The new Ekans is definitely an upgrade. Poison Sting deals no damage, but will leave its target poisoned instead. Going second, old Ekans into Arbok led to 80 damage from 2 attacks and 140 from 3. After promo Ekans attacks, if the opposing pokemon doesn’t immediately retreat, Arbok will come in and trap it, and with simple math we can see a considerable upscale in damage. 100 total damage on the second attack and 180 from the third. This means even with healing in the mix: Darkrai and non psychic deck Giratina leads will succumb to an Arbok opener going second before they get to fire off a single attack. Pokemon Center Lady may counter this kind of scenario, but all in all Arbok is more menacing than he’s ever been, so I wanted to design the most competitive version of an Arbok list.

Today’s deck combines Arbok with… yes. Magnezone. Many of you are probably wondering why I decided against the good old Weezing combination. While this duo was indeed an excellent Tier 2 deck in the past, things have changed. The metagame is beefier and hits harder than it did back in the Genetic Apex days. While Arboks ability is extremely powerful, its damage output is underwhelming. Pairing Arbok with Magnezone allows us to lock down our opponent’s EX threat and follow up with a powerful attack that builds up on its own, which is very important considering Arbok is a 2 energy attacker. Corner into Thunder Blast leads to a total of 170 damage, which is an ideal number to hit in this metagame.

In order to make use of Arbok’s trapping attack, we run a full set of Sabrina. This allows us to hunt down a pokemon with little to no energy investment in the back, and take it down before it gets to strike back. In order to pivot into an Arbok lead and preserve our energy as we swap out to Magnezone later, we run a full set of X Speed. Iono helps us mulligan our hand to find Arbok and Magneton early, while Red gives us that extra boost to date down those damn fat EX Basics.

As of now, this is THE BEST way to play Arbok in Pokemon Pocket. Ekans poisons, Arbok traps and Magnezone Zaps.