Gouging Fire

Gouging Fire ex is an aggressive deck, so you’re going to want to do your best to get it set up as early as possible. Often, your very longest turn will be your first one where you are taking advantage of Squawkabilly’s “Squawk and Sieze” ability to dig through your deck. Indeed, that card is so vital to this deck’s strategy that some Gouging Fire ex players run two copies of Squawkabilly to ensure they get the ability off in the first turn.

I find that the combination

Gouging Fire ex is an aggressive deck, so you’re going to want to do your best to get it set up as early as possible. Often, your very longest turn will be your first one where you are taking advantage of Squawkabilly’s “Squawk and Sieze” ability to dig through your deck. Indeed, that card is so vital to this deck’s strategy that some Gouging Fire ex players run two copies of Squawkabilly to ensure they get the ability off in the first turn.

I find that the combination of Heavy Ball and Squawkabilly works fine for me, however, and I rarely can’t find Squawkabilly when I need it.

One of the first things you are going to want to do when playing Gouging Fire ex is to get as many fire energies as possible into your discard early on. This deck doesn’t really benefit from having fire energies in the deck itself but instead benefits from having a ton of energies in the discard. This way you can accelerate them onto your Pokemon using Magma Basin and Sada’s Vitality. 

When choosing which Radiant Pokemon to put into this deck, it was a hard choice between Radiant Greninja and Radiant Charizard. In reality, both are solid options that would likely fair well in this deck. However, Radiant Greninja is the clear better choice thanks to its ability to get those energies into your discard while helping you reach the cards you need to play more consistently. Radiant Greninja’s well-loved ‘Concealed Cards’ ability enables you to discard one energy card (basic or special) to draw two cards.