Product Review
A starter deck that packs a punch!

For the last 2 years Pokémon has been releasing their new flavor of starter decks known as “V Battle Decks”. For almost every set release, they release 2 decks that are on-par with each other sealed. With the latest V Battle release for the Pokémon GO TCG set, we saw Mewtwo V and Melmetal V as the headliners.
 
The Mewtwo V deck really shined on an upgrade perspective. I challenged another local Youtuber, Salty Lad Gaming Corner, to a battle where the viewers had their say and had me upgrade and battle with the Mewtwo deck. The deck out of the box has some serious potential, this was how I went about upgrading the deck:

The Upgrade Parameters:

For this particular upgrade session, we chose to use 2 starter decks as well as $10 (R170 at the time) worth of singles.
 
The deck as a whole had to comprise of 40 cards from the V battle decks and up to 20 cards in purchased singles.

My Strategy:

One card pair that has had a lot of attention out of Pokémon GO set is the Lunatone / Solrock combo. These cards are incredibly synergistic and hit big damage numbers in an explosive way. The Mewtwo V and it’s evolution, Mewtwo VSTAR also synergize in the same way. Both the Lunatone and Mewtwo VSTAR attacks scale up according to energies in play with the Solrock recurring the energies back into play allowing for multiple energy drops in a single turn. This circumvents the regular limitation of 1 energy card per turn.

The List:
My final list came out looking like this:

Pokémon:
2x Mewtwo V
1x Mewtwo VSTAR
4x Lunatone
4x Solrock
 
Trainers:
4x Professor’s Research
3x Shauna
3x Marnie
3x Boss’s Orders
4x Great Ball
4x Level Ball
2x Quick Ball
2x Fog Crystal
1x Evolution Incense
2x Egg Incubator
2x Energy Switch
2x Switch
1x Ordinary Rod
2x PokéStop
 
Energies:
14x Psychic Energy

How the battle went?

The battle was very one sided with me sweeping the match 2-0. The mixture of this deck’s speed along with it’s consistency was just too much for the Melmetal deck to handle. I have seen variants of this deck appear in international tournaments as well. It really is a great deck and easy to pilot for those starting out making it the perfect intro product.

What if the budget was bigger?

If I had a little more of a budget, I would have considered adding the following:
  • Rescue Carriers (To recover our Lunatones and Solrocks)
  • Radiant Greninja (Its card draw with the edition of synergizing with Solrock)
  • Manaphy (Protects our Solrocks from getting sniped while on the bench)
  • Scoop Up Nets (Allows us more Solrock abilities a turn by picking them up and re-benching)
  • Choice Belt (We would be facing more V orientated decks, this just helps up the damage)