The largest city in the world enamored me with wonder. Lights that seemingly go on forever, followed by smells of street food. Cut or Tap Subscribers, this is how I describe Tokyo in a few sentences.
Welcome back to the website! I have finally journeyed home from my two-week stay in the Land of the Rising Sun. Spending time in Osaka, Tokyo, Nara, Kanagawa, and the many outside districts was extremely eye-opening in culture. Food shared with friends, and gifts brought home, made this trip so special for me.
Enough about the trip – I travelled all the way to Japan to play in the World Championship. In this piece, I will detail the list I played with short thoughts on a secondary play. Then I’ll regale my short eight-round tournament and how it ended.
In my earlier article post-NAIC, I included the thoughts that going into NAIC, I was very set on playing Turbo Lost Box. I didn’t regret my choice to play Arceus Box, but I knew going into Worlds that I wanted to rotate back to Lost Zone Variants. A 24% meta share of Gardevoir decks at NAIC definitely piqued my interest of continuing the Lost Box testing, followed by the popularity of Arceus decks (with their bag of tricks for Dragonite) starting to dwindle. Phinn and I expected similar meta shares to NAIC for Day 1 Worlds with slightly less Gardevoir due to the tie rate, and slightly more Baxcallibur due to lists becoming refined. Mew, Arceus, and Lost Zone Variants we expected in medium numbers, rounding out our top five expected archetypes, with Arceus/Lost Zone being split between a few styles.
We both quickly ruled out the idea of playing Gardevoir for a few reasons. The mirror seemed very luck-based while the long setup time diminished our abilities to avoid ties; stumbling in the early game easily creates these scenarios. Lugia Vstar was another deck we ruled out, as not only did we not respect its matchup spread, but felt the deck was highly relying on luck more than skill. (This decision would later come to bite both myself and Phinn in the backside.)
The final prediction we had deduced was that the popularity of Lost Zone Giratina would be prominent due to the online hype and consistent placements from the deck in Asia all year long. Foreigners seemed to favor Lost Giratina for its massive comeback potential, favoring lists with Path to the Peak and Roxanne to combo with big attacks. I myself played Lost Giratina at EUIC but I was struggling to understand the upside of playing a slower Lost Zone Variant at an event where ties are deadly.
After extensive testing and landing on a semi-consistent list, Giratina was my second choice headed into Worlds. Here is the list we landed on:
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