It’s Dark In Here! — Dark Box in the Post-Worlds Meta

Hello everyone! Can you believe it’s already 2020? (in the Pokemon world at least.) Thanks to the new change to League Cups, it seems like this year is already well underway—even though from where I am in the United States, we’re a week away from our first Regional Championships. It’s now over a month since the DC Open and the 2019 Pokemon World Championships and with the release of Hidden Fates, there’s no big change to the format since then.

For this article, I want to go over the deck that brought me success at the World Championships: Dark Box. This deck had some hype at the release of Unified Minds, but it hasn’t got nearly as much love recently. That’s a shame, because Dark Box was, and continues, to be an incredibly strong deck.

My Dark Box list performed wonderfully at the World Championships, as I was able to pilot it to a 6-1-1 record on Day 1, followed by a 16th place finish in Day 2. Since then, the deck has continued to perform strongly in local tournaments I’ve used it at and in testing, despite the meta adaptations resulting from the results of the World Championships. While this deck may not be receiving much hype, it shouldn’t be written off. If you’ve been playing Dark Box at all, hopefully your list looks somewhat like mine. If you haven’t been playing it, then I’ll try my best to convince you to give it a shot!

I’ll be going over what made the deck successful for me at the World Championships, as well as whether the deck can maintain that success going forward into Atlantic City and Knoxville. I’ll have a guide to matchups, as well as potential changes to the list that could improve it going forward.

This concludes the public portion of this article.

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