Welcome back, Subs! I’m so incredibly excited to begin our coverage of the Twilight Masquerade metagame. I haven’t been playing the previous format because I didn’t attend Indianapolis or any of the other majors this past month. This has allowed me to focus on our upcoming format, which I will play in the biggest tournament of all time: NAIC. We’ll cover the decks I believe to be the early frontrunners, and which of the staple decks from the previous format carried along. I’ll also touch on the new archetypes and how they fare into our Temporal Forces metagame. Lastly I’ll leave some beginning lists I’ve been using, with some light coverage on matchups. Before hopping into that, I want to have some closing thoughts about our Temporal Forces meta.
Temporal Forces led us to a meta dominated by Charizard ex, and had reigned supreme all the way until Indy Regionals. Our very own Andrew Hedrick was finally able to dethrone Charizard with his Dialgia Vstar deck, which you can read about right here on Cut or Tap. I think all Pokemon TCG players can agree that the second best deck of this format was Chien-Pao, which happened to rack up hundreds of finishes all around the world at tournaments. The power of these two archetypes shaped what decks could have success.
The sleeper pick of this format was Lost Box, which had a huge number of high-level finishes but wasn’t piloted by many. Players like Hermanni and Nicholas Galaz have reached 2nd-place finishes at major tournaments with the Paradox Box variant. Lost Box in general, I felt, was criminally underplayed this whole year – shout-out to me for keeping faith the whole time! Finally in Santiago Regionals, Fernando Lopez was able to take down the event with Lost Box, so it’s safe to say that it’s a mainstay of this format.
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