My name is Pedro Pertusi, I’m a Brazilian player and have been playing the game for 10+ years now. I have a pretty nice resume to my name back in Seniors, and more recently have also been fortunate enough to expand my personal resume in the Masters division. I am a three-time Regional Champion in LATAM, and have also had multiple Top 8 and Top 16 achievements to my name, and just recently I managed to take down my first International event ever, LAIC 2026. In this piece, we will cover my list of inclusions, important rounds, and changes going forward into the Phantasmal format, which should be in mind for everyone, with Gardevoir still being the BDIF.
Heading into LAIC
I had been playing the format for a few weeks, even looking at how it had been evolving since the Belo Horizonte and Milwaukee weekends, especially the different iterations of lists we had. The most notable would have to be the Dragapult Dusknoir win in Lille, mainly a result of the lack of Item Lock respect, which ended up helping cement what the top five decks in the format were.
Although I had been playing throughout the whole format, I knew my decision would only come after Las Vegas Regionals. With a tournament that big (bigger even than LAIC) happening the week before, the influence would be major. With Vegas done, the major decks to beat were still the same: Dragapult, Gholdengo and Gardevoir (mainly the Jelly version, but I grouped them together for now). The other close one was Mega Absol Box, because winning Vegas definitely put it up there. So basically, me and my testing group got together on Monday night to figure out what we should go with.
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