2-31: WHAT'S THE PLAY FOR NAIC?

Hello and welcome back to the Battle Frontier Podcast. This is an intro you haven't heard in quite a while, and I actually don't remember how it goes anymore. What. What was the tagline? I can't even remember right now. Oh, my goodness. That is a great question. You can tell John and I haven't done this. But anyway, as I said just a second ago, this is the Battle Frontier Podcast. We are long removed from doing that scheduled structured intro. We had tried to do a bunch of cold opens, but this week we really want to just get right to the point and we're going to do the, you know, pre A NIIC episode, same thing everyone else is doing this week. And it was nice to have a week off. I think that it was a scheduled break rather than an unexpected one. Maybe eases the sting a little bit and hopefully people are more understanding now that we've explained that out. But John, I wanted to know. We're obviously going to talk about naic. With that, we're going to have to talk about Turin, because we did have an event in the NAIC format this past weekend. But before we get into all those results, I wanted to know, did you have anything that you wanted to share with the audience either from, you know, personal Pokemon, whatever you want to talk about? Not too much. You know, I. I haven't been playing a whole lot of standard, to be honest with you. I've been trying to play some games here and there, but the format hadn't really changed a whole lot between, I feel like Perfect Order and Chaos Rising. So. But no, I mean, I was talking before we opened the show. You know, I've been testing some of the professor cup format and that's been pretty fun. I'm going to plan on bringing some decks to naic and I'll be playing some other professors there for that. So. So I haven't really played much standard, but I've been playing that format. I don't know if it's publicly available anywhere, but I'll just go over real quick. It's no Rule Box Pokemon or any. Any Rule Box card. So no ASPECs. You can't have more than three copies of any card, except for Basic Energy, of course. And then it's a buy list format, so you have a proverbial or a hypothetical $10 to spend. And then there are certain cards that are. You have to spend money to buy those cards to include in your deck. So cards like festival grounds is $4. And then, you know, more powerful cards like Monkey Dory are $3 slightly less powerful cards. I mean, Lily's determination is two, and then like PokePad is one, just to give examples. And once you buy one copy of that, you have three copies that you can run. So you don't have to buy each copy individually. You get access to all. It's like buying the rights to that card so you can max out the count. But I've been just trying to build some decks with that and bounce some ideas off of players. So I'm getting excited, getting ready for that and hopefully having a good time with that. I like doing the Professor Cups to kind of keep me grounded and playing and make it an accessible way for professors to keep play testing. So. But enough about my silly format. What about you, Aaron? What you been up to? Just a lot of baseball, honestly. I mean, I have been playing Pokemon here and there and with the release of the new set, I do like to try to try out new decks. Kind of do not quite what Azul does because obviously I don't have as much time to play Pokemon as he does. But try to jump in and play some stuff. I've been playing some Mega Greninja, playing some Beedrill. We'll talk about this one a bit more later. But been playing Slowking and Hops. Driving into a little bit to try to explore some new options I like. You know, variety is nice, right? You don't want to sit down and continue to play Dragon Pult. Especially when I'm not going to Naic. So why am I going to subject myself to playing Dragapult when I don't have to? But it's interesting. Some of the the decks, a lot of them feel like they're like almost there, you know, and for the most part like B Drill is super linear. You just kind of obviously you have one attack, no abilities. You literally just do your thing. If you set up. It's a deck that even though we have redeemable ticket, it really misses, I think more so like Hisuian Heavy Ball or even Azelf from Legends Awaken. Just an easier way to retrieve things from the prizes would be great. And Greninja is interesting too, I think. It's just I've been playing both with the Dunsparce variant and the Dry Cloak slash, like one Dragapult variant. And I'm still not even sure that going all in on just maximizing Mega Greninja is the best thing. There's a chance that just like the. The Dusk Noir Terra Greninja, the Grand Tree Deck potential that's been around for a while might still be the best Greninja deck. And it just got an upgrade by having 70hp froakies, which is kind of sad. Or maybe. And maybe you could still play like one Mega Greninja in there. Right. But it's weird because Mega Greninja feels much less viable without Neo Upper. And that Dust nor Terra Greninja deck really benefits from having that Grand Tree in there to get your stage twos into play more quickly. So it's kind of a weird balancing act. Not that, you know, Mortal Shuriken's a powerful ability. And there was a pop off turn for from Torin that we saw on stream in day one. I think it was like round four or five where it was Mega Greninja versus Alakazam. And on turn two, the Greninja player got two Greninjas out and took three prizes off of Mortal Shuriken. Surfing Beach. Mortal Shuriken attached. Neo Upper ko. It's like, oh, wow. Like, if you can do that every game, that's great. And then you remember that half the time you're going to play against Dragon Ball and they're going to say Itchy Pollen and you're gonna kind of cry a little bit. Yeah. Where that. Then you have the, like the alternative. If you have that Tera Greninja deck, you do put the grand like you Coros for Grand Tree and Ignition Energy Grant Tree up to a Greninja attach ignition and KO2.2 Dreepies off the bench. Maybe a little bit less viable now that people are potentially including Shamans in their decks. But I don't know. Just some food for thought at the end of the day. My opinion, we're going to see tons of Dragapult this weekend and maybe a smattering of some of these purple decks that look like they're trying to rise up to beat Dragapult. And that really is kind of the name of the game. I think that what I learned from this weekend, both from Tauren and from the Japan Championships that were going on, even though it does have an additional set, was that the most impactful card from the last three sets now? So perfect order up through Pitch Black. Most impactful card is going to be Telepathic Energy 100. Like that card is broken. And who would have thought, right? Like call Energy was stupid good. What was the other one? Capture Energy. Right. That you used to play? Just the one. But still, even just finding one was really good. So, you know, finding two's got to be even better, even if it's type limited. Yeah, I think that's a accurate assessment. It's not something that jumps out at you when you're looking through a set necessarily. I mean, maybe for some people it sounds like it did for you, but it is not something that like jumps off the page like a big Pokemon with a huge attack or something like a crazy ability. It definitely is like more of a consistency buff. And those tend to have the most impact on a format. Like look at lilies and how much that changed and shaped our metagame before and after. Pokepad is another example and more recent memory. And so yeah, it's. It's one of those. It made Psychic a lot more consistent. We lost a lot of the balls, like the nest balls and great ball even is kind of. You're feeling that a little bit. I mean, not like crazy, but it is what it is. But yeah, nest ball losing that was a huge debuff to consistency. So just gaining something like an energy. So when you can attach an energy for Turn and have the added benefit benefit of searching out two Pokemon putting on your bench, like that's huge. Like consistency wise. But also you just get more ways to search out like it has a dual function essentially. So very strong card. So yeah, I think that's accurate. Yeah. Not beating around the bush. I think we can do a quick recap. Well, I know you were pretty proud of one of the predictions we had for Indie. So even though we are a little ways removed from that, we could go over those real quick before we jump into. Right. Yeah. And another tournament where Dragapult was still featured heavily in Top Cut and throughout the tournament. But the finals were not were Dragon Ball free. So we had the Crustle versus by played by Raul ready Versus. Sorry, I'm missing. It was Karis Jones playing Al Kazam and what a matchup. What a really cool storyline for both players. Garris is having quite a season and Rahul's just been around for a really long time. Always a bridesmaid, never the bride. And that trend continued. Unfortunately for him. He played Crustle and just had a really bad matchup in Alakazam. Especially K's package running the. The Dene that lets you get back enhanced hammer that just kind of runs him out of energies. So not a lot, you know, with just being manually attaching energies for turn. There was a couple times where if things went a little differently for Raul, he would have won the game. But Karras drew Really well at certain points. And, you know, it's. It's. I think Raul made a couple mistakes, maybe benching a second Crustal at one point when he didn't need to, you know, opening up a window for Charis to fan off energy from the active to the bench and kind of prevent him from being able to attack consistently. So, you know, it was a really bad matchup and it just kind of played out like you think it would in a lot of ways. For the most part. There was still some, you know, Caris got lucky with drawing two enhanced hammers to close the game out, I believe. But, yeah, it was. It was. It was good. I am proud of my Crustal pick. That's kind of what I wanted to gloat about for a little bit, you know, and it was a really good meta call for the event showcased by Raul and I think with the rise of some other single prize decks and. Yeah, I don't see it. I don't see that being the case moving forward. So that was definitely the tournament to play it now. I think the Slow Kings and the Alakazams and Hop sticks will definitely eat through the Crustal pretty rapidly. So he got it while he could get it and got out of there. And now we're back onto the other side of that circle we talk about with Crustal, where, okay, Polaris are prepared for it. Now it's time to put it away for a little bit. Yeah. And who knows, maybe we'll see it circle back around in time for Worlds, even though it does look like we have another pretty powerful single prize deck coming out the next set too. So maybe not. Maybe Crustle's just done and I think the world is better for it. Yeah. I don't know. I just hate everything, apparently. Yeah. Raging Bolt sucks. Raging sucks. How do you feel about. How do you feel about Slow King? I love Slow King, man. Yeah. For that last tournament. But you are a week early. A week. One week too early. We've got. Here we go. Just touring results. Big highlight. Like John just mentioned, Slow King almost took everything down in the hands of Brennan cameraman, who I believe was undefeated all through Swiss and then double ID his way into top cut. And yeah, only loss on the event was in the finals against Jose Lopez's Hops Trevenant. And if you don't know what Hops Trevenant does, probably not a total surprise because this is undoubtedly a deck that was not on people's radar and really wasn't a part of any conversations. I think even Going into like nothing. There are no cards in this deck from Chaos Rising. Right? This deck was fully legal, fully viable in this sense to be played in the last format. And it's not like any of the new decks got introduced. Really impacted its viability. You know, you're looking to just theoretically prey on slower dragapult lists with a combination of Hopps Phantom plus two modifiers, whether it's the Snorlax and the choice band. Choice band and Postwick. Snorlax and Postwick to do the splashing dodge, which does 10 damage, which gets augmented plus 60 if you have two modifiers. So 70 koing all of these evolving basics like your Dreepies, Torchics, froakies, abras, dunspars, etc. And then you also have the added benefit that you get to flip a coin. And if you get heads, that Pokemon. Oh, it's weird. I'm gonna have to fix that, I guess. Only I'm still sharing the decklist even though I have the card pulled up in a different tab. But flip a coin if you get heads. Prevent all damage and all effects of attacks down to this Pokemon during your mixer. So just scot free invulnerable Pokemon. And that's pretty powerful. You know, it's something that I personally had taken for granted. Even though like I wrote off oh, you know, Trevenant's got a cool revenge attack that seems pretty powerful. But it caps out at doing 210, I believe. Which isn't super great, you know. Yes, you can ko your ogre ponds and your pheasantipities and your others like support ex's. But without a clefairy in play, you're not KO and Dragapult. And then anything that's not weak to psychic, you're just never koing it. Which can be really difficult and something that I've encountered. Like I said, when I was playing Beedrill earlier, I ran into a couple of hop stacks and was able to just boss around the phantump when they did flip heads and they were having to 2 to 3 hit ko my B drills. And that really just. You don't trade favorably at that point. Like the name of the game when you're playing a single prize deck is you're hoping to at worst trade 2 for 2 and hopefully trade 1 for 2 in most cases and just kind of swing things in your favor. But there's still some cool things in here that I think as a single prize deck, you get to take advantage of that. Other decks don't have. Right. Like we have the hassle. Yeah, I like hassle a lot. Pretty neat. You know, it's kind of like a raihan type effect or what is it feels almost like twins. Like sure. In the day. Yeah. Or just I guess teammates is a more accurate descriptor. Yeah, yeah. So they take a ko, you get to look some, look at some cards, get some free cards without having to shuffle or discard your hand away. And I mean really, I think that you would probably play research if you had it available. But you know, in this format where you are limited on consistency, hassle helps you out. Especially when your opponent is having to take 5Kos. It gives you five opportunities to play hassle throughout a game. Whereas the two prize decks typically are only giving up 3Kos before you've like you can't give one up anymore. Yeah. And this is a very combo heavy deck and so hassle just lets you dig for those combo pieces. You know, you can get the pokey pad to get the dub wool or the stadium off of this and get like energy and hops. There's not an easy way to search out tools right now. We lost Arven. So like that's one way to maybe find your hops. Choice belt or choice band. Sorry. Or like the psychic energy to recharge and put more pokemon on your bench. Yeah. And then you have also the Kramer. It's a pretty nice tool. It comes up quite a bit because you are giving up one prize at a time and then just the turn that you need it, you drop a telepathic energy on a phantom or a trevenant. Go grab clefairy and boom. One hit, one hit ko. A dragapult when you need to close out a game. Otherwise you're just sitting up there saying splashing dodge, gusting up like weak basics off the bench. Or take one prize at a time until you need to time up and take that two prize ko. So it's pretty interesting. Was pretty well positioned I guess looking for added in this format. But then also interestingly Jose didn't really hit as much dragapult as you would have expected for him to be successful. And instead just looks like, you know, hitting three slow kings throughout the event. Even like with Brennan included in the finals there is pretty odd but also really to his advantage because he did choose to include the shaman in his decklist. And then we really saw it showcased in the finals. Like Brennan just didn't really have any answer. I think if we hop over and look at Brennan's decklist really went all in. We've seen a lot of Slow King decks before. We featured the one that I think made top eight in Lima that had, you know, I think, five different options for you to attack with with. Seek inspiration off the Slow King. This is just. I've got my metagross, I've got my Kyum. I'm either going to do a lot of damage to your active or I'm going to snipe your field. And if there's a Shaman on the board, you got no. You got nothing. Yeah. Not running the spectrier to maybe deal with the Shaman that way. So definitely limiting what you can do, but just focusing on consistency, which is usually the right call with these kind of decks. You know, running extra setup with the Kangaskhan and having the cool combo with the lucky helmet on that you can like Cipher into set. Your set can either draw with the Kangaskhan or Cipher and then draw with a lucky helmet. That's a cool combo. This is a boomerang energy build. There's usually two ways you run Slow King right now. So you have the Boomerang energy and then the. What's it called? Power Glass is the other one. Yeah, Boomerang definitely feels a little bit stronger. You know, once you get that on your slow, Slow King, it. You get a couple uses out of it. The Power Glass, you're not always guaranteed to get that necessarily if they boss around it or something like that. That's not how that works. Sorry. But it. It just. It's a better. It feels better to run the boomerang if I have to make a choice there. Unless your opponent runs Enhanced hammer or crushing hammer or something like that, then it can get a little tricky running the Wonder Patch to kind of accelerate psychic out of the discard pile and then. Yeah, couple different options. You have the Ciphers to put stuff on the top and then obviously the Academy at night to do the same. And this isn't anything crazy from like a build standpoint. I. I haven't seen a surfer in any other Slow Kings, but I guess it's just. It's a way to, you know, increase your ways to pivot and draw cards. So that's kind of nice. You can. Yeah, I mean, that. That can come up mostly like if you have a turn where you have a Slow King and you have to use Trifrost with it, but you don't have a Boomerang energy, then it's just another switch out without having to play another copy of Switch because Slow King does have a 3 retreat cost, so it itself is very difficult to move. Even though you have Latias to move your other basics around more freely. Yeah. Then you can be out for it, I guess too. So you can't necessarily. There's no. I mean, there's no easy way to find the card. Like there's no petrol or anything like that to search out switch. So that's kind of nice. But yeah, I like. I don't know. I think it's going to be tough to play Slow King this weekend, but I think it's still, you know, really powerful deck, being able to use these really strong attacks on a one prizer. Sure. And force your opponent to deal with it. Like they don't want to go through a Slow King. They don't want to have to knock that out and get one prize for it. They much rather target down your Mega Kangaskhan. But if they're doing that, then you can just kind of run the boomerang energies and just run over them with know, metagross and other and all that kind of stuff, so. Exactly. Very cool. Yeah. I don't. I don't know how it'll be interesting. We'll have to talk about it when we talk about prepping for Naic, what we think about this deck moving forward though. Yeah. Other things of note, like, the most successful dragapult on the weekend was PUL Blaze. Again, we have two of them in top eight, which I think is pretty surprising to me considering the large public opinion that, as far as I'm aware, is that Pulp Blaziken was probably the weakest dragapult variant going into this format. So seeing the two of them up here and it's weird, it's kind of hard. Like you get this thing all the time. Special events take it with a grain of salt. But this is still a 2000 player event. So I have to feel like it's. The results have to mean something. Right. But it gets a little wonky. Like you look at it and you see Slow King and Trevenant on top and you're like, oh, well, you know, Tor didn't go. And none of the other big EU players obviously included in that conversation. But there's some argument for that, considering it's like the week before Naic, somebody might not want to play the top deck that they were playing for Nic, in order to avoid, you know, creating that scenario where that gets leaked and now you have to account for that somehow. But I think it's safe to say, like the level of competition isn't that big of a drop off to where you're really considering. This being like tier A tier battle and this being in tier B. I think it's still representative of what a metagame for this event could look like. It might not look like every. Like if you run a tournament again, I'd be very surprised if Hopps Trevenant wins it again. You know, just realistically speaking there's just not a lot of them out there and it's, it's. It's probably a good deck but I don't think it's you know, the best deck in format by any stretch of the imagination. So. Right. But that's. That's Pokemon, you know. And that's the cool thing is, you know, people might want to be quick to discredit and say that it's not a real deck or whatever that EU's fake news or not real. It can't hurt me. But I mean there's. These are good players playing and I think it, it still deserves our consideration. Yeah, the only. There's only three of them in Phase two and yeah, I mean there were only nine of them in Phase one. Sure, sure. To be fair. But I was not necessarily. I wanted to see. But obviously small sample size but I wanted to see what some of these matchup percentages looked like. So we've got unfavored into straight pulled and pulled dust Noir. A lot of ties actually, which is kind of interesting. And where's the pulp Blaziken at? They must not have. Oh, there's one. No, it's there. It's there. 51, 58. I mean it's only four games but yeah, yeah, it's really tough to say with a small sample size. I do think we'll have more than nine people playing this at naic for sure. Yeah. I mean be surprised at all. That wouldn't surprise me either. It's not that expensive to build. It's not that hard to really pick up and play I'd say. I mean there are some nuances, you know, making sure you don't overbench. Like you make your bench appropriate and like have outs the stuff as the game progresses. Because it's really easy to overbench with a hop stick. You know you put down two Tribinet, Snorlax, Wooloo and then you put down like something like a support Pokemon like Fezidipity. That's. Your bench is pretty much full. So it can get. Get really difficult to manage all that. But yeah, I think it's. It's a fun deck. So we'll see how that goes from here. Sure. One other deck I was interested was Emma Hagen's kind of Clefairy take. And I really like this deck a lot. She was the one, if I'm correct, the Eevee Evolutions player for the last few tournaments, right? Yep. So she's still kind of on a Terra build, running four Area Zero under Death and no Noctowls in this build. More of a quote unquote slot box with the Kangaskhans and Meowths. Like 4 Kangascon for Meowth for Lily's Clefairy. So mostly using Lily's Clefairy as your attacker in this matchup, and then just having the Terror Pokemon just buff your bench sizes, you run two Lilies Pearl, which was interesting to help with that price trade. And I don't know. What do you think about this a deck, Aaron? So I do know this originally came from all Out Blitzel, who played it in Indianapolis. I think he made top 32, if I remember correctly. And I hate this. Okay, this is the. This goes back to, like we talked about, the Raging Bolt deck. That's structured very similarly to this, where it's like four Kangaskun for me, out for Teal Mask, Ogre Pawn. And then you swap some of these other Pokemon out, like the Wellsprings as an example for two Raging Bolts. And you've essentially got the same deck and you're just doing the same thing. And to me, that's a problem. Like, you shouldn't have two basically identical decks where you just change out this Pokemon for that Pokemon, this Pokemon for that Pokemon, and change the energies around a little bit and have it still basically be the same deck. But that being said, obviously Clefairy is very well positioned with. In combo with Lily's Pearl. And I think it is cool to be able to highlight that. And then with the Hops deck, to be able to highlight, like, all the hop support cards that seemed powerful on upon reading them when they were released, but just weren't good enough at the time. And now they're kind of getting their moment in the sun. So seeing some of these trainer cards, like owners cards, rather come out and be able to do what they were originally intended to do is pretty cool. But 4 Kangaskhan for Meowth makes me want to throw up. Yeah, we're still waiting on Iono's Pokemon to have their moment. That's. That's not gonna happen. One of my league attendees was asking me if I ever thought that that would make it to the finals or top cut of originals, and I'm like, ah, probably not. So, yeah, I mean, I played against one a couple weeks ago who managed to deck himself out on, like, turn three, because, like, you draw a lot of cards. They have Canary. That came out in. Yeah. What did that come out in? Heroes. Yeah. Yeah. And that's a. That's a pretty dang powerful supporter, all things. Consider being able to find any electric Pokemon and then you could just burn through your deck with Iona's Kilowatt Roll and raining energy down with Belly Bolt. But that's just you. You do all of this. All this setup work to get your single prize attacker in the form of the Voltorb going, and you still struggle to take kos because you've dumped so many energy drawing cards to try to set up your board. But to circle back to this deck real quick, and this kind of goes in line with Raging Bolt. I think the other thing that this highlights for me is how hard big basics decks really got hit by rotation. Like losing Nest Ball in particular has been really hard on. Like, we see Emma here, and I think that. Yeah. Was running this in his as well. Having to play Dusk Ball in the deck to hope to find what you need. That's not a good shout. No. I mean, we've seen Cyrano. There's one copy here, and then other Raging Ball lists run Cyrano as your main way to get your stuff set up. Right. But yeah, I definitely don't want to. That doesn't feel good to have to play that as your supporter for Dern. Whereas Nest Ball was just, like, easy to play. No real downside, that kind of thing. Especially when you do have to crisp in so often as you're supporting the turn, like, so you can't. Obviously you can't afford to do one and then need the other one in the same turn. You just end up kind of locked out for a turn and it gets really awkward. Yeah, I think it's interesting. Wonder Patch is kind of coming into its own. We've seen it in a few decks here in the Slow King and then now here. So that's kind of cool to see some cards that might not have made a big splash whenever they got released now starting to have more and more of an impact after rotation, which is what you usually see. But it is interesting to see players, like, rediscover stuff or piece stuff together after. After the cards have been out for a Little bit, yeah. And the other thing, I guess, is even though everyone like the talk of the town since rotation has been how good Dragapult is. Right. And what I've seen here is. And I guess it kind of goes just because Clefairy exists and because Dragonfold is so dominant and so concentrated in terms of meta percentage. But it's the Psychic decks that seem like they're the best positioned decks in the room most of the time, because most of the dark types that they're weak to, and namely Zorark, are held down by the fact that Teal Mask Ogrepon just exists. Not even that it's really good or really well positioned, but the fact that it exists makes Zoroark's life so much harder because it's a deck that screams potential in so many ways, especially with the. Like, we've seen, you know, you've got people like Piper Lepine or Liam Halliburton who play the deck, and they make it look so good when they're sitting at the table playing it. But you have to think, how much harder are they having to work to make this thing function and make it viable, versus if they were just playing Dragapult or they were just playing the Psychic deck to counter the Dragapult. Yeah, it's tough to really fully assess. Like, I think as long as the Ogre Pond box or like Raging Bolt decks, anything kind of centered around Ogre Pond can make up over 10 of the meta. It's really hard for those decks to win out. Like, you know, the margin for the top cut scenarios is now very, very thin. So if you hit two bad matchups, essentially you're in a spot where you can't really progress to that level of the tournament. You know, Piper, I think, was on the bubble at one of the events playing Zoroark recently. Right. So it just kind of goes back to. It's just tough to cut these events and the margins are so thin. You know, with these decks having that glaring weakness, literally, it can be really tough to just close it out with overcoming such a large hurdle. And, you know, I'm excited to move into NAIC and see if we see like a decrease, a decline in the Ogre Pondex or something like that, see what kind of happens. So, without further ado, I guess, are you ready to talk about any. Yeah. So I went ahead and pulled up on Trainer Hill here. We can rank these. We can decide right now do we want to rank these in terms of just how strong the deck is in general or how Viable? We think it is for the tournament. I think viable for the tournament. Okay, that might be a better, more helpful metric for somebody listening, trying to go into it. Sure. So what do you want to say? Start with Dragapult. Just get out of the way. I think every firing of this is going to be S tier. There's nothing that has the built in draw power of Dragapult at the moment other than maybe Zoroark. But the thing that separates those two decks is Zoroark has a glaring grass weakness. And Dragapult, you know, you're weak to Clefairy, but that's a squishy 190 HP Pokemon. Yeah, I see you hesitating to put Dragapult Blaziken up at the S tier. I still think it's the bottom of S tier. Like it's still a less good variant. I mean we saw it still can produce and perform pretty well at a high level. Sure. So I don't think it falls off all the way to a different tier. So yeah, I don't think I'm making any waves and saying oh, even. Even now that Dragonfold's been around for a while. It's kind of like the Reggie Drago factor where it might not win the tournament every tournament, but you had to account for it when you're building your deck and have to kind of plan around and build for that deck specifically. Sure. So then, that being said, like, would you agree that you think Pulp Blaziken is the least viable of the three Dragapult variants going into this week? Yeah, I think so. I mean the pull Dusk Norris fallen off a little bit, I'd say from where it was maybe earlier in this format. I don't know if keep saying Crimson Invasion or like cri. It's Chaos Rising. I don't know if Chaos Rising really shakes up that hierarchy all that much. If there's not really any decks I'm too worried about, I get a big boost from all that. So I don't know if you feel differently or not. No, I do think like you have the opportunity to kind of do the Justin Neudorf thing and merge Straight Pult and Pult Nor together. I don't know if I'm a huge fan of that. I think the big draw of Dragapult Dust Normal is the availability of rare candy and the ability to play rare candy. Whereas the Straight Pult, you sacrifice that because you want to play your crushing hammers to have an advantage in the dragonfault mirror in that front instead of and then it's weird though, just. And I guess it's kind of the story if you are the top dog. Right. You have to pick and choose what you want to tech for. And you're deciding do I want to play the hammers to tech for a mirror? Do I want to play Shaman? Because I'm worried about the rise of these slowking decks coming up. Do I want to play what's a counter for Crustal? The Dunsparce? Well, I wasn't worried about Crustle too much, but maybe. But dudunsparce. But what I was thinking was Watchtower for dudunsparce. So trying to check for Alakazam. How many copies of special red card do I need to play? Because this is the deck that fit, that it fits into the best, especially in that Pulp Dust more variant. And I've seen some lists floating around that have been playing two or one in a judge or two and a judge and it's weird. But Dragon Bolt has room for it. That's the thing that Andrew Hedrick said to begin with. Why did he put Crushing Hammer in the deck? Because he felt it had room for it. Because you can play 56 cards. Realistically you could probably play 54 cards to like function at its core as a dragapult deck. And then you have these free spaces to tech for other things as you see fit. Yeah. So I think that's fair. Moving on. We have a lot of decks that we'll probably see not quite as much play. I think the second level down would be the Ogre Pond decks. So Ogre Pond, Meganium Hydrapple and then there's also Raging Bolt Ogre Pawn on there. Out of those two for this event, I would probably pick Raging Bolt over the Ogre Pond Meganium Hydra Apple. Although I'm curious to hear why because I was actually leaning the opposite direction. Yeah, I'll lean in the opposite way. I think Ogre Pond, Meganium Hydrapple might struggle. Like that deck was built to counter Dragapult. And you know, I think Dragon Ball will still be the most played deck, but I don't think it'll be quite at the almost 30% that we saw in the past few tournaments. It might come down to like a 24% and that deck struggles a little bit more into random stuff, specifically the one prizers than Raging Bolt can. You can play with a more of a one prize centric board with the Raging Bolt. I guess you do have the Bulu, which is nice and some. I've seen some builds with the Ogre Pond, Mogidium, Hydra Apple Tech in like a one of festival lead. Right. To like kind of get around the limitations of not having any other non 2 prize attackers. So you can kind of fix that a little bit. But I still think Raging Bolt might just be a little bit more consistent and have a little bit more power to deal with some of the bigger stuff. So maybe I'm a little off base. I know you don't like Raging Bolt so that might play into it too. I still think a little both A tier. They're still going to be powerful and still give you a decent chance to win the tournament. In my mind, yeah, I agree with this being an A tier. I was actually going to put this in B tier specifically because in my opinion and maybe I'm just not hip on like the most recent Raging Bolt list. But I. My rationale for it was that I think this deck struggles into single prize decks because it has to play a tube or 32 plus 42 plus prize cardboard almost at all times to function like the entire deck is almost all multi prize Pokemon. And that's where you run into something like a Honchkrow or a Slow King or an Alakazam and you really get into trouble if you don't just run them over. Yeah. You do have options sometimes to kind of play the single prize and force them to Gust for a multi price Pokemon. And if. If you do present them with the high drapple, sometimes 330 is a hard barrier to get over without weakness. True. So yeah, Fireweed, I think they're a little bit squishier. It's not as relevant even though obviously like Moltres, Gust up and Ogrepon. But that's relevant for both of these matchups. So it's affects them evenly. Right? Yeah. And you could see the decline in Moltres. I could see that like without it being super well, like I mean, I don't know. I think both of these decks are still really strong. Especially I think I'm. I'm coming around to your point of view a little bit more. I like. I like the Hydra Apple deck any better anyways if I'm honest with myself. But yeah, both of those are still going to be really good picks and still put you in a decent spot. Moving on to let's do Enzor. Okay. This deck has been kind of baffling like on paper after rotation. People were really excited to play it. Put it, you know, pretty high up there now. I think it's kind of leveled off And I think it's solid B tier. It's still pretty good. But I don't think it is gonna give you the best shot to win a tournament. You still have the glaring grass weakness. You still have. You have a good dragapult matchup which kind of saves it. But I just think losing out to a player that might be a newer player playing a grass deck, just not even having a way to really deal with that can really just kind of hurt you. Yeah. And I think that this deck actually struggles a lot with the Mega Pokemon as well. Okay. Namely the stage one Megas and just not having easy ways to really get over the top of them. Like you have to have a full blown like Petron Mochi Zekrom with Black Belt to take a one hit ko. And that's assuming, you know, we've seen, we've seen some of these stage one decks opt to include Heroes Cape as their A spec and just try to go the fully. I'm gonna tank tank you out with Wallies plus a 430 or 448hp stage one and Zoric doesn't have a way around that. Right. It makes it extremely difficult for them to kind of get the better of these Mega decks in particular. And then again because we haven't seen Darmanitan as much in the deck, like the one prize decks can also kind of give it trouble. Like particularly now that Sloking has a solid one hit KO option into Zoroark that it doesn't have to KO itself to do it. That's rough. Yeah, that's true. That's true. Yeah. Having the 300 being able to hit 300 with a slow King is pretty wild. It's pretty good. Speaking of Slow King, you've been hot on this deck for a little bit. I'll let you leave that one off. I think this deck, if you asked me last week this was an easy, easy A tier pick, high A tier pick for this weekend. And now it's like people who were considering it need to be wary of whether or not people are going to put Shaman in their deck. Because I think that it. That's one single card inclusion strongly affects the viability of this deck going into this week. And it's more so for things like I think Alakazam in particular really benefits from it. Festival Lead can obviously play Rabska and then some of these multi prize decks. Don't worry about the Shaman because they're either comprised of a bunch of Terra Pokemon or the fact that Shaman doesn't protect the other multi price Pokemon anyway so it doesn't matter. And then the real question becomes does Dragapult want to play Shaman this week? And I think the answer is still no. Because I do think Slow King is going to be a relatively low meta percentage deck. It's not high enough to really tech for in my opinion. Yeah. But I was still started teching for it and I think that's maybe this thing is maybe last week you didn't have to worry about anybody really except for sure, you know, maybe another single prize attacker player playing a Shaman. Now you're gonna have people with the ends playing it and the door, Dragapult playing it and you know, low, not low punated on sparse but like yeah it'll. It'll see a lot more play essentially. Yeah. And so I do think that the deck unfortunately would take a hit to his consistency and not be able to play that like max consistency playing two of every single attacker that Brennan was doing. And instead you may have to default back to do I need to include the Spectri or do I need to include something like Annihilate to guarantee that I can take a one hit KO exactly when I want to. Yeah. And I think that if you're planning appropriately and you hit the right matchups, I think Slow King is pretty well positioned still this weekend I wanted to ask you about Hops Travenant. Okay. See, obviously won this past weekend. I think that Jose himself said he didn't expect to win, that he went into the tournament playing a deck that he thought was fun to play and just kind of went on the run of his life and made it all the way up to the top. But have you played with this deck at all? I've played in the the silly professor cup format. I've played it but it's surprisingly powerful I'd say. And I'm well positioned into a lot of the stuff that is doing well, especially Dragapult. You know, being able to take that splashing dodge, you get lucky flip aheads and they can't do anything like that feels pretty good. It's kind of low to the ground. Like you don't need a lot to start attacking and hitting numbers like consistently it has hops bag which is a really underrated card right now it's basically poffin but you get two of any hops Pokemon. So like that feels really good in a format where we lost Nest Ball where we lost like some other consistency cards. So I think it's better than I had anticipated it. If I'm Honest, Like I got caught off guard just like pretty much everybody else did when I saw it win a tournament. Um, I don't know if I'd put it in A tier, B tier. I think it's probably B tier, C tier, maybe C tier. It's still really good. I think. I. I just not a believer yet. I don't know if. Well, it'll be interesting to see if we get like an 8% or even. I don't think it'll be 8% this weekend, but I would think. No, I mean it wasn't even 1% last weekend. Yeah. But now it's got a lot of hype coming into this tournament, so I could see somebody that any. I see. You know, you get a lot of people that are trying to win it, but you also get a lot of people that just show up and play and want to have fun. And it's a fun deck, you know, at least for now. Where I think Ian1 Garner, our friend of the show, I don't think we gave him a shout out the last podcast we had. He got married recently, so congratulations, Ian. But he's a big fan of the hop stack, so for him I'll put it in B tier. I still think it has a lot of power and that's where I'm at with it. Okay, so would you say it's more or less viable than the two decks that we currently have in the tier? I would probably say more viable than End Zoroark, less viable than Raging Bolt. Okay, Yeah, I can ride with that. I think that it's something where again, if as a deck that it. It does have some inherent strength. Obviously if you flip heads on splashing, dodge every single time you flip a coin, you're gonna win a lot more games than you would if you flip tails. And I also think that a lot of people had absolutely no clue how to play against this deck last week and actually might test against it heading into this event now. Right. Which will probably hurt it a little bit. But I also don't know if it's something you can like. You can't tech for this. Right. You either have a good matchup into it or you don't. Yeah, not really. I think it being a one prize, a deck that hits pretty good numbers and you can have the ability to kind of catch up with that clefairy when you like, you can switch up your board and do one prize at some point and yeah, you don't have to run the. The Zoshin. I don't Think it runs a Zion, does it? No. Jose's list didn't like I, I have seen that where you do play like one lotias so you can jump into that attack on turn one and do like a turn one 120 plus 30 to a bench guy. But then you're putting two squishy two prizers on your board that are just kind of dead weight for the rest of the game. Yeah, I don't love the Zion in. In. In that deck if I'm honest. So. But I think that's the right way to go about it. Just kind of make your. You make it make it a long game and you do a lot of damage over the course of the game. It's hard to clean up necessarily, but I think it's a good deck. You know, I'm. I'm hype on it coming into the tournament. I don't, I don't know if it'll like. I'd be surprised if it gets above 6% for sure. But I, I definitely am excited to see a couple of them sprinkled in. Day two, potentially. Okay, let's see. Next let's go ahead and do the Mega stage ones that I alluded to before. So we've got Lucario Hariyama and we can just say Mega Lucario in general for this because I think that this honestly should be like Lucario to Dunsparce because in my opinion that's a better variant of this deck. Okay. But I know that there are some kind of die hard Lucario players who do want to still stick with the Hariyama. And then obviously we also still have Low Point the Dunsparce which was a deck that like existed a little bit like honey back last format. And then it after rotation the dust nor package all got removed in favor of the dead Dunsparce and it spiked up really quick. Won a regional, did well the weekend after I believe. And then since then has just been steadily declining in play rate and success rate. And it's like people figured it out. Are people not teching the deck properly? Because the deck is pretty flexible, honestly. Like you can play the Miss Energy obviously, but then you can also play other things like. I know. I think I saw a list that was playing Prism Energies and then you could play Moltres and I also saw somebody playing the Stunfisk Ex from Ascended Heroes that has an attack that I believe does either 20 or 30 damage. Retreat locks that Pokemon and then next turn you do an additional 100 damage when you attack it. So you get to Lock it for piddly amount of damage doesn't really matter because the next turn you retreat into your low putty and do 330 and ko whatever pokemon it was. So like you have options and interesting the kind of cute plays you can do with this deck. But is it just not enough at this point? That's a really hard question to answer. I feel like I felt pretty good about it for most of this format. But yeah, I don't know if it's just the rise in Raging Bolts or Alakazam maybe having a more favorable matchup into it. I don't know. I think I'd be surprised if we don't see some of them make a deep run in this tournament. I like it a lot. I think I still put it in B tier as well. And I'm shoving everything in B tier. I think it's still inherently powerful. It can go on a run just like Hopps Trevenant and do really well too. I think it's still consistent, powerful load of the ground. Kind of what you all wait all what you want in one of these. And then. Yeah, I don't know. I. I'm still hype on the deck and still could see it doing well. Okay. And then I'll give a hot take on Lucario for this weekend. I think it's terrible. I think we're gonna see a lot of purple decks. Yeah. And kind of the claim to fame here is that you hope that you're just hitting dragapult all day. And Lucario has always claimed that it has a good dragapult matchup. Even though when you look at matchup data it's much closer to 5050 than I think the Lucario players would like to admit. And they're really just doing the thing where they're praying that they can just run over the Dragon Ball player and take a bunch of prizes that you know you can hopefully compensate for that three prize swing that you're going to give your opponent at some point when you can't wally your Lucario out of range. And I don't know. I guess they were just preying on the fact that dragapult lists at the time weren't as prepared for them, weren't able to play around them as well and just were hopefully being aggro enough to get around things. But now Dragon Ball players know the matchup better. Drag up lists are more consistent than they used to be. And you have a whole host of these new psychic type decks that are coming out of the woodwork to Try to beat Dragapult on the weakness front. And Lucario just gets collateraled by that all day. Yeah, that's a. That's an accurate assessment. I. I still think it's a little more powerful than D tier. I'd put it probably a little higher because it can have a good run if you hit the right matchups and like, you do have some ability to do some cool plays and like, you know, you have the built in gust effect and you can kind of work from there. But yeah, it definitely is less in a good position than it was for other tournaments with the rise of all those psychic decks you talked about. Okay, so I have a question then, because I'm not leaving this tier list until we have a deck in D tier. So if you don't think Lucario belongs in D tier. Of our remaining decks, is there one that you think does belong in D tier? I would say probably Beed. I don't think. Really? I don't believe that. It's too linear. You. You give up three prizes whenever you get knocked out. No, no, no, it's not a mega. Oh, you're right. Okay. It's still too linear. The. The games where you prize one piece just falls apart. You can just open up a bad hand and get donked pretty easily. You know, just. I don't know, man. I mean, you've played with it a lot more than me. Do you think it's in C tier or D tier? I think this deck's up here, honestly. Okay. Wow. I think that this, this is the deck that's going to surprise somebody. We're going to see somebody run really hot with it, and maybe it will just be a one off, you know, like Cinderella story, Dark Horse came out of nowhere. And really it should belong in B tier, but it's something where, yes, it only does one thing, but like Raging Bolt only does one thing. And people love that deck. And yes, you can claim, oh, I have options because I have multiple Pokemon that I can attack with. But Beedrill doesn't hide what it's doing. It's. And I think it's one of the things, like the, the biggest weakness of this deck is that it is new. And I don't think that the quote unquote correct list has been found yet. In the same way that like we had Ogrepon Meganium and initially people wanted to play with Mega Venusaur when that was around. And then, you know, we learned about Arboliva from the Japan Champions League tournaments. People started playing that. And then now that's evolved into Hydrapple because we've discovered hey, this is actually even better into Dragapult than Arboliva was. And so I think Beedrill, even though it does only do the one thing as soon as somebody finds the right list to maximize consistency for it and it really, it isn't as simple as just playing like four Puff and four bug catching set for Pokepad. Like there's a correct structure to that deck that hasn't quite been put together in my opinion because even like the list I'm not going to claim the list that I have is perfect. But you still have, you have games where you do turn two three, 30 and you're just unstoppable and and then you're right, you can't have games where you're like oh well let's just scoop and go next. But that's almost just the nature of this format still because we do only have the one consistency supporter. And you know, I don't know, I keep wanting to call it Forest of Giant Plants. Forest of Vitality is just such a strong card that if the games where you don't prize multiple pieces of your beedrill line like 330 is all you need. So you, you don't even need to get all four of them into play. So as long as you aren't prizing two of a given thing. I also think that this is a deck that should play one rare candy and I've still been trying to toy with the A spec as well. I think right now I'm playing secret box and a couple of petrol as just an option to either go find a stadium or to go find the secret box to find the stadium and play. I think I play like one lucky helmet as my tool option for that to then also just be, you know, draw cards make it more consistent to get the Beedrills back into play. And maybe I'm like coping on this and it is at least a little bit lower but I definitely don't think it's a D tier deck. Okay, okay, that's fair. What do you think is a D tier deck then Aaron? Oh, I thought it was Lucario but that's the only deck on there. I mean I don't know. Rockets Mewtwo. I'm not really impressed by. Yeah yeah this is something that's probably belongs down here. Like this deck hasn't gotten any better. If anything it's honestly just gotten worse because it's not very good into one prize decks and struggles like it struggles With Hydrapple, it struggles with, actually it's decent to Radio Bolt, but like it struggles with the, the non psychic weak Mega Pokemon, like Low Punny or people are still playing Starmie or Frost last. Like those are problems for it. So yeah, that would probably go down here. Yeah. Mega Greninja, like I mentioned before, this is another one where I think people just haven't figured it out yet. Yeah. But because of that, unless we see somebody just come out of nowhere with it. Like, I think if you looked at the matchup data for the deck in Turin last week, I think its overall win rate was like 42%. Yeah, it's pretty, pretty bad. It's gonna be a popular deck just because it's a new. Like Greninja is kind of one of the fanboys of the Pokemon game. People love playing Greninja. But I, I think I agree. I don't really see it. I mean, somebody might crack the code. Somebody might have been working on this since they released the card and had that list and have it dialed in. I don't see it for this tournament. So we'll see if we're proven wrong on that. All right, we've got a couple, three more decks. Oh, good. I do, I think it's better Lucario still. So I'm gonna put it up here. Okay, fair enough. I'm not gonna. Yeah, three more decks. See, this is, this is still a really powerful deck. You know, we just had Karras Win and Indy with it in a different format, but still relatively close to this format. The one thing that I think hurts this deck the most is the special red card inclusion. In a lot of decks, it can be really hard for that deck to recover from that. Not impossible. But a late timed special red card followed by like a, you know, boss's orders or something like that can really. Or a Watchtower. Yeah, or Watchtower. Sure. So I think it's definitely not A tier anymore. I, I, I know I'm lumping everything in B tier. I think it's still really strong and can do well. Maybe a C tier on this one. I don't know how you feel, but I think, I think B is pretty fair because. And mostly that's comparing it to the other things in this tier. Like if I, if I put it in C, I actually think that it's pretty favored into most of what is in B tier. I actually think Hops is one of the, is the deck that gives it the most trouble. Even though it's weird because when they Run that. Right. So but if you, if you take a KO with Alakazam Hops Trevenant actually doesn't get its revenge attack off because that is specifies that has to be by damage. So Hops Trevenant actually struggles to one hit KO and Alakazam. Once you finally get it set up, however, they're much faster than you. It could sit there and just take pride. Like KO your basics and even sometimes your stage ones with a phantom. And then when you do get to three or four prizes, suddenly they're one hit Koing Alakazam's a Cramer ant, so that, that is probably a bad matchup. But I think you're pretty good in the Raging Bolt. I think you're fine in the Zoro because they aren't playing Darmanitan. And I think that with Enhanced Hammer you can kind of get over the line against Low Penny as well. Okay. Yeah, I think that's fair. It's still strong. It's still a really strong deck. Still has really good matchups into Dragapult and everything else. Yeah. And then that leaves Rockets Honchkrow, which is a deck that I just really don't know how to feel about. Like this is. It's almost in a similar tier. Oh, I just realized Crustal isn't on here. Yeah, we can talk about that real quick. I think that's probably. I think Crystal's a good. Yeah, I don't think it's a good play this weekend. No, today. This is not the weekend to spin that match up roulette wheel. I just think that you're going to hit too many ones. So many. Yep. So including something tier because you can still make it a deep run with Crustal, but I don't think it's above that. Sure, sure, sure, sure. Go ahead. Honchkrow was like the Tim Danklin deck, the Zapdos TCG deck. Zool played this in Melbourne and it's just fine like this. This is probably like the BS B tier decks that on here. I do think that it's better than Zoroark. I. I honestly I don't think Zorg's super well positioned this weekend. Actually think Trevin is probably above this too. Like if we are going to order these a little bit. Like if you can hit Raging Bolt all day, that's great. I know. I've heard Azul say that he thinks that Dragapult is actually much better than what the data shows it to be and he thinks people just don't know how to play the matchup. Personally, I haven't played it a ton myself from the Honchkrow side. I played it from the Dragon Bolt side and it has never felt very difficult. But maybe those people don't know how to play the matchup. So I. I'm not entirely sure what I'm missing here, but I think that matchup is, eh. I think your Slow King matchup is actually incredibly bad. But it also kind of depends on who goes first. But it's easier for Slow King to get a single Slow King up and use a Trifrost versus you evolving all of your murkrows in the same turn. Yeah, you have a very squishy board with all your stuff against that matchup in particular. And you can't run Shaman because then you violate, you know, the whole Arianas and. Yep, that's. And Giovanni's, all that kind of stuff. So yeah, it's in a different spot than it was at Melbourne. Not as good a spot, I'll say that. So I definitely feel like it's there. I think if you wanted to move and Zor down, I'd be okay with it probably, but. Okay. Yeah. Looking at it now, it's still a strong deck, but it's definitely in a weird spot that it just keeps not doing well. So we'll probably get burned and have like Piper go on a, you know, undefeated run and into maybe Piper's casting. I actually haven't seen the casting, so I'm not entirely sure. Fair enough. But that leaves us with Festival Lead. And I don't even know how to feel about this deck in this format. Do you have any thoughts on it? I mean, Sydney's been playing it. That's the deck I gave to her when she started playing. And it's still good. Right? Like it's not like it lost anything or. I mean, I guess you have a weird Slow King matchup potentially, but you've run Shaman already most of the time, so you should be able to deal with that. I think it's still okay. Like, I don't think it's C or D tier. I think it's probably a B tier as well. Like it just. It can win a tournament. Like it can. It can go on a run. I mean. Yeah, I don't think it. I don't think it is worse than Rocket's Honchkrow, that's for sure. Where do you think Festival Lead goes in C tier. You happy with that? Festival Lead? Yeah. I mean B, I think B is fine. I don't. I think it's going to be incredibly low percentage. I don't really even see anybody playing it this weekend. I was actually. Better one prize options, right? You have better one prize options. If you wanted to play like a grass deck. Hydrapple is probably the best one right now. And even then you have the option to go with a like Diplin multi prize turn potentially if your opponent, you know, is a dragapult board that doesn't have a monkey dory on it as an example. Just putting yourself in a good position real quick. Wanted to see if. Was it like. What was the festival? Festival. It was still like a 5% deck in Turin. That's higher than I thought it was going to be. Yeah, it's not that bad. All right, Aaron, do you have time for predictions or you want to wrap it up? No, we can run through those real quick. What you got? All right. So hops Trevenant, one last event. You've kind of hop hide on it. We both like it. How high do you think it'll finish for this weekend? Top 64. Nothing against. Nothing against the deck. I think it's going to be a low play rate. You are going to have, you know, the best of the best. Any IC is an ic. Like everybody who is anybody as long as they were able to get to the lottery to get into the tournament is going to be there and they're going to be bringing their A game like it's. It's just a tough event. Yeah, I think I'm. I'm probably even less optimistic on top. I'm going to do one top 128. So it's still a good deck and I think it can go on a run. But yeah, definitely. I think we will be more prepared for it like we talked about and it'll be just a much harder tournament for this weekend. Yep. All right. What region do you predict to do the most? What. What region will have the most top cut players? Let's. Let's do that. Mix it up a little bit. So outside of the. I guess I should say outside of NA because I feel like that's. Unless you think. Well, I was gonna. I was gonna say na. I do think NA is going to have the most. But I mean, outside of na, I guess I'd have to go. Gets pretty hard but like, I don't know who's going. Right. So it's hard to know. Right. I'm not. I'm not going to pick Japan. Even though I do think that we'll probably see one Japanese player. Like they've been doing well in every TPCI region that they've gone to all season. They won multiple regionals. But I wonder if that also means that some of the ones that have already earned their invite by winning a regional, maybe they aren't coming to this event. Oceania is a really hard pick to pick make when there are so few players that travel to N A. So it's EU and Latam. So I'll pick eu, I guess. Okay. I don't have a. I don't have a good reason. I'm. I'm kind of hot on Japan. I think even we've seen, like, the top players from Japan, even after they get their invites, still go and play in tournaments. So I'm gonna pick Japan on that one. Or. Okay. And, you know, maybe Singapore. That lumped in there with that. Maybe I'll, you know, include Southeast Asia. All right. What will be the number of. What will be the. I guess not the highest placing. What's the highest placing? New archetype from Crimson and not Crimson. I keep saying that. Chaos. Buzzwole. Lycanrock. Yeah, we're. We'll go. I'm. I'm going to just have to stick my guns here. I'm going to go. Beedrill. I mean, really, the only two viable archetypes that you have, like, truly new archetypes from this set, are Greninja and BE Drill. Unless, you know, if somebody knows something about Mega Floette that. I don't know, maybe they're out there, but I doubt it. I did have the one, like, tournament, I think, in Japan. Okay. That was a, like, Diancy deck that played one floette. That does not count. Okay, fair enough. I'm gonna try and go with the fanboy of the set, the Greninja. I'm gonna see how that goes. Like, my heart wants Greninja. I'm not gonna lie. I like. Like, that's such a cool card. The effect's so good. You played a lot of it. I've played that more than anything else so far in this format. And it's. It feels good like that, and that's the reason why people want to play it, because you feel like you're doing things when you're playing the card. I think I've prized my Neo Upper energy one too many times for me to. To green light it, though. Yeah, I guess. Should I do a Champions question since this will be the second tournament with Champions, if we want to mix it up a little bit? Sure. Do you know Enough about vgc. I do not. Okay, we won't do that. So I was gonna say, like, do you new know what Mega Pokemon are and are not legal and. Or like which ones are and are not? I know Mega Floette's like the best one out of the new one. Okay, yeah, well, I mean that. Yeah, that could be a nice like little tiebreaker. Like in vgc, which Mega Pokemon will win the event because every team will have a Mega Pokemon. Yeah, yeah. But. Well, it's interesting because like you look at. I didn't actually pay attention to the results from Tauren, but like Wolf made. I think he got second place in Indy and he had his. Like he had two Megas on his team, but he had Steelix, which is something that like nobody's using. And then Tyranitar, which normally exists on a team, is kind of like a backup Mega Pokemon. It was. I think the event was won by Mega Charizard. Why? There might have been a float on it, but yeah. So if you would. If you were going to go with float for that, like, I'd want to pick something stupid just for the sake of doing it. But like I've. The easy answer is probably Charizard or actually, no, I'm gonna go with Aerodactyl. That's what I'm gonna go with. All right. I want to say Scovillain because there was a little while where Scovillain was like super popular and Skull villain has a mega. Have you not seen this? Hold on. No, I haven't one second. You've got to see this guy. Okay. No, wrong thing or something like, oh, that's so small. Why is that so small? Okay, this will look a little bit better. So this is Megasco Villain. Well, that's pretty punk. I kind of like that. So the cool thing about it, yeah, he's got like, oh, God. His ability is like, if he gets attacked at all, doesn't have to be like a contact thing or anything, just any move that hits him, the Pokemon that use it gets burned. So like Intimidate is really popular in VGC for cutting attack. And then this serves kind of a similar purpose because Scovillain learns Rage Powder to redirect attacks to him. And so this has been our once in a year VGC segment. And if you are at all interested in vgc, Champions is coming to mobile next week. Oh, I didn't know that. That's cool. Yeah, it comes out on June 17, I think. I think it's Wednesday. Wow. Have you been Playing champions at all or. No, I have. I've kind of fell off. I haven't played it all since they rolled into season two. I played it for a good bit in season one, though. It's pretty okay. Like, it's fun. I think that I would get back into it once I can do it on my phone during my lunch break at work or something. And, like, the battles are really quick. Like you. I think you can finish them in like three to five minutes for a battle. So it's not bad at all. It's kind of comparable with TCG Pocket in that. That regard, except it has more depth than Pocket does. Right? Yeah. But, yeah, I think that. That about, like. Well, I guess that would leave the. Still, you know, the old standby, you know, pick a player to win. Pick a player. Yep. I. I picked mine already, so I'll go ahead. And while you're thinking about it, I picked Justin Neudorf. He's. I think that's who it is. The newer guy, right? Yeah. He got second at Worlds last year. Yep. Yep. He's. He's had quite a run the last few tournaments, you know, losing out in the top cut in the last few regionals. But he's consistently been making those top cuts. And I think he makes a deep run in Naic, kind of runs it back. He's been really good with the dragapult, so I think he'll have a really good showing at this tournament. Okay, so I'm gonna go a player who I think is overdue for a result, somebody who has been putting a lot of time into grinding tcg Live. I saw a screenshot where he was up to like 1850 in Arceus a few days ago. I think it was over the weekend. And that is Ian Robb. Oh, yeah. Even though in the perfect order format, he was a fan of Raging Bolt, so that's got to be a knock against him. But I think that he's repented and has moved on to bigger and better things now, and we'll see him pull out a real deck and, you know, take everything down this weekend. Well, I'm excited to talk about it probably in a couple weeks again, I don't know if you have time next week. Maybe we'll see if we have time next week. You can go for it. You know, I know this week. The rest of this week's gonna be really busy for me, so. My son's got a baseball tournament this week that actually starts on Thursday, so my weekend is going to be all eaten up with that yeah. Next week, things will be a bit slower. Okay. Yep. And we'll have all of that recapped and a little bit of a debrief of how I judged at NAIC and how all that went. Next time, we do the Battle Frontier. Thank you very much. Have a good week.