Oh, so there's still a big SP presence. Do they count as unevolved?
Yes. And Unown G was rotated out, meaning you can't safeguard against it anymore.
Luxray LvX is just a bloody good card, I used to run it as setup support in a copypaste Beedrill deck, and it ended up being my main force a lot of the time. If I were playing I'd probably run an SP deck...so many good SP trainers, and SP pokes tend to be pretty decent on the whole.
Raybees would still be epic if the Band attack beedrill didn't rotate
SP trainers are broke, but now Trainer lock is a huge deal. There's Spiritomb AR which blocks trainers when active, and Vileplume UD which blocks them even when benched.
And even then SP STILL WINS. lol.
If there aren't things like Roxanne's around, guess that means Mespirit/Seeker is a valid combo...I'm concerned there are better Supporters you could be playing in the setup phase, but I can see that particular combo would keep working into the lategame.
Oh yeah, for sure. First turn Pokemon Collector "Search your deck for 3 basic pokemon and add them to your hand". One of those is a Mespirit
Then, in addition to seeker, they reprinted Super Scoop Up which lets you return any pokemon on a coin flip. So if you get a good flip, you can afford not to use Seeker.
Is Machamp LvX there for raw power, or is there some sort of support setup I'm missing? I would've thought Machamp's first two attacks would suffice for most purposes. It seems like a huge energy investment if you're going to use it offensively, and if Night Maintenance and the like are gone (?), a dead Machamp is a big problem :\
There's no Machamp Lv X in the deck. HGSS Triumphant gave Machamp decks the new 'Machamp Prime' which is essentially just a rarer kind of stage 2 they made for the HGSS block (Basically, sets include a normal stage 2 of the pokemon as well, nothing special).
It's different from a Lv X because it's not a level up card. It's literally just a rarer, different stage 2 to choose from.
As for it's place, it's there to deal with other stage 2 decks one might expect. Hurricane Punch is terrible at the best of times, however for 1 fighting and 1 Double Colourless (Yes they reprinted that too, so now Garchomp C Lv X is broken), you can do a guaranteed 60 and special energy discard.
As for recovery, there's a new special energy called 'rescue energy' that lets you return a whole line of pokemon (but not attached energy/tools) to your hand when it is knocked out.
If you were interested in busting out some cards, see if you've got Gyarados SF handy. None of the cards in Gyarados are very expensive and it is definitely a Tier 1 deck. But don't let me tempt you lol.
Also your Luxray SP lines will be quite valuable right now.