Best Pokemon TCG Live starter decks – September 2023

If you’re just starting playing Pokemon TCG Live, then one thing you’ll be happy to learn is that even if you don’t have codes to redeem for packs, you’ll have a bunch of cards right out of the gate. The game provides you a handful of starter decks that are all strong shells of powerful meta decks. But what are the best Pokemon TCG Live starter decks?

Now, some of these starter decks do rotate from time to time. But they’ve recently changed over to accommodate the release of Obsidian Flames. That means these decks will be in for a little bit. If you want the best decks to play in Standard, check out our guide to the best Pokemon TCG decks.

Best Pokemon TCG Live starter decks

First, let’s take a look what decks are offered to us in the game.

• Obsidian Flames Charizard EX
• Origin Form Palkia
• Origin Form Dialga
• Giritina Lost Zone
• Regieleki VMAX
• Koraidon EX
• Arcanine EX
• Lunatone & Solrock
• Serperior VSTAR

Now, there’s a few options here that stand out above the rest, so let’s start with those.

Best Pokemon TCG Live starter decks – Giritina Lost Zone

The first deck we’re going to look at is Giritina Lost Zone deck. This deck wants to abuse cards like Comfey and Colress’s Experiment to get cards into the Lost Zone. Once there are 10 cards in the Lost Zone, it sets up both a Giritina VSTAR and a Sableye with energy and uses some very powerful moves. These moves require 10 cards to be in the Lost Zone to even work. There’s a few other support Pokemon in the deck as well such as Cramorant and Lumineon V.

This deck is a fantastic starter shell for the more competitive Lost Box deck. From this deck, you can build the version of Lost Box that we showcased in our best decks guide with a little over 3000 crafting gems on TCG Live so this is an amazing option for a new player to pick up.

Origin Form Palkia

The next deck that stands out on the list is the Origin Form Palkia deck. This deck is one that wants to get a lot of water energy out onto its Pokemon and quickly. While Palkia itself can do a good amount of damage if both players have a full bench, the power behind Palkia VSTAR is its VSTAR Power. This lets you put three water energy from your discard pile onto your Pokemon. This deck uses Kindra from Battle Styles as its energy sink. This Kingrda’s second move does more damage for each water energy attached to it.

This game plan is exactly the same as the more competitive versions of Origin Form Palkia. The more competitive versions use Chien-Pao EX instead of the Kingdra. And some versions of this deck use a Baxcalibur evolution line to give you another avenue of dumping energy onto a Pokemon very quickly. Once again, we have a very powerful shell here, and building up to the top end versions of this deck will cost you between 4000 and 5000 crafting gems on Live.

Charizard EX

The other deck that is a bit of a standout here is the newly added Charizard EX deck. This deck is pretty straight forward in that its game plan revolves around getting out Charizard EX and taking names. Now there isn’t at present an established archetype that wants to follow this game plan, but there’s a couple of applications that Charizard EX has in the current meta.

Firstly, from a competitive standpoint, there was one deck that showed up to the Champions League in Yokohoma, Japan that was a Charizard and Galade deck. This deck is definitely the closest strategy wise to the starter deck. Considering that the deck finished in 8th place, I’d say that there may be something here.

The other place that this Charizard has shown up is in a Lost Zone variation. Instead of Giritina, or any of the other staple damage dealers, three copies of Charmander and three copies of Charizard EX are present in the deck. This deck leverages the same shell to get cards into the Lost Zone, but it doesn’t mess around with trying to set up Giritina. It goes all in on getting Charizard, Cramorant and Sableye on the board quickly. The only way the deck can get Charizard in play is the three Rare Candies in the deck.

The reason that I call attention to this card and these decks is because these decks only require three copies of Charizard EX. You get two with the starter deck, and you get a third copy for free on the battle pass. Meaning that you can very quickly put together any deck that requires this evolutionary line. That being said, the Charizard deck as-is is a solid contender and can definitely win you a lot of games.

The other decks

The other decks, while you can play them in the lower ranks and do just fine, they’re definitely a step down from the decks we mentioned, as they’re not competitive shells. They will have cards that are used in competitive play though, so it’s nice that we have that variety of decks to add to our collection.

And those are the best Pokemon TCG Live starter decks that you can play right now. If you’re just getting started with Live, then you should check out our guide on how to redeem Pokemon TCG codes. If you’re looking for something a bit different than Standard, then check out our guide to the Gym Leader Challenge.