Twilight Masquerade is set to hit shelves in North America soon, and with it a host of powerful new deck archetypes will be revealed. In this guide, we’re going to be taking a look at the most meta relevant decks getting released in this set. Buckle your seat belts and lets dive in!

Iron Thorns ex

You can’t talk about the impact of Twilight Masquerade on the existing Pokemon TCG meta without mentioning Iron Thorns ex. Iron Thorns ex has an ability that shuts down all other abilities from non-Future Pokemon as long as its in the Active Spot.

In a meta that no longer has Path to the Peak (a Stadium that shut down ALL abilities), this is huge. It means players have a real way of slowing down ability-dependent decks, if not shutting them down entirely.

The only caveat? You need to be running a Future deck to really get the full benefit of Iron Thorns ex.

While some early decks have shown promise building their deck entirely around Iron Thorns ex and using him as something of a stall deck, more likely this deck will be used in conjunction with the existing Future Iron Hands strategy.

*2nd Place City League Tōkyō 05/01 - イタチ*

Dragapult ex

The deck getting the most hype right now thanks to stellar performance in Japan is Dragapult ex. As for which way to play this deck is best – that’s yet to be confirmed. Right now it’s seeing success with a lot of different pairings including Lost Zone, Charizard ex, and my favorite – Xatu from Paradox Rift.

In general, I think that Xatu from Paradox Rift is an underrated engine. It can both accelerate energies and let you draw cards which is pretty great.

But enough about Xatu – what makes Dragapult ex so good? Let’s take a look in more detail.

Dragapult ex card breakdown

It’s really not hard to see why this card is so fire. It’s got a massive 320 HP making it hard to take out like another powerful Pokemon right now, Charizard ex. However, unlike Charizard ex, Dragapult is even harder to deal with because it is a dragon type. And everyone knows dragon types have no weakness.

Apart from this, it’s Dragapult ex’s powerful Phantom Dive ability that has everyone going crazy. This attack dishes out a powerful 200 damage. But even more than this, it allows you to strategically place six damage counters on your opponent’s benched Pokemon in any way that you want.

You can use this to take out weaker Pokemon, or finish off Pokemon. And the best part is it can’t be blocked by Manaphy. Really, the only way to protect against this powerful attack is to run Mist Energy.

See an example deck list that took first at a tournament in Japan below

*1st Place City League Kanagawa 04/29 - ウル*

Why Tatsugiri?

As you can see in the above deck list, this deck takes advantage of a single copy of Tatsugiri. Tatsugiri is a powerful, meta changing card introduced in Twilight Masquerade. It’s particularly relevant in the current meta game. Right now, there’s not a single reliable way to get a supporter from your deck, so a lot of people are running things like Poke Gear to try and search out those supporters when they need them most. With Tatsugiri, however, you can search the top cards of your deck each and every turn to try and find a supporter among them. In this particular deck, for example, you can search out an Arven, use it to pull a Rare Candy and a Pokemon Tool, and get some pretty impressive combos in.

Look for many, many Pokemon decks running Tatsugiri after Twilight Masquerade.

Festival Deck

Although I would put the overall competitive outlook of this deck fairly low, it’s still worth mentioning because of how Twilight Masquerader focused this new deck archetype is. It’s seen decent results at tournaments in Japan, and may even get some rogue victories in Japan. If you are looking to attend a Twilight Masquerade prerelease, it’s also a strategy to keep in mind as Thwackey (one of the core cards in this deck) is included as a promo in the Prerelease kits.

What makes this deck work is really the synergy found around Festival Grounds and Dipplin’s “Festival Lead” ability. This enables Dipplin to hit pretty hard, taking more than one KO in a turn if possible (it can attack twice if Festival Grounds is in play).

Additionally, Thwackey’s got a pretty broken ability that pairs well with Dipplin, letting you search for any card in your deck.

See the deck list below and read our Festival Deck guide to learn how to play it.