Working with Weavile after Winning Malmo

Hello everyone and welcome to another article. This time I wanted to take a look at the two finalists’ decks of the Malmo Regional championships who both ran an interesting Zoroark Weavile deck that proved a very good pick for the day.

We saw in Malmo Zoroark being paired with Weavile in order to try and counter the meta that had introduced Ultra Prism. There was a lot of talk of Ability based decks being popular. Cards like Magnezone, Glaceon-GX, Leafeon-GX and Lucario were all being tested as potential plays for the tournament by many people which all had built in Abilities. That, along with Zoroark-GX being the one of the strongest cards printed in the past few years and Tapu Lele-GX still being used to set up meant that a lot of people were planning on running Abilities. Prior to the tournament, the three strongest decks in the format were Zoroark/Gardevoir, Zoroark/Golisopod and Buzzwole/Lycanroc. All three of these decks make use of Abilities in some way, with the first having almost no Pokémon without Abilities when fully set up.

With this being said, there were two ways to try and counter these Ability based decks. Either using Ability lock, usually in the form of running Garbodor with the Garbotoxin Ability, or using Weavile and its Evil Admonition attack to punish opponents from setting up an ideal board state. As a player that took part in the tournament, there was a fair amount of Garbodor around. The age old Garbotoxin Ability was still very powerful and classic combinations such as Golisopod Garbodor and Buzzwole Garbodor were seen in high numbers and some even made it to Day 2 of the tournament.

However, a relatively large pool of well-known players also took the Weavile approach, including players such as Tord Reklev, Robin and Phillip Schulz, Nico Alabas and of course the tournament winner Adam Hawkins. His list is below:

The list is relatively simple and pretty much what you would expect at least skeleton wise from a Zoroark deck. 4-3 Zoroark-GX is a good basline for the deck as you have access to them to start Trading into the rest of the deck. 2-2 Zoroark BREAK to compliment this is a very strong 1 Prize attacker right now. Mind Jack is a brilliant counter to the early game Lele into Brigette plays that almost all decks play and runs off of the same cost as Riotous Beating. The BREAK can copy any attack for a singular Darkness Energy which is huge also. (I’ve included a small table later to show some of the cool things you can do with the BREAK right now!)

The 2-2 Weavile line is the decks way to deal with all of the Abilities in the format as I have already mentioned, and is a thick enough line to not have to worry about prizing it or discarding it early. This is then complimented by a Tapu Koko promo to help soften things up in the early game, and a Mew-EX as the decks answer to Buzzwole-GX which would normally run though the deck as it is all weak to Fighting. Of course, the deck is also running Tapu Lele-GX as with almost all decks nowerdays.

Trainers wise, the deck runs a fairly uncommon selection of Supporters. 3 Brigette, Guzma and N are all fairly low-standard counts but the new Supporter Cynthia helps balance this lower than usual number. One Acerola is also relatively standard in Zoroark-GX decks to keep trading and avoiding losing Prizes early, and similarly, Mallow is pretty standard in these decks too to be able to Trade into exactly two cards you need for the rest of the turn such as Energy or Choice Band for example. Cynthia is also the reason decks are running a lower count of Sycamore and as such this is why the deck is only running one. Finally, Kukui is one of the many ways that the deck can manipulate damage in order to get KO’s out of nowhere.

4 Ultra Ball as always, and 4 Puzzle of Time, again the norm in Zoroark decks right now as it is pretty easy to actually have both in the hand at once in order to get the second effect. Two  Evosoda is super important in the deck as does it not only get the Zoroark-GXs into play to let you start Trading, but it also helps grab the Weavile and Zoroark BREAK lines which may normally be difficult to access. Two Field Blower is important for Garbodor matchups as they can turn off their Abolities in order to reduce the amount of damage Weavile does, along with, along with stopping you from being able to Trade to carry on through the game.

Finally, the deck ran 3 Choice Band and a Devoured Field in order to again help manipulate the damage calculations the deck can do. Devoured Field was chosen over Reverse Valley I believe due to the hype around Metal in order to be able to not give them the extra 10 damage resistance they would have if you had Reverse Valley in play. With the combination of Kukui, Choice Band and Devoured Field, the BREAK can do the following things:

• Copy Golisopod’s Armor Press with any of the buffs to take a 2 shot whilst preventing them 1 shotting you without prior damage.
• Copy Golisopod’s Crossing Cut GX with Choice Band, Kukui and Devoured Field to deal 210 damage and 1 shot them provided they haven’t Armor Pressed.
• Copy Buzzwole’s Knuckle Impact for a KO with Choice Band or Kukui and Devoured Field.
• Copy Zoroark’s Trickster GX for a single energy.
• Copy Dusk mane Necrozma’s Meteor Tempest or Sun’s Eclipse GX for a single energy.
• Copy Dialga’s Timeless GX with a Choice Band for a KO for a single energy, taking an extra turn in the process!

These are just some of the reasons the BREAK is so strong right now and I really think it’s a super underrated card. These damage buffs also help Zoroark-GX reach up to 180 damage with Riotous Beating to KO things like Tapu Lele-GX, and Weavile to deal 210 damage with Evil Admonition with the opponent only having 3 Abilities on the board.

This was all topped off with a 4/4 split of Double Colourless Energy and Darkness Energy.

Adam met the mirror match of all things in the final of the tournament, beating Nico Alabas playing the same deck. This list is as follows:

As you can see there are some pretty interesting differences between the lists considering they are of the same deck, with the 2^nd place list being in general more techy in my opinion.

Nico decided to play an extra Zoroark-GX over the second Mind Jack Zoroark which is a perfectly fair decision to make as the backbone of the deck is drawing into the answers you need with Trade. He decided not to play any BREAK which again I agree with in a list that only plays one Mind Jack Zoroark. Only one Weavile means the deck may be slightly more concerned with discarding it in the early turns but did choose to also run a Rescue Stretcher as an extra recovery card meaning there wasn’t pressure on wasting Puzzles of Time in order to access it again. The list played Oranguru from Ultra Prism in order to recover resources and also completely avoid losing to mill decks that normally have a very good matchup against Zoroark decks. Finally, a Giratina Promo was run in order to help in the Greninja matchup. I think without this the deck really struggles in the matchup but I believe Adam didn’t want to have a single card just to help with one matchup. I don’t know how many either played but I wouldn’t be surprfised if Nico found it useful during the day.

Nico ran one less Cynthia in favour of an extra Acerola which I think makes sense with the higher Zoroark-GX count. However since testing this list, I have found that using Acerola on the BREAK is also a huge deal if you have a second Mind Jack Zoroark out. Playing two Enhanced Hammer forces Zoroark players to have to dig for Puzzle’s in order to keep up with attachments meaning they are more likely to paly more Zoroark-GXs down, making Weavile an even stronger attacker. An extra Field Blower over a second Evosoda helps sure up the inevitable Garbodor matchups that were expected on the day and again makes sense in a deck with more drawpower and less intent on evolving in general as Trade should be able to carry you though the game once 1-2 have been set up. Finally, running a Float Stone over the 3^rd Choice Band makes sense due to cards like Oranguru and Giratina Promo having a high retreat cost.

Overall, I think I like a mix of both lists as the optimal 60. This would be the list I would play:

This list is sort of a best of both worlds. I would play the Zoroark BREAK part of the deck as I think the card is just too strong right now. There is a huge amount of good attacks you can copy and for a single energy it can really swing games. I don’t think Koko is necessary from Adam’s list, nor Oranguru or Giratina from Nico’s. I have upped the Evosoda count again to accomodaye for the extra Zoroark evolutions, dropping the Field Blower count back down to two. I really like Nico’s Enhanced Hammer and Rescue Stretcher and have kept them in my list. Finally, I am also playing Reverse Valley as I believe the it is better to have a worse matchup against Metal rather than giving other Zoroark varients extra damage that Devoured Field does.

Thanks for reading, hopefully you can have some fun with these lists. Let me know which is your favourite! Make sure you stay tunes to Omnipoke’s videos and streams over the next few weeks, and if not before I’ll see you all in a couple of weeks time for another article.