Hello Schemanske’s Corner readers! It’s been a little while since last we spoke but I hope you all have had a wonderful holiday season and are enjoying your new years! I would love to tell you all that I have resolved to be a brand new person in the year of 2025 but alas, here I am bringing you my take on the best Gardevoir options for the upcoming Birmingham and San Antonio Regionals! As we approach the end of the Surging Sparks format, people are once again realizing that Gardevoir has been a top tier deck the entire time. The largest problem with Gardevoir by far is its matchup into Regidrago which, while certainly manageable, can be quite a challenge to overcome. Outside of the Regidrago matchup however, Gardevoir boasts an incredible overall matchup spread, taking almost no other bad matchups whatsoever depending on how you build the deck.
Now, when deciding to pick up Gardevoir you have two primary options in terms of deck building. We have the traditional Gardevoir, which I will be referring to as “Slow Gardy” for the duration of this article. Slow Gardy plays a list similar to the iteration popularized at NAIC, utilizing multiple Munkidori, no Rare Candy and plays a large number of Arven trying to capitalize on a turn 1 Arven into Technical Machine Evolution. Slow Gardevoir boasts a much larger array of options, which can be useful into a metagame that is increasingly diverse. The other option is what I’ll refer to as “Turbo Gardy” this is the version of the deck that Henry Chao used to win the Baltimore Regional Championships back in September. It utilizes Secret Box alongside a large number of Earthen Vessel and Bravery Charm to aggressively push towards large Drifloon attacks as quickly as possible. Turbo Gardy also plays multiple copies of Rare Candy as a way to play around opponents stopping your Gardevoir ex coming into play via knocking out all of your Kirlia.
Today we’re going to go over the pro’s and con’s of each option as well as my current list for each of them. We’ll start with Turbo Gardy.
For those of you who are Gardevoir connoisseurs you will almost certainly recognize this list. Turbo Gardy hasn’t really changed much from the last time we saw it, this is mostly due to the fact that the Turbo list is incredibly tight. We really don’t have flex slots in the deck because each individual piece plays a significant role in some way or another. Turbo Gardy was born as an answer to the high tempo format that Regidrago created at the 2024 World Championships. By playing heavy Charm, Rare Candy as well as multiple draw options that had more than 110 HP, Gardevoir was finally able to keep up with the menace of the format. Turbo Gardy gave you the insane power of Gardevoir ex with a bit more resilience to something blowing up your entire board.
That being said Turbo Gardy does lose a bit in terms of options. Because we have to commit so much space to the extra energy dig, the Rare Candy and even extra Bravery Charm, we lose space for options. By having fewer options, oftentimes we are simply deciding between using one of our Bravery Charm attackers (Drifloon or Scream Tail) or utilizing Gardevoir ex as our attacker. With only 1 Munkidori we lose the ability to easily take extra prizes with it, and we really don’t have the space to include tech attackers like Flutter Mane, Cresselia, Mawile, etc. So what we gain in power and resilience we lose in flexibility, meaning that the Turbo Gardevoir archetype is much better into a more centralized meta, particularly one that is answered by the options that we have.
So what do the matchups look like? Well, pretty good to be honest. We really only take 3 “bad” matchups, Regidrago, Slow Gardevoir and Miraidon. We can sometimes struggle into matchups that play Jamming Tower or Vacuum as we are a bit more reliant on our charms to make plays, but these situations are few and far between.
I know what you’re thinking, “This whole archetype was built to be able to keep up with Regidrago and it still loses to Regidrago?” Yup! Welcome to the format! Unfortunately Gardevoir as a deck will also be fragile to a deck like Regidrago because they can simply threaten so much board pressure that we can’t really do much to answer it. There are certainly plays to be made and the combination of Rare Candy and the large array of charms can definitely give us a much closer chance, but ultimately the matchup can still be a loss if our opponent simply draws what they want to draw because so much of our matchup revolves around setting up knockouts while disrupting them.
Slow Gardevoir being a bad matchup primarily comes down to the fact that we play 1 Munkidori and they play 2. For anyone who has played the 1 vs 2 Munki matchup, you know it’s not very fun. Slow Gardevoir also gets to play more flexible attackers which can create problems for us, and to top it all off they can also put manaphy in play which removes our only real option to knock out their Munkidori and Kirlia. This matchup sucks and honestly, it’s the primary reason in my mind not to play Turbo Gardevoir.
Miraidon is Miraidon. They attack us fast with Iron Hands, and now, thanks to Magneton, Gardevoir ex is a much less reasonable attacker in the matchup as they can power up a Raichu V much faster than they were able to in the past. If you can stick Klefki early and stall them a turn or two I would still call us favored, but those instances are a lot less common than they used to be so Miraidon finds it’s spot on this list.
Our list of potential changes is a very small one. As I mentioned earlier the list incredibly tight and so we really can only consider dropping the spiritomb for something else. The issue? If we drop spiritomb our Charizard matchup instantly becomes infinitely worse as we give our opponent the opportunity to use Lumineon in the mid/late game which can counteract our best line into them (KO Pidgeot, Iono + Hit Fez for 180, Munki Fez + knockout Zard for Game). Cutting Spiritomb also marginally damages our Lugia matchup, although I’m not sure how much we care as I believe the matchup is still positive without it.
Before we talk about which iteration of the deck I prefer, lets lay out the case for Slow Gardy as well. I’m going to be using Henry’s Toronto list as a point of reference for Slow Gardy, but it’s important to note that many of the options that we played in Toronto are not mandatory and depending on the matchups you’re trying to beat you have a plethora of options to attempt to answer them.
I opted to showcase Henry’s list instead of the one myself, Benny Billinger and Michael Davidson played mostly due to the fact that I believe it to be a stronger iteration overall. The option of Moonlit Hill as well as the synergy between Night Stretcher and Mawile are not to be overlooked as they provide incredible tools in a plethora of matchups. This doesn’t mean that these are your only options, the nicest thing about Slow Gardy is the wide array of options that you can include in the deck. From attackers, to support Pokemon to random and fun techs you really can build out Slow Gardevoir to answer almost anything. So why would you ever play Turbo Gardy over Slow? Well, unfortunately we can only put 60 cards in a deck, and when we commit slots to tech, it means that we lose out on consistency. As much as I would love to say we can answer everything with Slow Gardevoir, we haven’t found the perfect 60 to do that yet.
Slow Gardevoir also has a bit of a weakness to decks that can kill both of your Kirlia on turn 2. Things like Kyurem and Radiant Greninja can prove to be massive problems for Slow Gardevoir if you can’t establish a Gardevoir ex before all of your Ralts and Kirlia are wiped from the board. With no Rare Candy we have to evolve all the way up through Kirlia into Gardevoir and so our only way to cheat and evolution is by using Technical Machine: Evolution to turn a Kirlia into a Gardevoir ex. We’ve functionally traded speed and resilience for an array of options. So what does Slow Gardevoir struggle with?
Drago remains as a problem for Slow Gardevoir, albeit with the inclusion of Manaphy, the second Munkidori and even Mawile the matchup does improve, albeit marginally. We have a bit of an easier time setting up a Gardevoir ex with no Damage on it and you can leverage multiple KO’s slightly easier by using said Gardevoir in addition to your two Munkidori. While we can’t set up a comprehensive draw engine with this list, drawing cards and avoiding putting Kyurem targets into play, manaphy, smart bench management and evolving excess Kirlia in the late game can help us to avoid getting a swift loss due to trifrost.
Charizard ex is the other primary issue with Slow Gardevoir. Mawile was an attempt to solve the matchup with a single card inclusion, but because the option is known now, Charizard ex players will almost certainly have figured out ways to deal with it. If you’re looking for a matchup to tech for, this is the one.
Tech options are a bit broader for Slow Gardy, lets talk about some of the primary ones.
Flutter Mane - This card used to be a staple of the archetype but has since fallen from grace quite a bit. Flutter now functions mostly as a tech option for the Gardevoir mirror and Lost Box. Flutter is cool and can replace Klefki in some instances essentially trading value against turbo style deck and Klawf for utility in the mirror and Lost Box.
Technical Machine: Devolution - I’m putting this right after Flutter Mane mostly due to the fact that I believe you should never play one without the other. Flutter Mane helps to activate Devo in the Charizard matchup by allowing you to get past Charmeleon’s “Flare Veil” ability fully removing your opponents option to just re-evolve into Charizard. Unfortunately now that Fezandipiti is standard in Charizard, Devo has lost quite a bit of luster.
Spiritomb - This is probably the best option in terms of a Charizard tech short of playing two copies of Devo. Shutting of Rotom early and Lumineon in the mid to late game can buy you a LOT of time against Charizard, not to mention this card shuts off Lumineon and Wyrdeer V in the Lugia matchup. This is probably the first card I would add to Slow Gardevoir at the moment of writing this.
Energy Switch - This is a cool one that you may have seen popping up on twitter for the Prismatic Evolutions format. Energy Switch is something we talked quite a bit about for Toronto and you don’t need to play 3 Munki to get use out of it. Essentially this card gives you two main options, the first being the ability to use two Munkidori with one Dark Energy, which is very strong in a plethora of matchups. The other way it can be used is to make a Gardevoir with 290/300 HP against Drago by accelerating one Psychic Energy to the bench and then moving it to the active without putting the damage in play. Then with either a single Munki or by attaching a Psychic Energy from hand, you get a Gardevoir ex that can’t be one shot by Regidrago VSTAR. Cool Card.
Mimikyu - As much as this pains me, this card is simply not good right now. I can’t tell you how many coaching sessions I have where my students bring me a list with Mimikyu. Unfortunately it just doesn’t do anything so, here we are.
Fezandipiti ex - I’m not going to spend too much time going over this as I kind of already talked about it in the Turbo section, but this is a crutch card against Regidrago. It’s much easier to throw down a Fezandipiti and draw a bunch of stuff with something that doesn’t die to Kyurem than it is to play your entire game from start to finish trying to avoid an end game Trifrost. If you struggle with Drago, this is a good tech to stream line the matchup.
Tatsugiri - Not a fan of this one either, the issue really is that the card has anti synergy with ™ Evo as you can’t retreat into it and use it to evolve your Ralts. It also has anti synergy with Munkidori as you can’t attach and retreat Tatsugiri and attach a dark to Munki. These are enough reasons for me not to like it. The main plus side to Tatsugiri is that it frees up bench space and allows you to make your entire deck Artazon searchable, which I suppose is cool!
If you can’t tell, I’m quite partial to Slow Gardevoir in comparison to Turbo. While Turbo certainly has it’s place in the meta, the more diverse our deck pool becomes the better having options becomes whic leaves me firmly in the camp of Slow Gardevoir. If you’re going to Birmingham at the very least that would be my recommendation. Personally I would try to find a spot in the deck for Spiritomb, and the novelty of Mawile has worn off just a bit so I’m fairly certain dropping that is a reasonable option!
I hope you all have enjoyed this outline of Gardevoir in our current format! If you have any questions about the deck feel free to reach out to me on Twitter or wherever and as always if you see me in San Antonio please feel free to come say hi and I’ll see you all next time with some Prismatic Evolutions content!