Hey friends! Travis Nunlist here back with another piece, and I’m really excited to see what everyone has been coming up with since the release of Shining Legends and Crimson Invasion.

The Alolan Ninetales-GX/Zoroark-GX Deck has been gaining a lot of hype lately as it swept some of the first tournaments with Shining Legends. Zoroark-GX is definitely the most hyped card out of the mini set and seems to have helped solve a lot of the weaknesses that Alolan Ninetales faced before. Zoroark-GX has found its way into all kinds of decks, and other cards like Shining Jirachi have snuck into existing Garbodor variants. But, we haven’t actually seen any official results with the full set of this block: Crimson Invasion.

My last piece was focused around the new Counter cards and all the potential I saw in their ability to shake up the format. It seems like the general consensus on these cards is that they’re clearly good, but finding the right partner is going to be the tricky part. Since then I’ve been toying with all kinds of ideas to see what I can come up with, and amidst my Crimson Invasion exploration, I became enamored with Silvally-GX. It has a 210 HP, a great Ability, and two incredible attacks! Gyro Unit gives free retreat to all of your basic Pokémon, and Rebel GX does 50x for each of your opponent’s bench Pokémon, forcing them to play with a tight bench. The Colorless typing and Energy acceleration attack give it a lot of pairing flexibility, making it a very powerful support Pokémon.

Deck-building at the beginning of a new format can be quite challenging, as grinding out new concepts takes a lot of time and effort, especially when we have so many battle tested powerhouses to fall back on. When high stakes tournaments like the upcoming London Intercontinental Championship are the first event of a new format, it’s no wonder that a lot of players prefer to stick with what they know. Today I’m going to go over how I went about exploring my favorite GX out of the new set and give an overview of my general process when fleshing out ideas with new cards.

Studying Silvally: A Deck Building Case Study

This article — “Studying Silvally” – A Case Review on Deck Building while Looking at London — was originally published on SixPrizes.