While Roaring Moon—both in its regular and in its Pokémon-ex form—has been a staple of Pokémon TCG tournament play ever since its introduction, a new take on a deck featuring the ancient Paradox form of Salamence has recently started to increase in prominence. At the Pokémon Europe International Championships (EUIC), Mark Høstrup of Denmark surprised many by taking this deck to a seventh-place finish.

This deck uses the Dudunsparce card from Wild Force [SV5K] as a draw engine. Its Ability of Run Away Draw enables the player to draw three cards at any point during the player’s turn before shuffling Dudunsparce and all cards attached to it into the deck. This in turn allows Dudunsparce to be subsequently retrieved from the deck and played once again to draw more cards, making it significantly easier for the player to get the necessary cards.

Both forms of Roaring Moon serve as the deck’s main attackers. The ordinary version, a card taken from Wild Force [SV5K], primarily makes use of its Vengeance Fletching attack. Combined with cards such as the Ancient Roar [SV4K] duo of Earthen Vessel and Professor Sada’s Vitality, it’s just a matter of using them to fill up the discard pile to power up Vengeance Fletching and rip through opponents’ decks.

Roaring Moon ex, meanwhile, is mainly there to pick up the big KO’s which the basic form might not quite have the raw damage output for. Frenzied Gouging, a high-risk, high-reward move that inflicts 200 damage on Roaring Moon ex itself, can be used for insta-KO’s on some of the biggest threats to this deck. Ideally, Frenzied Gouging would be used to KO a multi-Prize Pokémon to get the most out of the attack.

The minimum cumulative price of all the cards in the Roaring Moon/Dudunsparce deck is 12,000 JPY (~US$78).

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