Many blessings, Subs! It’s been a short while since you heard from me, because life has been busier than ever. My job has been on overtime due to the summer months’ busy season, along with 100-degree heat keeping me quite exhausted. The largest tournament in history has concluded, giving us the first bit of data to look at for this new format. Only the World Championship in Yokohama, Japan remains for this season. I wanna give some shout-outs to our writers and my teammates at Cut or Tap, and Dead Draw Gaming. Congratulations to Phinn, Piper, Braiden, Andrew, Christian, and myself for obtaining a Day 1 invite. Congratulations to Andrew Hedrick and Gabriel Smart for completing a daunting Day 2 invitation as well. Anyone who is subscribed to Cut or Tap that obtained an invite or came close, I congratulate you as well, and we appreciate your business and trust in us!
In this article, I’ll be touching on some general meta info and results from NAIC, explaining my deck choice, including insight in what techs were included in our whacky Arceus Box deck. Lastly, I’ll touch on Arceus/Dura and why I believe it was not only the play but how it’s taking down this Paldea Evolved format.
The tournament decisions slowed down for me on Tuesday prior to the event. Phinn and I had extensively tested Lost Zone Box for most of the season and felt that Turbo had a very good shot of winning. Some predictions we had were as follows: the most popular decks would be Gardevoir, LZB, Arceus variants, and Mew. I predicted Gardevoir to be the largest meta share while Phinn believed LZB would hold the lion’s share. My instincts bested his as our wager landed Gardevoir at a whopping 24% in Day 1, an astronomical meta share for a single archetype.
Turbo was solidified into our minds until a tragedy occurred. Due to the ongoing forest fires in Canada, flights were getting cancelled from early as Wednesday. Phin happened to unfortunately have his flight cancelled without time to rebook. I Include this scenario to say that I probably wouldn’t have changed from Turbo if Phinn arrived at the tournament.
After upgrading to Stage 2 you will see the rest of Hunter Butler’s article, a PTCGL friendly deck export at the bottom of the article, and an audio recording of this article by Andy Hyun: 
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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.