Hello everyone! This is Elena from Gaia Storm TCG and welcome to another article at CCG where we are going to talk about some very interesting decks that reached the top positions on the last European Regional in Germany. More than 520 Masters played through the weekend and at the end of it an unexpected contender took the victory: Sylveon GX. How did that happen? What did the meta look like in order for this fairy Pokémon to win?

Since its release in Guardians Rising, Sylveon has been played with different level of success. Thanks to its attack Magical Ribbon it becomes the perfect Pokémon for stall and mill engines, providing key cards consistently. In an environment with decks running low counts of energies, Sylveon capacity’s to find hammers and healing cards like max potion becomes a crucial asset that not many decks can counter. In Frankfurt Regional, Sylveon was able to obtain the win as a consequence of the surprise factor and a good read of the state of the format.

If we took a look at the popular decks that were played in Germany we see that a huge percentage of players opted to go with Zoroark variants, Shrine of Memories decks, Rayquaza Vikavolt and Malamar. To start with, Zoroark variants run barely 8-9 energies, most of them special ones. Sylveon thus completely wrecks the deck with Enhanced hammers and the fact that it can never be killed during the match up with its darkness resistance. Shrine of memories decks are also quite favorable for Sylveon for the same principle of energy disruption and healing cards. The only decks that have effective ways of recharging energies to the field are Rayquaza Vikavolt and Malamar but the fact that Sylveon hits Rayquaza for weakness becomes a huge advantage for the deck.

Then, the other strategy that took the top 8 by storm was a very unique Hoopa Steelix deck (yes, you heard right).It basically follows the same principle of disruption + healing of Sylveon decks with a different choice of Pokémon. The list was designed to stall through an entire game with bulky Pokémon such as Celestial Storm Steelix and Wailord, which happen to have more than 230 HP with Bodybuilding Dumbbells, at the same time that it removed energy with hammers and an out of the blue Articuno GX attack.

Of course, these types of strategies are very concrete and can be easily stopped with recycling cards like Oranguru but no one was expecting mill decks and Frankfurt and that allowed two stalling strategies to reach the top 8. We will have to wait to see if mill decks are able to make a comeback or if players will adapt their decks from now on. Thanks for reading!