can add every single recovery item you may need to your hand, between them Energy Recovery, Lana's Fishing Rod, Lure Ball, etc. Black Belt is also fantastic because when you're behind on prizes you can use any of Excadrill attacks for no cost, and well, Clay adds those too.
 

jamashawalker

Ikouze!
Member
You probably built it without Lana's Rod and Lure Balls, because using those two together along with Clay guarantees you don't need to use Brock's Grit to recover anything, and Clay can add every single recovery item you may need to your hand, between them Energy Recovery, Lana's Fishing Rod, Lure Ball, etc. Black Belt is also fantastic because when you're behind on prizes you can use any of Excadrill attacks for no cost, and well, Clay adds those too.

Definitely going to try that out next!
 

Flygonite

Meta/budget player
Member
Yeah, if you're going to use Clay you definitely need to go all out. For a build like that I had in mind filler cards like Acro Bike, Judge Whistle, Lusamines to recover discarded Stadiums and Supporters, Pal Pads to recover energies, and like I said, go all out on pokemon and energy recovery. Hell, you could use Rayquaza GX to drop even more cards on your turn and use its GX attack since your deck wouldn't rely on GX attackers. 120 + 170 = 290 (Drill Bazooka hit after getting behind on Prizes with dojo active) means you 2HKO both Reshizard and ReshiZekrom, and you already OHKO everything on Dark Box and PikaZekrom with the option of Crushing Hammer to get rid of Weakness Guard Energy.

The deck biggest problems would be Giratina variants since the guy only gets OHKO'd by Eleventh Hour Tackle and Drill Bazooka + Dojo when behind on prizes, something that can't be surmounted as easily when going against SPA decks, and MewMew in the variants that are otherwise weak against you (although you can slow it down with Power Plant).
 

rewster1

Aspiring Trainer
Member
All this discard with clay and excadrill makes me want to build a rotom deck that has a stage 1 fighting type attacker to open with. Clay doesn't discard the tools, but I can just play bombs and barriers that discard themselves.
 

Ghostrickster

Aspiring Trainer
Member
Yeah, if you're going to use Clay you definitely need to go all out. For a build like that I had in mind filler cards like Acro Bike, Judge Whistle, Lusamines to recover discarded Stadiums and Supporters, Pal Pads to recover energies, and like I said, go all out on pokemon and energy recovery.

I had this exact same idea. You have to tech for Malamar but the good news is that you can't be OHKO'd by Shadow Impact either. Unfortunately 1 Dimension Door or Spell Tag can ruin that, but it's something. Diancie Prism Star + 10 extra damage (like Dojo) gets the KO with Drill Bazooka.

Something like 4 Clay, 0-2 Hapu, 2-3 Brock's Grit, 0-2 Lusamine, maybe some Clefairy Doll, 2-3 Pal Pad, 4 PokeCom, 4 Acro, Gear, and Whistle, 3 Lure Ball, and maybe some Lana's Fishing Rod was what I had in mind for the deck's engine, supplemented by Zebstrika. Lure Ball in conjunction with Clay and Hapu is a pretty decent way to search for Excadrill and Zebstrika. It'd also be possible to further capitalize on Lure Ball by playing Weezing with a few Roxie. That helps drop some extra damage to fix KOs. The other option for a setup supporter that I could see is Pokemon Fan Club or Professor Oak's Setting to get out the Drilbur and Blitzle that need to be found early and are hard to search or retrieve from the discard pile otherwise. They also can get Diancie before you start turbo mode with Clay and lose it.

It's kinda awkward but also sounds like a lot of fun.
 

Flygonite

Meta/budget player
Member
Roxie's Koffing looks so punk, lol. Too bad it will get discarded 90% of the time instead of being on board.
 

Number51x

Blasting off at the speed of light!
Member
That style on the Koffing is perfect! I also love the "slice of life" art for Surge. Add to his character.
 

Frost

Ice/Fairy Stan Account
Member
Well, seeing how they blew through so many popular characters at once (including ones they never even used in the TCG before, like Flannery), this probably will be the only set that has these CHR cards. lol

Oh, and I guess this counts as Surge getting his full art, when he was the only Kanto Gym Leader (including Janine) to be skipped over throughout Gen 7.
 
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