Inteleon VMAX - The Elegant Sniper!

The new Rapid Strike Inteleon VMAX from the Fusion Strike set is a card I’ve been excited about for a while now, and I am happy we will finally have it in our standard format. In this article, I’ll discuss why this card is excellent and interesting and offer one of my deck lists I have built focused around this exciting new Vmax. If you need any cards to build this pokemon deck or any other pokemon online decks, you are on the right spot! Po Town has a large selection of PTCGO codes, and you can get them emailed to you very quickly! That being said, let’s learn more about the Rapid Strike Inteleon VMAX deck!

This Inteleon VMAX has pretty typical base stats: 320 HP, weakness to lightning, 2 retreat cost. In addition to this, remember it has the Rapid Strike emblem! It has 1 ability and 1 attack, both of which are very good.

Double Gunner, the ability, allows you to discard water energy from your hand to put 2 damage counters on 2 of your opponent's benched Pokemon. If you have multiple Inteleon VMAX in play, you can use each of their abilities, and it doesn’t have to be active to use the ability. This can be used to set up Pokémon to be knocked out, later on, clean up damaged Pokémon, or “ping” down small Pokémon like Sobbles and Galarian Zigzagoons. Keep in mind this can be combined with Inteleon (CRE)’s Quick Shooting ability as well to rain down upwards of 10 or more damage counters on your opponent's bench each turn.

Inteleon’s single attack is G-Max Spiral, which costs Water+Colorless and can be fulfilled by rapid strike energy. The attack does 70 damage plus another 70 if you return energy attached to this Pokémon to your hand. This ends up being less of an additional cost and more of a bonus so that the energy is safe in your hand away from Fan of Waves and Hammers, and you can also freely Cheryl the Inteleon on the following turn before attaching the energy back down.

This Pokémon can be the focus of a deck or a partner. I think two obvious partners for it are Rapid Strike Urshifu VMAX and Inteleon VMAX (RCL), but in my current favorite list, it is the spotlight of the deck.

A common mistake I expect to see in pokemon online decks built around the new Inteleon VMAX is too much water energy. The ability on Inteleon VMAX is fantastic, and we will certainly be using it often, but you don’t need more than a handful of water energy in your deck for it. I would want to play 3 or 4 stadiums in the deck anyway since we want to be able to remove Path to The Peak, and Capacious Bucket and Energy Retrieval are both searchable by Drizzile/Inteleon and get 2 energy, so they are more valuable than just adding 1 more actual energy in their spot. With 4 basic water energy, 2 energy retrievals, and 3 training court, if each training court stays out for a single turn, you could use a maximum of 11 Double Gunner abilities over the course of a game; that would be 440 damage worth of counters placed on the opponent’s bench… so I think we have quite enough resources for Double Gunner!

My game plan for this deck is to use a couple of Double Gunners, Cheryl damage off of Inteleon, attach Rapid Strike Energy, and use GMAX Spiral for 140 - rinse and repeat. I am playing 2 Escape Rope since Double Gunner can only hit benched Pokemon, so we sometimes want to send the opponent’s active Pokemon to their bench.

Basculin from Fusion Strike is also a Rapid Strike Pokemon and has an incredible attack: for water and colorless (or rapid strike energy), it does 30 + 10 more damage for each damage counter already on the defending Pokemon. So if Inteleon hit for 140 on the previous turn, Basculin can deal 170 next turn for a single attachment.

This deck’s biggest enemies are going to be anything that can one-shot it like Single Strike Urshifu VMAX, Jolteon VMAX due to weakness, and Marnie. Let's talk about how you can circumvent these weaknesses.

Single Strike Urshifu VMAX can reach 330 Damage with 3 Single Strike Energies attached to it, which would knock out Inteleon VMAX in one shot. We can circumvent this in two ways: remove their energy or increase our HP. Fan of Waves could fit into our deck since it's very searchable with the Drizzile engine plus Octillery, but putting their energy to the bottom of the deck won’t always matter if they have enough Houndooms on the board. We could play Big Charm to increase our HP so they would need all 4 single strike energy attached which would be much harder for them, but they could get around it with a Tool Scrapper or Tool Jammer. I think it might just be fine to let the first Inteleon VMAX get one shot and hope they can’t do it twice in one game, but these options exist.

Jolteon VMAX can be countered by adding Rapid Strike Urshifu V into your deck, with or without the VMAX. I’d suggest either 1 Urshifu V and 1 Raihan or 1 Urshifu V and 1 Urshifu VMAX. 150 damage one-shots Jolteon VMAX due to weakness so an attack from either V or VMAX will do.

Marnie is the harder one to prepare for. The best answer is Milotic from EVS with the Ability: Dew Guard - Whenever your opponent plays a Supporter card from their hand, prevent all effects of that card done to you or your hand. This is stage 1 and a lot of decks will snipe it or its pre-evolution prior to it getting much use, so I am not confident in its value.

I hope you enjoyed my analysis on one of the coolest cards from the new Fusion Strike set! Like I said before if you need any PTCGO codes to build this deck or any other pokemon online decks you are on the right spot! Po Town has a large selection of PTCGO codes and you can get them emailed to you very quickly! See you next time here on the Potown Store Blog!