Rhyperior Lv. X (2009)

Rhyperior Lv. X stands out as the one and only pokemon with 170 HP in the Diamond and Pearl era. This is the highest out of every other Lv. X card and outside of two Wailord cards in the era no other pokemon had more HP. The other appeal is in its type, as a fighting type pokemon it poses a big threat to Luxray GL Lv. X, possibly the most dangerous pokemon in the era. All Rhyperior cards also have a resistance to lightning giving even more headaches to Luxray as it won’t even be able to hurt us much. The bad news is that Rhyperior has costly attacks that don’t even do the excessive damage you might expect for the energy costs you pay. Even so, the following list gives you a good chance to remedy that and also reap some additional effects not common on other pokemon:

Rhyperior Lv. X x1 Rhyperior x3 Rhydon x3 Rhyhorn x4 Groudon x1 Solrock x4 Lunatone x4 Uxie x1 Pachirisu x1

Roseanne’s Research x4

Felicity’s Drawing x4

Cynthia’s Feelings x1

Professor Oak’s Visit x2

Bebe’s Search x1

Stark Mountain x1

Broken Time-Space x2

Rare Candy x2

Luxury Ball x1

VS Seeker x1

Pokemon Rescue x1

Night Maintenance x1

Switch x2

Fighting Energy x15

I’ll be honest, compared to other Lv. X cards Rhyperior Lv. X doesn’t provide much besides the nice HP upgrade. For Hard Crush to be effective you need to dedicate a deck list fully to facilitate this attack and mitigate the drawbacks of getting your deck milled. It could still be an option as our last game ending attack if our deck is low on cards and we make sure to recover 3 energies with Night Maintenance before going for it. We do have a lot of energies in this deck for other reasons, but if you keep track of what’s left in the deck it could be the best attack to use at the end and also make for an epic finish. Upthrow serves to fuel Hard Crush shuffling all of your fighting energies from the discard pile back in your deck. This attack ensures you never run out of energies but being a forced effect could be a nuisance if you don’t want to do that mid game. Setting aside the effect, because both of the regular Rhyperiors have conditions on all their attacks a lot of situations will make Upthrow be in fact the best attack we can use if we got the Lv. X out. A 60 for 3 attack being the best we can do is certainly discouraging, but you’ll see why that’s the case soon when we look at the regular Rhyperior cards.

This Rhyperior is our main attack force once we get it going. The best attack on it is not actually Deep Scrap but Raging Drill, at least in my opinion. Deep Scrap 60 for 4 is very low damage for the cost to pay but that’s because it’s accompanied by a deadly deck discarding effect. If you KO the defending pokemon with this attack your opponent has to discard the top 3 cards from their deck. As useful as this can be to potentially deck out your opponent or to just have them lose resources for no reason, this is still a situational attack. We need to get a KO to gain the effect and you won’t always have 4 energies on anyway. However, if you do have the energies and are going to get a KO with 60 then obviously this is the attack you want to use, so it isn’t fully useless. Because it does cost 4 energies though this is why I said previously that 60 for 3 with Upthrow could be the best attack we can use at a game state. Raging Drill is the really useful attack we can hopefully make use of. I say “hopefully” because a good player will try to play around this attack if they know what it does. It does 30 damage for 2, but will do an additional 10 for every damage counter on Rhyperior.

The original Diamond Pearl Rhyperior is beautiful, as with all rare holos in this set, but I promise I have valid reasons for running it besides that. When you evolve into this card you can discard the top 3 cards of your opponent’s deck with Earth Fissure. If you get to recover this card again late game and evolve a second time that’s 3 more cards. By no means do we aim to deck out our opponent as our main tactic but you can clearly see how these discards can add up when paired up with the other Rhyperior too. You never know what your opponent may lose, so it’s just a handy bonus. Rock Wrecker doing 80 for 3 isn’t as mighty as I thought when I was a kid but it’s a solid chunk that can finish off softened pokemon. It’s definitely better than 60 for 3. The problem with this attack is that it doesn’t hit for weakness and even worse than that is Rhyperior won’t be able to attack at all next turn.

With 140 HP or 170 if you have the Lv. X on this pairs perfectly with this attack as even the strongest attackers will be unable to OHKO Rhyperior. Even just having 50 damage on will turn Raging Drill into 80 for 2. Any more than that and you can get a OHKO on any pokemon. For this reason, if your opponent can, they will probably try to avoid attacking this Rhyperior and try getting prizes on other pokemon instead. When that happens then doing 30 for 2 isn’t good hence why doing 60 for 3 with Upthrow could become our best option. However, it’s not as dramatic as I make it out to be. Even though Gengar, Luxray and Garchomp are popular attackers that can access pokemon on your bench, they can only do that for so long. Neglecting Rhyperior also means we get to power up Deep Scrap ensuring more consistent deck destruction. A lot of the time your opponent won’t have any choice but to attack Rhyperior so they’ll play into our hands whether they like it or not.

Even if you have the Lv. X on you won’t be able to use those attacks either. Unless you’re gonna to burn 4 energies to retreat your best remedy is using a Switch or another switching outlet so make sure you have one in hand ready. Do I need to repeat what I said about Upthrow again? This attack also ignores resistance not just weakness but that doesn’t really matter once we have a look at Solrock in this deck. The inclusion of this card isn’t necessary and can also backfire but I still decided to include it instead of running 3 Supreme Victors Rhyperior.

Deciding between the two available Rhydons depends on a few things and while in the past I chose to favour the Supreme Victors one I’d say the Diamond and Pearl one is probably a better pick for this updated deck. The slightly better retreat cost probably doesn’t matter much because it’s still high but it should be noted. The main reason to favour DP Rhydon is Storm Up, starting out at 30 for 2 but doing 50 for 2 if there is any stadium down. Then you discard that stadium. Because of the way we use stadiums in this deck you probably won’t be bothered even if you’re discarding your own but it’s important to acknowledge that this is a forced effect, whatever stadium’s down will get discarded and you get that bonus damage.

If it’s your opponent’s stadium, even better. 50 for 2 is pretty good considering Rhydon is a stepping stone for Rhyperior. SV Rhydon flips 3 coins with Fury Attack and depending on your flips you can deal 20, 40 or 60 for 1. Even 20 for 1 is fine since this is our middle evolution and the potential for more damage is a plus. However, if you consider a scenario where you’re starting out with Rhyhorn, attach an energy, attack and then evolve into Rhydon next turn; you’re more than likely attaching another energy so you’re able to go for Storm Up. They both have a 60 for 3 attack but DP Rhydon does 10 damage to itself and forces your opponent to switch. Both of these are unwelcome side effects and Rock Tumble is better on SV Rhydon overall even ignoring resistance without any drawbacks. Because Rhydon has solid HP (whichever you pick) and usable attacks in terms of damage; it’s possible to power these guys up and use them in a desperate situation where you don’t have Rhyperior. For this reason SV Rhyperior was the better pick for me in the past. It has a better second attack and an attack it can use immediately with 1 energy. However, ignoring the second attack we maximize damage favouring the DP Rhydon if we were going to attach the second energy on anyway and evolve up to Rhyperior while attacking on the way. That’s why I believe running a 2-1, 1-2 or even just a 3 DP Rhydon line is probably best. I’d say if you play second, then more than likely you’ll find you get more use out of SV Rhydon if you can just instantly evolve with Broken Time-Space and try your luck with Fury Attack so whichever route you choose to go between them has validity.

As I did with Rhydon, in the past I favoured running 4 of SV Rhyhorn. The decision was easy, more HP and a 50 for 3 attack is something usable in a desperate but unlikely game state. Once again though, even though you’d rather not open with Rhyhorn, if you do with the DP one you can start attacking instantly, even if it’s just 10 for 1. If things go well you can evolve into Rhydon next turn, attach a second energy and put even more pressure at the earliest stages of the game. 30 for 2 with Take Down is also usable at the start of the game and will limit Spiritomb into only one Darkness Grace evolution before getting killed. This will likely only be a dream against Kingdra, Beedrill, Blaziken FB and any other fast and hard hitting deck but against many of the strong slower decks that little bit of an advantage can make some difference. Rhyhorn has a lightning resistance so it survives one of Luxray’s attacks anyway.

This card is amazing for so many reasons. Quite honestly if I owned a full play set I would have experimented running all 4 as the corner stone of this deck and many others. Instead we’ll be prioritizing some different pokemon but even one copy of this Groudon has a lot to offer. You’ll probably first set your eyes on the number 100 on it. Beautiful 100 HP and it’s also packing an 100 for 3 attack. The HP is obviously excellent for a basic pokemon and it makes for one of your best starters. The weakness to grass is also better than a weakness to water for the most part thanks to Gyarados, Kingdra and Palkia being some of the toughest decks around. Even though it won’t hit them for weakness or anything it’s nice that they can’t hit Groudon for weakness either seeing as our primary pokemon Rhyperior is weak to water. Lightning resistance will also make this card last forever against Luxray. Drought is a costless attack that can help power up our Rhyperior and any pokemon really with fighting energies quickly.

One of these guys is good enough seeing as we’re aiming to utilize Lunatone and space is always something you have to keep in mind. It’s really gonna suck if you have to open with it, especially given all of our better opening pokemon in this deck but if you do you’ll still want to move it out of the way and start attacking with Solrock or Groudon as soon as possible. You won’t want to have this on the bench and then play a second one to draw.

Solrock is not as good as Groudon as a standalone card but running this card in high numbers along with Lunatone grants us some different utilities. Solrock is also a method to power up Rhyperior and any other pokemon with its attack while also putting some damage. If you can get at least 2 attacks with Solrock and grab 2 energies then it fulfilled its role well enough. It goes without saying but this card is your ideal starter if you have a few other basic pokemon on the bench to work with. The Sunlight poke-body won’t offer that much value compared to a different effect but ignoring fighting resistance on our opponent’s pokemon is still better than nothing. You need to have Lunatone out for this effect to work but that’s exactly what we aim to do.

This card is similar to Felicity but more forgiving, letting you draw 3 cards and then putting 1 card from your hand at the bottom of your deck instead of discarding. Nothing extreme but reliable.

Your 1 Luxury Ball best used to get evolution pokemon.

Yet another DP deck where this card is ever so important, providing good straight draw while discarding our many fighting energies in the discard pile. Thanks to Lunatone she gets more competition with Roseanne in this deck as the best supporter but even she probably still is. Throughout the whole game we likely won’t need or have space for all 3 GE Lunatones and we most definitely won’t be using 2 or even 3 Solrocks. Same goes for Pachirisu. Felicity is an excellent way to get rid of all the unnecessary cards in our deck if you already have enough fighting energies in the discard pile.

You can even attach the energies on Groudon itself! We have a lot of fighting energies in this deck for this reason among others and it won’t be that hard to exploit this attack early game if you open with this card. Major Earthquake is also excellent; despite discarding 2 fighting energies afterwards and hitting all of your benched pokemon for 10 damage, doing 100 will go a long way and will usually be enough to kill most pokemon. You could say this spread damage can fuel Raging Drill on Rhyperior so it’s not totally a drawback for this deck. We soften up our opponent’s pokemon with some of our other attackers so even stage 2 pokemon could be knocked out by this attack with the correct game state. I love the artwork on it too by the way.

Stark Mountain is not a mandatory card to have in this deck but it helps up powering up another attacker if we were going to switch anyway. Example cases include after Groudon attacks with Major Earthquake, after you attack with DP Rhyperior and even if you’ve got a random energy on a Lunatone or something. There’s situations where you get to attack and attach energies with Solrock super early but won’t have a Rhyhorn or Groudon to put the energies on. In those cases, you’d rather move the energy to a better attacker rather than just leaving it there for no reason. Save this card and throw it down to use in these types of situations.

What’s really cool about using Solrock and Lunatone is the bonus from Supreme Victors Lunatone as well. Instead of having a fourth Great Encounters Lunatone having this card instead gives us a really strong defence against any Lv. X pokemon. If you have this card and any Solrock out these cards will be immune to any effects and damage from Lv. X pokemon. This is amazing help to protect these guys from all of the dominant and dangerous Lv. Pokemon in the era. Dialga G Lv. X of course shuts this down making it the exception but this is still too good to ignore. It also has free retreat so it won’t even be that bad if you open with it. Due to this card Luxchomp becomes forced to target down Rhyperior and they won’t be able to try and get easy prizes against these guys. If Stormfront Gengar also has the Lv. X on it also loses the Shadow Room attack as an easy way to get a prize on the other Lunatone. Awesome.

Lunatone is a big liability against Stormfront Gengar because it has a poke-power while having 60 HP. As much as that sucks the combo between this card and Solrock is our main form of draw power outside of supporters. If you have Solrock in play Lunatone allows you to discard a card from your hand and draw 1 from your deck. This little mini draw may not seem that impressive but because Lunatone is a basic pokemon if we get two or three of these out with Solrock the draw will start to add up. It’s not just the draw though; this effect obviously pairs with Sol Charge, allowing us to ditch fighting energies for Solrock to grab back when it attacks. 20 for 1 is also better than what other support pokemon can do even if it won’t be as good as Solrock grabbing energies.

If you really don’t want to risk it all with Rhyhorn as your opening pokemon this card can fix that problem but it’s probably best reserved to move DP Rhyperior out of the way when it attacks with Rock Wrecker. It also combos nicely with Stark Mountain.

The inclusion of Great Encounters Solrock and Lunatone in this deck turns Roseanne into a great utility card. Depending on what we have she’s be able to fetch what’s missing so we can draw cards with Lunatone without wasting time. For this reason she becomes a great supporter even mid to late game which isn’t always the case in other decks. Obviously you still have the typical play of grabbing Uxie and getting our Rhyhorns down too.

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.

This is another deck where Call Energy gets more in our way than help, not necessarily because Rhyperior can’t utilize it but because it interferes with Solrock and Groudon. Not only that but running any number of Call Energy means cutting down on fighting which again will cut down on this deck’s flow. Good news is we always have the lovable rodent to fall back on; if we open with Pachirisu we can get a bunch of basic pokemon and then retreat to Solrock or Groudon and start attacking. It’s actually better for this deck if you open with Solrock and a few basic pokemon without needing Pachirisu, but to increase our odds for a consistent set up if we have to play first, Pachirisu is included. Without this card this deck has 14 basic pokemon which a good enough number to avoid a potential donk, but with Pachirisu we’re at 15 and guarantee security if we just see 1 of the 15 fighting energies here or another basic pokemon. I’d say I’ve given myself enough good odds.

I’ve never been the biggest fan of supporter cards that have you pay a cost only to get 1 card but if we’re not over relying on her 1 Bebe’s Search in the deck should be fine. She can also turn into a draw supporter if you use her to get Uxie but you’d rather use her to get evolution pokemon. A lot of decks in the era would play 3-4 of her only because you’d grab Claydol and then you can draw additional cards that way. So, even though you’ve spend your supporter and didn’t gain any card advantage it would balance out with draw from Claydol. From there, you can use Claydol to draw more cards every turn. Since I don’t have Claydol in this deck though, we’d rather have supporters that actually draw us multiple cards.

Only the Rhyperior line benefits from this card, so I wouldn’t blame people if they wanted to drop it completely, drop a Rhydon and just run 4 Rare Candies. That’s what I had done before, but to be a little bit more resilient to trainer lock we run 2 copies of this card and 3 Rhydons. Multiple decks run high numbers of this card so you may even get to utilize it without having to play yours down.

Ultimately we can’t go without at least 2 Rare Candies. It takes up less space than having Broken Time-Space and running a lot of stage 1s, but since I’d do 3 copies of Rhydon anyway at least 2 copies of Broken Time-Space made sense.

This finishes up my deep dive on Rhyperior! Thanks to Raging Drill and very high HP Rhyperior can deal a lot of damage to pretty much any deck, even the water decks it’s weak to. When playing against water decks you’ll usually be better off not getting out the Lv. X at all since it has a x2 weakness to water. Obviously the water weakness still isn’t welcome but both Kingdra and Palkia G Lv. X need to be careful as Raging Drill can OHKO both of them depending on how much damage Rhyperior has. Gyarados won’t have to worry though, as it also packs a fighting resistance, so it won’t be as easy to KO it even with Raging Drill. As stated in the intro its biggest appeal is being a natural counter to Luxray GL Lv. X and it’s good to know that your deck is good against one of the strongest pokemon in the era.

Stormfront Gengar is annoying because of Fainting Spell but it hurts even more in our case seeing as high HP is one of Rhyperior’s greatest traits. Shadow Room is also a very big pain killing Lunatone in one shot. Because typical Gengar decks are slow though trying to set up with Spiritomb active, we also get a nice advantage building up energies with Solrock while dealing damage. GardeGallade can also prove dangerous when Gallade can get a OHKO on even a fresh Rhyperior Lv. X; probably the only pokemon in the era that can pull this off so easy without hitting for weakness. Maybe I’m being too optimistic but all in all I’d say Rhyperior is pretty underrated. For now, thank you for reading and I’ll catch on the next article.

This card is risky thanks to lots of trainer lock but the utility of having this as opposed to another copy of other supporter cards in here is pretty good too. With VS Seeker you can use a fifth Felicity if you really want too, a second Cynthia or even your first Cynthia if you had to discard it and now have the chance to use it with the full draw bonus. The list goes on.

Getting a pokemon in hand from your discard pile is handy especially in this deck when I don’t have Premier Ball. This card will usually be reserved to get a Rhyperior or Groudon but depending on the game state, it also allows you to reuse Uxie for draw etc. Very good card.

Depending on how the game goes we may even use this card only to shuffle 3 fighting energies before risking it all with Hard Crush for an epic KO. If you won’t be going for that attack then pokemon recovery is more important since we have a lot of fighting energies to get by and we also get back with Solrock.

15 fighting energies might seem overkill and a waste of space but in my opinion it’s just the right number for the way I have this deck. A lot of these ensure Groudon will get the max value with Drought while you still get your manual attachment and with Solrock and Lunatone, we want to be discarding these and getting them back with Sol Charge. Then there’s the potential Hard Crush with Rhyperior Lv. X etc. Also even though it seems impossible, we can get 4 energies on SV Rhyperior for Deep Scrap.