Banette’s Night Bind attack may be weak, yet it prevents your opponent from attaching energy from the energy zone onto their active pokemon. This means if the pokemon has no energy, unless your opponent has access to X speed or leaf. Not only can they not attack, they also can’t retreat. Allowing your Bannette to score a KO that’s essentially free. Once I got over my profound sense of disgust, I realized my perspective was flawed. Banette is not a toxic pokemon, she’s actually incredibly fun, at the expense of making your opponent’s life miserable. I soon realized… that’s not my problem.

Today’s deck traps pokemon who have no energy investment, to then end the game as Mewtwo Psy Drives them. The game plan is actually really funny, we evolve into Banette. We then resort to Sabrina or Team Rocket Grunt to leave the opponent with a lead lacking energy, as we Night Bind to leave them trapped, so that our Banette takes them out while remaining intact. In the meanwhile, we build up our Mewtwo in the back, so that we can win the game with a Psy Drive attack, back to back.

I designed the deck to enable said opener as consistently as possible. We run a total of 6 pokemon with a full set of pokemon communication. A full set of Mewtwo may seem excessive here, but because Banette only requires 1 energy, we want to be able to build up Mewtwo quickly, the extra copy of Mewtwo that we draw can be cycled away with Pokemon Communication so we can find Banette. This is why we also run a full set of Leaf, to make sure we can correct our Mewtwo openers for free.

Bad draws and terrible matchups exist for this deck, unfortunately. Yet that is the price to pay for a strategy that will allow us to embrace pure degeneracy.