Greetings

Greetings, fellow poké-maniacs, Justin here. I've just been looking over the TR set and I've been wondering. . .are the rockets going to soften wigglytuff decks? Let's have a look at some of the attributes of the Wigglytuff Deck:

The Strategy: Stall for time with Jigglypuff, utilize Challenge! and other various bench-building strategies, then load up for do the wave and supposedly not have to worry about losing against psychic decks in particular. . .

The Boss's Way (The Solution): The addition of Dark Golduck to the current card sets is going to be a problem to all those people who think that psychic is dead to colorless pokemon. With Super Psy (The same as base-set kadabra's) and average HP, it's fits in quite nicely in a psychic deck. But about the bench-building. . .although it's pretty unlikely for people to use this card, Dark Machamp could quickly be the end to Wigglytuff decks. You could probably devise an Anti-Wiggly deck with Dark Machamp as the star poke, and SER and ER as the star trainers. Run their energy supply dry, gust their benched pokes out, and fling them back where they belong.

The Pokemon: Wigglytuff, DUH! Along with an assortment of weak and useless pokemon that just sit on the bench and do nothing while a Jiggly Lullabys and Pounds or a Wiggly Lullabys and Does the Wave.

The Boss's Way (The Solution): Whenever I play Wiggly decks, the players always seem to forget to charge up their benched pokemon. That's the big problem. I don't know why, but Snorlax and other high-retreat pokemon quite often pop up in wigglytuff decks, maybe to stall for time, I don't know. A Gust of Wind or bench-damaging attacks are the main loophole. There are plenty of Rocket Pokes you can use, still. Try combining Gust of Wind with a Dark Dugtrio or Dark Muk (the latter, preferably) active for a nasty effect. What about Dark Arbok, though? Usually, I see plenty of pokemon on the bench with 80-90 HP. Let's pretend you're fighting your friend, Rick. Rick's got a Wigglytuff active (fully powered for do the wave, of course), and he has 3 Kangaskhans and 2 Snorlaxes benched. With some ERs or SERs, a fully-powered Dark Arbok, and time, you could knock out the Wigglytuff, and when Rick sends out one of his pokes, with another poison spray, you could knock out the rest of his pokemon. Not bad, huh?

The Boss's Way (The Solution): Not much of a problem here, but if you're playing someone who's been known to be uncanny with his trainer useage, Dark Vileplume can take care of it. Usually, though, they have such a useless assortment of card-drawing trainers like Bill, Prof. Oak, etc., that they'll just deck themselves anyway.