Beedrill EX ended up being one of the cards I overrated the most out of Shining Revelry. With 170 HP, crushing spear deals 80 damage for 2 energy, while also discarding a random energy from its target. On paper, this card looks amazing, until you realize the flaws within its design. Discarding an energy from the opponent’s active pokemon is a very powerful effect for an attack to have, but there is a time limit for it to accomplish true disruption. What do I mean by this? In a pokemon pocket game there are 2 types of pokemon on the board, those who are activated and those who are not. Every attack has an energy requirement, once a pokemon card has accumulated the final energy needed to enable said attack, this pokemon is what I refer to as activated. An example might help here. Let’s say Darkrai has accumulated 3 energy, this means it can unleash it Dark Prism attack, if Beedrill were to attack Darkrai in this state, making him lose one energy won’t be enough to prevent him from attacking next turn, as the player can just place another energy back onto him.

Pokemon that have been already activated don’t suffer much from Beedrills effect, the only upside here is you prevent the opponent from using said energy for building up something else in the bench. If Darkrai were to have 2 energy on it instead, Beedrills Crushing Spear will effectively lock Darkrai out from being activated, this is the scenario we want with Beedrill. Which is what I mean when I say there is a time limit for Beedrill to accomplish true disruption. And the issue is, Beedrill is a stage 2 evolution, which is how this potentially game winning effect is ultimately balanced.

Players have tried navigating around this downside by designing decks that go all in on Beedrill, running a full set of Weedle as the only basic pokemon in the deck. While this tactic may work out well for the likes of Charizard EX, Beedrill lacks both the bulk and damage output to pull off wins consistently on its own. This is why so far, the best performing decks with Beedrill run it as a splash alongside Meowscarada. But this isn’t a real Beedrill deck. Mine is.

Today’s deck aims to go all in with Beedrill, but in order to counter Darkrai decks wearing us down with pings, and to enhance our resilience overall, we also run 2 copies of Shaymin. It turns out this is all Beedrill needed. With Shaymin we have an ongoing healing engine that enables us to make full use of Beedrills impressive bulk, and make up for the fact that we’re aiming to 2 hit KO our enemies. Since we run a total of 8 pokemon, pokemon communication is extremely effective at finding our key missing piece, Iono also helps mulligan away our hand to fish for that damn Kakuna sitting at the bottom of our deck.

Speaking of Kakuna, what an amazing stage 1 evolution piece this pokemon is. For just one energy, String Shot has a 50% of paralyzing its target, allowing us to buy time in key moments where we’re lacking a specific card needed to end the game, it also allows us to 2 hit KO Darkrai by combining a super effective String Shot onto Beedrills Crushing Spear. The earlier we enable Beedrill, the better, as we can lock out our opponents' pokemon from being able to attack, punishing their greed.

Beedrill is easily one of the most fun decks to play in pokemon pocket, and after countless hours experimenting with different ideas around him, I finally found a deck that can reliably compete against the strongest decks in the metagame.