Hola 6P! After quite a weekend in London, where we had Crimson Invasion show its true colors and how good of a set it actually is, we now have San Jose on the horizon for this weekend.

Our Expanded format somewhat mirrors Japan’s format and thus, based on what was reported by PokéStats back in September, we’re heading in to a Zoroark-GX dominated format. Not that our Standard is any different though, as we saw Zororark-GX based decks do really well in London.

Zoroark-GX can easily be included into any deck, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see decks such as Night March, Vespiquen and Golisopod have a strong showings with Zoroark-GX as their main support Pokémon. We could also see more Zoroark-GX heavy decks such as a Toolbox version (with Necromza-GX, Tapu Koko, Alolan Vulpix, Mimikyu, etc.) or paired with Lycanroc-GX in order to have a direct response to Zoroark itself.

No matter what, I’d venture to say that, at the very least, 50% of the Day 2 decks in San Jose will have Zoroark-GX in them. Having said that, Buzzwole-GX, Silvally-GX and Gardevoir-GX are also some of the decks I’d expect to have a presence in the metagame, solely because of how much success they enjoyed recently in London.

With such a wide pool of cards and viable decks in the format, it’s hard to narrow down a deck choice. With so little time between London and San Jose, and my last Expanded venture being all the way back in September at Ft. Wayne, I won’t be giving you the end-all, be-all play for the Regional. I will however, go over the 3 decks I’m considering the most, following the logic I used for Ft. Wayne, which was also right after Worlds. These include two Zoroark-GX variants (Lycanroc-GX and Golisopod-GX) and one very straightforward Gardevoir-GX deck.

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This article — “Moving Onward and Westward” – Moving from London to San Jose, Expanded Musings on Golisopod/Zoroark, Lycanroc/Zoroark, and Gardevoir — was originally published on SixPrizes.