Top GLC Meta Decks - Part 2

Welcome to Part 2 of my series on the top performing decks for each type in GLC! In Part 1 I went over the best deck for Colorless, Water, Fire, Grass, and Lightning. In Part 2 I’ll be covering the rest of the types, Psychic, Dark, Fighting, Fairy, Metal, and Dragon. The decks in this list aren’t in any particular order, so just because a deck is here in Part 2 or at the bottom of the list, that doesn’t necessarily mean anything about the strength of the deck overall.

Psychic: Lost Zone Psychic

List credit: Tzubi

Lost Zone Psychic is an incredibly powerful deck. Spreading 12 damage counters wherever you like every turn is no joke. Bursting Balloon, Spell Tag, and Horror Psychic Energy spread even more damage counters, allowing Sableye to pick apart the opponent’s board, taking multiple knockouts every turn. Getting to 10 cards in the lost zone is in some ways even easier than in Standard format, because in GLC you can play cards such as Lost Blender and VS Seeker to reuse Colress’s Experiment. Pokemon such as Chimecho can disrupt your opponent’s setup and sometimes win the game outright by locking ability decks out of all of their Pokemon. This deck can also use Marshadow like no other deck can, with the items and Pokestop it is very easy to consistently use and reuse Marshadow to spin the Let Loose wheel until your opponent gets stuck.

Lost Zone Psychic is one of the best decks in the format, but it is also one of the most difficult to play. This deck has a very high skill ceiling, playing Lost Zone in a singleton format is very difficult. Keep this deck on your radar, it is bound to show up and place very highly in tournaments when played by a very skilled player. It has seen a huge amount of success online and at local tournaments, Sableye is and will always be a powerhouse card.

Dark: Turbo Dark

List credit: PhoenixFire712

Turbo Dark is the fastest archetype in GLC in terms of how consistently it can take a knockout turn 1. With cards like Spiritomb, Frozen City, Hustle Belt, Alolan Meowth, and Hoopa, this deck is incredibly aggressive and able to hit for extremely high amounts of damage starting on the first turn of the game.

Turbo Dark has most of the best features of classic Dark and more. This deck does not play Galarian Weezing, but that’s because the one of the best forms of ability lock is just knocking out the Pokemon that would have used its ability the following turn.

Turbo Dark does very well in the current metagame and has seen a ton of online and IRL success with various players. It has good matchups into several of the most popular decks such as Psychic and Colorless due to Weavile and Zoroark both taking easy KOs in each of those matchups. Guzzlord is a powerhouse card as well, taking 2 prizes each attack with 150 HP makes it one of the gnarliest cards in all of GLC. This deck is easy to learn but difficult to master, managing resources correctly and maximizing the use of each attacker takes a ton of practice and deep knowledge of the deck list.

Fighting: Hitmonbros

List credit: AllAboutThatBaisch

Hitmonbros is a very strong and flexible deck with many outs to victory. Pulling off two Ultimate combos in one game can often be game winning. Machamp is an absolute unit with 300 HP, and can easily take multiple prizes by itself. If there’s ever a super large threat that you can’t get through with spread damage, Annihilape stays true to its name and can annihilate any threat on the board after 3-4 prizes are taken. Hitmonbros tends to be more consistent than most other fighting lists, which is what makes it so appealing.

Hitmonbros is an especially strong deck in the current metagame. Decks like Lost Zone Psychic and Turbo Dark have very low HP Pokemon and can easily die to an Ultimate Combo or two. Silent Lab can turn off Bench Barrier Mew while leaving Machoke in play to block return damage and damage counters. Archeops is also not a bad matchup for this deck either, Hitmonlee + Hitmonchan can take out Archeops on the bench, and Machamp can tank through fighting resistant attackers like Lugia and Aerodactyl.

Fairy: Turbo Fairy

List credit: Watto

Fairy has struggled to find relevance in the GLC meta until Watto’s Turbo Fairy list has put Fairy on the leaderboard. Fairy has a very limited cardpool and does not receive any new cards, but this is definitely the best Fairy list yet. Togekiss provides a huge amount of energy acceleration and can be reused with its Delta Evolution ancient trait and cards such as Devolution Spray. Clefable, Mimikyu, and Xerneas are some of the deck’s best attackers. Florges can make attacks even cheaper, so that you can stream attackers quite effectively. While Fairy still struggles to compete against some of the top S tier decks like Archeops, don’t underestimate the strength of this deck, it will catch you by surprise.

Metal: Metalzone

List credit: Plopal

Metalzone is one of the tankiest decks in the format. With cards like Cape of Toughness, Metal Core Barrier, and Charm of Courage you can make already giant Pokemon like Orthworm and Zamazenta even bigger! Metalzone is a very flexible deck, Magnezone allows you to attach any amount of metal energy to your Pokemon in any way you like! Mt Coronet, Klara, and Superior Energy Retrieval help you keep up a stream of attackers, and Mallow & Lana lets you heal attackers to keep them swinging. Metalzone tends to be more consistent than standard Copperajah builds because Magnezone lets you have a lot of flexibility with your attachments. Metalzone also has Revavroom, which is a perfect draw support Pokemon for this type of build. With so many energy cards and ways to recover energy, Revavroom can draw through the entire deck in just a couple turns.

Dragon: Fast Call

List credit: Energan

Dragon is a very difficult type to master, but very rewarding when you do. Dragon has some of the hardest hitting basic attackers in the format, almost all of its attackers hit for 160 damage. With Dragonite and Gabite as support Pokemon, you can set up all of your attackers and search for any supporter card every turn! Dragon really relies on using Raihan and Double Dragon Energy to keep its attackers going with all of their various energy costs. Fast Call is a classic Dragon list that has been around since the beginning of GLC, there have not been many changes to the archetype for a while due to no new Dragons being printed in recent sets. Dragon has struggled a bit recently in online tournaments due to its limited card pool, but it’s still a great deck in the right hands.

That’s about it for Part 2! This list isn’t a comprehensive list of what’s playable in GLC and what’s not, decks like Psychic, Dark, and Fighting have several different tournament winning archetypes I could have showcased. If you want to read some in-depth articles on these decks, most of these lists have articles here on cardboardwarriors.net with more information about how these archetypes work. Thanks for reading!