Pokémon TCG Pocket: Best deck for the Blastoise Drop event

Use these decks to make quick work of the Blastoise Drop event

The Pokémon Company

Pokémon TCG Pocket’s got a new solo battle event to celebrate the new year, this time focused on Blastoise and other Water-type cards. Water-type cards aren’t particularly threatening for the most part – they’re a bit too reliant on Misty to be reliably frustrating – but a lucky coin flip could ruin a deck that isn’t quite set up for it. 

Thankfully, there are some obvious answers for dealing with the Pokémon TCG Pocket Blastoise Drop event, and while no deck is going to be perfect for taking down Blastoise and his bubble-tossing buddies, we do have a few options. In this guide we’ll go over the best decks for the Blastoise Drop event in Pokémon TCG Pocket, including the best deck for all levels of difficulty in the event and the best low-rarity deck for the missions. 

Pokémon TCG Pocket Blastoise event: Best Lightning deck 

The best Lightning deck for the Blastoise event in TCG Pocket is also one of the best meta decks in TCG Pocket right now: the Pikachu ex deck. Here’s the full decklist: 

• 2x Pikachu ex
• 2x Blitzle
• 1x Zebstrika
• 2x Voltorb
• 1x Electrode
• 2x Zapdos ex
• 2x Poké Ball
• 2x Professor’s Research
• 1x Sabrina
• 1x Giovanni
• 2x X Speed
• 2x Potion

This deck is all about getting in, dealing damage, and getting the win before your AI opponent can set up properly. Pikachu ex is far from the hardest hitter in the game, but it’s a basic card with a low energy cost that does more damage based on the amount of Lightning-type cards on the bench. Setting up this card takes two turns at the most, and you’re dealing 90 damage – 110 with the weakness boost – which is enough to two-shot any of the boss cards in any of this event’s decks. The rest of the cards here are for backup, just in case your opponent gets a lucky Misty that results in a one-shot for your Pikachu ex. 

The drawback of this deck is twofold — the first is that Lightning-type cards are generally quite frail, and the second is that the autobattle AI is dreadful. Lightning cards being frail means that Pikachu ex and Zapdos ex aren’t really built for the long-game. If you’re on the field long enough for your opponent to set up more than one boss card, you’ve probably already lost and should scoop. The autobattle AI is a more frustrating drawback, as this deck in particular needs energy placed in specific places, and the AI seems to want to distribute it evenly for some reason. You’ll still win an autobattle more often than not, but we’d recommend looking away while it does its thing, or keep a close eye on it and jump in if you see a win condition. 

Pokémon TCG Pocket Blastoise event: Best low-rarity Lightning deck 

Like other Drop events, the Blastoise event has missions at the Advanced and Expert levels that reward you for defeating their decks using only cards of ♢♢♢ rarity or below. This means excluding ex cards from your deck, which can be devastating, especially when Misty rewards your opponent with a bountiful set of flips. 

You’ve got a few options here, depending on how you want to play it. The first is to use the Lt. Surge Rental Deck from the Genetic Apex set. It’s not a phenomenal deck, but the autobattle AI knows how to use it mostly effectively, and as long as you don’t face the wrath of Misty, you should be able to scrape a win. 

The other option is to use a Raichu deck, for which we’ve put together a decklist: 

• 2x Pikachu (Mythical Island) 
• 2x Raichu (Genetic Apex) 
• 2x Magnemite
• 2x Magneton
• 2x Poké Ball
• 2x Professor’s Research
• 2x Lt. Surge
• 1x Sabrina
• 1x Giovanni
• 2x X Speed
• 2x Potion

This deck essentially uses Genetic Apex’s Raichu as a pseudo-ex card, since it’s capable of dealing 140 damage in a single hit, at the cost of discarding all energy on the card. This deck will have you set up two Magneton on the bench, each capable of generating an energy for itself each turn. With Raichu in the active spot with enough energy, you can fire off a big Thunderbolt to knock out any given boss card, which will discard all energy from the Raichu. From there, you can pop a Lt. Surge to move energy from the Magneton to the Raichu, letting you fire off another big hit, which should be more than enough to win you the game. 

It’s worth noting that this is the Genetic Apex version of Raichu rather than the Mythical Island version, which is much less powerful. We’ve also gone with the Mythical Island version of Pikachu, which is a little bit more useful and can deal a bit more early-game damage.