Hey Trainers! I’m Joe the other face of Mossdeep City. I recently attended my first League Challenge of the season on July 13. One of our local game stores, The Woke Poke, in St. Augustine was hosting. It’s a really great shop and one of the few to main Pokemon.
I haven’t played IRL in over a month and I wasn’t sure what to play. I decided to play what I’ve been playing on PTCGL, Ancient Box. It’s a pretty easy deck to pilot and it’s cheap! I also have a fondness for single prize decks. Making your opponent go through 6 prizes can play into your favor.
35 players were at this League Challenge making us play 6 rounds. My first opponent was against Lost Box Giratina (Lost Tina). This was a great first matchup for me because my deck plays 4 Flutter Mane which shuts off Comfey’s ability. So my strategy was to have 2 Flutter Mane in play while powering up Roaring Moons and getting ancient cards in the discard pile. The game was straight forward and I was able to win pretty easily.
Round 2 was against a Lost Box deck that was similar to Lost Zard but using Bloodmoon Ursaluna ex. Again, I opened up with Flutter Mane slowing down my opponent. However, I went aggressive too soon and started attacking with Roaring Moon giving my opponent an opening to start lost zoning their deck to get Sableye online. After a few back and forth knockouts I was able to place some well timed Ancient Booster energy Capsules on my Roaring Moons. This added 60HP to my Moons preventing my opponent from taking knockouts. I was able to pull this one out but I knew I got lucky.
Round 3 was my first of 3 mirror matches. I did not anticipate playing against multiple ancient box decks. This was an easy game because my opponent drew, passed for 4 turns while I was able to take 3 prize cards before he could take 1. I was able to chain Roaring Moons enough to get the Knockouts needed. Round 4 was against my friend Nick. Another fellow ancient box player. His deck played the spicy Morpeko from Twilight Masquerade. This Morpeko has an ability allowing the user to look at the top card of their deck with the option to discard or not. That was pretty clutch because he was able to get a few extra ancient cards in the discard pile faster than I was. Needless to say, Nick was one step ahead of me. This would be my only loss of the day.
Round 5 I finally play against a multi prize deck, Dialga VStar. My opponent was very talkative and tried to do some shady things but we got the win as I was able to knock out 2 Dialga’s and his lone Mew ex.
Round 6 finally gets here and as I’m looking at the standings, I’m sitting pretty well. I figured if I could intentionally draw my opponent I could get Top 4 no matter what. My opponent decides to play it out and of course he plays Ancient Box. My opponent, unfortunately, suffers from the same draw, pass issues my previous ancient box opponent had. I’m able to take 3 knock outs before he gets 1. I get the win finishing with a record of 5-1. My buddy, Nick, went 6-0 leaving me with a second place finish.
Ancient Box is a very fun deck and I built mine to be as consistent as possible. I didn’t have any “tech” cards. However, something that could have been beneficial would be to add 1 Penny (helps remove pokemon from the board) and because I played 3 Ancient Box mirrors, I would have loved a Lost Vacuum to take quicker knock outs turn 2. I’m pretty happy with my list and game play. This concludes my tournament report, I look forward to my next League Challenge. Thanks for reading!
Be sure to check out The Woke Poke at 3440 US-1 Suite 102, St. Augustine, FL 32086