blog The rise of Spiritomb in the meta!

The rise of Spiritomb in the meta!

Hi everyone! This is Elena from Gaia Storm TCG and welcome to another article here at CCG. As the meta moves forward, not only the strongest strategies consolidate, but it is also pretty common that some unique and not-so-obvious decks appear out of the blue and that are able to deal with the top tier decks. This is the case of Spiritomb, a very interesting and definitely under the radar combination that has started gaining popularity in the last weeks. Let’s see what makes this deck so unique and so good for the current format.

When it was released, more than a year ago Spiritomb was a Pokémon that caught everyone’s attention. For only one darkness energy, Spiritomb -the Pokémon the deck revolves around- deals 10 + 30 damage for every damage counter on itself. If the Pokémon has 5 damage counters (the maximum amount it can take) it will be doing 160 damage. Combine this with a Hustle Belt and there you go, you can KO almost every non-Tag-Team or V Max attacker in the entire format. Even if getting to that point is a bit slow, this makes Spiritomb one of the best cost-efficient attackers in Standard.

But of course Spiritomb is not enough to win on its own so the deck tries to stretch to the maximum the concept of low prize attackers by combining it with other very powerful and versatile Pokémon that can be used in a wide variety of situations with the help of multitype energies like Unit, Rainbow and Aurora. The list of this supporting attackers varies a bit from list to list but it is very common to find Ultra Beasts (Buzzwole and Nihilego), Cryogonal (To try to stop Baby Blowns and slow down the majority of the strategies) and Yveltal GX. Speaking of which, I think Yveltal GX is a perfect example of how every card can be amazing in the right environment. From being one of the most useless cards in the format to become a staple in many current decks, Yveltal can very effectively deal with any big menace with just an energy in exchange of its GX attack.

The reason why Spiritomb has started to become popular in the recent tournaments is because of its capacity to put a lot of pressure in the prize exchange dynamics against meta decks. If you think about it, in the top steps of the meta ladder we can find strategies that revolve either around big Tag Team or V/Vmax, so forcing them to get the full 6 prizes before Spiritomb and its friends are able to get just 2/3 big knock outs is quite difficult. And even against decks that use attackers like baby blows and disruption strategies, Spiritomb always has the advantage that it only needs one single energy to attack every turn, so it almost never misses an attack.

The deck is for sure a very solid option moving forward and playing the last stages of this format before Darkness Ablaze arrives so if you  already have four copies of Jirachi (the only relatively expensive card of the deck) and you are tired of the same old decks, Spiritomb is certainly the strategy for you. Thanks for reading!