Y’all Need to Stop Freaking Out About Celebi Ex in Pokemon TCG Pocket

When the Mythical Island mini expansion first dropped in Pokemon TCG Pocket, one particular deck list immediately emerged as the new, popular deck to play: the Celebi Ex/Serperior combo.

To be clear, when the Celebi Ex/Serperior gets going, it’s really scary. Your goal is to get Serperior online as quickly as possible so you can use its Jungle Totem ability to double the amount of Grass Energy you have on your Pokemon. This gives Celebi Ex a whole ton of coin flips to play around, basically guaranteeing that you’ll always be able to one-shot any Pokemon your enemy puts up. Barring, of course, freak incidents where your RNG is just absolute garbage, and you roll like 10 tails in a row.

With all that being said, however, we’ve just gotten through our first weekend of proper tournaments since the Mythical Island drop, and it’s become abundantly clear that Celebi Ex is not, in fact, the overpowered deck it’s been cracked up to be. On the contrary, it’s got about an overall 45% win rate against a whole variety of decks in the game. This includes old staples like Mewtwo Ex, as well as new emerging decks like Gyarados Ex, and other lists that run the new Tauros and Druddigon.

It’s also worth noting that even from the very beginning, it was clear that Celebi Ex had a ton of counters in Pokemon TCG Pocket. Alakazam could shut it down pretty easily, especially with Mythical Slab and Mew Ex helping to make it more consistent, and we also still had the budget Blaine decks and Arcanine Ex decks that could counter it immediately.

Anyway, the point is that Celebi Ex/Serperior is still a decent-ish deck list that can perform well when it high rolls. It’s just not that overpowered, broken deck that the community and content creators have made it out to be on release day. In fact, after looking at some of the tournament data from this past weekend, some of the breakout cards include surprising picks like Gyarados Ex. This is surprising because base Gyarados from Genetic Apex was considered borderline unplayable, resulting in its Ex version flying under the radar when Mythical Island first dropped.

When paired with the Greninja line and Druddigon, you can effectively buy yourself all the time you need to get Gyarados Ex set up. Druddigon has quickly risen up to be the best, most versatile card that’s come out of Mythical Island, effectively replacing Kangaskhan as the wall card you want to use in the early game. With Druddigon buying you time, you can build up Greninja and Gyarados Ex. You will, of course, also need Misty to give yourself some potential high rolls for a quick, early Energy boost.

Greninja and Druddigon can help with chip damage to bring your opponents down to crucial breakpoints, while Gyarados Ex serves as the big finisher to close out the match.

Gyarados Ex can also be paired with Starmie Ex and Vaporeon for a faster paced style of play. Starmie Ex is still excellent in the current meta game, as it’s able to move in out with its free retreat cost. Vaporeon also brings a lot to the table with Wash Out, which lets you move your Energy freely to the Active Pokemon. Again, you still need Misty for the high rolls, but it’s just another example of a top performing Water deck that could become a real menace in the coming days.

All of this is to say, as expected, the Pokemon TCG Pocket community was too quick to jump the shark on what was going to be meta in Mythical Island. We all thought Celebi Ex was going to be the meta breaker, when in reality, it’s just a dead onion cabbage thingy thing.

Pokemon TCG Pocket is now available on mobile devices.