Hello everyone! It is Ian and today I will discuss my top eight run at Indianapolis regionals. Weeks before the event, I knew that I would play Charizard EX Pidgeot EX and no one could change my mind. After realizing this, the next step was to figure out what the best list was going to be for the event. In my previous article, I laid out my major thoughts about the deck, and the list I posted ended up being very close to the final build. One weird thing happened between the article and the actual event that ended up not working. Lost City in Charizard EX.
Going into Indianapolis regional one of the goals for the event was to have a strong Chien-Pao EX matchup. This meant that your deck needed a strategy that abused one of Chien-Pao EX’s major weaknesses. Either abusing the fact that they run a limited amount of Energy Retrieval and having only two Baxcalibur. The first solution and the most obvious is to run Eri. This does not work. Eri is way too inconsistent in its ability to disrupt your opponent. While yes if you do discard two Superior Energy Retrieval the card did its job, if you are not getting 2 high-valued items what is the point? The second solution is running the Chien-Pao EX player out of Baxcalibur. One way to do this is just to use Boss’s Orders and Counter Catcher to keep knocking out Baxcalibur but that is not reliable as the Chien-Pao EX player can keep getting them out with Super Rod and Rare Candy. The only real way to remove them for good is Lost City. This realization is what caused me to put time into seeing if Lost City made the Chien-Pao EX matchup favored.