Post Arlington Regionals, I have conceded to the meta. In other words, I am now only comfortable playing higher tier decks with strong engines. Mew, Lugia, Lost Box: these are archetypes with strong engines that offer high levels of power and a consistent support engine. Regis and Mewtwo also have engines, but not with the same level of resilience. I played Arceus Box at Arlington, also called Arc Catron or Arceus Aerodactyl Espeon. The deck is rogue and designed to counter to the meta. I did not enjoy my experience with it. This sort of deck is entirely based around hitting the right match ups, without offering much room to outplay opponents. The deck left a very bad taste in my mouth, and going forward I am much more interested in very consistent decks that rely on outplaying opponents, despite what the numbers may be on paper.

Understanding engines

What is an engine? The way I define a true Engine, is a series of cards that provide consistency through being in play turn after turn. This is different from cards that are only providing consistency when they are drawn at the right time. For example, Primal turbo would count as a true engine effect because it offers Energy acceleration every turn without any other cards being played from hand. Crobat V and Lumineon V are not true engine cards based on this definition. Crobat V is a card that you have to draw at the right time or search out, and it only provides a one-time use. Lumineon is essentially the same, but can be shuffled back in through its attack, meaning it is not a one-time use card in decks that can easily attack with it. Arceus Vstar’s Starbirth is also not a true engine card, again because it is a one-time use effect. The Arceus counters deck does not have a real engine, it has an imitation of an engine, through multiple single-use consistency effects, which can easily be burned through in the first couple turns.

If we look at decks that have had consistent success, all of them have some sort of powerful engine as their backbone. Mew has Fusion Strike System drawing several cards every turn, Lugia has Primal Turbo accelerating the most powerful Special Energy in the game every turn, and Lost Box has Radiant Greninja and Comfeys allowing many cards to be drawn/thinned each turn. I have to admit that the Inteleon engine does not entirely fit my definition, because using Shady Dealings requires playing new cards each turn to use these effects. Shady Dealings is also not one-time use, because of Scoop Up Net. The reason why Inteleon is still an engine is that lists have very high counts of cards that enable it to use Shady Dealings multiple times every turn. Bibarel is another solid engine, although it has been less utilized recently. Oranguru is my favorite engine card because it requires only one slot in a deck list while enabling a slightly higher level of consistency throughout a game.

If your deck does not have an engine, it’s not a real deck.

The options

If you choose to play a deck with a solid engine, there actually are not a huge number of options in the meta. This can be viewed as a good or bad thing; personally I find it helpful because it makes deck choice significantly easier. My favorite engine is that of Lost Box, so let’s start there.

Jacob Eye’s Top 8 Lost Box

Jacob’s Arlington list takes extra steps to make this deck more consistent by playing three copies of Raihan and a Pokegear, whereas the deck can normally get away with no Pokegear and only two Raihan. He has also fit in a Capture and one more Switch Cart than is played in other lists. I do like this list, however Tyler Mathews played a different list that earned him 10th place, which is worth considering.

Tyler Mathew’s 10th place Lost Box

I believe Tyler actually had the same record as another player who made Top 8, so in my eyes this list has just as much credibility because resistance was the only thing keeping Tyler out of Top 8. The most notable difference here is the addition of Metal Energy, at the expense of having zero Water Energy. The reason for this is that Tyler plays Amazing Raikou which has the same Energy requirement that Rayquaza has, except instead of a Fighting, it requires Metal. With the overlap in Energy requirement and the perfect weakness Raikou is hitting, there is merit to this change. This made sense to me because Greninja requires a completely different Energy as compared to any of the other attackers and needs two Water attached to attack, where Raikou is using the same Energy types that are already in the deck, plus the one Metal. Remember that Raikou also snipes for more damage than Greninja doing 120-120 instead of 90-90. There is one downside to Raikou, in that it has to hit the active and snipe one benched Pokemon, where Radiant Greninja can hit into any two Pokemon your opponent has in play. I still find this to be a worthwhile exchange because it allows for great math to be set up against Lugia. The idea is to hit into Lugia for 240 and snipe an Archeops for 120, and follow with Sableye to knock out both and place an extra five damage counters somewhere. This will only work if Manaphy is not in play, but you can easily use Sableye the turn before using Raikou to knock out Manaphy.

Tyler and Jacob laid the foundation for this deck and gave credibility to this variant of Lost Box. I have some differences in my list that I will cover, but first I have a video that I believe will help a lot of you with this deck. In the video below I play out the opening two turns using my Rayquaza list, with three examples. This video was created to show how to optimally set up the engine of this deck with proper sequencing.

After upgrading to Stage 2 you will see an audio file of Andy Hyun reading this article here:

You must have a Stage 2 Membership or greater to see the rest of this post. If you don't have a Stage 2 account, you can Sign Up for one here.

Username

Password

Remember Me

 

 

Forgot Password