Wugtrio is easily one of my favourite cards out of the latest expansion. Meet the new Dragonite. With 140 HP, Pop Out Throughout deals a total of 150 damage spread out randomly across your opponent’s board. For just 3 energy, this ridiculous damage output is balanced by the fact that you don’t decide what to hit. Results vary from absolute perfection to pure disappointment. show clip here

While Dragonite hits 4 times, Wugtrio is a stage 1 evolution that gets to attack earlier, and doesn’t need 2 different sources of energy. It’s just a massive upgrade, really. So how do we make this pokemon downright disgusting? Apart from its physical appearance I mean. Due to the nature of its attack, the first thought that came to mind is…

What if we could make Wugtrio attack by turn 2?

Ramping is always strong, but with a pokemon of this nature, accelerating Pop Out Throughout allows us to navigate around the attacks downside. The earlier it is in the match the more likely our opponent has not fully developed their bench, meaning our 150 damage swing will more likely net us an early KO, potentially on the pokemon they’re building up. Ramping into Wugtrio EX is quite simply a terrifying idea, and I designed a deck that can do so consistently.

Today’s deck is one of my most proud creations so far. We establish an early game ramp engine that allows us to Pop Out Throughout by turn 2. The key here is the following 3 cards. Manaphy, Shaymin and Dawn. With Manaphy we can ramp energy onto 2 of our benched pokemon, we can then Dawn one of the spread out energies onto Wiglett, evolve into Wugtrio and fire away. Shaymin is what glues this combo together. Its Sky Support ability allows us to retreat basic pokemon for 1 less energy. Our entire Pokemon lineup has a retreat cost of 1. Which means barring an evolved Wugtrio, we can retreat every single pokemon in our deck for free. This is amazing with Manaphy for 2 reasons. First of all we can easily correct our opener and more consistently Oceanic Gift on our first attack. Second of all, we can later retreat Manaphy for free, preserving its energy so that we can rally it over with Dawn, without having to give away energy placed onto our backup attacker.

Articuno is our sixth basic pokemon, having a retreat cost of one, he blends perfectly into this deck. Providing us with a non-EX basic 3 energy attacker that can potentially single handedly save us from seemingly unwinnable situations.

This deck is both absurdly fun and powerful. I began my ranked climb with it and it carried me all the way up to Great Ball rank in just 1 day.