Welcome back, Cut Or Tap readers! Regionals in the 2026 season are right around the corner, and the 2025 World Championships just brought some interesting developments to the meta. While it was expected that Gholdengo would be very strong in the Black Bolt & White Flare format, many players online had started to counter the deck prior to the World Championships. Decks like Typhlosion, Charizard, and Eevee Box all gained popularity in online tournaments. Even other popular decks began to tune their lists to have better Gholdengo matchups, with Dragapult adding Jamming Tower and Gardevoir adding back Drifloon. Despite all of the hate, Gholdengo still had a great showing at the World Championships.
To keep up with the very hostile meta for the deck, Gholdengo players (including myself) adapted the deck to handle some of its typically poor matchups. Myself and a few others decided to bring Gholdengo with a side of Lucky Bonus Chansey, allowing us to flip for extra prize cards in situations where we fell behind in the prize trade. We saw Chansey as a great inclusion for the deck because it could be used in nearly every problematic matchup, in addition to providing a boost in the popular mirror match.
The List
Prior to the World Championships, I was playing lots of games with a standard Gholdengo list at the time, not playing the Chansey package and instead playing a 1-1 line of Scizor. However, with Jellicent ex seeing less and less play in Gardevoir, Scizor seemed to be less useful in the games I was playing. It had applications against Raging Bolt, Gholdengo mirror, and Cornerstone Mask Ogerpon ex decks, but all three matchups could fairly easily play around it by limiting the number of Pokemon with abilities they have in play. With that in mind, I started to look for other ways to utilize that space. My first thought was baby Gholdengo: a single prize attacker that could push you ahead in the mirror match and potentially against Charizard and Joltik Box as well. I played many games with baby Gholdengo, but it too was underwhelming. In games where it worked, it could lead you to winning the prize trade, but it often led to a shortage of Gholdengo ex you could have in play. With only four Gimmighoul and no way to get any out of the prize cards, this proved to be an issue even in games where the baby Gholdengo seemed good. Despite the issues, it was clear that the card was very strong in the mirror match, when combined with Ultra Ball to find it without benching Genesect ex.
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