Build & Battle Decks: Competitive Upgrades

Hello again everyone! In this article, I’m focusing on two beginner-friendly decks that can be put together with a few modifications to some of Pokemon’s official sealed products that are readily available to new players. Namely, I’ll be looking at the Lucario and Torterra archetypes from Brilliant Stars. These Pokemon were included in prerelease kits for Brilliant Stars, which are also what you get when you purchase a Brilliant Stars “Build and Battle Stadium” box. 

From the Pokemon product description, the Build and Battle Stadium includes:

• 2 individual Build & Battle Boxes, each containing a 40-card ready-to-play deck
• Each deck includes 1 of 4 unique foil promo cards
• 4 additional Pokémon TCG: Sword & Shield—Brilliant Stars booster packs, so you get 12 in all
• Each booster pack contains 10 cards and either 1 basic Energy or 1 VSTAR marker
• 121 Pokémon TCG Energy cards
• 6 damage-counter dice
• 1 competition-legal coin-flip die
• 2 acrylic condition markers
• A collector’s box to hold everything

There are a lot of items included here that are relevant to players getting into the game for the first time— stocking up on a large amount of Energy cards, so you can build a variety of types of decks, is important, for instance. Special condition markers, and tournament-legal dice for damage counters and coin flips, are also important to have. But the question is: do the included 40-card decks provide enough resources to justify purchasing this product if you’re looking to build competitive decks

To start with, obviously a 40-card deck is 20 cards short of being a tournament-legal 60-card deck. Secondly, the provided decks are low on consistency: most of the Trainer cards included are single copies, which do not provide the consistency needed to build up the evolution lines in these decks efficiently. In expanding from the 40-card decks to competitive 60-card decks, you would want to focus most of your attention on adding more and better Trainers to these lists. 

However, I was surprised by how high the quality of the provided decks are in terms of the Pokemon you’re given to work with. The idea for this article originated when my friend Reagan Lamb bought a Build and Battle Stadium and wanted to know how to improve the provided decks. One deck featured Torterra and Lucario, with Grass and Fighting Energy; the second featured Torterra and Infernape, with Grass and Fire Energy. Both decks also included a 1-1 Bibarel line (a good card in competitive play— see my teammate Frank Percic’s finalist list from EUIC last weekend) and a handful of mostly single-copy Supporters and other Trainers, some of which see play competitively. 

If built up to 60 cards and optimized, Lucario and Torterra both have the capability to actually perform on a tournament level. Both have the advantage of being high-damage single-Prize attackers, which, if they can be made consistent enough, have been a strong formula for competitive decks in the past. Lucario in particular is in a nice spot in the current meta, as a lot of top decks (Arceus VSTAR variants and Gengar VMAX) have Weakness to Fighting. Torterra is perhaps harder to set up, being a Stage 2, but can have a very high damage output on a high-HP single-Prize attacker if everything goes according to plan. The top player in the world, Tord Reklev, was working on a Torterra deck on his stream a few weeks ago, and while it probably wasn’t a serious consideration for him for Liverpool Regionals (where he played Mew VMAX), he at least seemed to think the deck had potential. 

In this article I’ll cover lists for both Lucario and Torterra and explain the changes I made from the rough 40-card skeletons provided in the prerelease kits.

Lucario

Lucario is very good against anything with Fighting-type Weakness: Arceus VSTAR, Gengar VMAX, etc. But the main issue is the Mew VMAX matchup, since Lucario can’t OHKO Mew VMAX, and smart players will then take advantage of Lucario’s Psychic Weakness and use Psychic Leap to KO Lucario while simultaneously healing their Mew VMAX. This list aims to fix that problem by including a Galarian Moltres/Klara/Dark Energy package to be used in the late game to OHKO Mew VMAX. In the early game, your Prizes can come from KOing Meloetta or playing Boss’s Orders on a Genesect V.

Cinccino makes sense as an engine for this deck because it stays within the deck’s single-Prize Pokemon strategy, but doesn’t take up as much room as an Inteleon line, so you have room to fit a full Lucario line as well as the large Galarian Moltres package.

Manaphy is pretty much a necessary inclusion in all single-Prize decks these days, as otherwise these decks will autolose to Rapid Strike Urshifu VMAX, which is coming off wins at Liverpool Regionals and the 2022 EUIC. Although Manaphy doesn’t make the matchup an autowin, it can be more effective in this deck than in some other archetypes, because you already play Klara and Scoop Up Net. If an Urshifu opponent uses Boss’s Orders to KO the Manaphy, you can use Klara to put it right back in play. If the Urshifu player starts stacking damage counters on Manaphy to set up a Yoga Loop play with Medicham V, you can use Scoop Up Net to pick it up and then play it down again, removing the damage.

The rest of the engine here is pretty straightforward, with high counts of search Item cards, and Cynthia’s Ambition to take advantage of the fact that your low-HP attacker is probably getting Knocked Out every turn, letting you use it for the full draw-8 effect frequently.

With the inclusion of Galarian Moltres, this deck should be able to hang with Mew VMAX, and its matchups against Arceus VSTAR variants should be favorable because of Fighting Weakness. If Arceus decks play Dunsparce, you may have to spend a turn using Boss’s Orders to KO Dunsparce and turn Weakness back on, but this shouldn’t be an issue since the single-Prize nature of Lucario means you have a lot of time to win games, and will be favored in the Prize trade. With Manaphy to help the Rapid Strike Urshifu VMAX matchup, I think Lucario has the potential to win games against most of the top decks in the format. 

Torterra

Torterra has the capability to be an extremely strong attacker, with the ability to max out at 300 damage if your entire board is Evolution Pokemon. (I’ve also included 1 Choice Belt to boost the damage even higher to 330, letting you OHKO most VMAX Pokemon.) Because your damage is based on having evolution lines in play, Torterra has natural synergy with an Inteleon engine, so I’ve made use of that here. The deck also has a built-in setup engine as part of the attacker’s evolution line with Grotle, whose Ability lets you search your deck for a Grass Pokemon. With all these pieces to set up your evolution lines, it’s actually pretty easy to build a huge board of Evolution Pokemon and start hitting for big damage.

The issues are surviving the early turns of the game (getting multiple Turtwig and Sobble into play), and keeping the damage output high as your opponent starts Knocking Out your Pokemon. I added high counts of search Items (4 Quick Ball, 3 Level Ball) and 2 Capture Energy that can all help in finding those Basic Pokemon to set up in the early game. I also included 2 Rare Candy so that you can start attacking with Torterra as early as turn 2. As your Pokemon start getting Knocked Out, the 2 Ordinary Rod can return them to your deck to make sure you always have a full board of evolution lines. You can also set up Bibarel to consistently draw cards throughout the game. (Bibarel is included in the Build and Battle Stadium already, so I decided to take advantage of that with this list.)

Raihan is a very important card to this list because Torterra takes 2 Energy to attack and there is no other form of Energy acceleration. With Raihan, you can keep attacking with Torterra on consecutive turns even if you start with no Energy in play. This is important because even one turn of missed attacks can let your opponent regain tempo and get back ahead in the Prize trade if they aren’t also playing a single-Prize deck. Another potential option for the list would be to play Exp. Share so that you can move an Energy to a new Torterra after a KO, letting you play a different Supporter than Raihan on the ensuing turn.

How does Torterra fare against the top decks in the meta? It is theoretically possible to OHKO Mew VMAX with Choice Belt and six evolution lines in play, but once that Choice Belt is removed from play, this is no longer an option, so you may have to be smart and use Boss’s Orders to Knock Out Genesect V, Meloetta, or Oricorio off the Bench. Torterra actually has very high HP for a one-Prize Pokemon, though, so there are only so many times your opponent will be able to get away with using Psychic Leap to heal a Mew VMAX. Since they are forced to take 6 KOs, you can definitely deal enough damage in that time to win the game first. Arceus VSTAR matchups should play out similarly: you should be able to OHKO at least one Arceus VSTAR even through Big Charm, but on turns where you don’t OHKO, you’ll have to be ready for Cheren’s Care completely healing an Arceus. You’ll have to run your opponent out of Cheren’s Care or use Boss’s Orders to take Prizes off the Bench.

As for Rapid Strike Urshifu VMAX, Manaphy is probably a necessary evil in this deck to deal with it— it doesn’t contribute to dealing more damage since it’s a Basic Pokemon, so you won’t be able to reach the 330 damage needed to OHKO Rapid Strike Urshifu VMAX when it is in play. However, without Manaphy in play, your setup will probably be completely destroyed by one or two uses of G-Max Rapid Flow. You should aim to two-shot an Urshifu and then pick off the deck’s lower-HP attackers. If people start picking up Gustavo Wada’s EUIC-winning Urshifu list that runs Galarian Moltres V, you can take advantage of its Grass-type Weakness. 

Conclusion

Lucario and Torterra are a couple of fun single-Prize decks that can actually stand up to most of the competitively played archetypes, even if they might not be outright favored. Both of these decks can be built with some modifications to the Build and Battle Stadium starter kits or prerelease starter kits, and the cards you’d need to add (e.g. Inteleon lines or more search Items or draw Supporters) are staples you’ll need for other competitive decks anyway, so they are good investments. If you’re new to the game but interested in competitive play, these decks are cheap to build and both have fairly simple gameplans that aim to do basically the same thing in every matchup, so they are great for learning the ropes in a local store tournament or an online Limitless tournament. 

If you have questions about this article or anything else PTCG-related, or are interested in coaching, feel free to find me on Twitter @twhitesell42. (Also follow my team UNDNTD!) I’ll aim to write one more Brilliant Stars Standard article here before the end of the format, then start looking ahead to the Astral Radiance format around the time of Victoria Regionals and Milwaukee Regionals in June. Stay tuned!