Ongoing TCG Tuesdays with Archaic

[Archaic]

Hi everyone. This will serve as the discussion thread for TCG Tuesdays, my current ongoing weekly series on the Bulbagarden Twitch Channel in which I'm primarily streaming the Pokémon TCG Live app, but will occasionally also bring in other TCG related content like the TCG game on Game Boy. You can catch me every week on starting at 4pm US Pacific / 7pm US Eastern / 9am Wednesday Australian Eastern. I'll generally post on the Bulbagarden Discord server in the #tcg-and-collectables channel when I'm about to go live.

At this time, I've not been saving every "episode" as a highlight on the Twitch channel, though now that we've had a bit of time to get the format down pat I'll be starting to do so in the near future. Once I start saving those, I'll add a link to the collection here. We may eventually start editing these for YouTube as well. I'm also going to be starting to share some of my decklists here on the forums, so you can see what I've been playing, and what decks I have available for you to force me to play with using your channel points. When I do put those up, I'll put those in threadmarks so you can easily find them.

I'd love for this to be as interactive an experience as possible, so if you do have any suggestions or feedback for the series, please feel free to share those here as well.

 

[Archaic]

Here's the Sunflora/Eldegoss deck I used during the stream last week. It was surprisingly effective. Our biggest problems were VMax decks with 300+ HP, and decks with plenty of healing.

Basic strategy here is fairly straightforward. Power up Sunflora, use Eldegoss to make sure you've got energy in hand to discard. Use Gardenia's Vigor to make sure your benched Sunkern are prepared to step forward the following turn when you're inevitably KOed. Make liberal use of Klara, Rod, and Recycler to keep those energies coming back. Bruno gives great draw with all the KOs you'll inevitably take. Tuffield Stadium assists to make sure that your Sunflora keep coming out. Radiant Venusaur can help in a tight spot when you need additional draw at the beginning of the game, though it honestly got ignored on my bench most of the time.

Pokémon (13)
Sunflora (Silver Tempest 006/195) x 4
Sunkern (Silver Tempest 005/195) x 4
Eldegoss (Evolving Skies 016/203) x 2
Gossifluer (Sword & Shield 020/202) x 2
Radiant Venusaur (Pokémon GO 004/078) x 1

Trainers (35)
Supporters (14)
Bruno x 4
Gardenia's Vigor x 3
Klara x 2
Peonia x 1
Peony x 2
Serena x 2

Items (19)
Air Balloon x 2
Battle VIP Pass x 3
Energy Recycler x 3
Escape Rope x 2
Great Ball x 3
Hisuian Heavy Ball x 1
Level Ball x 3
Ordinary Rod x 2

Stadiums (2)
Turffield Stadium x 2

Energy (12)
Grass Energy x 12

 

[Archaic]

Here's the Dewgong/Finneon/Eldegoss deck I used during the stream earlier. It sadly didn't live up to my expectations, but it was fun while it lasted. It has much the same weaknessses as last week, with high HP VMax Pokémon able to run roughshod over us, as well as a weakness to spread damage on the bench. It's also probably not as reliable as Sunflora, since you can't pull out the evolved Pokémon quite as reliably. That might be something that could be solved with a tweak to the trainer build though, so let me know what you think.

Basic strategy here isn't too dissimilar to last week's deck. Evolve Seel to Dewgong. Finneon allows you to attach as many energy as you like to Dewgong. Use Eldegoss and your trainer cards to pull out stupid amounts of energy every turn, which immediately get cycled back into the deck by Dewgong's Floe Return attack (Shuffle any amount of

Energy from your Pokémon into your deck. This attack does 40 damage for each card you shuffled into your deck in this way.) for massive damage. Use Ordinary Rod, Klara, and Nessa to grab back Pokémon from discard as needed.

Pokémon (16)
Dewgong (Lost Origin 034/196) x 4
Seel (Lost Origin 033/196) x 4
Finneon (Lost Origin 040/196) x 3
Eldegoss (Evolving Skies 016/203) x 2
Gossifluer (Sword & Shield 020/202) x 2
Radiant Venusaur (Pokémon GO 004/078) x 1

Trainers (33)
Supporters (11)
Bruno x 4
Candice x 2
Irida x 2
Klara x 2
Nessa x 1

Items (20)
Air Balloon x 2
Battle VIP Pass x 2
Caspacious Bucket x 4
Escape Rope x 2
Hisuian Heavy Ball x 1
Level Ball x 4
Ordinary Rod x 2
Ultra Ball x 3

Stadiums (2)
Training Court x 2

Energy (11)
Water Energy x 11

 

[Archaic]

Been a while since I last updated this with the decks I've been running, hasn't it? Well past time I shared some of the rogue decks that I've been playing around with over the past few weeks.

We've tried a few variations of the Wugtrio deck so far, but the one we've had the most success with to date has been a version playing off the well established Lugia VStar/Archeops combo to rapidly pull special energy from the deck. The strategy is straightforward. Mill, mill, and mill until your opponent has nothing left in the deck.

A significant difference with this variant of the Wugtrio formula is that it can actually change gears and go for a prize taking game, if necessary. This makes the deck a lot less vulnerable to having important cards locked in the prizes, where a Wugtrio deck would typically struggle to retrieve them. The deck does however struggle with draw a bit at the beginning, at least until you start drawing probably far more than you'll ever need from Gift Energy and Lucky Energy.

There's a few other interesting variants of Wugtrio I'd like to experiment with, particularly one that would use Spidops ex as part of a strategy to lock a Pokémon that can't do damage into the active position, so we'll be sure to see more of Wugtrio in the coming months!

Pokémon (14)
Wugtrio (Scarlet & Violet 57) x 4
Wiglett (Scarlet & Violet 56) x 4
Lugia VStar (Silver Tempest 139) x 2
Lugia V (Silver Tempest 138) x 2
Archeops (Silver Tempest 147) x 2

Trainers (30)
Arven x 2
Blunder Policy x 1
Cynthia's Ambition x 2
Escape Rope x 2
Hisuian Heavy Ball x 1
Level Ball x 3
Mesagoza x 2
Net Ball x 2
Pal Pad x 1
Peonia x 1
Professor Burnet x 1
Professor's Research x 3
Rescue Carrier x 2
Serena x 4
Ultra Ball x 3

Energy (16)
Double Turbo Energy x 4
Gift Energy x 4
Lucky Energy x 4
V Guard Energy x 4

 

[Archaic]

Many many years ago, I created a deck that worked through an interesting mechanic to exploit the synergy between Flygon ex (EX Power Keepers 94), Delcatty (EX Power Keepers 8) and Delcatty ex (EX Crystal Guardians 91). While I never got to play the deck in the end (I had post-graduate exams on the day of the Australian Nationals that year, so I wasn't able to attend), it left me with an interest for decks which manipulate energy in the discard that's influenced a lot of what I've attempted to build since (and which is really serving me well in the current meta).

Hisuian Basculegion's Upstream Spirits attack is basically Delcatty ex's attack reborn for the modern era, with a lower energy requirement and double the damage, on a single prize attacker with more HP. Talk about power inflation! Finding cards to pair with it has been a challenge though. Radiant Greninja only sort of takes the place of the regular Delcatty from that old deck, given you can only have one and it only draws 2 cards, but it is at least a basic. To find something that would let me discard plenty of energy each turn though.... well, I've experimented with a few things. My latest attempt (and only one on stream) uses Infernape from Brilliant Stars. I honestly wasn't convinced of it on paper, but after I faced one randomly online the other week, I started to become a bit more of a believer that it could work. Still not certain of my trainer build, but it's at least a lot more consistent than my previous attempts. The low number of trainer cards is really painful though!

Pokémon (19)
Infernape (Brilliant Stars 26) x 4
Monferno (Brilliant Stars 25) x 4
Chimchar (Brilliant Stars 24) x 4
Hisuian Basculegion (Lost Origin 45) x 2
Hisuian Basculin (Lost Origin 44) x 4
Radiant Greninja (Astral Radiance 46) x 1

Trainers (21)
Arezu x 3
Battle VIP Pass x 2
Energy Recycler x 2
Energy Retrieval x 2
Irida x 2
Level Ball x 3
Mesagoza x 2
Rare Candy x 2
Ultra Ball x 3

Energy (20)
Fire Energy x 15
Water Energy x 5

 

[Archaic]

So this is less of a deck and more of a deck idea at this point. In the stream earlier today, after playing a few matches with a few other decks I realise I haven't gotten around to posting in this thread yet, To Be Continued asked us to try putting together a deck using Jumpluff (Evolving Skies 4). For those not familiar with the card, Jumpluff's ability Fluffy Barrage allows it to attack twice each turn. Its basic attack doesn't do a lot of damage though, so we knew we had to pair it with something. The Rapid Strike Scroll of Swirls (allowing it to do 30 damage each of your opponent's Pokémon) seemed like a decent match, giving it a potential bench damage output in excess of Electivire (Brilliant Stars 47). Since Jumpluff is a Rapid Strike Pokémon, it makes sense to put Octillery (Battle Styles 37) into the deck for its Rapid Strike Search ability, so that at least gives us our draw engine, but the two together aren't really enough to carry a game. So then, I started taking a look at every Rapid Strike Pokémon in the game, to see if there was any potential combo to allow Jumpluff to do enough damage to KO, and I found something rather interesting.

Weavile (Chilling Reign 31) has an interesting attack called Two-Hit KO, costing just . The attack description reads as follows:
During your next turn, if the Defending Pokémon is damaged by an attack from a Rapid Strike Pokémon, it will be Knocked Out.

Now, normally, your opponent would simply retreat the Pokémon, and that'd be it. But if Jumpluff is hitting every single Pokémon.... then we've got a guarenteed KO the next turn of whatever the defending Pokémon was that Weavile attacked, while also doing a minimum of 60 damage against every single other opposing Pokémon in play.

This seems like an exploitable combo.

Now, I don't think this is an entirely new combo, but a quick search on Youtube didn't show anyone there having played it, so I think it is potentially an under-explored combo. I'm going to be playing around with a few variations of it over the next few days, and we'll see if Paldea Evolved might have something for it too. Calamitous Snowy Mountain might be a decent stadium (I'm running Gapejaw Bog now, since I don't care about damaging myself, only spreading more damage on their Pokémon to try and get OHKOs to the bench), and Reversal Energy could be promising, but this idea still needs a little time in the tank to be made fully workable.