Introduction

Hello, Cut or Tap readers! It is a common consensus that you can throw any tech Pokemon together with the Lost Zone engine, and your deck won’t be half bad, as seen with Zacian VSTAR as an example. However, a frequent issue with many of these lists was the late game. This is why typically we see powerful attackers being added, such as Kyogre CEL or Amazing Rare Rayquaza in the Silver Tempest format. Alternatively, by using big damage V attackers, like Dragonite V, or ones that hit key Pokemon for weakness, like Raikou V, Sky Seal Stone can turn the prize trade in your favor.

This illustrates a key issue with Lost Box: while you may be able to take some cheap knockouts in the early game, or pick off some prizes with Lost Mine, this is not enough to win the game, and this is an issue I have felt with most Turbo Lost Box lists. While sometimes Radiant Charizard is enough to solve this issue, the Mew matchup can be a struggle if they play a Lost City, and Arceus decks can be overwhelming due to the high health. This means that there needs to be a better, more damaging early game attack in the deck – a way to chain powerful late-game attacks, and/or a way to take multiple prizes easily.

This brings me to the three Lost Zone variants I have been focusing on in my testing: straight Moltres, Turbo Kyogre, and Moltres Kyogre Lost Boxes. 

Straight Moltres

Back in the Silver Tempest format, one of my testing partners spit-balled the idea: what if we played Moltres in Lost Box? We tested it, and the deck was solid, but Amazing Rare Rayquaza just felt like a better version, with a stronger early game – something much more important with the pressure Lugia VSTAR had in the last format. Now, with a much slower format, the late game becomes much more important, hence why the deck is in a much better position. I decided to give the deck more thought when I saw the video Omnipoke posted, and the list I came up with ended up pretty similar:

Similar to Nick Moffit’s EUIC list, I opted to not play any Battle VIP Pass. I can get away with not playing Passes due to the format being slower by nature, but one of my other reasons for this omission was that in the end, it gave me an extra deck space to mess around with. This allowed me to play something like Echoing Horn or Energy Retrieval, two very strong cards in the deck.

Echoing Horn has been a great option, in combination with Boss’s Orders, to give the option to take game-winning knockouts on weaker Pokemon. While this card has seen a lot of play in Kyogre builds, this use is very important in this deck in order to win prize trades.

As I just mentioned, Energy Retrieval (yes Retrieval, not Recycler) is a broken card in this deck. Not only does Retrieval allow you to discard more energy via Concealed Cards, retreating, or Ultra Ball, but it also allows you to get the necessary Dark energy to power up Moltres, without burning your Supporter for turn. This tech feels best when you get Judged or Roxanned and need to Klara to get the energies, but need to Colress to find the switching effect or Moltres. With the ability to get energy back and still play a supporter, like Boss in some scenarios, Retrieval has quickly become an uncuttable card, in my opinion.

Retrieval is also nice since you play from the hand a lot, namely with Malevolent Charge or cheap attacks, so Mirage Gate becomes worse as the game goes on. Retrieval makes our game plan easier to pull off, and gives us an extra space with cutting the fourth Gate. With the Retrieval, I am not completely set on the energy line, and there is a high likelihood that a third Psychic energy will be added, in place of the fourth Water or fifth Dark, but I haven’t committed to this yet, as I quite like having the higher counts of both these energies to keep my options open with the threat to Moonlight Shuriken or Thumping Snore.

An important note on prize mapping the Arceus Box matchup is if and when to use Zapdos. While it seems you’d want to use Zapdos every game, there are some games where you cannot win. In general, my game plan would be to likely sacrifice one prize to the early game pressure of Arceus, while developing my board. This is the peak time to take a knockout on Arceus, as it will bring you to four prizes, and your opponent to three after this. From here, you need to attack with Sableye, Snorlax, or Cramorant, to set up chip damage onto their next attacker. Then, you will need to Moltres twice. If you are able to, setting up one damage on another Arceus VSTAR makes your life much easier, as the second attack will get an easy knockout. If you are unable to do so, you will have to make the aforementioned Echoing Horn, Boss, Fiery Wrath play to win. This is a very tight schedule to hit, and if either player misses what they need, even for a turn, the game is almost lost for them. 

Overall, I think this deck has a lot of potential, as I believe a second Moltres, along with a Galarian Zapdos V, provides for a sufficient win condition into all of the matchups Kyogre is also useful into – those being Mew, Arceus Box, Miraidon, and a couple others. The Lugia matchup is definitely a bit more awkward, but it was pretty poor to begin with, as some poor Cragalanches could prevent you from Aqua Storming. If you were looking for a better Lugia matchup, the two options are playing a Tropius to gain tempo from one-shotting a Tyranitar V, or an Articuno, to effectively one shot a Tyranitar, as most Lugia players play few switch outs. The former of these takes up more deck spaces, but could be as simple as taking out Zapdos and Fighting for Tropius and Grass. On the other hand Articuno has uses outside of the Lugia matchup, but it is also a bit more fragile to a Penny play from the Lugia player – a card which was present in Regan Retzloff’s second place list from Portland.

As you’ll see later, I touch on the Kyogre Moltres build, which I think is a great play, but this is definitely an easier build to play, with a similar power level, if not just slightly worse. 

After upgrading to Stage 2 you will see the rest of Piper’s article and an audio file of Andy Hyun reading this article here:

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