Another month has passed, so time for another Fun Deck Friday! This week I'll be looking at a deck that aims to stop your opponent from doing anything so you can just take them out easily later in the game! Remember that fun deck Friday is all about trying out new strategies that you may not ordinarily think of. While this deck may not win the next major tournament, it's cheap to build, easy to play and fun to experiment with.
The deck is based around cards that destroy your opponents hand. You'll want to set up Malamar as fast as possible and use his attack, along with other trainers and supporters, to make sure your opponent never has any cards in their hand, meaning they will never be able to set up properly. You'll also want to use a lot of Delinquent to discard their hand fast. Basically you want to get rid of as many of their cards as you can.
What's the deck?
Most top tier decks rely quite heavily on having a big hand at the beginning of the game. If you can deprive them of their resources, you may be able to get rid of enough of their cards that they can't get their deck to work.
You'll also want to get rid of all of their energy so they lose even more resources. Using cards like Enhanced Hammer and Crushing Hammer will be important so they can't just keep taking you out easily.
Getting rid of all of your opponents resources will mean they can't get their strategy going properly. Once you've discarded most of their resources, you'll be able to start focusing on getting your field set up. Use low-energy attackers to take them out. The Pokemon you choose don't need to be the most powerful, because the point is that you will have depleted their resources so much that they can't hit you back very hard either. Using a Pokemon that will take 2 or 3 turns to knock them out is fine, just use something that doesn't require much energy so you can set them up easily, something like Yveltal EX could work quite well.
What's good about the deck?
- The deck is cheap to build, all the cards are relatively easy to find as they're low rarities
- You can keep getting rid of your opponents resources even after you start attacking
- Low energy costs for all attackers means it doesn't take long to power up your Pokemon
- Hand disruption (changing the cards in your opponents hand) is a strategy that has worked quite well in the past. It means your opponent can't plan their moves and can't rely on getting the cards they need. It can also be quite frustrating for them to have their best cards discarded from their hand, giving you the psychological advantage
- Using mainly non-EXs at the start of the game means even if you lose a few Pokemon, your opponent will still have to take quite a few prize cards to win the game
What's not so great about the deck?
- Malamar (as well as Inkay) has fairly low HP, so is relatively easy to knock out
- It takes time to evolve so you can start discarding their hand, you'll need to run cards like Evo Soda or Wally to speed this up
- You can't one-hit your opponent, meaning it can be quite hard to knock out some strong Pokemon
- This deck takes a long time to play. You have to stall your opponent for a long time by discarding a lot of their cards before you can start focusing on attacking. If you're playing in a timed tournament, you may have problems getting through 3 games.
- This deck need to draw well. If you don't get the right build and don't get enough of your hand destruction cards early enough, you may not be able to stop your opponent enough.
- Decks that can work with small hand sizes and lots of resources in the discard pile (such as Night March) may not have any trouble working with a small hand, especially once they have enough of their Night Marchers in the discard pile.
- Even if you get your opponent down to 1 or 0 cards in hand, they can still draw cards like Professor Sycamore, which will give them a whole new hand and will mean a lot of your effort was wasted.
Other cards you may want to use
- Head Ringer: This will slow down your opponent quite significantly and make them waste even more resources to get their Pokemon to attack. Remember that this can only be attached to EXs. Another great thing about Head Ringer is it stops them being able to attach a tool to that Pokemon, so if it is something that they want to Mega evolve, they can't attach a spirit link.
- Red Card: This can lower your opponents hand size if they manage to get back a lot of cards, then just use Malamars attack to get it down to almost nothing.
- Trick Coin: If you only manage to flip one heads from Malamar's attack, you can use this to re-flip the coin so you can hopefully make your opponent discard more cards.
- A few stadiums. Things like Shadow Circle can be useful, but you'll want to run a few so you can use Delinquent.
All cards have been linked to an online copy of the card, so if you're not sure what a card does, click on the name in orange to see what it does.
Where can I get the cards?
Malamar comes from XY base set, which is quite hard to find boosters for, so your best bet may be to trade for this. Delinquent comes in Breakpoint and Enhanced Hammer comes in Primal Clash while Crushing Hammer comes in the Generations set. The rest of the cards are pretty generic trainers and supporters, so you'll probably have most of them already.
Let us know what you think of the deck in the comments section below!
Not sure what some of these words mean? Check out our glossary here.
