Hey, Cut or Tap readers! The Pokemon World Championships is a month away, and testing is ramping up with the new release of Black Bolt & White Flare on PTCGL! I’m going to be writing today on Grimmsnarl, my top choice for Worlds right now! The deck is incredibly well-positioned for Worlds, taking a favoured matchup into the BDIF, Gardevoir ex (although Henry Chao will debate this…)!
So Why Grimmsnarl over Charizard?
At this point, I’m sure everyone knows me as “the Charizard guy.” So why, after all those majors with the deck, am I considering a swap? Well, after a disappointing NAIC run, going from 9-1 to 9-3-1, I had a lot of time to reflect. The biggest issue in my run came from two areas. First, the seemingly-favoured Gardevoir matchup our Dragapult Charizard deck took was completely flipped by the winning NAIC Gardevoir list. The inclusion of a fourth Munkidori and Mew ex presented a very difficult combination for the deck. This combined with the possible rise of Jellicent Gardy with TM: Devolution for Worlds gave Charizard a ton of problems:
The inherent power of Munkidori against Dragapult Charizard was presented in two different ways. First, leaving damage on their side of the board was very punishing, and made Dragapult very infrequently helpful. Additionally, the swarm of Munkidori in the mid- to late-game almost always allowed the opponent to steal one or two prizes on Drakloak/Charmander with Adrena-Brain, which would completely invalidate any huge lead we took.
Second, Mew ex synergized with four Munkidori very well. The overwhelming strength of Charizard & Dragapult’s attacks were now its biggest weaknesses. That Gardevoir deck was reliably able to set up two to three Munkidori every game, allowing Mew ex to score consistent OHKO’s on Charizard ex with Genome Hacking as early as when we took three prize cards with two Adrena-Brains. This would then put us in a near-checkmated position, where if we KO the Gardevoir, the Mew ex takes another easy KO, and if we KO the Mew ex, they simply needed a Night Stretcher to win the game.
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