Countering Mew VMAX

Alola Trainers! I’m back here at the PoTown Blog with an article for those of you who are tired of Mew VMAX, either because it is very expensive and difficult to obtain, or if you just feel like it's too powerful of a Pokemon deck. It seems like you either love or hate Mew VMAX at the moment, and if you’re the latter, then this deck will be for you.

There are two main ways to counter Mew VMAX at the moment, the first one is to shut down its engine, Genesect V’s Fusion Strike System Ability or the other is to simply OHKO Mew VMAX through Weakness with Dark Pokemon.

In this deck, we are going to combine both options, by using Galarian Weezing’s Neutralizing Gas Ability to shut off all Abilities, along with a lot of great Dark-type attackers that can easily OHKO Mew VVMAX: Galarian Moltres and Sableye V.

Koffing lets us get Galarian Weezing going quite quickly thanks to its Ascension attack. The sooner you stop Abilities for Mew VMAX, the more you can mitigate the damage they do. However, your end goal is to get enough damage going on Mew VMAX for Sableye V to take it down with Crazy Claws.

Mew VMAX usually applies a lot of pressure very quickly though and it might not be easy to slow them down. However, that is where Galarian Moltres comes in. The longer the game goes and Mew VMAX takes more prizes, the more powerful its Fiery Wrath attack becomes. The best way to power up Galarian Moltres is with its Ability Malevolent Charge, which combined with Klara, becomes very easy to utilize successfully.

The deck gets progressively stronger and as long as you don’t start or bench a Sableye V, you can easily slowly set up as you only give one prize card each turn. You could even be at 6 prizes to their 2 against Mew VMAX and pull off a comeback with back-to-back attacks from Galarian Moltres.

This favorable exchange and the threat of nullifying Abilities, along with Sableye V potentially OHKOing anything with enough damage counters on it, makes this deck actually viable against all Pokemon Online decks, not just Mew VMAX. That is also where Hoopa shines, as it can get a quick hit and leave enough damage counters to make sure Sableye V can OHKO any threat.

Finally, the Inteleon line with the Shady Dealings and Quick Shooting Abilities, help you find what you need, when you need it, along with establishing damage counters to make sure the math works out correctly when you’re trying to achieve KO’s.

Galarian Moltres V is another Pokemon you could consider as a way to help counteract the fact that you need to go down in prizes for Galarian Moltres to be effective, or you need prior damage for Sableye V to be a threat. Galarian Zapdos V and a copy of Fighting Energy can also be a consideration in order to counter one of this deck's worst enemies: Jolteon VMAX.

However popular Mew VMAX is, you’re still expecting to play against other decks in the Pokemon TCG Online or future Pokemon TCG Live ladder, so having some answers to them could be important.

This matchup is your best one and as long as you don’t dead draw, every piece of this deck is geared towards countering and dismantling this deck. Early Galarian Weezing into Sableye V and Galarian Moltres attacks through Klara are the way to go.

You, unfortunately, don’t get too many favorable exchanges against this deck, but late-game Galarian Moltres can be deadly against them if they’re not careful and place too many damage counters on their Pokemon with Houndoom’s Ability whilst powering up their Pokemon.

This matchup is very bad due to the two prizes they can potentially get each turn, along with Galarian Weezing not being effective at all. This is the deck's worst nightmare without the Fighting tech of Galarian Zadpos V mentioned in the previous section.

In a similar fashion to Jolteon VMAX, the bench damage is too much for this deck to handle and there isn’t any tech you can use to overcome this matchup.

Even though Suicune decks don’t threaten the bench, the prize exchange against them is not as favorable by using Sableye V and thus if they get a small lead early it can be hard to make a comeback. It’s also basically impossible to limit your own bench so they will easily achieve OHKO’s on your lower HP Pokemon.

In the same vein as Suicune except this is worse as they have healing and generally higher HP. Even though Zacian V’s drawback of attacking every other turn could help you in keeping up, they usually have enough tools to just continue applying pressure on you.

This deck can be very hit or miss against the top decks as you can see on the matchup spread. However, a positive matchup, almost an auto-win, against the top and most popular deck will always be appealing. Along with the fact that this deck plays very differently than any V or VMAX deck and thus offers more opportunities to do some cool/clutch plays.

This is a very budget-friendly deck as well, which you can easily build with very few PTCGO codes or in the future, PTCGL codes. Good luck if you decide to play this deck in the future and hopefully you run into plenty of Mew VMAX’s along the way!