Wait — Where’s Tera Box?
Hello PokeBeach readers! Isaiah here, and I am happy to be writing another article for you all!
Last time, I discussed my run at the Atlanta Regional Championships pretty in-depth, detailing my thought process on how I came to the conclusion to play the deck that I did, which was Archaludon ex / Brute Bonnet. In that article, I briefly discussed one of my favorite decks in the format, Tera Box, and how I ultimately decided to not play the deck despite investing a lot of time into preparing with it.
To my dismay, the deck ended up producing pretty poor results at Atlanta, with the highest finishing player being Nicholas Moffitt, who got 39th, which is certainly a good finish, but considering the high expectations that I think a lot of players had for the deck, this outcome was a bit underwhelming.
This past weekend, though, Yerco Valencia showed the world what could be possible with Tera Box with his Top 4 finish at the Monterrey Regional Championships in Mexico. With an unfortunate loss to 2024 World Champion Fernando Cifuentes and his Blissey ex deck, Yerco’s finish showed that Tera Box was not a complete flop, and it was instead just not the right time for the deck. Going forward, I expect Tera Box to make a proper resurgence, and in this article, I want to talk about why that is the case.
What Has Caused Tera Box to Fail?
In the first major post rotation event, Champions League Fukuoka, we saw a dominant finish from two different decks. One of these was the “Walls” deck, which typically includes Farigiraf ex , Milotic ex, Cornerstone Mask Ogerpon ex, and other similar cards to try and find a way that it is impossible for most decks to beat it. This deck initially seemed promising, but I think that players would pretty quickly realize that the deck simply was not good enough to succeed beyond the surprise of this first major event.
The other deck that dominated this event, though, was Tera Box. This deck uses Noctowl with a variety of Tera Pokemon (hence the name) to search for the exact Trainer cards that you need to pull off a powerful stream of attacks, such as Torrential Pump from Wellspring Mask Ogerpon ex and Topaz Bolt from Pikachu ex. This deck’s approach to most matchups is extremely surgical, often pulling together games with the exact amount of resources the deck needs to execute the plays that it needs to.
Because of this, the deck is actually much more simple than people would generally think upon first glance, with the best play frequently being pretty obvious. But efficiently executing each play is the difficult part, as any inefficiency with the deck can be game losing. Tera Box would certainly be the focus of the pre-Journey Together hype from what I could tell, largely because of Tord Reklev’s deep run in Fukuoka with the deck, but when the set actually came out, the expected success for the deck never really materialized.
This can be attributed to two different factors. One factor is simply that the deck does feel a bit difficult to play when you are first getting into it, and players will often overextend when they do not need to and it will cost them games. In these cases, players will, of course, assume that the deck is just weak because it cannot close out their rounds. The reality is that they probably made a minor mistake somewhere and it ended up punishing them a couple of turns later when they did not expect it to. These players are obviously not indicative of the deck being “bad” or anything like that, as they are simply making mistakes, but this was a contributing factor in a troublingly low win rate for a deck that was expected to be the next big thing.
The other factor, though, is a bit more existential for the deck, and that is simply people being overprepared for Tera Box. One of the biggest perks to playing Tera Box is getting access to Pikachu ex, or more specifically its Resolute Heart Ability. Pikachu ex dealing 300 into big HP attackers like Gholdengo ex is fantastic, but this is largely because they cannot Knock it Out in response, so the Pikachu ex is often able to trade four Prize cards for two Prizes, swinging games into your favor with ease.
However, a lot of Gholdengo ex deck lists have started to include cards like Vengeful Punch or even Rocky Helmet to “break” Resolute Heart, keeping the trade closer to even, and making it so Pikachu ex is a bit more of an inefficient attacks as you have to recover it, power it up again, and probably lose Sparkling Crystal in the process.
Of course, Gholdengo ex is not the only deck preparing to beat Tera Box. The Archaludon ex deck that I played with Brute Bonnet is able to Knock Out Pikachu ex to Poison, or Gardevoir ex is able to use Munkidori to put damage on Pikachu ex before using Miracle Force. The ways that the format is prepared to handle Resolute Heart seem more or less endless, which is a huge existential problem for the deck. This compounded with the fact that Terapagos ex / Bouffalant emerged as an archetype that was made to destroy Tera Box just showed that it was doomed from the start, and there was just no way that Tera Box could ever succeed in such a hostile metagame.
As I said previously, Tera Box would ultimately see a fair amount of play at Atlanta, but it certainly failed to meet the expectations that were set for it, but that does not mean the deck is bad either, and as Yerco proved in Monterrey, the deck certainly can be powerful.
This concludes the public portion of this article.
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