A Pokémon Pocket deck featuring two Palkia Ex and 18 trainer cards has won a 300-person tournament, and no one is quite sure how it pulled it off. The tournament took place on February 28, and saw 298 people battling it out for top spot. Somehow, this very strange deck beat 11 of them, suffering only one loss, to win the top podium position.
Now, in fairness, we’ve recently seen that Pokémon Pocket decks featuring only two Pokémon can be successful, especially now that tools like Rocky Helmet and Giant Cape can make individual Pokémon significantly stronger. This Pachirisu deck, for instance, also won big on the competitive scene.
But Palkia is (literally) a very different beast to Pachirisu, with an attack that takes a lot longer to set up. Sure, Dimensional Storm is a great move, but it requires four energy to use, and then you have to immediately discard three of them, a brutal restriction that forces you to use your much weaker slash attack for the next few turns.
Palkia Ex is not a bad card , but it requires a lot of setup. Most successful decks centered around this Pokémon use other cards like Vaporeon and Manaphy to pile energy onto it. Without that help, it’s hard to imagine one winning a tournament.
While Irida healing for 40 can certainly help Palkia slug it out in a prolonged fight, overall the deck just seems like a worse version of the two-Articuno strategy (indeed its one loss was against just such a deck).So we’re wondering, did the Palkia deck’s pilot, TheSuperTNT, just get really lucky with those Misty coin flips? We notice they only faced a single Magnezone, which must’ve helped.
Online commenters who noticed the tournament result have likewise shared their confusion. “This baffles me,” wrote one Redditor, Cute_Intention_, while another said they’d tried the deck and found it distinctly underwhelming.
Right now they’re still a novelty, but if 18-trainer decks continue to perform well, we wonder if Pokémon Pocket’s developers will consider putting a limit on the number of trainer cards you can put in your deck. The deck-building system needs an overhaul anyhow – it keeps giving all of my decks the wrong energy types!
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Source: Wargamer
