Greetings from the Lost Zone, readers! I’m back from my Amazon travels with minor rewards. I played Charizard ex/Pidgeot ex to a 282nd place out of 1300 players. Not the finish I wanted, but due to some unfortunate situations like playing with a 59-card deck, not calling a judge to reach a penalty on extra drawn cards, and losing to an unexpected Thorton in Chien-Pao left me in the 5-3-1 record. However, I’m happy to have received points, and my student Bodhi was able to collect 7k from the tournament with the stipend and top 64 placement at his first Masters IC!
Before getting into the introduction of this article, I want to recap my predictions from the previous article that I had for LAIC. The first was that one of the divisions would be crowned Champion by Chien-Pao/Baxcalibur, this would be my only missed prediction. This surprised me, as the deck was so strong and piloted by strong players such as Azul and Ian Robb. The next prediction I had was that Iron Valiant would place somewhere in the Top 8, and it happened to take 2nd! Noah Sawyer piloted the Entei variant which I posited to be the strongest. The last prediction was a Roaring Moon Top 8 which was clenched out by one of the strongest players in the EU region right now: Brennan Kamerman, using his Lost Box Moon variant.
Speaking of Lost Box, I am remiss to say that I did in fact have a Lost Variant that I was confident was extremely strong, but under-tested. Headed into LAIC, I was most invested in Roaring Moon and Charizard ex, so my lack of time proved to be a huge problem in trying to iron out what I believe to be a Tier 1 threat. This piece will cover a couple Lost Zone variants that can stand in this evolving meta, while detailing the issues they have. I also played in a 218-person League Challenge at LAIC, where I went 7-2 with a Lost Variant; I will include that list in the end.
As I’m writing this, Gdansk has just concluded – an EU regional taken down by Snorlax Stall. To my knowledge, this is the first event ever to be won by a Stall variant, which should increase the deck’s meta presence.
But we are not here to talk about boring Stall (sorry Jake). The first Lost Variant we are going to cover is Tord Reklev’s wildly unorthodox Kyogre build. Which I will be calling Reckless Box:
After upgrading to Stage 2 you will see the rest of Hunter Butler’s article and an audio recording of this article by Andy Hyun: 
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.
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.