The Gardevoir ex deck cemented its position as the deck to beat in the current metagame heading into August’s Pokémon TCG World Championships following a dominant showing at the Pokémon North America International Championships (NAIC). While the majority of this success has been credited to the newly-introduced Munkidori card from Mask of Change [SV6], one other addition can’t be overlooked: a new ACE SPEC option—the Hyper Aroma card from Crimson Haze [SV5a].

Hyper Aroma enables the player to take three Stage 1 Pokémon cards from the deck and place them in hand. Since this is an ACE SPEC card, this play can only be made once per game as a deck is only allowed to contain just one ACE SPEC card. That, however, is not an issue at all.

A Gardevoir ex deck contains just four Stage 1 Pokémon cards in total: four copies of the Kirlia card from Incandescent Arcana [S11a]. That’s all which are needed, though—the most important thing to do is evolve two of those Kirlia into the titular Gardevoir ex card from Scarlet ex [SV1S] so that the deck’s main strategy can get underway. The more Kirlia cards are retrieved, the better the chances of getting both Gardevoir ex cards up and running.

Kirlia itself is also able to make key plays. Its Ability of Refinement not only serves as a draw engine; it also fills up the discard pile with Psychic Energy cards. Once it evolves into Gardevoir ex, it gains access to the Psychic Embrace Ability which allows the player to take those same Psychic Energy cards and load up any Pokémon accordingly—and all of this can begin with the use of Hyper Aroma.

The English version of this card is card 152/167 from the Twilight Masquerade [TWM] set.

A Hyper Aroma (Crimson Haze [SV5a] 055/066) card is relatively affordable at a price of just 470 JPY (~US$3).

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