Darkrai Giratina ex continues to dominate TCG Pocket Ranked

The Pokémon Company has recently revealed interesting statistics about Pokémon TCG Pocket’s ranked mode, showcasing the top 10 most-used decks during April 2025’s A2b season.

While there are a few surprising inclusions such as Beedrix ex, the top two decks of the format should come as no surprise to trainers playing last, and this, season, with two variants of Darkrai ex and Giratina ex dominating nearly 13 percent of all decks last season—and has likely increased this season as well.

It’s hard to fully articulate why the deck is so strong, but know it’s an overpowered combination that doesn’t have much counterplay with the current cards available in-game.

And that’s a bad thing.

A healthy metagame is needed to incentivise trainers to go on the long and grindy process of trying to reach Master Ball rank, and it can be mind-numbing to play the same deck over and over again. You either come across the deck and it slowly burns and chips you out, or you play it yourself and have to deal with constant un-fun mirror matches over and over again.

There have been some anti-meta decks this season thanks to a small yellow demon bird, but the bird fails to really deal with Darkrai’s ability to deal 20 damage simply by attaching a Dark-type energy to it. Other trainers have been actively discussing on social media how they “can’t escape” the duo at all, with lots of players calling for some way to deal with the deck come next expansion.

This season has seen other powerful decks come into play, with Solgaleo ex and Rayquaza ex equally having strong play and being picked up by new and old players alike. The introduction of Rare Candy has also seen other decks form to try and overtake the powerful Darkrai ex and Giratina ex meta, but they are still failing to the consistently the former brings.

It’ll be interesting to see where the deck lines up in usage come the end of the season, as the data we are getting only represents the most-used decks and not decks with the highest win rate. But let’s hope the next mini set brings some polarizing cards that’ll force dramatic changes in ranked play for months to come.