Lost Box Takes Over Stuttgart! Three Lost Zone Decks for the Current Meta
After being reasonably under-represented in the Paradox Rift format thus far, Lost Zone box variants had a dominant showing at the recent Stuttgart Regionals. At LAIC, Brennan Kamerman debuted an interesting Sableye / Radiant Charizard deck featuring Roaring Moon ex and made Top 8. Following that, Tord Reklev made Top 8 at Gdansk Regionals with a madman’s concoction — a Kyogre variant featuring Iron Hands ex, Roaring Moon ex, and Origin Forme Palkia VSTAR, of all things.
Interestingly, Lost Zone box decks haven’t been played all that much in this format, with these wild decks being the outliers. Lost Zone box is weak against Charizard ex, which has been quite popular. Furthermore, Jirachi neutralizes Sableye, so many were left thinking that Lost Zone box’s prime was in the past.
Stuttgart Regionals saw a vanilla Sableye / Radiant Charizard win the entire tournament, along with some interesting Lost Zone box decks in Top 16. A counter-box deck featuring Supereffective Glasses among a myriad of different-type attackers was in the semi-finals, and notably, no Sableye. Tord once again brought a crazy deck, swapping out last tournament’s Origin Forme Palkia VSTAR with Giratina VSTAR along with the accompanying Energy types. This seemingly gives the deck a better shot against Charizard ex, as you have another strong option to one-shot a Charizard ex in the Star Requiem attack.
Today I will be going over all three of Stuttgart’s interesting Lost Box decks. Let’s start with the first-place ‘Sablezard’ list.
Sablezard List
Playing Sablezard
I’ve never thought Sablezard is all that good, as it often loses to common disruption cards like Iono and Roxanne, and is also extremely weak to Jirachi. The deck is also fairly weak and inconsistent, however, if you’re going to play the deck, this list is a strong choice. The basic strategy varies slightly from matchup to matchup; against decks with multi-Prize Pokemon, you try to take two Prizes in the early to mid-game between Cramorant and Sableye hits, then Radiant Charizard cleans up by taking four Prizes in only two attacks. Sableye prepares Pokemon for KO’s from Radiant Charizard if they have too much HP to begin with. This strategy often involves letting your opponent get down to one Prize card and then winning within a strict turn window, which can get sketchy if you have to draw big combos amidst hand disruption. This deck isn’t particularly great at thinning the deck either, lacking options like Radiant Greninja and PokéStop.
This concludes the public portion of this article.
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