Small update today! After a mail day, a Temporal Forces prerelease, and a little bit of trimming, there are seven total physical cards changing in my GLC list. Three (Veluza, nest ball, and arctibax) are just upgrades, namely EN → JP and in the case of veluza non-holo to art rare. The other four are functional changes.
(top row is being removed, bottom row is being added)
I had noticed the two retreat cost on snom being an issue in games where I opened it, preventing me from cleanly retreating into alolan vulpix on turn 1, so I switched the snom to the version with a 1 retreat cost. This will be a little bit worse against spread decks, since it has 40 hp instead of 50, but I believe the reduced retreat cost is worth it.
Nakayoshi poffin (Buddy-buddy poffin is a very silly translation, and I am excited for my JP one to arrive so I don’t have to announce it by the EN name) is the best new trainer card printed for this deck in quite some time. The card is obviously strong, and the cut for it was easy, as Parallel City was a tech card that I had been playing because the players at my previous locals didn’t know how to play around/against it. Since I’ve moved and don’t know the meta I’ll be going into, I am happy to replace it.
The other functional change I made to the deck was putting Abyssal Hand Octillery back into the deck. I have played the card in this list before, and had cut it somewhere around the release of Lost Origin because I felt that my hand was getting clogged and I wasn’t able to draw cards with it at all on many turns, and almost never more than 1. Since then however, the meta has sped up significantly with the printing of powerful cards like Revavroom SVI, Luxray PAL, Tinkaton PAL, Xatu PAR and Technical Machine: Evolution, and is likely to speed up more with the addition of Nakayoshi poffin and the strong pokemon in this set (Metang, Raichu, Great Tusk, etc). With the format speeding up, it is time to once again trim flex slots for consistency tools. Cynthia & Caitlin and Tate & Liza, while they are both powerful and flexible, are simply too slow for a format that has sped up as much as GLC has, at least in a deck as lean as Dance/Pump water. I love the cards dearly (Cynthia & Caitlin was the first expensive full art that I bought for this deck back when I first decided to max-pretty the deck), and I don’t think I’ll ever sell or trade them, but I do think it’s time for them to take a rest in the binder for a bit.
While I could ramble about this deck for a very long time, I think I’ve gone on long enough for today! I mostly just wanted to share my excitement about the new cards for the deck, especially the super pretty veluza, and it turned into a bit of a gush about the format, oops! Thank you to anyone who made it this far, and I hope you have a lovely day!~
