Welcome to the next edition of what to expect at the 2005 Pokemon World Championships in San Diego, Cali. This week we are going to look at a Dark Slowking deck that gets set up by Turn 2 and uses disruption through a different means by using Cunning to screw with your opponent's top deck. But later on that. Basically Turn 2 is all the rage right now in U.S. Pokemon and expect to see and play against those decks at Worlds.

On to the deck. The deck focuses on getting Dark Slowking out and abusing his Cunning Poke-Power to mess with your opponent's top deck. Cunning allows the player that controls Dark Slowking to look at the top card of your opponent's deck, once per turn, and then shuffle their deck. Please note that if you have multiple Dark Slowking's in play you will be able to use each of their Cunning power once per turn. Unlike other Turn 2 decks, it is a good idea to keep more than 1 Dark Slowking in play because Dark Slowking's HP is only 80. Having more than 1 Dark Slowking will also allow you to abuse Cunning to its fullest. What better way to annoy your opponent each time they are about to topdeck a good card then to just shuffle it away. This reminds me of the old Mankey- Peek combo with Imposter Prof. Oak.

Things to watch out for when playing a Dark Slowking deck is definitely the low HP at 80 and its weakness to Grass. While Grass is not a popular type that sees major play, there are tech Grass Pokemon like Breloom that can easily ohko Dark Slowking. Also with Slowking being part psychic and part darkness a deck that techs in Togetic can also shut down Dark Slowking. None of this matters though if you can succeed in Cunning and make sure that your opponent doesn't topdeck any of those tech cards. You want to hit hard and fast with Dark Slowking and shut down your opponents draw each turn by using Cunning. The main threat is probably Dark T-tar with Grind. Dark T-tar has enough hit points and the resistance to Psychic is hard to overcome after a Dark Slowking player has exhausted a majority of their Tools and Secret Machines.

This leads us to Dark Slowking's attack called Litter. For 1 Psychic energy and 1 Colorless energy, Litter allows you to discard a combination of up to 2 Pokemon Tools or Rockets Secret Machine cards from your hand. The base damage for Litter is 20 but for each Tool or Machine you discard it does an additional 30 damage per. So basically you are looking at 50 damage if you discarded 1 and 70 damage if you discarded 2. Then add on the plus 10 for Darkness energy because you really want the 1C energy to be a Darkness energy for the +10 additional damage, and you are dishing out 80 damage for only 2 energies. You will see in the build that I offer you that there are 18 Tools and 14 search cards to accomplish this massive amount of damage by Turn 2. If you can hit your opponent hard and early, it will be difficult for them to make a comeback.

To coincide with this combo, I have tech'd in 1 Rockets Meowth which allows you to search your deck for 1 Pokemon Tool or 1 Rocket's Secret Machine with his attack called Snatch and Run. After you show the Tool or Machine to your opponent you can switch Meowth with 1 of your benched Pokemon. Mainly Rockets Meowth is used for his Snatch and Run attack if you want to even use him at all. But he also has a 2nd attack that can come in handy when you want to finish off a game with Miraculous Comeback. Miraculous Comeback lets you flip a coin for each Pokemon in play both yours and your opponents and it does 10 damage the active defending Pokemon for each heads you get and then for each tails that you flip, Rockets Meowth takes 10 damage per tails. Nowhere near as powerful as the old Team Rocket's Meowth under the old Wizards rule when a Metal energy could be attached to Meowth to soak up the 10 damage per tails. This Rocket's Meowth will indeed hurt itself for each tails that you flip for Miraculous Comeback. But for each heads that you flip especially if both benches are full and if Rockets Meowth has a Darkness or 2 attached to it can win you the game. I mentioned before that the Grind T-Tar gives this deck problems because of the resistance to Psychic, well Rocket's Meowth is pure Darkness and is a way to overcome that if you are lucky on your flips. Also there are 3 Crystal Shard's for Dark Slowking to use against Psychic resistance Pokes.

Pretty much the trainers are self-explanatory. Read my deck article on Medicham-ex if you want to know the combo behind Swoop Teleporter and Jirachi. http://pojo.com/pokemon/FeaturedWriters/JohnnyBlaze/2005/7-23.shtml

The Professor Birch is to refresh your hand after you dump the Tools and/or Secret Machines for Slowking's attack. Like I said before there are a total of 18 Tools and Machines and 14 draw cards for this deck to run off of and provide consistency.

Here is an example decklist using the above mentioned strategies:

Pokemon - 13
4 - Slowpoke
4 - Dark Slowking
4 - Jirachi (DX)
1 ' Rockets Meowth

Trainers - 32
4 ' Professor Birch
4 - Swoop! Teleporter (RSM)
3 - Rocket's Ball
3 ' Rockets Admin
3 - Poke Retriever (RSM)
3 - Strength Charm (Pokemon Tool)
3 - Crystal Shard (Pokemon Tool)
3 ' EXP. All (Pokemon Tool)
2 - Buffer Piece (Pokemon Tool)
2 ' Prof. Oak's Research
2 - Copycat

Energy: 15
11 - Psychic
4 - Dark

And as always this decklist is just a starting point to get you to start building and playtesting in preparation of the 2005 orld Championships. You may not like the Rockets Meowth and maybe replace that with and something else with a couple of Stadium cards as there are no Stadium cards in this build. Also please contact me at JSChimento@aol.com or AIM me at JSChimento if you wish to discuss this article or any decks.