A slow castle.
My initial thought when I saw the new Palossand was… what the fuck is this. Here we have a stage 1 evolution with 130 HP, a retreat cost of 3 and an attack that deals 90 damage for 4 energy. Oh my god. I’m staring at an obese, negative IQ version of Arbok. If you are a human being, and have… well you know, a brain. You’re probably asking yourself… why? The devs clearly have a lot of respect for the Acerola combo. A little too much respect if you ask me. A normal person would take one glance at this card and be like: yeah, I’m going to play something else. I’m a card game masochist and therefore not very normal. So when I stare down this monstrosity I see a challenge. Can I make a playable Palossand deck?
It doesn’t take long for one to realize… you need to ramp onto this thing. Once you move past the cards' hideous numbers, you realize something interesting. Sand Tomb only requires one specific source of fighting energy. My first idea was to combine Palossand with Delcatty, as Delcatty could serve as a lead to ramp normal type energy onto Palossand. This deck concept was dead on arrival. We are combining 2 stage 1 evolutions that quite obviously lack damage output. Just look at these 2. Where is the damage? Palossand also struggles significantly as an end game sweeper, despite its synergy with Acerola, Palossands HP stat caps out at 130. This means you are getting mauled by the meta’s high end attackers.
In order for Palossand to be useful, we need a deck capable of not only generating excess energy, but rallying it over to Palossand immediately in the end game allowing us to trap something. It turns out, this kind of deck is possible.
Behold, a deck where Palossand does something. We incorporate the sand castle onto the Lunala Giratina core where Palossand serves the role of an early game wall and a late game trapper. In slower decks, Giratina EX serves as an energy generation engine. We can then transfer said energy onto Lunala to begin our offense, once our front line attackers are wounded, we retreat them to rally over our energy onto the next. And when the time is right, we send in Palossand, Psychic Connect to then trap their EX.
Lunala’s ability can only transfer psychic type energy from a psychic type, but it says nothing about who can receive it. Once we’ve managed to score a point, we can pivot onto Palossand to trap their EX Pokemon, while we build up Lunala again in the back to finish. In order for this to be possible, we need to run both psychic and fighting type energy. And this is actually fine. As Giratina generates psychic energy on its own and like Palossand, Lunala’s Lunar Blast only requires one specific source of psychic energy.
The end result is a deck capable of pivoting around powerful attackers, where Palossand’s mere presence threatens our opponents thanks to his role as a trapper.
