Welcome back, Cut or Tap readers! The North America International Championships took place a couple of weeks ago in New Orleans, Louisiana, and I was able to win the entire tournament with my version of Lost Zone Box!

This was the biggest ever event outside of Japan, and I had to close the tournament on an extremely difficult 9-0 run in order to make it happen, with a deck that I felt had been a bit underappreciated with the release of Twilight Masquerade. With Dragapult ex and Raging Bolt ex entering the metagame and Lugia getting a huge boost from Legacy Energy and Ursaluna ex, it felt like some of the attention that Lost Zone Box deserved had been redirected to other decks. Additionally, I think that many people (initially including myself) saw Dragapult ex as an extremely challenging matchup for a deck reliant on low-HP Pokemon, while in reality the matchup was actually winnable when played correctly, and Dragapult also ended up not having quite the level of impact that it was expected to at the start of the new format.

I questioned the fact that I had written off Lost Zone Box after I was beaten in testing by it, especially considering I believed that I could make a much stronger list that was better equipped to deal with the expected meta. I revisited the turbo version of the deck that I placed in the Top 16 with at Toronto Regionals earlier this season, to build a similar list in the current format, and then my group and I worked to improve the deck and its matchups.

The biggest difference from that version of the deck to now was the move away from Forest Seal Stone entirely, as there are no Pokemon V that the deck really wants access to. With the fast and powerful list my group had developed, and very few techs such as Jirachi expected at the event, Lost Zone Box was in a strong position to succeed.

In this article, I will discuss the card choices made in the deck, and a bit of helpful sequencing advice with PokeStop.

After upgrading to Stage 2 you will see the rest of Andrew Hedrick’s article and an audio recording of this article by Andy Hyun:

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