Lost Box Wins! Reviewing NAIC and the Optimized First-Place List
Hello everyone! The largest western tournament of all time, the North America International Championships in New Orleans, has just concluded. For this tournament, the most hyped decks were Lugia VSTAR, Gardevoir ex, Lost Box, and Raging Bolt ex . Additionally, Dragapult ex received lots of attention, due to its results in Japan as well as Tord Reklev’s MasterClass on the archetype. However, many top players were skeptical of Dragapult, and lists were still far from optimized. Nobody really knew what the best variant of the deck was, let alone the exact list to play. While people tend to gravitate towards new stuff, it’s a risky play for such a large tournament. My group had an inkling that Dragapult wouldn’t make its mark, and therefore strongly considered Charizard ex as a powerful deck that can handle just about everything besides Dragapult. In the end, we chickened out and played a run-of-the-mill Gardevoir list. Gardevoir has no apparent bad matchups, which made it an appealing play.
I was hesitant about playing one of the big four decks, as many other decks could easily tech for them. For the Lugia matchup, it was common to see random Enhanced Hammer or Temple of Sinnoh floating around, with some decks even teching in Iron Thorns ex. Against Gardevoir, decks could easily play Jamming Tower or Lost Vacuum, even when they otherwise wouldn’t. Finally, Lost Box struggled to deal with Flutter Mane techs. Raging Bolt ex has seen a massive surge in popularity lately, plus some top finishes at the recent Japan Championships. It was on everyone’s radar, but seemed to be in an awkward position with its subpar matchups against Gardevoir and Lost Box. All Day 2 lists can be found here for easy reference during the remainder of this article.
Lost Box
Let’s start by talking about Lost Box. This deck clocked in as the fourth-most-played deck at the tournament, with about 9% representation. This was slightly higher than my group’s predicted 7%, and for good reason. Many players ended up including Iron Thorns as a versatile tech card to counter Lugia while also having some utility against Gardevoir, Charizard ex, and Stall / Control decks. Spiritomb was a more commonly known tech for Lost Box to utilize, but upon reflection, Iron Thorns makes a lot more sense. Lost Box is a powerful, adaptable, and consistent deck that can fight on even ground with just about everything else. The fact that it’s favored against Lugia and Raging Bolt made it a very sensible play for this tournament.
Lost Box had a huge conversion rate, ballooning to 15% in Day 2, and, of course, it ended up winning the whole tournament. In addition to first place, Lost Box saw Top 8 and Top 16 finishes, and there were several more in Top 64. Most lists were following the same formula, making use of the usual Lost Zone suspects in addition to the insanely powerful Iron Hands ex. Some lists still played Roaring Moon ex, though it has somewhat fallen out of favor now that the deck has access to the ubiquitous Bloodmoon Ursaluna ex. Another inclusion that saw some play was Hassel as a pseudo–fifth Colress's Experiment. While Hassel is sadly useless in the early game, it is typically better than Colress’s Experiment in the mid- to late-game, and Colress is already pretty good.
Andrew Hedrick’s winning list looked to be the cleanest and most optimized version of the deck. Although there wasn’t anything too crazy, he did include the Iron Thorns, realizing that the card offers too much power and versatility for just one tech slot. The more I think about it, the more Iron Thorns fits the bill as the ideal tech card.
This concludes the public portion of this article.
If you'd like to continue reading, consider purchasing a PokeBeach premium membership! If you're not completely satisfied with your membership, you can request a full refund within 30 days.
Each week we post high-quality content from some of the game's top players. Our article program isn't a corporate operation, advertising front, or for-profit business. We set our prices so that we can pay the game's top players to write the best content for our subscribers. Each article topic is carefully selected, goes through multiple drafts, and is touched up by our editors. We take great pride in our program!
