The latest big Pokémon Pocket tournament was won by a card I don’t think I’ve ever properly looked at, let alone considered putting in a deck.
Hooglandia & Spragels Open was a $1000-prize, 867-person tournament which took place March 8, 2025. This competition mainly featured the two new meta favorites. Fighting decks using Lucario and Rampardos, and Steel decks featuring Arceus and Dialga dominated. But the first place finisher was a water deck using Palkia.
But not just the regular Palkia Ex we all know and love. This deck, by user Toushy, contains two copies of Origin Forme Palkia. Incidentally, this is now the second weird Palkia deck we’ve seen taking down tournaments in the past week.
Taken at face value, Origin Forme Palkia seems like a pretty bad card. Sure, it’s got good HP and a strong attack for a basic, non-Ex Pokémon, but you have to balance that against the downsides of a high retreat cost, and more importantly an attack that requires three energy to use. Plus relying on a coin flip for your high damage attack isn’t a great feeling.
However, if there’s one Pokémon type that can ramp up energy it’s water. Palkia decks already want to be playing Manaphy and Misty, and between the two it’s not too difficult to get Plakia, Origin Forme loaded up and ready to attack, while also stacking energy on your Palkia Ex.
The other advantage of this deck is that it allows you to save your Ex for one final, decisive attack. You can afford to lose your Manaphy, switch to your Origin Forme Palkia, attack until it’s KO-d, then use your Palkia Ex to (hopefully) mop up. Since it’s quite hard to get more than one big attack out of Palkia, even with Misty’s assistance, this play pattern works out great.
You can also use Giant Capes and Irida to keep your high damage, slow set-up Pokémon alive for longer.
Of course, with any successful water deck there’ll be accusations that Misty luck is the main reason for its success, and it does seem like Toushy had quite a fortunate run of things. However, as you can see in the video above, there were also matches on their march to the top where Origin Forme Palkia really came in clutch.
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Source: Wargamer
