2007 World Championships Deck Overview: Jun Hasebe

By Michael Martin

Want to learn how to compete with the best? Then a 2007 Pokémon TCG World Championships deck is perfect for you. There are four powerful decks to choose from, and they are all available now! This overview reveals the secrets of Jun Hasebe, 2007 Junior Division World Champion.

Jun Hasebe is the Pokémon Trading Card Game Junior Division World Champion at the incredible age of only seven years old. To achieve this feat, Jun chose to center his deck around some of the most powerful cards in the format, Flygon ex (EX Dragon Frontiers, 92/101) and the evolutions of Eevee (EX Delta Species, 68/113). There were many decks using one or the other of these as their core, but it was unusual to see both working together. Yet work together they did!

Jun actually used two different versions of Flygon that helped each other. In addition to the Delta Species ex version, the deck also has another Delta Species Flygon (EX Holon Phantoms, 7/110) with the Poké-Power Delta Supply. This allowed him to power up Flygon ex very fast, in just two turns instead of three. And once Flygon ex is powered up, what a beast it is! First up, its Poké-Body Sand Damage punished Jun’s opponents for having any Basic Pokémon on their Bench. Sand Damage put a damage counter on Benched Pokémon between each and every turn. And not only did its Psychic Pulse do 80 damage to the Defending Pokémon, it also did an additional 10 damage to Benched Pokémon that already had any damage counters on them. Talk about adding insult to injury!

The evolutions of Eevee that Jun decided to use in the deck did double duty. Jolteon ex (EX Delta Species, 109/113) allowed Jun to put a damage counter on each of his opponent’s Pokémon when it was put into play. It also served as a counter to Lightning-weak Empoleon decks that were very popular at the World Championships. Vaporeon ex (EX Delta Species, 110/113) not only acted as a counter to popular decks based around Infernape, it had a Poké-Power that made opponents shuffle their hand into their deck and draw only four cards. Players often invested a lot of their deck’s resources to drawing huge hands, so forcing his opponents to lose all those cards was devastating to them.

Usually you don’t want to have single copies of cards in your deck; it’s hard to get them when you need them, and if they are important to your deck, you don’t want them stuck in your Prize cards. But sometimes, if those cards are doing special jobs and you have a lot of Trainers that can help you put them into play, then you can get away with just one of them. Jun had a few of these cards in his deck. Absol ex (EX Power Keepers, 92/108) helped him move damage from one of his opponent’s Pokémon to another, allowing him to get a key Knock Out when he needed it. Budew (Diamond & Pearl, 43/130) gave him the ability to pull a critical Trainer card out of his deck, but at the cost of an attack and probably a Knock Out! Finally, Fearow (EX Crystal Guardians, 18/100) allowed him to search his deck for one Delta Species Pokémon each turn, giving him an amazingly fast set up.

It’s important to realize that no matter how great the Pokémon in a deck are, it means nothing if you can’t get them into play and powered up. The Trainer and Supporter cards in the deck make that happen quickly and reliably. Jun depended on a very popular mix of cards known as the "Holon Engine." These are a group of Supporters that can all take advantage of a Trainer called Holon Transceiver (EX Delta Species, 98/113). Holon Transceiver allows you to search your deck or your discard pile for any Supporter that has Holon in its name. This flexibility gave Jun lots of options to get whatever Supporter he needed, when he needed it. It takes a lot of skill to control all the options and power that this deck gives a player, but if a seven year old can master it, maybe you can, too. Give it a try and see if you can make it fly!