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As we move towards the National Championship, we will be covering more and more of the meta adjustments that are coming with the Flash Fire expansion due for release in May. The first in this series of articles will be to discuss Pyroar, and what the current meta decks can do to deal with the fiery lion. To conquer our enemy, we must first know as much about the enemy as we can. Before we can make any statements regarding how to combat Pyroar, we must first understand who Pyroar is so we can start creating strategies to deal with him.
Yes, it is a him, Pyroar has clearly distinguishable male and female forms. Who knows what they have in store for the female Pyroar! Pyroar is a Stage 1 Fire type Pokemon. He has a two retreat cost and a Water weakness. All of this is underwhelming, as it is his Ability that has given so much hype.
Most of our meta game is composed of decks that depend on Basic attackers, so this is a very big deal. So to deal with his Ability, we have two obvious options and that is attack with evolved Pokemon, or use Basic Pokemon with Shred attacks to knockout Pyroar.
Another strategy could be to use Poison to knock it out. As it has a Water weakness, evolved Water Pokemon probably provide the lowest Energy investment to damage ratio needed to knockout Pyroar. Pyroar will see play in both its own archetype, as well as a possible wall in other decks.
For the ones that choose to wall with Pyroar, Pokemon Catcher and Red Signal can be used for a lot of prizes, but for the dedicated Pyroar decks, a little more may be needed. First, lets take a look at the option of using Shred attackers. These are attackers who have attacks that go through all effects on the Defending Pokemon, and that would include Intimidating Mane. We have two Dragon type Shred attackers from Dragons Exalted. The only other obvious deck is Emboar for Rayquaza, and they already play it.
The secondary problem is the attacks hit 20 short damage wise, so a Muscle Band would be needed. Now, there is a third problem with these cards, and that is their Dragon weakness. Pyroar decks will certainly play the new Druddigon, which has Revenge, and hits Dragons for weakness. The big problem with Cobalion EX? There is no use in trading two prizes just to get one. And then finally, our last option is G-Booster, but this has to go on the Fire weak Genesect EX, so this is also a non-option.
One option some players may take to combat Pyroar is to use the Poison status effect to knock it out. There are a few options to inflict Poison in this format, the most popular being Hypnotoxic Laser and Toxicroak EX also gives a potential Poison option. The issue with this strategy is it will be very easily countered. The next thing I want to take a look at is what specific decks can do to counter Pyroar.
Raichu, with its DCE attack cost is probably the most viable universal counter, but it has the issue of having 90 HP, making it very easily countered by their next Pyroar. In the past, a deck like Pyroar think something like Quad Sigilyph could be overrun by just knocking all of their Energy off the field. This is the most accessible deck to combating Pyroar. With HP it should be hard for the Pyroar player to take down in one hit, making it an excellent counter to Pyroar.
If you run out of Delphox to attack with, you have some other options. They can then choose to knock it out with another Pyroar, or use Revenge with Druddigon. The only real evolution played in most lists is Blastoise, and you should be able to trade a Blastoise for 2 knockouts on Pyroar. You can get a lot of mileage out of one Blastoise if you also choose to play Max Potion. One option you also have is to play a heavier Wartortle line. Maybe go something like for your Blastoise line in the deck.
This deck has a couple of options, one to play evolved attackers and the other is to just play Garbodor, and shutoff Intimidating Mane with Garbotoxin. Zoroark has the issue of being knocked out by a Pyroar with Muscle Band, and you might have trouble having enough of them to last the game, but the Pyroar player will also run out of Muscle Band or whiff Black Smith if you N them at appropriate moments.
You can also play Sacred Ash to get a Zoroark line back in your deck, which may be enough to finish off the game.
If you can keep Garbodor online most of the game, I would think you would win most matches against the deck. This deck is put in the most difficult position as a result of Pyroar, as it is a deck that runs solely on Basic Pokemon with no answers, meaning that it has to evolve as a deck concept otherwise just suck up an autoloss to anything playing Pyroar. All of those Team Plasma sets did give us plenty of evolved Plasma Pokemon that we have all been ignoring that will soon find a place into Plasma decks.
I think the path of least resistance in dealing with Pyroar is to pick something with Water typing to hit it for weakness. I see two main options for these Pokemon. The first is Glaceon, whose Icy Wind attack does 60 damage, good to knockout a Pyroar. It also adds something to the deck in that it gives all of your Team Plasma Pokemon two less retreat cost, making the deck more mobile.
The big question for Plasma will be whether it can still compete with the rest of the meta game while still teching for Pyroar. This deck has at its disposal any Stage 1 you could want. The issue Aromatisse decks will have is that they only have so much Energy that they can devote to evolved Pokemon, as they run on 4 Prism and 4 Rainbow Energy, and only Rainbow Energy count for the attack costs of their Basics.
If you have difficulty finding your Rainbows early, you might get into a tough spot. One advantage going for this deck is that they play a heavy Max Potion count, so theoretically it could get a lot of use out of one attacker.
This deck is interesting, as it is a Fire weak deck, making it very vulnerable to a Pyroar strategy. You have to be careful with what you bench, otherwise they can just Catcher up your Fire weak Pokemon and take two prizes every time they do that. Most of these decks play Raichu already, so that can serve as a quick and easy counter to Pyroar, especially against things just using it to wall.
However, with only 90 HP, Raichu will easily be knocked out on your next turn. G-Booster gets the job done, but that discard your Energy, and sends a Fire weak Pokemon in the line of damage. As Virizion decks will probably be looking for a Water counter to combat Fire decks in general, Abomasnow is an option.
Now this is just our main meta decks. As seen, most of these decks have solid options for dealing with Pyroar, so going the Archeops route is probably the most viable option for a dedicated Pyroar deck. I think Pyroar as a wall option in something like Strafeguard, or as an alternate to give a Fire deck strategic depth are going to be viable options, but if you want to play Pyroar as a dedicated deck, then Archeops is probably needed. Archeops, with its Prehistoric Power Ability prevents your opponent from evolving from their hand.
If your opponent only can play Basic Pokemon down, then Pyroar will obviously be in a great position. Now, Archeops does make use of the convoluted Fossil Engine, which means it will be a little slow to setup. However, they should be able to get it out before you can get out most of your evolutions, so it can easily turn into a game of knockout the evolutions until you win.
There is an obvious way around this, which is just to put Evosoda in your deck. The first is to play Garbodor, and just hope you can get it out first, and when you do, it survives long enough for you to take down their deck. With Archeops taking so long to take out, and being difficult to do so, I would expect most of the time, the deck would only be able to get out a maximum of two Archeops per a game.
If this deck gets big, expect Gust effects to bring up Archeops to see more play. I think that will be the overall strategy towards combating the deck…knock out the Archen and Archeops, and then deal with your gameplan for just Pyroar after you do that. Their lock should be a little slow to setup, and that should give you a chance to deal with the Archeops strategy. So there we have it for our first really big look into Pyroar.
Most decks will have easy solutions to just dealing with Pyroar by itself, but adding Archeops to the mix makes things a lot more complicated. Just the fact that we are talking about changing decks to include these additional strategies to just deal with two cards Pyroar and Archeops shows just how impactful this card will be. Luckily for us, Archeops will only be around for one format, so we will just have to deal with Pyroar by itself for most of its lifespan, which is much easier than dealing with two locks.
I kill every single Litleo that the opponent plays. For that I use Lysandre. And if he manage to evolve into Pyroar is almost at the same time that I have Blastoise in play. And thats the end of the battle for the enemy. So I decided that the best way to counter Pyroar with my fire deck, was adding Pyroar too!. Muscle Band does the work. I do not know what to put counter pyroar … I read your article but it did not help me: I counter pyroar with my two tournaments decks.
I hope my ideas help anyone. Thanks for the big look into the Pyroar card! Leave a Reply Cancel reply. Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email.