Arceus Lv. X (2009)

Oh, my beloved Platinum Arceus. Despite opening and playing Diamond and Pearl cards from the start this set was my first 36 pack Diamond and Pearl booster box; opened in 2014.... 5 years after it was first released. Ironically it’s also the last set from the era and many players at the time were not very impressed by the total package. Spiritomb, Expert Belt and the Gengars were very significant cards to come out of it and to a lesser degree you might also want to bundle Charizard, Luxray and Salamence Lv. X as some other good pokemon from there. If you directly compare it with many of the other DP sets of the era, it isn’t that it’s that underwhelming but rather people were disappointed that the main theme of the set, the Arceus cards, were not that effective in top tier play. Probably because the deck is difficult to use with a lot of drawbacks but there are some good aspects too; after all some players did have some success with it even if it wasn’t the most dominant of the era. Considering my history with this set as I’ve briefly outlined above I was always keen on trying it out and making it work. Today, I’ll be showing you my version for the deck and how to best make the cards work:

Arceus Lv. X x4 Arceus x4 Arceus Water x2 Arceus Fire x2 Arceus Darkness x1 Arceus Fighting x1 Arceus Lightning x1 Arceus Psychic x1 Arceus Grass x1 Arceus Metal x1 Unown G x2

Ultimate Zone x4 Roseanne’s Research x4 Felicity’s Drawing x4 Professor Oak’s Visit x3 Cynthia’s Feelings x1 Volkner’s Philosophy x1 Beginning Door x4 Luxury Ball x1 Pokemon Rescue x1 Night Maintenance x1 Switch x1

Call Energy x4 Warp Energy x2 Water Energy x2 Fire Energy x2 Darkness Energy x2 Grass Energy x2 Fighting Energy x1

This deck is difficult to use as it is but I can’t even imagine just how much weaker it would be if this card didn’t exist. First of all, all of the Arceus Lv. X cards have a number of great assets copy pasted between them. They all have 120 HP, an excellent upgrade given many of the standard Arceus cards have 80 or even 70 HP. They have 1 retreat and no weakness, a great benefit really no other deck in the era shares and the Multitype poke-body which will mimic the type of the basic Arceus you levelled up from. I wish this body went even a step further and also kept Arceus colorless type but oh well. From here, this is where the 3 Arceus Lv. X differ, and this one is the most usable providing us the Omniscient poke-body. Thanks to this effect, this Arceus can use any attack from all the other Arceus cards, including the other Lv. X ones. This is extremely useful and important because most of the basic Arceus cards have average attacks and yet it is in our best interest to make use of their type. Hitting for weakness with Arceus is paramount; otherwise even its best attacks won’t be too effective with their high energy costs. This card allows us to do that which is why we run 3 of them.

If you’re at least somewhat familiar with this deck you may be surprised to see this Arceus Lv. X included as it is considered the worst of the 3 prints. However, I truly think that’s debatable. It is surely less useful than the former one we just looked at as it isn’t as versatile but compared to the one with Psychic Bolt it can be argued if it’s really outclassed. They both can do 100 for 3 using a different combination of energies and have also different costs for this damage. The Psychic Bolt one guarantees that damage with the cost of discarding a psychic and a lightning energy. On the other hand this one right here requires you to flip a coin. You get heads, you do 100 for no cost; tails you do 50 damage instead. It’s clearly obvious why this one would be deemed the worst by most players and for the longest time I thought the same. It won’t be consistent and reliable so why use it if you have a similar and more reliable option? 2 reasons. First, Meteor Blast uses a more practical combination of energies.

Hands down the most important card in the deck. As useful and important Omniscient Arceus is, this can’t even be a deck if you can’t have the energies to attack. With the Ripple swell attack Arceus will grab up to 6 basic energies from your deck to attach to each of your Arceus in play. I’ve worded it specifically like this because the condition for this attack to work is a full bench of 5 different types of Arceus. You won’t be able to get this attack off if you play first as it’s unlikely you’ll open with 6 different Arceus with this one included. If you play second it’s possible to pull it off if you see a few Beginning Doors and Roseanne but if not you’ll still have to pass the turn using Call Energy to fill out your bench. Regardless, it’s essential you get the energy acceleration from Ripple Swell as early as possible and at least once. With 9 basic energies in the deck total you’ll only get the max value once anyway and either way I wouldn’t recommend wasting time being anymore passive.

The fire Arceus is one of the better attackers so it helps for us to have another card that can utilize those fire energies. Both the lightning and psychic Arceus have bad attacks despite their very useful type, so we don’t want to burn our invaluable spaces for energies on those types. If you did, it would mainly be for the Psychic Bolt Arceus but you’re limiting yourself from every other aspect this way. I’d rather have extra copies of energies for the main attackers I want to use and be more consistent from that regard. The second reason is that you are somewhat required to ride your luck with this deck. Running out of energies is one of this deck’s biggest problems, as your best attacks require multiple energy discards while costing 3 energies to perform as well. Even though getting a lot of energies at the start of the game is part of what this deck does, you’ll be running out of them faster than you think; especially if your opponent can respond with quick knockouts. Psychic Bolt Arceus wouldn’t be able to be used over and over anyway, so if you’re going for a 2 hit KO while hitting for weakness anyway using other attacks, might as well use Meteor Blast instead. If you get lucky, you can get a OHKO on a fully fresh high HP pokemon if hitting for weakness without losing your energies and that is definitely the type of advantage this deck needs to be successful.

Between those 6 energies and the manual attachments you get every turn (you don’t want to miss) you’ll have to get by. The deck won’t able to do much if you can’t pull this attack off. With all the different types of Arceus included and needed anyway for Ripple Swell to work, the deck should tag between the different types of Arceus that give you the advantage depending on your opponent’s pokemon. Sky Spear is a very good attack, being a snipe for 80 but the cost is a pretty hard one to stomach. All energies attached to this Arceus go into the Lost Zone. This sucks even more because it means we can’t get them back with Night Maintenance or a different card. While useful, you’ll need to be very careful with how you use this attack. Even if it’s tempting, I’d actually discourage from using it unless you’re late in the game and plan to win a with few more attacks. And you better make sure you always get a KO with it. If you don’t use this attack correctly you will seriously lose to yourself by running out of energies or not having enough to attack, missing turns attacking and then losing even more when your opponent gets a KO.

In my head this is the best regular Arceus in terms of attacking and packs 90 HP instead of 80 or 70. Simply because Fastwave ignores any annoyance your opponent may be packing and does a solid 50. If it did 60 then this would have been the best attack to use against SP all the time, hitting them for weakness and getting OHKOs. At 50 though Lv. X pokemon will survive even with a x2 weakness. Regular evolution pokemon with a +30 weakness will usually need two shots to kill them off but nevertheless this is the safest attack to use as it doesn’t have any bad conditions, specifically discarding energies. You can hit Mewtwo Lv. X with it, which would otherwise wall this deck and as a water type, this card always kills Blaziken FB Lv. X if it used Jet Shoot the previous turn.

In terms of damage, most Arceus players will agree this card has the most reliable attack you’ll want to copy most of the time if you know you’re going for OHKO. Outside of Meteor Blast, 80 damage is the best you can do and if you’re lucky you won’t even have to lose energies. Bright Flame requires a coin flip and if you get tails you have to discard 2 energies. Unlike Meteor Blast the 80 damage is consistent regardless of what you flip but at the same time without a x2 weakness it misses OHKOs Meteor Blast is able to get. This is why I say if you can’t get a guaranteed OHKO with another attack might as well try your luck with Meteor Blast. Fire type is also super important to hit Dialga G Lv.X which is a tough pokemon in general, but also shuts down our poke-bodies. That’s why the second copy is important here, if you levelled up already you need this fire Arceus without a Lv. X on otherwise you can’t hit it for weakness. Good news is we do enough damage to get a OHKO on it 99% of the time.

This card’s attack is great to copy as it also deals 80 damage but only if you’re behind in prizes. If not, it only does 20 which is obviously too weak. The darkness Arceus is important to kill Gengar and a few other relevant pokemon weak to darkness. If you were to recycle any regular Arceus card back with Rescue or Maintenance this is also one of the most likely ones you’d get. I’d include a second one if I had the space.

The fighting Arceus is also one of the better ones since Break Ground hits for that key 60 damage without any energy discards, meaning it’s the best attack to use when hitting SP Lv.X pokemon for weakness. Being fighting type means it can OHKO Luxray on its own too even without Omniscient Arceus. Hitting all of your other cousins for 10 sucks but it’s much better than discarding multiple energies.

Leaf Refresh is the perfect attack to negate Abomasnow or Bronzong attacks and against other pokemon, if we only needed to do 30 damage anyway why not go for this attack and get some free bench healing too? Even Gengar Lv. X will also occasionally spread. It’s true that these are indeed some situational examples but because we tag between our different Arceus there’s a good chance you’ll have some hurt pokemon on your bench that will appreciate that heal. It only takes 2 of these attacks to heal 60 damage from all your pokemon and this shouldn’t be taken lightly.

Psychic Arceus is only slightly better than the lightning one having 80 HP but that’s about it. Mind Bend is also weak and another attack I have no intention of using in a game, so no psychic energies here. In spite of that, that psychic typing is still valuable, letting us hit Gallade, Machamp and Mewtwo for more damage, even letting us kill the Lake Trio Lv.X cards and Gardevoir in one shot.

With our crucial need to gather 6 Arceus of different types you’d think Roseanne would be of utmost importance in the deck even more than usual. Nevertheless, despite maxing it out for this reason she doesn’t help out that much when she can only grab 2 basic pokemon max. Also, she doesn’t have much use in grabbing energies since after one Ripple Swell we’d have gathered most of the basic energies from the deck already on our field.

Normally Luxury Ball is best used to get evolution pokemon since fewer cards allow us to do that easily in the DP era but in this case you’ll be happy to get any Arceus just to fill your bench for Ripple Swell, or Unown G against Machamp.

It sucks that we have to burn space in the deck for this card but it’s probably best if we do. Every Arceus is a basic pokemon and Stormfront Machamp is our biggest threat, even more so than other high tier decks in the era. 2 copies of this card give us the chance to fight back at least and with the psychic Arceus we can hit Machamp for weakness.

How this was one of the Arceus they used to promote a theme deck is beyond me. Lightning Arceus has a bad attack and 70 HP on top of that, but that lightning type gives us handy coverage against strong water pokemon so we still can’t go without it. Hitting and switching isn’t completely useless and could come up, but we don’t have any wall pokemon like Spiritomb to promote and the damage is weak. For this reason, I didn’t even bother having lightning energies at all in the deck so this is one of the Arceus cards that cannot use its own attack in this deck.

Oak doesn’t discard any cards but saves them back in your deck, so even if you get rid of something you still want to keep you know it’s back in the deck at least. This makes Oak possibly a better supporter than even Felicity in this deck, at least in my opinion. Unable to run Uxie in this deck more copies of this card is the best replacement.

The grass Arceus is usually considered the most useless one of the regular cards because its type doesn’t hit any popular high tier pokemon for weakness and its attack is very situational too. I’d agree on the type argument but the attack isn’t as useless as it may appear. For starters, I have 2 grass energies for the Meteor Blast Arceus anyway so it is possible for this card to attack. 90 HP is also better than the last 2 Arceus cards we looked at and the water resistance ensures at least one big hit from some of the toughest water pokemon in the era. It also survives against a Garchomp C Lv. X snipe since you’re gonna have random Arceus sitting on your bench anyway.

Metal Arceus is considered one of the middle ones in terms of usability and while I’d agree, we still won’t be utilizing its attack. It’s considered a middle one because metal type won’t hit any popular pokemon for weakness just like the grass one but Metal Barrier is effective against decks with Lv. X pokemon. You know, some of the best cards in the era? It prevents any effects and damage from Lv. X pokemon along with 40 damage. The problem is nearly every popular Lv. X pokemon you can think of can play around this effect. Luxray, Garchomp and Palkia can access the bench easily. Gengar can use Shadow Room or even Compound Pain and while it probably doesn’t want to use those attacks against us, it still gets some damage through.

Switching outlets are super important in this deck for several reasons. The first is to make sure we can get Ripple Swell Arceus in the active position efficiently if we’re unlucky enough not to open with it. The second is the need to tag between other types of Arceus to hit for weakness and to evolve as many of them as we can to a Lv. X card. The third is even if we won’t hit for weakness with the next Arceus we can maintain our energies by moving them with Ultimate Zone while denying our opponent prizes if they can’t target the bench. The only reason I’m running 1 copy of switch is because I also run 2 Warp Energies, otherwise you’d definitely want to have more ways to switch.

Even Blaziken, Infernape and Dusknoir can play around this attack. I haven’t even listed all the other ones that won’t care. For this reason, it’s waste to include even 1 metal energy in the off chance you want to use this attack, not to mention many strong decks in the era don’t even use Lv. X pokemon. It’s a shame, but this card is only here to help for Ripple Swell. Who knows, maybe if you play against a random Glaceon Lv. X deck you can also use this to hit for weakness.

Without the bonus draw Cynthia’s Feelings is a very average supporter, but with the bonus she becomes the best supporter in the era. Shuffling your hand to draw 8 cards is amazing, but the condition also makes it a bad supporter to have in the set up process. Some pokemon are really aggressive, but realistically you don’t want to be in a position where you’re losing prizes so easily, especially at the start of the game so you won’t be getting her full effect. For this reason I’d rather not favour her so much.

Ultimate Zone is another gimmicky card that’s essential for this deck to work. Ripple Swell doesn’t let us put the energy wherever we want if you remember and this card is our means to move them to our active Arceus. It works with special energies too giving Warp Energy some extra utility. Lake Boundary would have been wonderful for this deck but unfortunately must be sacrificed for this stadium. You can still try and include, maybe replacing it with a copy of this stadium; but because you usually want this card quickly and want to make sure it stays down I’d rather max it out. If we really don’t need so many copies Felicity will be glad to dump this for us.

Felicity is in a similar boat with Roseanne as even though we max her out in the deck she doesn’t give us any combo utility with her discarding cost unlike in other decks. You definitely don’t want to be discarding energies with her I’ll tell you that. Because we can’t run any Uxie or other poke-power draw cards (one of this deck’s drawbacks) supporter based draw is needed even more and that’s why she’s maxed out. Despite not having as many disposable resources as in other decks you’ll still have cards you don’t care about ridding of. Some examples are some of the lesser Arceus cards and even extra copies of the Ripple Swell print. Once you fill your bench and get a Ripple Swell attack off you don’t need to be stressed about a full bench anymore so extra Arceus cards that didn’t get played down won’t needed.

Obviously you don’t want to get rid of the good ones or ones that will give you type advantage depending on your match up. Even though Ripple Swell Arceus is technically the most important we max it out for consistency purposes to hopefully open with it and go for Ripple Swell. Sky Spear is still very good to have as a mid to late game attack but you don’t need all 4 copies of this card to use that attack once or twice. Discarding one or even two copies may not be that bad. Same goes for unneeded copies of Roseanne, after you fill your bench she won’t be that useful, or Unown G if you think you won’t need it in your game.

When it comes to match ups with Arceus you can technically have a type advantage against anything you play against since you can use the exact type of Arceus your opposition would be weak against. Arceus Lv. X also doesn’t have a weakness which means whatever your opponent is using doesn’t matter in terms of coverage. The only exception is Machamp because we’re an all basic pokemon deck but with Unown G Machamp can become pretty helpless. Dialga G Lv. X would be a major problem but Fire Arceus will easily kill it, just don’t allow Garchomp C Lv. X to snipe it before you do. The real drawbacks Arceus has come from its own self, attacks are not too strong if they’re not hitting for weakness, the inability to run Uxie or Claydol and the need to use a Ripple Swell at least once otherwise you won’t have much to work with. Running out of energies or even just running out of a particular type of energy can also be an issue for this deck and you’ll need to ride your luck with Fire Arceus when attacking with it.

Arceus also fares worse against fast decks, with or without hitting them for weakness, Kingdra, Luxray and Blaziken can cause issues when they’re ready to go while you’re still trying to set up. Kingdra is the worst because even if you hit it for weakness with an 80 attack it won’t be enough. If it’s holding an Expert Belt then even a heads with Meteor Blast won’t be enough. At least the SPs will die easier thanks to the x2 weakness. Good news though are some of the things we discussed; no bad match ups due to weakness, best type coverage out of any deck in the era and also not caring about power lock from a lot of popular cards in the era. That’s gonna do it for the epic and wondrous God of pokemon, catch you guys on the next article and thanks for reading.

You can treat this guy as a one off Claydol draw or slightly worse Uxie in the form of a supporter. Given how this decks works there’s a good chance we won’t have much of a hand to work with after we play some things and then Volkner becomes the best supporter this deck can ask for. At the same time though he can be risky as if you do have a big hand he won’t let you do much. Oak’s Visit by comparison is more reliable that’s why we favour more copies of that card instead.

Arceus cards can be run in however many copies we want but Pokemon Rescue still allows us to save space and recycle the most appropriate one for our match up. The darkness one is a common choice since it does a lot of damage if you’re losing for 2 energies instead of 3. You probably have enough Lv. X cards to get by but those would be some other likely options.

Really important card to get back Arceus cards that hit your opponent for weakness and basic energies. Even if you get back 3 energies with this don’t be thinking it’s a good idea to try and use Ripple Swell a second time mid to late game unless you have no other play.

Call Energy is mega important in this deck due to our need to fill our bench as quickly as possible and thankfully it’s also very compatible with our attacks. Excluding the non Omniscient Lv. X Arceus prints, every Arceus only needs one energy of a specific type to use its attack so colorless special energies won’t be useless after we attach them for their other effects. The only problem is their incompatibility with Ripple Swell but that won’t be much of a problem most of the time.

What’s sad about Arceus is it gets this excellent exclusive card that would have pushed it to be top tier, but then Spiritomb gets released in the same set, cutting the effectiveness of trainer heavy decks. Still, Beginning Door is an adder of any Arceus from your deck, even Lv. X cards helping us fill the bench at the beginning of the game and easily grabbing our precious Lv. X cards too. I cannot bring myself to include Bebe’s Search in the deck when Arceus has this card in its arsenal, trainer lock or not.

Warp Energy is a lot more useful in this deck than Switch or Warp Point because it grants a lot of utility plays. Because it’s an energy we can use it through trainer lock, so that’s the first benefit. Thanks to Ultimate Zone we can easily move to the newly promoted Arceus so it won’t be an awkward energy attachment like in other decks. Finally, it’s a deck space saving card enabling me to have 3 switching options without cutting back on our valuable energies.

Our need to max out Call Energy and run 2 Warp Energy leaves us with 9 spots for basic energies if you run the deck exactly as I have it here. Running doubles of water, fire and darkness is a good idea since they’re part of the best and most common attacks we’ll be using. The double grass may be questionable, but I do want to make sure Meteor Blast is available to me when I want to go for it. That only leaves one spot for a basic fighting which if I could I’d run at least 2 for that type as well.