After winning the Pokemon TCG World Championship piloted by Fernando Cifuentes, everyone wants to know: how do you build and play the best Iron Thorns ex deck?

In this deck, you only run four Iron Thorns ex, forcing your opponent to play without abilities on their Pokemon ex, V and Radiant Pokemon. In a meta dominated by two-prize Pokemon with abilities, this card can and did single-handedly steam-role the competition. That being said, it’s not invincible.

We’ll be taking a look at the basics of how this deck works below, as well as a few practical ways to work around it.

Pokémon: 4
4 Iron Thorns ex TWM 77
Trainer: 45
4 Arven OBF 186
3 Professor's Research SVI 189
3 Judge SVI 176
3 Boss's Orders PAL 172
2 Colress's Tenacity SFA 57
1 Iono PAL 185
1 Penny SVI 183
1 Giovanni's Charisma MEW 161
4 Pokégear 3.0 SVI 186
4 Crushing Hammer SVI 168
4 Pokémon Catcher SVI 187
2 Techno Radar PAR 180
2 Canceling Cologne ASR 136
1 Prime Catcher TEF 157
1 Earthen Vessel PAR 163
1 Energy Loto ASR 140
1 Lost Vacuum LOR 162
3 Future Booster Energy Capsule TEF 149
1 Technical Machine: Turbo Energize PAR 179
3 Lost City LOR 161
Energy: 11
7 Lightning Energy SVE 4
4 Double Turbo Energy BRS 151

Iron Thorns ex deck – primary strategy

Iron Thorns ex is something of a double edged sword. Sure, its got an insane ability that does what Path to the Peak used to do. However, it only works if its in the active spot. And because it doesn’t have an amazing attack, that means you have to talk multiple turns of attacking in order to achieve a knockout.

While that might not sound great, decks are so reliant on rule box Pokemon with abilities that you can actually sustain the slowness of its knockouts and win the prize race simply because your opponent will just sit there drawing cards.

The way you play Iron Thorns ex goes something like this:

Play Iron Thorns ex to block abilities

Play Iron Thorns ex. You can get away with having only one in play and none on your bench if you are confident you can substantially freeze your opponent up. In situations where you feel you might take a KO, you’ll need to ensure you have another Thorns on your bench.

Items and supporters stall your opponent

While Iron Thorns ex will stall your opponent just by virtue of its ability, you have additional tools at your disposal to slow your opponent down. Crushing Hammer, for examples, prevents your opponent from building up energies on the board and prepare Pokemon for the attack. Additionally, you can easily switch your opponent’s Pokemon to the bench via cards like Pokemon Catcher, Boss’s Orders and Prime Catcher. Use this to keep your opponent stalled while you make attack after attack.

Search out energies with key cards

Another weakness that Iron Thorns ex has is that it requires a large ammout of energy to get its relatively weak attack off with. Meanwhile, there’s no significantly great way to accelerate energies onto it. You’ll be relying mostly on manual energy attachments to get your Iron Thorns ex attacking, as well as the handy Turbo Energize TM this deck runs which lets you accelerate energies from the deck.

Energy Lotto and Collres’s Tenacity are going to be your friends here as well, helping you bring special energies into your hand while Earthen Vessel will be your best bet for basics.

Hand disruption blocks your opponent

Like any good stall deck, hand disruption plays an important role in this deck. You have ways to disrupt energy attachments, Pokemon abilities, and hand resources. That’s ultimately what makes Iron Thorns ex the ultimate stall deck in this lopsided format.

To that end, you have plenty of ways to prevent your opponent from building up resources in their hand. Judge is your most frequent tool to keep your opponent’s hand low, while Iono can also be used later in the game to your advantage.

How to counter Iron Thorns ex

Now that we’ve covered the basics about how to play Iron Thorns ex, let’s look at how to play against it. There’s going to be a lot more people playing this deck now that it’s gotten the best publicity a deck can get: winning a World Championship. So you’ll be facing plenty of these decks at every level of competition.

For starters, the best way to deal with Iron Thorns ex is to shut off its ability. This can be done most effectively with Flutter Mane, as Flutter Mane offers a one way shut off ability. Getting Flutter Mane into the active position can give you the coverage you need to use your resources and set your Pokemon up for success.

If you run Cancelling Calogne in your deck, that could also be a strong way of shutting down its Initialization ability, buying you some more time.

Assuming you can shut Initialization long enough to build up your Pokemon for the attack, Iron Thorns ex itself isn’t a powerful Pokemon. It can reliably be knocked out by most of the attackers out there in the meta.

The trick is just getting off an attack.

Iron Thorns ex Deck List and Guide – 1st at Worlds 2024