Pokémon TCG: Sword and Shield—Brilliant Stars

Skittles !Taste the Rainbow!

Chomp X is great for a lot of stuff ... including getting your Chomps back into play as basics (no Battle Frontier issues) ... but just isn't quite as good at getting ho-oh set back up. Ho-oh is already a basic and needs 4 energy. It's also quite good to run Chomp with just 3-4 types of energy if you can game your meta well. At states Psychic-Water-Lighting alone would have pretty much carried the day. You just don't need the full rainbow the way you have to have with Ho-oh. Chomp can be run rainbow style but it's not a default.

Garchomp - Togekiss will be a great deck, but I just don't see it as Skittles. Skittles = Ho-oh to me.
 
Skittles is not just anything with Togekiss as accel...there are other decks like Magmortar, Garchomp and Pelipper that use Togekiss in very different ways. Ho-Oh has unique abilities and requirements that make it a completely different deck.

Besides, there's better accel for Garchomp than Togekiss. A stage 2 getting powered up by a CIP power on another stage 2 is just slow.
 
Most togetic decks can not be considered Skittles because you will not use every type of energy... Ho oh MAKES the deck Skittles....
and ok ive been working on a couple of lists for this and Ill post them soon... Porygon Z X anyone :D
 
I think Ho-oh limits Togekiss greatly, and I see more decks in the future utilizing Togekiss with single energy types to fuel better lines. Like I said though, right now there aren't that many good basics to work with it.
 
psychic lock wont one hit KO ho-oh, but psychic cut will most definately. any sensible G&G playerr playing skittles would want to get out gallade, not gardevoir, as quick as possible.
 
^uhhh.. you flip 3 prizes.... and even if you do the first attack you still have to flip one.. then what if I flip heads.. you wasted all of those flips.. and giving ho oh another turn to attack is not wise
 
Any sensible G&G player would want to get out Gardevoir as soon as possible to lock Skittles out of Serene Grace, then have a Gallade to sweep everything after Gardy's taken a couple prizes. You had it backwards.
 
The thing is that Serene Grace can happen T1 if going second. G&G needs more cards for the T2 Psychic Lock than Skittles needs for T1 or T2 Serene Grace. I'm not saying that G&G will never get Psy Lock first ... they can and will a certain percentage of the time. It's just that it will be more common for the Skittles player to get at least one Serene Grace first. After that Grace the pressure is usually on the G&G deck. They need the DREs and Scrambles to respond quickly enough ... and if Crystal Beach gets into play for even a few turns then G&G starts having real problems.
 
Serence Grace T1 isn't going to result to anything in many cases depending on how many energy you run and what luck you have.

If you are talking about speed, I'd say G&G is faster. A single DRE and any energy can get Gallade OHKOing things and a single DRE can power a Gardevior lv.X to bring down all your basics. Togekiss/Ho-oh takes longer because the main attacker takes 4 energy to attack and can't abuse DRE/Scramble. Togekiss isn't a good attacker at all, and can only stall the inevitable.
 
Prime, if manually attaching, sure Ho-oh is slow. But with Togekiss that's not always the case. You can have that 4 energy attached in nothing flat with Serene Grace and perhaps a manual attachment. Saying "takes 4 energy" is true but misleading in terms of speed.

I'll gladly admit that I would rather not attack with Togekiss over Ho-oh. But it's not horrible. Fighting Resistance. On average will two hit a nomral Garde or Mags.
 
I've always loved Skittles and I very much respect anyone who can play this deck. Though I for one will never touch it for the simple fact that I am not worthy!! lol

Great read ~
 
I'm not at all convinced by the matchups. If those matchups were true, a lot more people would be playing and succeeding with Skittles than the feedback from european Nationals and States reflects. After all, people want to play the deck that will win, and if Skittles is indeed 50+:50 against everything listed, there's no reason it wouldn't see play.
 
Speaking from the US Regionals perspective, I don’t think that Skittles was played in nearly the frequency that G&G, Magmortar, and even Arithmetic were ... yet it was heavily represented in top cuts around the country given this far less proportional play.

My experience is that Skittles is just absurdly fast in most games. G&G just has problems keeping up if Skittles really gets going. Conversely if G&G sets up then it’s difficult for Skittles. It’s just that the speed seems to be on Skittles side on average. There is no lopsided advantage but the average Skittles seems to have a very slight advantage over the average G&G. Specific builds and players will make a difference.

The Mags matchup is a lot harder. My experience says that it’s usually at least 45-55 in mags favor. The burns, poison, bench sniping, and scrambles can give Skittles a really hard time. Mags just has so many options to get around Ho-oh. The biggest thing against the Mags player may be time. Skittles is able to take early prizes more easily than Mags. Again builds play a part. My Regionals deck ran Holon WP and extra Warp Points with matchups like Mags in mind.

Banette and Arithmetic are difficult as well & without the Holon WP energy. I tested Arithmetic vs my own Skittles with WP pretty extensively. I’m not the best Arithmetic player but my Skittles was winning 3 out of 4 matches against a build similar to the one posted here at the gym by Mr. Ballard. It has a lower success rate vs the version that Eric Nance ran at Regionals though & I did loose to him there ... barely. If my 3rd Togekiss hadn’t been prized or I had flipped heads one time more I think that I could have won that game.

Beyond those decks Skittles has some trouble with generic water deck due to Ho-oh’s weakness and even more with decks that play heavy Cess. PokeDad’s T2 Houndoom deck that ran 4 Cess is a perfect example of a deck that Skittles has major problems with. I don’t know the European meta and if it’s full of some of the things listed here then I can see why Skittles might not be the play.

My personal expectation at this point is that water will be seeing more play after MD and I’m not sure that Skittles will be the play at US Nationals myself. Skittles is NOT going to like Empoleon MD + Cess.

More than anything I think Skittles take a bit of time to really get comfortable with. It’s a deck that’s easy to make mistakes with.
 
vanderbilt_grad said:
Prime, if manually attaching, sure Ho-oh is slow. But with Togekiss that's not always the case. You can have that 4 energy attached in nothing flat with Serene Grace and perhaps a manual attachment. Saying "takes 4 energy" is true but misleading in terms of speed.

I'll gladly admit that I would rather not attack with Togekiss over Ho-oh. But it's not horrible. Fighting Resistance. On average will two hit a nomral Garde or Mags.
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I don't know how many energy you are running in your version, but 18 in mine doesn't result to diddly squat for an early serene grace. When I want to go on the offense T2 or T3 with Ho-oh, I just can't, and when I am having a bad game, and need to stage a comeback, it's hard to get the four energy on each of my ho-oh before my opponent can DRE and flip over their prizes or snipe my claydol next turn.

Togekiss is a horrible attacker imho. It on average won't KO a single thing because Magmortar will heal 20 a turn, and both Magmortar and Gardy can lv up for the extra 20HP. It's a wasted three energy, and the entire line is pretty lame imho. If Serene Grace wasn't as powerful as it was, I wouldn't even be looking at the card. (jmho)
 
I really don't want to do the math to see what the average should be for an early SG ... but my in play experince was that I ususually got anywhere from 0 to 6 energy with SG and that getting less than 2 or more than 4 was pretty uncommon. Getting 2 or 3 were the most likely outcomes.

I only had 17 basic energy in mine but I usually did everything I could to maximize Grace. A typical pre-Grace action sequence might be to put two energy on the bottom of my deck with Claydol and then use Bebe's to put a 3rd back into the deck and get them all shuffled up before doing Grace. Yeah that's not the T1 or T2 move most of the time but it's just an example of the kinds of things I would do to try to increase the odds of a good Grace. I also shuffled like crazy between games since the deck has a tendancy to stack your energy together in clumps if you don't.
 
I'm not doubting that Serene Grace can pull some massive energy off the top of the deck, but I was just talking about in certain situations where you might not have the togekiss out or you might not have had the claydol out shuffling energy back into your deck. If a GG or Mag pulls something on you early and you aren't setup, it can take a while to setup a Ho-oh with four energy on it.

Times when you Serene Grace and get no energy is times when I really don't care for the randomness of the deck.
 
MadHatter said:
^uhhh.. you flip 3 prizes.... and even if you do the first attack you still have to flip one.. then what if I flip heads.. you wasted all of those flips.. and giving ho oh another turn to attack is not wise
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50 + 20 + 20 = 2 prizes

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and about this deck, i personally think magmortar is alot more consistent. It does the same amount of damage for one energy cost, and you dont have to worry about what type of energy you are getting. Plus, Magmortar has a lv. x form, 20 more hp on its basic form, and no x2 weakness until you get to its lv. x.

Back to back posts merged. The following information has been added:

vanderbilt_grad said:
The thing is that Serene Grace can happen T1 if going second. G&G needs more cards for the T2 Psychic Lock than Skittles needs for T1 or T2 Serene Grace. I'm not saying that G&G will never get Psy Lock first ... they can and will a certain percentage of the time. It's just that it will be more common for the Skittles player to get at least one Serene Grace first. After that Grace the pressure is usually on the G&G deck. They need the DREs and Scrambles to respond quickly enough ... and if Crystal Beach gets into play for even a few turns then G&G starts having real problems.
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psychic lock = DRE + psychic + gardevoir + rare candy + ralts.
Serene Grace = Togepi + rare candy + togekiss + Ho-oh. That's a one card difference, not that much.
 
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