"Genesect and Virizion"- an Unlikely Combination

Hello all,

My name is Charles Randall Larenas-Leach. I have been playing the Pokemon trading card game for several weeks now, and I believe that gives me the authority to write a blog about all things Pokemon. I know that people that are reading around these types of blogs just want to play cookie-cutter decks, like Yveltal or Pyroar. I'm here to tell you that you are wrong. Personally, I prefer to play rouge decks.

Rouge- a deck that a player plays when they are more creative, skilled, and generally better than other players.

Now you don't want to just turn your binder upside down and sleeve up whatever cards fall out. The key to "going rouge", as I call it, is to play cards that work well together and that can beat other decks. Sometimes, you may look at a card and not think outside the box. My job is to show you how to tear up the box and recycle it. Sometimes you have to look at a card and think about other possible applications for it.

Genesect PLB

Some of you may have seen Genesect being used in popular decks. Genesect is a Team Plasma Pokemon, so it can take advantage of many of the cards printed to help that group of Pokemon. Thundurus/Deoxys/Kyurem decks seem to have been at the top tables at every States this season, and if you look closely at their benches, you might notice a Genesect EX sitting there. Genesect EX has the ability "Red Signal", which lets you drag up a Pokemon from your opponent's bench when you attach a Plasma Energy to Genesect from your hand. Unfortunately, this counts as your attachment for the turn, and you are limited to using this Ability four times (because you can only have four Plasma Energy in your deck!)

Anyway, you might have noticed this card being included in TDK decks, but what you might not have noticed is that Genesect EX is a very strong attacker. Its attack Megalo Cannon does 100 damage for GGC, and in addition it does 20 damage to a benched Pokemon. Cards like Colress Machine let us accelerate energy to Genesect to fulfill the C cost, and cards like Ether let us attach Grass Energy without attaching energy for the turn. With cards like these, we can be using Megalo Cannon as early as turn one. But wait, there's more!

G Scope

In Plasma Blast, the creators at the Pokemon Card Laboratories printed this broken (if I do say so myself) tool for Genesect decks. Picture this: you attack an opposing Pokemon EX for 100 damage with Megalo Cannon. However, on the next turn, they retreat and attack you with a new EX. Now you can't get a knockout with Megalo Cannon, and your previous turn was a huge waste. That's where G Scope comes in! You can attach G Scope to Genesect and use the special G Scope attack to snipe off that pesky cowardly excuse for a Pokemon. Your opponent will quiver in his boots!

Here is a skeleton list for this "Speed Genesect" variant:

4 Genesect
1 Lunatone PLS

4 Ether
4 Colress Machine
1 G Scope
1 Max Potion
2 Energy Switch
1 Switch
2 Potion

4 Professor Juniper
4 N
4 Tierno
3 VS Seeker

3 Frozen City

12 Grass Energy
4 Plasma Energy

Let me go over a couple of the specific cards in the deck:

Lunatone PLB

Lunatone is in the deck because it goes well with Ether. Ether lets you look at the top card of the deck. If that card is an energy, you can attach it to one of your Pokemon! Lunatone lets you reorder the top two cards of your deck, which helps optimize the use of Ether. One disadvantage of Lunatone is that it has a very high retreat cost. We run the one Switch so that if someone drags up Lunatone to stall, we can play the Switch and keep attacking with Genesect!

Tierno

One of the dilemmas that I ran into while testing this deck was whether to run Tierno or Cheren. Tierno is a boy and Cheren is also male, which wasn't always apparent to me when I looked at the art on his card.

Anyway, since Cheren and Tierno are both Supporter cards that let you draw three cards, it all comes down to playstyle choice. If you are someone who likes to take lots of risks and play aggressively, then I recommend Tierno. If you like to be more conservative and hold your cards close to your chest, then I recommend Cheren. Obviously, I've elected to play Tierno in my list, and many truly competitive players elect to do the same. The choice really is yours though, since the difference between the two cards is minimal.

The list has some issues. One of the problems though is that it is difficult to stream Genesects. You have to hit every Ether to keep the attackers coming, and if your opponent can somehow knock out a Genesect in one hit, it is very difficult to set up another one. For this reason, we need another way to accelerate energy for the deck. Luckily for us, there is a hidden gem in Plasma Blast that can help us out.

"VirSect"

Virizion EX from Plasma Blast has an attack for two energies that does fifty damage and lets you attach two Grass energy from your deck and attach them to a Benched Pokemon. This way, you can load up energy on a Genesect while doing a little bit of damage to start off the game. I call this combination of Virizion and Genesect "VirSect", which is a creative combination of the names of Virizion and Genesect.

Unfortunately, Virizion and Genesect don't have perfect synergy. Virizion isn't a Team Plasma Pokemon, so it can't use Colress Machine. To fix that, we'll run some Team Plasma Badge so that we can get off a consistent turn one Emerald Slash.

The coolest part about Virizion though is its Verdant Wind ability. When Virizion is in play, no Pokemon with Grass Energy attached can be affected by a Special Condition. This has really good synergy with Munna from Boundaries Crossed. Munna has you flip a coin. If heads, your opponent's Active Pokemon is asleep. If tails, your Active Pokemon is asleep. This is good because your Active Pokemon can't be asleep because of the Verdant Wind ability! Munna gives us such great utility, so we should really run a couple.

Here is what a skeleton list for VirSect might look like:

2 Virizion

4 Genesect

2 Munna

1 Lunatone

3 Ether

3 Colress Machine

1 G Scope

3 Team Plasma Badge

4 Tierno

4 N

4 Professor Juniper

2 Cedric Juniper

3 Frozen City

12 Grass

4 Plasma

You'll notice one big weakness of this deck: Fire Pokemon. If your opponent is running Fire Pokemon, you don't stand a chance. I'll be making a post soon about fighting fire with fire, so keep checking the Bloggedy-Blog. In this case, the fire we fight fire with is water though of course, because fighting actual fire with fire is foolhardy (invest in a fire extinguisher folks!).

Thanks for reading,

CR