Ranked season has begun and Darkrai is everywhere. Amongst all other kinds of combinations, Giratina Darkrai has taken the meta by storm, many believe it to be the best deck in the game. If you wanna climb you have to be prepared for this matchup, and while certain fighting decks are a known counter to this particular strategy, in my experience they fall short in many other matchups. Today I’m going to share an off meta deck that will provide you with an advantage against Darkrai, while having the ability to bully other tactics as well. I’m going to talk about the dark horse of this expansion, a pokemon that is actually incredibly good, yet nobody is talking about it.

Meet Tinkaton. For 3 energy, her Terrific Thumping attack leads to a coinflip, if tails you will deal 80 damage, if heads we double that to 160. This seems like a purely RNG based attack that will ultimately prove to be unreliable. Initially I rated this as the worst EX of this expansion. Boy was I wrong. While Tinkaton seems unimpressive at first glance, her typing and stats shape her up to be an absolute threat. The key thing here is her HP stat of 170. This bulk means the vast majority of the time Tinkaton is going to be able to attack at least twice. Back to back Terrific Thumpings will net you with a 75% chance to flip heads in one of them. And 160 damage means almost every single meta relevant EX Pokemon will meet their end.

Your initial idea may be to combine Tinkaton with Dialga, but this is the wrong approach. Tinkaton is a stage 2 evolution, meaning ramping energy on to her is nowhere near as efficient as it is to ramp onto a basic heavy hitter such as Arceus. As enabling Tinkaton is going to take some time, given you have to find all 3 evolution pieces. Tinkaton excels with a partner that can apply pressure from the get go, score a point early so that all Tinkaton has to do is knock out one EX pokemon in order to win the game. Fortunately for Tinkaton, she is a steel type. Meaning she gets to pair with the best non-EX Basic Pokemon in the game.

Today’s deck is a steel type midrange powerhouse. We lead off with Skarmory, 2 hit KO pokemon such as Druddigon and then send in Tinkaton to end them. It’s a simple tactic really, but you’ll be shocked by how downright effective it is.

Due to the fact that we run Skarmory, we have a full set of both Giant Cape and Rocky Helmet. This leaves us with few slots for supporter cards. For our 2 remaining slots we run 1 copy of Pokemon Center Lady and Cyrus. Pokemon Center Lady plays super well into the Darkrai meta, healing us for 30 makes up for 2 Nightmare Aura pings, allowing us to extend our pokemon’s durability and net more value from our tools placed onto them.

This deck absolutely dominated the ladder for me, once Skarmory nets us that first point, Tinkaton’s presence will be immediately felt. As no EX Pokemon she encounters will be safe.