Ancient Box Crushes the Current Meta
Hello everyone! After the dominance of Gardevoir ex and Lost Box at NAIC, it begs the question, what decks can beat both? After all, both Lost Box and Gardevoir are extremely powerful and adaptable decks without many obvious weaknesses. They use single-Prize attackers to win Prize trades. Lost Box is more fast and aggressive, while Gardevoir can come back from nearly any position.
Leading up to NAIC, one of the main decks I was testing was actually Ancient Box. This isn’t saying a whole lot though, since our group tested out just about everything. However, Ancient Box stood out to me because it matched up exceptionally well into the expected meta. It has fantastic matchups against Lost Box, Gardevoir, and Raging Bolt ex . It is a neutrally strong deck that also has the potential to stand up to just about anything else. When it draws well, Ancient Box is trading favorably into every matchup with its powerful and somewhat bulky single-Prize attackers.
There were two main reasons why we didn’t end up playing Ancient Box for the tournament. First, the Lugia VSTAR matchup wasn’t as dominant as we wanted or expected. From our testing, it seemed to be about 50-50, and we wanted to solidly cover Lugia for this tournament. Second, the deck had some consistency issues. It would randomly lose games that seemed to be in the bag, or peter out without immaculate resource management. It also struggles against any deck with a Pidgeot ex, but that wasn’t as big of a concern. Even with these weaknesses, Ancient Box’s matchup spread into the current meta is simply too ridiculous to ignore.
Furthermore, the meta is shifting to a favorable direction for Ancient Box. Of all the viable decks in the current format, Gardevoir and Lost Box were the ones that dominated NAIC. Both decks have no real way to beat Ancient Box, which puts this overlooked deck into a great position. The biggest flops of NAIC were Lugia and Dragapult ex, which is also a good outcome for Ancient Box. Ancient Box didn’t do particularly well at NAIC, but I believe that is because hardly anyone played it.
All that said, it’s important to keep in mind that there is a lack of major events until Worlds, at which point a new mini-set will be released. Therefore, it’s hard to say if the current meta trends will still be relevant, but I think Ancient Box will remain strong.
This concludes the public portion of this article.
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