Hello everyone! This is Elena from Gaia Storm TCG and welcome to another article at CCG Castle. It’s been a while since I last talked about the Expanded format and being it such an interesting environment, I think it is already time for us to see what the decks looks like now there.  For those of you that might be a bit unfamiliar with Expanded, it is basically this official but rarely played format where every card from Black and White onwards is legal. As you can imagine, such a large cardpool means that everything is possible and, sometimes, unforeseen strategies get out of hands. In fact, Expanded has more than 20 banned cards as of now, most of them having to do with unfair hand disruption or powerful locks. The most recent ones to get banned where Milotic, Oranguru, Sableye and Shaymin EX.

One of the most incredible aspects of Expanded is that every single strategy you can think of is great and much more powerful than their Standard versions. For example, let’s take some typical decks from our current format: ADP Zacian, Pikachu Zekrom Tag Team and Mad Party. You thought they were good? The thing is that in Expanded you can take them to the next level. ADP Zacian can Altered Creation in the first turn thanks to Double Dragon Energy; Pikachu Zekrom has access to easy T1 Tag Bolt with Max Elixir and Mad Party sets up tons of damage with Battle Compressor. Every strategy is better supported at Expanded, that is my point. And the funniest part is that you never know what you are going to be facing.

It’s difficult to effectively cover all available options in this format but I will try giving you a high level overview of the different decks by using the well-known dichotomy between Aggro and Control. To start with the later, one of the most popular strategies in Expanded are control & lock decks. They basically focus on stopping the opponent from playing while taking resources away. For instance, one of the most popular control decks is Hoopa & Friends. This types of decks run different “walls” that prevent the damage from specific types of cards, so depending on the situation you promote one or another with the objective of stalling your opponents. Then, you use all sort of energy disruption cards until you reach a point where you opponent has no energy left and consequently loses the game. In fact, this sort of decks are a bit weaker now than what they used to be because of the recent ban of Sableye from Dark Explorers but they are still incredible effective nonetheless. In the same way, lock decks aim to create a complicated situation from the early turns of the game and “trap” you opponent into a position they can’t move. Examples of this type of locks are Bunnelby Cinccino, Raichu Lock (that can deal infinite paralysis) or Exeggutor Vileplume that shuts down item cards from the beginning.

In the more aggressive side, you can find strategies like the already mentioned Pikachu Zekrom Tag Team, Dark Box (which can be run with ADP sometimes), Centiskorch VMAX, Zacian V Turbo and Mad Party. All of them are capable of attacking turn 1 for massive amounts of damage and focus on running lots of accelerating cards, not to mention that they can usually abuse Crobat and Dedenne engines. There are of course other decks more “in between” these two styles of playing, like Mew & Mewtwo Tag Team, Ultra Necrozma Garbodor, Giratina Garchomp or Coalossal VMAX.  
So, in conclusion, I consider Expanded to be the perfect environment for getting back all the excitement about the Pokémon TCG considering that our current Standard format has kind of stayed the same even with the new set releases. And contrary to what you might think, there are some very cheap options to start playing like Ultra Necrozma Garbodor. So try it out but, remember, be prepare to deal with the unexpected!