Pokémon Pocket fans sick of seeing Giratina ex at the top of tournament leaderboards week after week may get a kick out of this one. The best ex card in Pokémon Pocket is slipping a little. In the latest 600-player Ursiiday tournament, the big spiky demon Pokémon didn't even make it onto the podium.
Okay, so a Giratina/Greninja list did take fourth place, but that's a pretty poor performance given the Pokémon's recent history. In fact, the metagame data on Limitless TCG tells an interesting story. It looks like, while Giratina/Greninja was the most popular deck, followed closely by Giratina/Darkrai, neither had a great win rate.
The Greninja variant was at least a smidgen above a coin toss, with a 50.34% win rate overall. But the Darkrai deck had more defeats than victories, with a win percentage of 49.57%. No doubt some of that can be explained by low-skilled players jumping on the bandwagon but still, it's heartening to see.
So has something taken Giratina's place as top dog? Surprisingly, the answer to that is not really. Instead, it seems like a plethora of decks are all vying for dominance, with none actually achieving it. No one strategy appears more than three times in the tournament's top 15. Have we finally arrived at a healthy meta?
There are two decks that showed particular promise, and the first - the overall winner of the tournament - is the Buzzwole ex deck from last season's meta. It's perhaps a little surprising to see this deck performing so well, given how many Flareons and Charizards are around. But the standout feature of this big ultrabeast is it can oneshot a Darkrai ex, which is great now Darktina is a popular deck again.
Charizard/Sylveon is the other clear victor of the weekend, with a 53.5% win rate. A classic case of Sylveon streamlining an already strong deck, this one's fairly self-explanatory, it wants to get Charizard up and running as quickly as possible, then blast away with Steam Artillery.
It's surprising that we've reached a sort of equilibrium so late in the season, with no one deck in the lead. We'll have to see if this lasts until the next Pokémon set comes out.
What's your favorite Pocket deck in the new meta? Come join the conversation on the Wargamer Discord. If you like physical cards you should also check out our leading guide to the most valuable rare Pokémon cards.