Clodsire EX is probably the most requested pokemon here. With 160 HP, its Venoshock attack will deal 60 damage initially, unless the target is poisoned, in which case we’ll be dealing 120 damage instead. For just 2 energy. Comparing Clodsire to Scolipede, we have 20 more HP and while Clodsire is an EX Pokemon, it's a stage 1 evolution, making him significantly easier to complete. Overall Clodsire seems like a significant upgrade for poison decks. So then…

Why is Clodsire’s playrate so low in ranked?

There are 2 main reasons. First of all, Arceus is unfortunately still a thing, his immunity to special conditions has had a negative impact on poison based strategies as a whole. Second of all, despite all of Clodsire’s benefits over Scolipede, there’s a critical downside to him. His retreat cost of 3. This means pairing Clodsire with Weezing can be quite clunky, as we cannot pivot him around as effortlessly as we could with Scolipede, since Leaf will still require us to discard one energy. This is why Clodsire’s ideal partner seems to be the new poisoner, Grafaiai. Grafaiai has the amazing ability to poison from within the bench, unfortunately its effectiveness is dependent on the coin. If you flip tails, nothing happens. This fundamentally makes Clodsire’s damage output RNG dependent.

Don’t get me wrong, Clodsire is still a very strong pokemon, in order to fight against bad RNG, I designed a deck that is consistently able to find all pieces, and enable 2 Grafaiais.

Today’s deck is what I believe to be the best way to play Clodsire. We run 2 stage 1 evolutions and nothing else, while the rest of the deck is built to find them, and hunt down weakened enemies who attempt to retreat to the bench. 1 copy of Pokemon Communication and a full set of Iono allow us to combat bricks, the earlier we evolve Grafaiai, the more chances we’ll have for our Poison Coating to succeed.

A full set of Cyrus allows us to consistently hunt down pokemon we’ve poisoned prior, so that we can poison them again so that our Venoshock ends them.

I love playing poison decks, and Clodsire is definitely the strongest addition to the archetype to date.