By Natalie Millar, contributing writer
The Pokémon Trading Card Game: Scarlet & Violet—Paradox Rift expansion is here, and Pokémon from both the past and future are making waves in the Pokémon TCG world. Both decks in the finals of the Latin America International Championships heavily featured Paradox Pokémon, with Iron Hands ex in Juho Kallama’s winning deck and Iron Valiant ex in Noah Sawyer’s finalist list. I’ll focus on Noah Sawyer’s deck today, which featured Iron Valiant ex and Entei V!
Iron Valiant ex/Entei V Main Strategy
Decks that use Abilities to place damage counters on the opponent’s Pokémon have always been at the top tables of big tournaments. Iron Valiant ex is a new addition in the long history of this kind of deck. However, Iron Valiant ex’s Tachyon Bits Ability is unlike anything we have seen in the Pokémon TCG.
Abilities that do damage during your turn tend to be heavily restricted: they’re usually limited to either being used when the Pokémon comes into play or to Stage 2 Pokémon. Tachyon Bits is something new: it places two damage counters on one of your opponent’s Pokémon whenever Iron Valiant ex comes into the Active Spot during your turn. Crucially, Tachyon Bits doesn’t work when you promote it after your Active Pokémon gets Knocked Out. This requires you to fill your deck with a ton of switching cards, and players often include four Switch, four Switch Cart, and four Escape Rope.
When Iron Valiant ex was first revealed, many players immediately looked to pair it with Rapid Strike Urshifu VMAX. This creates a deck similar to Rapid Strike Urshifu VMAX/Inteleon VMAX, which is focused on spreading damage counters around and Knocking Out small Basic Pokémon very quickly. Playing with Rapid Strike Urshifu lets you play with another Rapid Strike Pokémon, Medicham V. Its Yoga Loop attack works well with Tachyon Bits, as you can easily put opposing Pokémon in range of a Yoga Loop and take an extra turn! This lets you get more value from your Rapid Strike Energy since you can use it to fulfill the requirements of both G-Max Rapid Flow and Yoga Loop. However, the biggest issue I had with the Iron Valiant ex and Rapid Strike Urshifu VMAX pairing was struggling to Knock Out any Pokémon with high HP.
With that pairing, the most amount of damage you could do with a single attack was 150 with Rapid Strike Urshifu VMAX’s Gale Thrust. While you could increase that damage slightly with Tachyon Bits, it was still never enough when facing down a Charizard ex with 330 HP or a Gardevoir ex with 310 HP. This could be mitigated by playing Radiant Charizard and four Luminous Energy. Playing Luminous Energy over Fighting Energy was never really a problem, as Rapid Strike Energy always covered your attack costs. However, playing Rapid Strike Urshifu VMAX also came with a downside—you had to find an Evolution Pokémon to use some of the best attacks in your deck.
With these problems, many keen-eyed players online switched from using Rapid Strike Urshifu VMAX with Iron Valiant ex to pairing it with Entei V. Since Entei V is a Basic Pokémon, it lets you cut Ultra Ball completely and fully streamline your deck with just Nest Ball and Battle VIP Pass. Entei V’s Fleet-Footed Ability also lets you cash in your switching cards for extra draws if you don’t need the extra uses of Tachyon Bits. You might wonder why we’re including Entei V over a different Basic attacker, and there are two main reasons.
The first one is that we can power up our Entei V with Magma Basin. Magma Basin is a fantastic Stadium card that has unfortunately not seen much play thanks to a lack of powerful Fire-type Pokémon. Magma Basin lets you power up your Entei V for a Burning Rondo as early as the first turn, since it attaches Fire Energy from your discard pile to your Benched Fire Pokémon. Better yet, it does this while being a Stadium card, which effectively bumps problematic Stadiums like Path to the Peak! While Iron Valiant ex and Entei V don’t seem to have much synergy together, Entei V is a very efficient attacker and covers Iron Valiant ex’s weaknesses very well. That said, let’s get into the deck list.
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Iron Valiant ex
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5Fire Energy
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3Double Turbo Energy
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4Professor’s Research (Professor Sada)
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2Boss’s Orders (Ghetsis)
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2Colress’s Experiment
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2Iono
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4Magma Basin
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4Battle VIP Pass
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4Escape Rope
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4Switch
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4Switch Cart
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3Nest Ball
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2Earthen Vessel
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2Forest Seal Stone
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2Future Booster Energy Capsule
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1Lost Vacuum
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1Technical Machine: Devolution
The Pokémon
The Pokémon line in this deck is relatively simple. You want a lot of Basic Pokémon to fuel Burning Rondo, so four Iron Valiant ex and four Entei V are natural inclusions. You also want to start with Entei V because you can get the free use of its Ability, Fleet-Footed; so I wouldn’t include fewer than four. We still carry over the Medicham V from playing this deck with Rapid Strike Urshifu, and power it up with Double Turbo Energy. Double Turbo Energy works well in this deck because we can still use it to retreat Iron Valiant ex as well as power up a Burning Rondo or an early Combustion Blast. Finally, we also have a Squawkabilly ex. Having access to its Squawk and Seize Ability is important to help draw cards early on, since you often have an explosive first turn involving multiple uses of Tachyon Bits and a Burning Rondo. Radiant Charizard is also an important part of this deck. You have no other single Prize Pokémon, so if you can force your opponent to take a Knock Out on Radiant Charizard at any point, then that Prize card will likely not be relevant, since they will always have to Knock Out three of your Multi-Prize Pokémon to win the game.
Trainer Cards
The Supporter line for this deck is very simple. This deck has almost no draw engine like Kirlia’s Refinement or Comfey’s Flower Selecting, so including four Professor’s Research is a must. The next Supporters are two Colress’s Experiment, two Iono, and two Boss’s Orders. Iono is a very strong card in this deck, as early on it functions as essentially a fifth and sixth copy of Professor’s Research. It does have the slight downside of not being able to discard Fire Energy for Magma Basin, but drawing six cards is still worthwhile. However, Iono’s real strength is in the late game, when you can reduce your opponent’s hand to two cards and attack with a Radiant Charizard. This forces your opponent to immediately draw into a Boss’s Orders or Escape Rope, something that is difficult to do after an Iono to two. While including four Iono would be nice, this deck is fairly weak to Iono itself, and drawing an Iono off a two-card hand is often not great. This is where Colress’s Experiment comes in. Colress’s Experiment functions as an extra draw Supporter for any point in the game. It’s not as good as playing Iono and drawing six cards, but it’s much better than playing an Iono and drawing two cards late in the game. Colress’s Experiment can also have solid applications throughout the game because it lets you keep the cards you already have in your hand. A common situation while playing with Iron Valiant ex is having loads of switching cards in your hand, but no Iron Valiant ex cards in play to use Tachyon Bits. Colress’s Experiment can find those Iron Valiant ex cards while letting you keep your switching cards, making it a worthy inclusion.
Boss’s Orders is a necessary inclusion in almost any deck, and Iron Valiant ex/Entei V is no exception. Bringing up opposing Benched Pokémon is very important, so it makes sense to have it as an option. Four Battle VIP Pass and three Nest Balls find us the Pokémon we need throughout the game, and similarly, Earthen Vessel finds us Fire Energy, on top of being an out to discard Fire Energy for Magma Basin. We don’t naturally have a VSTAR Power, so Forest Seal Stone is perfect for finding any card you need. Future Booster Energy Capsule is a nice card to have in this deck as well, giving your Iron Valiant ex free retreat acts as multiple switching cards throughout the game. However, drawing into multiple copies of Future Booster Energy Capsule isn’t great as you can’t retreat more than once in a turn, so two copies makes more sense.
The last few Trainer slots in this deck are for more tricky cards: Lost Vacuum and Technical Machine: Devolution. Lost Vacuum was initially added as a fifth card to bump Path to the Peak, as this deck heavily relies on Abilities like Tachyon Bits, Fleet-Footed, and Excited Heart, but it also has extra uses in removing both Bravery Charm and opposing Forest Seal Stones. While in most cases Star Alchemy will get used immediately, smart opponents will wait and save their Ability to guarantee they find what they need off an opposing Iono, so having Lost Vacuum to disrupt that is very important. Technical Machine: Devolution is good to have for Charizard ex and Chien Pao ex/Baxcalibur decks. Normally, it is very difficult to deal with a Charizard ex. After all, 330 HP is gigantic and often requires two Burning Rondos and a couple of Tachyon Bits to deal with. However, you can slowly work on multiple Charizard ex cards at once, then use Devolution to Knock Out all of them! This gets even easier if your opponent uses Rare Candy to evolve into their Charizard ex since you only need to use four Tachyon Bits on it to Knock Out the Charmander by devolving it! Technical Machine: Devolution is also necessary to defeat Chien Pao ex/Baxcalibur, as 160 HP on a Baxcalibur is often too much for you to Tachyon Bits your way through.
Tips and Tricks
This deck has a ton of little tricks you can use for different situations. Thanks to the amount of control Tachyon Bits allows over damage, there are multiple interesting lines you can take. Most of these involve not taking Knock Outs on your opponent's Pokémon. Normally you’d want to Knock Out your opponent’s attacker—they just set it up and attached a bunch of Energy to it, after all. However, there are several reasons why you might not want to take a Knock Out. The main one is if you’re up against Charizard ex, since you can force its Burning Darkness attack to do a maximum of 180 damage. Attacking your opponent’s Pokémon without KO’ing them also doesn’t mean that you’ve wasted your attack since you can always finish it off with either Tachyon Bits or a Yoga Loop to buy the turn back later.
You can also avoid taking Knock Outs to play around Iono or Roxanne. If you are playing against Lost Zone Giratina VSTAR decks, keeping yourself at above three Prize cards is the key to victory—prevent them from playing Roxanne. Even drawing extra cards off an Iono is important, as this deck does struggle with running out of Supporter cards sometimes. You can even make creative plays against Miraidon ex decks by hitting their Active Miraidon ex for 200 damage if it just used Photon Blaster, trapping it in the Active Spot since Photon Blaster prevents it from attacking on the next turn. This line against Miraidon ex works even better if you manage to use Switch Cart to heal the damage on Entei V, since Miraidon ex usually does a maximum of 220 damage. You can use Switch Cart to heal like this against any deck that struggles to do 230 damage, like Roaring Moon ex or Charizard ex when you have taken one Prize card.
One other strategy you can try is attacking with Radiant Charizard ahead of schedule. With one use of Magma Basin and a Double Turbo Energy attached, you are using Combustion Blast for 230 damage when your opponent has only taken two Prize cards! This is very strong against Miraidon ex and the mirror match since both decks want to take two Prize cards every single turn. Forcing them to play Escape Rope or Boss’s Orders every turn is a good line to go for, especially when combined with Iono.
I have found playing this deck to be very interesting since you tend to break a lot of principles that are ingrained in the Pokémon TCG. It is a habit for most players to just opt to go first. However, with Iron Valiant ex, that decision isn’t as fixed. There are several matchups where it is more advantageous to go second, as you can get the first attack against decks like Miraidon ex or opposing Iron Valiant ex decks. I would even consider opting to go second if you win the opening coin flip. You only really want to go first against Gardevoir ex decks.
Another principle that this deck breaks is that you always promote a Pokémon with a free Retreat Cost. When your Active Pokémon gets Knocked Out and you have an Iron Valiant ex with a Future Booster Energy Capsule attached to it on your Bench, it is often correct to promote an Entei V instead. This is because you can use its Fleet-Footed Ability, switch into that Iron Valiant ex with the Future Booster Energy Capsule attached to use Tachyon Bits, and then finally retreat into the Entei V you want to attack with and get an extra use of Fleet-Footed. This only works if you need to use Tachyon Bits that turn, but it’s a way to use an extra Fleet-Footed Ability. These add up throughout a game and allow you to draw several extra cards.
Iron Valiant ex provides a gameplay experience unlike any Pokémon deck I have ever played. Damage counters fly everywhere, and you take extra turns left and right. You sometimes draw 13 cards on your first turn with Professor’s Research and Squawkabilly ex’s Squawk and Seize Ability. Iron Valiant ex/Entei V came second at LAIC and has had a smattering of placements at Brisbane and Gdansk Regionals. I hope this article has ignited your interest in this deck. Good luck and I hope you give it a go!
For more Pokémon TCG strategy and analysis, keep checking Pokemon.com/Strategy.
Natalie has been playing Pokémon casually since late 2013 but started attending more competitive tournaments in late 2017. She won the first Regional Championships after the pandemic in her home city of Brisbane, Australia, and has been attending most major tournaments since. Outside of Pokémon, she studied psychology, but it doesn’t help with reading opponents as much as you would think. You can find her at most major tournaments and can follow her on X at @nataliem9999.
