2-32: We're back!

Now we're recording. Now we're recording. Yu-Gi-Oh Faroe Islands. They're a smaller chain of islands pretty much between Norway and Iceland. You draw a line, they'll kind of hit that line at some point. But they're like kind of part of the same volcanic system that created Iceland before. Created Iceland, it created the. The Faroe Islands, if that makes sense. Like, kind of like Hawaii has the hot spot and then moves with tectonic plates over time. Similar principle. So it's both. They're. They're similar to Iceland in the geography. So geology, that's the word. Rocks. And it's really stark. Like they have some amazing green hills where sheep are like walking up the side of a mountain. Not even exaggerating, just like, Yu-Gi-Oh how do they not fall off? And lots of practice, I guess. But they had. They seem happy, the sheep do. But I got to see like puffins and I got to see some cool. Just amazing, like fjords and waterfalls and all this kind of stuff. So very, very good trip. I gotta spent some really quality time with Sydney and my parents as well. That was really special. You never know. You never know what life's gonna take you next. And don't none tomorrow is not guaranteed. So it was really just nice to be able to like, kind of separate from the real world a little bit and get to spend time with them and, like, playing trivia and, you know, hang out at dinner and after dinner and all that kind of stuff. So just like really quality time with my parents. That was really nice. I discovered what Moomin is. I don't know if you know what moomin is. I don't even know what word you're saying. Sounds like you're. Okay, I was gonna say it sounds like you're like, phonetically, if I was going to spell it out. It sounds like you were making the same noise as a cow. That's pretty close. It's M O O M I n. It's a Finnish cartoon series started in like 1945. But there's some really funny characters and one of them is called Stinky. So that's who my personality is. Did I. I see you post something about that on. I did post it on Instagram. Yep, I posted. You know, when you open one pack of Moomin Guards and Stinky personality, from there on up, all of these characters look like hippos. Well, that's the Moomin. Am I crazy? That's like the main dude. It's like the Pikachu of the franchise. But then they, like, kind of have other characters too. Yu-Gi-Oh this guy looks like. He looks like one of those coconut guys from Moana. Oh, that's true. I gotta lower my. For anyone who has never heard of Moomin can actually. We can educate people here. Really? Yes. We're doing the international cultural studies portion of our podcast. We've got Moomin characters. So here's all of our hippo folks. This is the Scarecrow from Wizard of Oz. This is a Moomin podcast now. Sorry, I'll have to catch up. Wait, is this. Is there, like, modern Moomin where they have these, like, claymation or 3D animated ones? Because this stuff looks like old school cartoons. Yu-Gi-Oh they did a. They did a. They did a cartoon and they had an animated series at one point. So the animated series was, like, from the 70s, I think. Did you know that they have a theme park in Japan? I didn't know. I did not know that. It's pretty sick. There was the. Go see the illustrator. Like, it was animated in Japan in the 70s, this animation. So that kind of, I guess, has some crossover. Is Stinky a more modern character? I don't see him in any of these pictures. Nice. Hold on. I think I had him in my previous. He's just not a. Where is Stinky? There he is. This guy. There he is. Yu-Gi-Oh Yu-Gi-Oh These. That's terrifying. Holy cow. No, I don't like. I don't like the cgi. Stinky. Cgi. Stinky can't hurt me. I feel like this has gotta. This looks very, very much so. Like Yu-Gi-Oh generated, though. Yu-Gi-Oh I can even highlight his body, the eyes. That's crazy. That's terrifying. No, I like. I like og Stinky. You know, the black. I'm sorry, how did you discover this to begin with? I opened up a pack of Moomin trading card cards. Okay. Where did you find those Stinkies in there? It was at a card store in Norway. Oh. I went to a Pokemon card store and they had Moomin cards. And you just felt so possessed that you. Well, I was like, I want something from Norway. Yu-Gi-Oh I wanted something from Norway. That was like. Because the. They don't have, you know, Norwegian language cards. It's all English. Sure. And then the store had a really good selection. Shout Out, I think it was called. I'm gonna butcher it. It's not card market, because that's a separate thing, like Card player. And it was in Christian's home. But it was really. It's a nice store. Like, a really nice store. And they had a really good amount of Japanese and Chinese product too, and some Korean. So Sydney opened some Chinese and Japanese packs and I just opened up the Moomin pack. So I don't know. That was definitely one of the highlights. I don't need no Poke man cards. I got them back in the States. Yu-Gi-Oh that's kind of how I, I'm not gonna lie, I was like, I don't need more Pokemon cards. I do need Moomin cards. My gosh. So now if you think back on it, you've been to a number of card shows. Have you ever seen a Moomin card at a card show? No, I've never. I mean they're, they're made by Panini, so it's like a reputable manufacturer. It's not like some dude making them in his basement. But no, I had never seen Moomin cards. But there's so many trading cards out there that we don't even know of that, right? Yu-Gi-Oh I mean, Yu-Gi-Oh you figured like it gets more akin to like a baseball card, right? It's not a card game, is it? Right? No, it's not a card. Okay. Okay. It's. I don't know what the chases are. I, I guess I could look that up, but I'm not that invested. I just like pulled the shiny gold stinky. What happened? What happens when shiny gold stinky is like a two thousand dollar card? Oh my gosh. I mean, I don't love them that much. $2,000 to $2,000. I could, you know, do a lot of things with that kind of money. You can be the next Logan Paul and just pumping the Moomin market. There we go. You heard it here, folks. Invest in moving. No, it's all ridiculous. We're gonna have a disclaimer in the description of this episode. We do not. Yu-Gi-Oh we do not. Any sort of financial advice, especially not card markets. Absolutely not. I have never been to a card show, although I was thinking about it and how it could be interesting. I've seen some different content from people about just, you know, and you've told me too. Just it's a. Can be a fun experience. You go find some. Go in looking for specific things potentially. And sometimes you just find random stuff that you may or may not have been expecting to. And it doesn't even necessarily need to be Pokemon related. You know, go in and you could find, you know, maybe you really like Marvel stuff and. But you don't want to buy a bunch of the new magic stuff that just came out. But you're looking for one specific card and you stumble upon a booth that happens to have that or you really like a certain Disney property and they have that specific enchanted card at their booth. So you don't need to go on TCG player to purchase it for some exorbitant price. Maybe you can kind of wheel and deal a little bit better there. I don't know, Something like that. It just seems like it could be a fun time. Yu-Gi-Oh it's a, it's the thrill of the chase and like, you know, you get to form relationships with other collectors. You get to like, some of them have actual like events going on inside of the trading thing. Okay. You know, they don't really have a lot of trading going on. It's mostly just buying and selling. Or really like, if you trade, it's with the vendor. No, that's what I'm saying. Yu-Gi-Oh It's like barter. You're bartering. Yu-Gi-Oh of course. More than you are, like directly trading. Yu-Gi-Oh I get that. I get it. Yu-Gi-Oh So now a lot of that has kind of crashed recently too. I, I saw a thing where like Target is updating their electronics section now and it's going to have a whole, or at least some stores are moving all of their TCG stuff back to that area. And all the shelves are like foil lined and it looks really weird, but I saw a picture of, I guess it was somewhere in Texas and they had restocked products going all the way back to Prismatic Evolutions Ultra Premium collections and like dozens of ETBs from multiple sets, like Perfect Order, Chaos Rising, pitch black. And I mean, it was summarily cleaned out within the next, you know, six hours. But there was a lot of product that hit shelves. And I guess there's a lot of people that think that now that Pokemon has kind of got things up and running with their facility, that a flood of product is about to hit the market and a lot of these investor bros and scalper folks are gonna crash and burn with their hoarded amount of commercial ETBs. Yu-Gi-Oh I mean, Goldin have happened to a worse kind of group. You know what I mean? Like, I'm not that sad to see it, but I don't, I don't, I don't know. Like, for me and you, I feel like it's a different kind of vibe than like somebody that has been getting into it for the financial reason of it or even a regular collector for that matter. Like, neither one of us, we, we might have a couple cards here and there or like, some stuff put aside for our collections. But for the most part, like, we don't live and die by, like, what we collect. And there's not, like, stuff we're chasing, like. Like, if we have it, we have it. If we don't, you know, there's very few cards that I'll spend on actual money. And, you know, I have, like, one thing. I'm kind of finishing up here with the triumphant set. I have one card left in that, but after that, like, I'm good for a while. Like, I've been doing some of the 30th anniversary stuff, like with all the starters. I've been picking those up as they come out. Okay. So I might make a Pandora for that. I don't know if I'll try to master set it per se, but it's just a cool set. It looks really cool. I'm excited about that. Oh, I have one card in particular I'm very excited about in the 30th anniversary set, if all of the leaks and Whatnot are to be believed. Okay, what's that? Where I saw the pictures of. You know how they have a booklet whenever they come out with sets like this or I guess does every set do it? Like every ETB has one of these? Yu-Gi-Oh every ETB has one now and it just has photographic images of every single card in the set. And apparently there's going to be an Sir Fuecoco ex. Oh, that's pretty sick. At some point I'm gonna have to try to track that down. Fuecoco, like the base Evolution. Is it Ex? That's crazy. Yes. I have no idea what it does. I just know that it looks really cute and that's my little guy. Like, I've got all sorts of Fuecoco merch all over this desk. Nice. Yu-Gi-Oh that's definitely your card, your chase. So, all that being said, welcome back to the Battle Frontier podcast where we aim to help you level up in your journey as a competitive Pokemon TCG player. Since we have been around in a while, I'm Aaron, semi retired Pokemon player, old head at heart and in presence. Across me over here is my co host John, also an old head at heart and. Well, I'm not going to call you old. You can call yourself old if you want. I'm. I'm again. I mean, I'm an ox status in the game at this point. There you go. But one-of-one so obviously we haven't had a show for a while. You heard a little bit of talk there. John's Been on vacation. I've had one kid out of school in summer along with having a new baby still, so just also busy with work and obviously with John out of town, I didn't want to scramble to try to find a guest host and didn't really feel like trying to record anything by myself. And spoiler alert from when we talk about the state of the game later, I'm not incredibly thrilled with where the game is at currently and as such I've been looking into other games potentially. Like I know I had friend of the show one-of-one who is really big into Lorcana, hit him up and he sent me just stuff not. Not to play competitively or anything. Yu-Gi-Oh Lord knows I don't have time for that, but he sent me a box of things so I can make themed decks around different Disney franchises. So I've got like a bunch of Wreck It Ralph stuff and lilo's just kitchen stuff to do, kitchen table with my kids or my wife or any other family members and Whatnot. Just something else to do. Keep it more like board game style. So that's been pretty cool to explore. And he sent me a bunch of that stuff for free and just had to pick up a couple of things. I think my total extra financial expenditure is like $12 to have like four decks that I can Blue Ice So that's pretty neat. It seems like that game is kind of getting into the same space that Pokemon is as far as affordability is concerned. I know it was something where initially obviously came out during COVID and product was just impossible to get and it was basically what Pokemon is now and things were kind of through the roof. But on the flip side of that, their singles prices were also absolutely ridiculous. Where, you know, if you wanted to buy for the equivalent of Dragapult Ex from their set, each of them was going to be like 40 bucks. And Pokemon has not been like that for quite a long while, thankfully. But we're back. We're going to discuss on this episode kind of the changes for the upcoming season. I'm sure you've probably already heard that, but we'll get a little bit of a different spin on it with John giving his perspective as a judge as well as providing potential resources for people if they are interested in pursuing that judging pathway or other reminders that you might need as a player heading into the season, especially if you are newer or maybe coming back to the game. And then we will hit on the current state of the game and maybe John has a more positive outlook than I do. But, you know, we've got the Avengers, Dr. Doom movie coming out, and I feel like Dragapult is kind of Dr. Doom at the moment, where I'm pretty sure in that movie he's gonna show up and like everyone's gonna think he's a good guy and then he's just gonna kill everybody. That's kind of what Dragapult does. Like you. You. We sat in the format where Gardevoir was more or less the king of everything, and Dragapult kind of sat there fighting the good fight. And everybody said, come on, Dragapult, you can do it. And now we're stuck with this guy until next rotation. Yep. Yu-Gi-Oh we're living in Dragapult's world and we're finding just ways to cope with it every day. Yep. Playing. Playing a lot of alternate format stuff. For me personally, that's how I'm staying sane in our dragonfold land. Right now I'm playing put some GLC yesterday at League and then I've been testing for the professor cup that's coming up. I'm doing the professor conference in Chicago in two weeks. We can. But next weekend. That'll be a lot of fun. I'm excited about that. That's gonna be like one full day of kind of like talks and presentations. And then that evening we get to go into the Field Museum of Chicago. Then the whole fossil exhibit that they have going on. So that'll be kind of fun. And then Sunday they do a Professor Cup. So excited about that. The format, for those that are interested, it's 50 card decks, no rule box, Pokemon. But you can Blue Ice many aspects as you want in your deck. With the caveat being that in a best of three series, when you play an A Spec, instead of going to the discard pile, it goes to the Lost Zone. So you don't have access to it for. If you play a three game set, games two and three, if you play in game one, does that include expanded aspects? No, it's okay. So the format is G on. So you do get access to earlier Scarlet and Violet cards like Nest Ball and Artisan and one-of-one and stuff like that. So that's pretty nice. But overall it has kind of a slower feel or not slower feel. It feels more like. I don't know. So it's 50 card decks. My thought. My thought process is I think Grief Testament might be better now because you have less to mill. And five Prizm cards isn't a huge difference than six price cards. When it's a single Prizm game. Sure. So especially when you have a legacy energy too. Legacy energy, survival brace, that kind of stuff. So I've been cooking with that. And then I'm probably gonna have to just build festival lead because Goldin with festival lead also seems pretty broken right now. And then you have access to like, I don't know. Yu-Gi-Oh More. So is it really. It's really more like every deck is 40 cards and. Or like 35 cards and 15 A specs. It's funny because the more I've thought about it, the less I want to put like 10A specs on my deck and just kind of like. I don't know, I feel like, you know, I was like, oh, I can play in the great test middle deck, I can play one pal pad and one miracle headset. And then I'm like, well, what happens if I play the miracle headset game one and then Prizm pal pad game two? And I just feel really bad about that and like, don't have a supporter, like I want to need it or something like that. So I don't know. It's like I can play more ASPECs and I probably should, but I also think, like, you have to play games two and game three and if you play your aspects early, you can hold onto them in your hand, I guess. But I don't know. I haven't really tested and played a lot of games of the format yet. It's more just theory crafting right now. Yu-Gi-Oh Yu-Gi-Oh So I'll report back maybe in a couple weeks if I play in the tournament. Don't crash out. I played in the. To give an update. I did play in the last online professor cup and I didn't do very well. I think I went one, three drop. Oh, geez. Yu-Gi-Oh just not. Not my day. I played the Hop Trevenant I was working on and it wasn't as consistent as I was hoping it would be. Like, I missed pieces. I missed a couple turns of attacking here and there and just kind of came up short a couple times. There are close games I lost, but just wasn't as powerful as I was hoping the deck would be. You know, you flip tails a couple times on the Phantom and the deck kind of falls apart. Yu-Gi-Oh But it was still fun. Just. Yu-Gi-Oh just not my day. But Yu-Gi-Oh I'm excited for this new season that we just got announcements about. Yu-Gi-Oh We have news about the 2077 championship series, including the event schedule changes to best finish limits, which really there aren't any travel aboard Tiebreakers were changed a little bit. one-of-one affect most people, so we're not going to spend a ton of time on it. VGC continues. Unite is no longer part of Worlds. Just to kind of give the cliff notes of things that don't apply to tcg. Unite got split off to have its own championship series. Everyone is in Chicken Little mode associated with that game and they think the game is dying, which wouldn't be totally surprising. I mean, you look at what happened to Pokken when it was briefly a part of Worlds and now it's gone and I don't know they haven't made another new game for that. I grant it's a little bit different because it wasn't a live service game. So Unite might have a little bit more of a leg to stand on, but that remains to be seen. There were updates to qualifications for Worlds, where I believe some most rating zones got a few more invites going into next year and there were some changes to eligibility in specific regions due to the laws in those regions. But it doesn't affect the global majority of players. And since most of our listener base is US and Canada based, I don't think that we're really gonna spend a lot of time on that either. Shout out to Brazil. Pokemon Go got a really weird update too, where now if you're playing Worlds in Pokemon Go, you qualify for Worlds as a single player and then you play on a randomly assigned team of three for the rest of the event. And that makes zero sense to me. That's weird. I guess maybe they're leaning into the Pokemon Goes always had like a very community heavy aspect where you're like, it's supposed to work together with other people and take down raids and do all this and that. But Yu-Gi-Oh that's. That's randomly being. I mean, that's kind of fun in some ways. But like, is it really what we want to showcase, like the best players? Maybe not. So. Right. Yu-Gi-Oh I don't know. And it's really weird because we one-of-one see the full effect of it until the next World Championship either. Yu-Gi-Oh So by then most of us will have forgotten about it. And then you'll see something where you have. You have three people on stage versus three people on stage and you'll be like, oh, are these guys all friends? And you find out these three just met yesterday and now. Or I have no idea how Worlds is going to work for that. But we did get a majority of major event dates for most of the world, with the exception of the North American region, where we are still missing several Dates so obvious. We did get updates for. You know, they're keeping the cadence of roughly one regional per month in each major region. So we've got September and October with Baltimore and Louisville. And John's going to go here in a little bit and state that judge applications are already open for both of those events. John, correct me if I'm wrong, is. Is Baltimore still open? Yu-Gi-Oh it's open till the 30th. So sorry, if you catch this after the 30th, they closed this will release on the 30th. So, Yu-Gi-Oh if you want to sign up, sign up today. Yu-Gi-Oh as of the releasing of this episode. Otherwise, sorry, you missed the boat on that one. But you could sign up for Louisville or any of the other following. No, Louisville closes the 30th as well. Oh, that makes no sense because it's a month later. I don't know. That's weird. Oh, well, let me double check before I verify that, but I think that's. We have Vegas returning in December again, and then they've already announced Milwaukee for April and San Diego at the end of May next year, along with NAIC being in Chicago next summer. So we're missing tournaments for November, January, February, and March. If. If we do have events on each of those months. And. And if you look at the kind of geographic spread of each of these events, the last couple of seasons we've had three west coast regionals, three east coast regionals, and three Central US Regionals. Since we have don't typically get a true, like, Central Canadian regional. And last season we only had one Canadian regional with Toronto taking up one of those east coast slots. Toronto conspicuously is absent here and normally has been present in January. So I wouldn't be surprised to see that announcement come through. You know, just to give my two cents on predictions, look, we're missing four regionals. We still need two more east coast regionals. We need, I believe, one more west coast and one Central. So I'm seeing Toronto either Atlanta, Orlando, or maybe you could do something in like, Charlotte. Charlotte somewhere. One of, like one of the Carolinas, if they have a big enough convention center. I think, like, Nashville could also be another really cool one to still kind of keep it somewhat Southern. And I'm sure that they've got a large convention center in that city. Oh, for sure. But then Toronto would really say. It would really surprise me to have no Canadian representation. I think for Central we're gonna have the annual Texas regional pop up. And then for west coast, we already have California And Vegas, but we're missing the Northwest. You know, Pacific Northwest Regional last year we had Seattle. So I expect to either be Portland, Seattle or Vancouver. Know one of those three cities is kind of a lock. Which one it is remains to be seen. Doesn't really affect me. I've never been to any of them for a Pokemon tournament and I don't plan on starting now. Well, I went to Seattle last year and that was fun. It's a good city for it. But Yu-Gi-Oh just Certified Louisville and Baltimore are closed at 5pm Eastern Daylight Time on 30 July. And then Las Vegas is open at the moment and that closes on August 9, 2026, same time. Okay, so like a week and a half, right? Yu-Gi-Oh Yu-Gi-Oh So that one, get that one in. That should be doable. So just to go over the process of applying, it's really not that hard. If you are a professor, you should be familiar. Now they've been moving everything to the professor professor program. And if you go up to the Banner, it has a tab for staff calls. You click on that, click on Regional Championships and that'll pull up all of the regional championships that have staff applications open at the moment, including like European, South American and Australian. But I think you can sort it by location. Yu-Gi-Oh you can but. But that will just. That's the way to go. Now it used to be a little different where you had to maybe navigate through gaming generations page but they've moved everything over to professor program Pokemon so just log in there. If you go, click the one you want to apply to. I'm going to share my screen. Go for it. It should be. Yu-Gi-Oh it's not. Okay, just take my word for it. I don't want to share screen because it's technically private. It's behind a password and you have to be approved as a professor. So Yu-Gi-Oh I don't one-of-one Yu-Gi-Oh but I don't think I'm really like leaking anything vital. But the whole application process, you just fill out a Google form, it just asks for kind of basic information, you know, email address, phone number, and then it just gives you a couple questions as to your why do you want to apply? What do you think you can bring to the team from your background, their experience and then what is your experience as a player or as a judge and then any other last things or things we need to know and that's about it. It's really not a hard application. It doesn't take too long. My hack is I just write it all in a Google Doc. That way I can proofread it and you know, have it saved for when I apply. Because I'm going to apply like, you know, every, every regionals. It used to be sometimes you could just hit like what regionals you want to apply for and have that one application apply for all. But now you just, just save it in a Google Doc. That way you can just copy paste it. It's the same questions every time for every application. So you can just, and it's all gaming generation. You can just kind of copy paste and, and change it as you like, gain experience or have a couple things that you want to edit here and there. Like I tweaked it a little bit here and there. Like I updated it for this year compared to last year. But I like, once I have it written it, it's a, it's, it's not a done deal. So I'll edit it for like NAIC or EUIC or something like that. EUIC is a little different. It's a different, it's different event coordinator. So you have to, you know, the questions are going to be a little different, but that's about it. But Yu-Gi-Oh it's not hard. One other one thing is it asks for a Pokemon professor that you would have that is like, it asks for a reference. So make sure you ask people before you put them down as a reference. Don't just assume that they're okay with that. Obviously, you know, most players, most judges will be okay with you using them as a reference, but you know, don't put my name down. And like, I don't know if, if I get contacted and I don't know your name, I'm sorry, I'm not gonna be able to recommend you for anything. So my follow up to that was gonna be. Have you ever been listed as a reference for someone and been contacted regarding that individual? Yes, I think I've been just Certified more than asked like the details of it. But Yu-Gi-Oh I was asked like, do you know this person? Yes. Okay, that was about it. So like once, I think it doesn't happen all that often, but Yu-Gi-Oh it does happen. Especially if they like are kind of suspect about it or like, you know, like I'll put, you know, just somebody that's on stream as a judge or. I don't know. Yu-Gi-Oh you know, honestly, that probably does happen. Yu-Gi-Oh I've heard, I've heard stories of something like that happening and Yu-Gi-Oh I mean, you think I got the cloud of a big name and it draws a lot of attention or Something like that, but. Right. You don't. I mean, who wouldn't want Pram as a reference? Yu-Gi-Oh right. That's fair. That's funny. Yu-Gi-Oh Yu-Gi-Oh He will deny. He one-of-one He will be brutally honest and say, I don't know, he's a nice guy. But he's also not a pushover in that regard. But Yu-Gi-Oh it's. It's not a hard process. And I would just recommend, like, even if you're, especially if you're local, they definitely favor local judges for regionals. So, like, if you live in the Baltimore area, like around D.C. or Maryland or Virginia, I'm. I'm like two and a half hours from Baltimore, so I'm hopeful that I'll get into that. I have in the past and I hope to again, but that usually helps a little bit. And then, you know, work on just judging at a local level. There's not a lot of intermediary events between league cups and regionals, which is a different problem for a different conversation piece. There's no time for it anymore. That's the problem. Yu-Gi-Oh that's a fair point. You know, there's not like it's not the citizen's not segmented like it used to be. The time would be like during the break period or something like that. Like you have. And a lot of times some stores have started to do that where they'll have like a state championships that's run independent of the organized play system. I've seen that a couple times in the last few weeks. But overall, Yu-Gi-Oh there's just not a lot of opportunities at the lower, I guess middle level would be maybe the accurate way to put it, like they used to be. But league cups are still really valuable. You get a really good sense of what it takes to manage interactions at a higher stakes level, not the highest, but higher than like a league challenge. And if it's like a 40 or 50 player league cup, you know, that's like. If you think about it from the perspective of you're usually assigned a table section and it's like 150, 200 players. So 40 to 50, if you're just one judge by yourself as opposed to like a team of five or six, it kind of feels similar. Wouldn't be the same, but it is a decent approximation of the skill level you'll need. If you're judging a league cup by yourself or with one other judge or something like that, that's not, you know, there'll be interactions you have to work through and players that you have to manage expectations of and all that kind of stuff. So get out there, get, get involved in local ones and you're. If you don't have a league in your area, you know, drive, consider reaching out to professors saying hey, do you need help? I see you have a league cup scheduled and I really need experience and I'm a newer judge but I really want to get my feet, you know, wet and get, get, get to get to judging. Don't be afraid to drive a little bit if you have to reach out to professors in your area. It's easier than ever to do that. But Yu-Gi-Oh call the store and say hey, who do you have judging? And then you can just find that name on professor program dot com. Professor program Pokemon dot com. There's a whole like community section now. There's a whole, it's, it's way more interconnected than it was even five years ago. So it shouldn't be impossible. So don't, don't get discouraged if you don't get selected to. There's thousands and thousands of applications at this point every regional. So it's a really hard decision and it's not a reflection of you at all as a judge. A lot of the times it's more just like some of it's the luck of the draw. Good. Hold on. It could be, it could be. Oh Yu-Gi-Oh I mean you might, you might not be like truthfully, maybe you're not ready yet. You know, I'm not saying, I'm not saying that they're an awful person, although that could be the case. If you are an awful person, maybe you one-of-one be selected. But Yu-Gi-Oh maybe, maybe you're just the background check and people. I mean if your reputation precedes you in a negative way that can impact your ability to be selected for these events. I'm not going to pretend like that doesn't factor into the decision. And if you get like a reputation somehow sometimes that can, that can be a detriment. But a lot of times, you know, it's tough. Like I got passed up for EUIC and LAIC last year that I applied for and I staffed those events in the past and you know, it just, it wasn't my time that time. So. Yu-Gi-Oh it's not like it's not a, it's not a, it's merit based but it's also not entirely like, it's, it's, it's, it can be maddening to try to decipher and figure out why you might, might have got passed up and the best advice I can give if you do get passed up is just like, you know, just be content with what you have and say, oh well I didn't get that one, I'll get the next one or you know, well I'll find something else fun to do that weekend or I'll play. You know, that's always an option that will help you. Or if you like playing, you know, it's fun to do that. Like I, I mean I, I, I don't think of playing as a negative thing like some not saying judges think that. But it definitely helps in your applications too if you show that you're a player. So, so that's, that's a factor. Well and you know, for if there is anybody kind of really new to this process, there's also a framework now to kind of better yourself right in the, in terms of being a professor. There are kind of rankings within professorship and some of it does involve being staff at higher level events is kind of one of the qualifications once you get to the like mid upper levels of those different rankings. But there are also different classes and online reading and teaching materials that you can partake in to help yourself be more qualified and be better equipped to staff these events. I had one more question before we move on from this and that's when, when you fill out the application for one of these calls, what is the typical turnaround time that you should expect a response within. That's a good question. And to touch on what you just said with there being more resources out there, that's so true Aaron. Now we have like sick war symposiums where there's like many professor conferences all over the world, more local than ever. So look, you know all just start atprofessor program Pokemon that's such a good resource and that'll direct you to most everything you need as a professor. And if you can't find it there, the Discord channel is available to professors. It's not an official thing so I don't think you know, but that's really good. Like that is probably the place where I get most of my information from and still contact and if I have a question I ask it there first. But Yu-Gi-Oh to answer your question the turnaround time it's usually so like for Louisville, let's say Baltimore, I'm clicking on it offer emails we subject will be sent through August. So usually about a month out or 90 days or not 90 days, like a month to six weeks out would be what I would expect. You know and that that's A little late. It's a little shorter now than it might be later on in the year. Sometimes it's two months out. But, you know, be patient. I know that, you know, they're getting ready for. They're. They're doing Worlds this year. So it'll probably be after Worlds would be my guess. You know, it says in August. If I had to guess, it'll probably be. Even though it says when is it? September 18th. No, that might be a little. No way that's going to be after Worlds. Yu-Gi-Oh that's. Yu-Gi-Oh it'll be before Worlds, but it might not. It might be the week of Worlds if I had to guess or like something like maybe the two weeks before. But I would. It's not like. But it's kind of probably. I might. It sounds like the six to eight week range is typical. Yu-Gi-Oh kind of. You know, when event registration is opening up is also when you expect usually calls to be answered. That's a good way to put it. Usually it's like right before event registration goes live. Okay. That way, you know, if you don't get accepted a staff, you could go and play. You can attempt to go play. Yu-Gi-Oh There's been times where it's been after event registrations open and if you hedge your bets and say, oh, I want a staff, but then I also will apply or I'll apply as staff, but if I don't get it, I'll pay to play. Like I'll register it as a player. If you do get accepted as staff, you are able to. And then this is in the past, that might be different this season, but you have been able to get a full refund if you register to play it. Well, you can still get reef. Like every event could get refunded now. Right. But you know, last season there's not the service charge that you would have if you get a refund. Well, I didn't. So as an example, I had to cancel my registration for Orlando last season or this season and I was able to get all my money back. Oh, okay. It's just kind of a staged refund period. If you cancel far enough in advance, you can get a full refund, which is good and bad. Like, it's great for people that do find out they aren't able to Whatnot an event. But it's also bad in the sense that somebody can sign up for every single event that opens up and then decide, oh, I don't want to go to this one anymore. And now somebody who was like, oh, this is the only Regional I can go to this season and doesn't get a spot because of that. And then you end up fighting in the trenches for the last three spots on the third wave of registration or whatever it is. And it's a nightmare, like having, like. I don't know if you've ever been in this situation where you have to sit there and watch the countdown for how many spots or like, where you are in line to go or how many different spots are still available and you just see the number getting smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller. And I don't remember what event it was last year. Maybe it was two seasons ago now that I went to sign up for something and I missed that. One of the ways of registration when I was like the single digits in line, I believe. And that was brutal. I think I got it on the next one. I'm pretty sure it was Naic. I think that I missed the first wave, but I got in on the second one and it was okay. Yu-Gi-Oh I definitely played Naic and missed the first wave at points, I think I missed. But I got it on the second one when I played like three years ago. That's. It's definitely a bad feeling. So. But, you know, they're trying to make a reality of it. Yu-Gi-Oh they're getting bigger event spaces. I know the Baltimore one coming up, we only had, I think, one. Was it one event Hall a couple years years ago? Maybe it was two. And this season they've got like six lined up. Now, obviously they are trying to make more space for tcg. They expect more vgc. You know, I didn't mention this earlier in the show. I have actually been playing a lot of champions as well. Like the last, like, almost every season, I gotten to, like, Master Ball one or two, and I'm not sure how good that is. I think that, like, master ball two, you have to be like, top 10,000 or something. But I don't know how many good VGC players there are, so I don't know if that's actually an accomplishment or not. But coming from somebody who has no VGC experience, it has been really nice to be able to just kind of find a team and copy and paste it from some limitless VGC tournament, because those exist as well. And being able to kind of figure everything out and just do it now that it's on mobile, too, which has been really nice. It doesn't make your phone want to explode in the same way that TCG Live does, which is another big benefit. And the games are really Fast. So if you're looking for something to do on your lunch break, like, you can probably cram in. If you have a 30 minute lunch break, you can cram in like four games of champions before you're done. Whereas with TCG Live, you'd get like one and a half. Maybe. Yu-Gi-Oh it takes a while. Yu-Gi-Oh But speaking of TCG Live and the TCG in general, we really didn't get to talk like post NAIC or about the Chaos Rising format or now the Pitch Back. Pitch Back. Yu-Gi-Oh Pitch Black format at all. And you know, we mentioned up a little bit ago that it is just still Dragapult's world. We all just live in it. And if you were. If we were to make a tier list right now, Dragapult would be S tier. Everything else would be at most like B tier. And a lot of decks kind of just feel fine. And then you play against Dragapult and you're like, well, this deck sucks. And the worst part is you had mentioned, because I didn't even look at the results, obviously Full Grip Games does their regular release weekend tournament for every set. And they had one for Pitch Black. And the winning deck was a Dragon Bolt list that played zero Pitch Black cards, had two cards. I think it had three cards in total in that decklist from the last three major set releases. And admittedly the last three sets have been very, very small in terms of modern set sizes. But it also shows that they are all very, very low impact when Dragapult is making up such a large percentage of the top cut of something like this and with minimal changes to the decklist as well. Yu-Gi-Oh Just looking at the full group results, we have the Dragapult Hammers build similar to the. Sorry, what's the Hawkeye? Andrew Hedrick. Andrew Hedrick. Yep. Similar to that build. Not like much different from that. And then a couple other Dragapult builds showed up. And fourth is Look. And fourth and eighth we have Dragapult Blaziken. And then fifth is another Dragapult Hammers. So there's four out of the top eight were Dragapult, second place was Lucario or sorry, Yu-Gi-Oh Mega Lucario Hariyama deck. So that's pretty cool. And then third, third place was Jesse Parker with Slow King. Okay. And then sixth was sixth and seventh were Hydrapple decks. And that's it. So. So there were no new archetypes in the top eight of this event. Correct. And really like the. The decks that received potentially impactful cards didn't even like Festival Lead like you Mentioned earlier, got the Goldin which is poised to be a potentially very impactful card. Something that swings the single Prizm matchups for that deck to make it more consistent into them and also give it another means of one hit. Koing a Dragapult and not good enough to make top. Top eight. I guess Slow King got another attacker. I think that the Annihilate from Pitch Black is decent. It does like a hundred damage to the Active and then also spreads five counters to the bench. So there's a very niche thing for that to be impactful against. Oh, goodness. Maybe festival lead something else with really small basics. But, you know, no hide and sneak in this. In this top cut. No toucan in. Were there any other real new or. Oh, no. Mega Excadrill. Excadrill, Yu-Gi-Oh That being said, like, people are still. Well, Fossils are fake. That's never going to be good. Yu-Gi-Oh unfortunately, like, they're cool. I really like the Bastiodon. I was also very disappointed to see the. One of the first decks I tried in this format was Megadel Fox. And it's just having like a Tatsugiri Ex style build where you're popping out like a Mega Dragonite so you can move these things out of the Active along with a couple of Bastiodons so your opponent cannot attack you. If they have two or fewer energies and you're avoiding putting all, then you don't have to play the Fossils. You just get the guys in play and then you just kind of go to town with the baby Delphox. That does a bunch of damage when you have a bunch of energy on your board. And it's neat when it works. But part of the problem is the second part of that sentence and the fact that you're presenting a Mega Pokemon and putting a big sign on it that says hit this on the Turner too, where you have to try to use that setup attack to make it work. So that's more of a gimmick than anything, unfortunately. Or maybe I'm just not hip to it. Maybe this like Zebra combo variant of it is not very good and there's a more streamlined like Delphox, just straight Delphox deck or something like. Oh, that's another archetype that was potentially or was released in the set was the Mega Chandelure with that water duplicate style Lampent, you know, potentially impactful stage ones and just nothing to follow it up because it's not as good as Dragapult or. Or Dracloak for that matter. Yu-Gi-Oh it's It's a weird format. It doesn't feel all that different from what we've seen. And so that's kind of why we haven't talked about it. I mean, there's some cool cards. Like, I like Toucanon a lot. I like some of the stuff that come that came out. It's fun, but I don't think it's like competitive, you know, it's just. It's just kind of this world's format. I'm excited. Maybe, maybe somebody will innovate. You know, we'll definitely see some innovation at the highest level of the game coming into that. But Yu-Gi-Oh it'll definitely compared to like Worlds last year, I felt a lot more excited about that than I did about this format. So, no, we're so my hot take. Like we're not, I guess, fully equipped yet for a pre Worlds episode. But I think that this world will be more similar to Hawaii Worlds like two seasons ago when Fernando one-of-one And looking at things in where dragapult is in a very similar spot to where Reggie Drago was in that shredded Sable format. And I expect it to be 45, if not more percentage of the room on day one. And I mean, Japan was kind of similar with Lugia numbers on day one. And you look at a format like that, you get weird decks that crop up, like Jesse Parker's amazing Miron run that season or the fact like Fernando's iron thorn stack ultimately winning the event overall, just something that you're attempting to target a very specific deck. I mean, you can even look at Naic this season with James Kowalski's clefairy box deck taking down just a bunch of dragapults because that's all he played against. And if somebody comes in with an anti dragapult deck and only plays against dragapult, they're probably gonna one-of-one worlds. Yu-Gi-Oh But otherwise it'll be the dragapult deck deck that didn't play against the anti dragapult deck throughout its run. And I mean, that's kind of the story of card game tournaments in general. Like, you need to have good matchups to one-of-one an event, but it feels really disheartening. When it feels like it boils down to it, the only options are the two things I just outlined where you have dragapult deck that didn't play the counter deck or the counter deck that only hit the dragon bolt decks and everything in between those two things is essentially non viable. Yu-Gi-Oh it's so different than before rotation where we had like eight different decks. In Top Cut, and that wasn't unreal. Now it's. Yu-Gi-Oh half is Dragapult and the other half is decks that can be dragonfold at least some of the time. So I don't know. I, I don't think that's anything too shocking if you've been playing the game at all in standard format. And that's kind of why me and Aaron have been kind of reluctant to put out a lot of content. Well, you've also been on a boat. Well, Yu-Gi-Oh it's hard to. When I'm doing this number, it's hard to record, but. Yu-Gi-Oh Yu-Gi-Oh I don't know. Are you more hopeful than I am? Like, I feel, I feel like I'm very in. I'm very much. I'm optimistic place with the game currently. Yu-Gi-Oh I, I is a casual. Like, I don't, I don't think if I was to play, I'd probably feel a little different than me just observing as a judge and as a fan of Pokemon, I've not been competitive. Like, I haven't played. I haven't played live in a month and a half, if I'm honest. So I've played locally. Like, I play in paper, and I, I always just like playing Pokemon. And I'll always enjoy, even if it's just Dragonfold Mirror, like, forever and ever, as crappy as that is, it's still Pokemon and I still enjoy playing it for the now. And I'll definitely, like, be excited to see what people will do to innovate because there will be innovations. There will be people pushing the envelope and saying what beats Dragapult consistently and what can hold up against everything else. And, like, the answer to that question isn't solved. And I don't think it will be solved until after Worlds kind of thing. And even then, like, we've seen, you know, years from the end of a format look at 2010. People will innovate on the format still and still figure out, like, nothing ever gets solved, essentially. And, like, that's the beauty of it in my mind is you. You think you have everything figured out, and then somebody's like, well, what if we put hammers in it? Or what if we, you know, add this tech or that tech? That's the cool part about Pokemon. So I, I think that's what keeps me excited, is to see innovations, to see people not settle and suffer and kind of keep pushing it and figuring it out. And that's, that's always fun to see. Yu-Gi-Oh I mean, I was excited to see. I think it was earlier this week. Azul one Tournament of Doom, undefeated with Grimmsnarl. Yu-Gi-Oh I'm a big fan of that. Yu-Gi-Oh that. I think that the big thing that makes all of these other decks feel so much worse, and we've talked. We've talked about this or at least touched on it before, is that this format has one good supporter. Yu-Gi-Oh And Dragapult is the deck that is the least impacted by that because it has Dracloak. And I was actually thinking about if we had. Because, you know, people are like, oh, well, if you just ban Dracloak, Dragapult will be in line with the other decks. And so that's stupid because you theoretically could run a deck that doesn't have Dragon Bolt as the attacker. And Dracloak is a cool supplemental draw engine that allows other things to be viable as well. And it's just kind of unfortunate that Dragon Bolt is also very efficient and very strong with its attack. And I was thinking about what are other ways if you were going to ban something that would impact Dragapult, but not necessarily totally kill the deck. And one of the only cards that I could think of, and this is probably wrong because I think that it would probably hurt the deck more than I am willing to admit that it does. But I was thinking if you remove Badoo from the format, Dragapult loses its ability to go, like, stamp Badoo build up behind this new wall where you have new resources to work with or just slowing you down from the get go. Like, if you go first and you don't have a ball search card and all of a sudden you get itchy pollen and then you have a lily, but you can't do anything to follow it up because you can't play items and you're just kind of stuck. Well, now they have a guaranteed two. One or two Dracloaks on turn two because you lost the coin flip. Like, that's pretty stupid. Yu-Gi-Oh And maybe Badoo, like, Badoo definitely holds the deck up in a lot of scenarios, but I also wonder if it was gone, would the deck just fall apart completely? Because we kind of saw Dragon Ball wasn't very good before Badoo was printed. Yu-Gi-Oh But I. I think the format's different. Like, it's a little slower than it was in some ways because you don't have as many good Sarah supporters. Yu-Gi-Oh I don't know. I. I don't know if that would solve it, but it definitely would make it interesting. It would be like you'd have to definitely re Evaluate you. You could play a lot differently. You could play more aggressively. You can build your deck to, you know, not have to worry about item lock at all. And you, your turn ones would look a lot different. Like you don't have to turn to search out like your evolution stage one or whatever because you know you're gonna get item locked. You can kind of play around it. I think my solution would be, oh, I just had it and I lost it. Shoot. Yu-Gi-Oh While you think about that, my. Yu-Gi-Oh My biggest concern with the potential of banning badoo is that. Does that just make the format a big degenerate aggro deck fest? Because everything. I mean, we don't have nest ball anymore, which is kind of a big thorn in the side for these big basic decks to begin with. But I feel like they would still find a way. Like I've said before, I wasn't. I'm not a fan of the deck construction of something like James Kowalski's deck with four Kangaskhan for meowth. Let me just get these bench sitters out because they make my deck more consistent. I mean, that's good. That essentially is good deck building when that is the goal of your deck. But I hate that that type of strategy is more viable currently than I feel like it should be. Or in my kind of idealized format, something like that wouldn't be the best option. Right. Or wouldn't be a very good option. Like, it'd be something that you could hand to somebody when they're brand new to the game and you're like, hey, you can learn how to play the game with this type of deck. But if you want to get into a more complex strategy, and I feel like a more complicated thing should theoretically be more rewarding as far as like, the amount of effort you're putting in should equal the output that you get from a thing. And right now, the only deck that kind of feels like it has that is dragapult. And maybe if it doesn't have the floodgate of that badoo, it wouldn't be able to stop things. But I mean, there's kind of workarounds to that. Like, you could go back and see people start playing, you know, l os frillish as an option potentially. But still, then maybe they can't play hammers because they have to fit these other cards in. And maybe because your deck wasn't really weak to the badoo, but it was weak to the energy disruption that they were able to get with those hammers. Maybe now your deck can keep up So I don't know if like something. Something's got to give somewhere and it wouldn't. I'm curious. I remembered what I was gonna say. Oh, go for it. The thing I'd ban would be the boss's orders if I could, because a lot of times Dragapult will set up stuff to be KO'd on the bench and boss it up and knock out stuff that way. And I know that's not a perfect fix. Like, there's, you know, meowth and you can do at least this appeal, but like, hey, like, that's another level of difficulty or like, that's not a card that's always viable and good. I think I hated that they kept Boston format. I would have much rather they kept like counter catcher or something like that where you could play around it. So that. That's. That's my two cents. Yu-Gi-Oh I'm not. I'm listening to what you're saying and I definitely agree with most of it, but, like, that was the one thing I was thinking of was like, man, Yu-Gi-Oh Bosses just makes Dragapult because, like, it makes your damage output so much more efficient that you're able to line something up and KO it on the bench. And like, Yu-Gi-Oh with Dragon, with, like, you could still get away with other stuff like, you know, like I talked about, but it would be more difficult and it wouldn't just be like, meow for boss for game kind of thing. So that. That definitely. But I mean, we've had that in the game forever. And I'm not saying that that justifies now, but you've had like tapu lele for boss or Lumineon for boss or still feels bad. Yes, 100%. And I. But the problem with Dragapult specifically is the fact that it does a good chunk of upfront damage with the spread damage to the bench. Now, maybe that does feel different without boss and it probably does, but I'm not sure if that's better or worse for the format for Dragapult specifically. I think that it overall would make, I. I don't know. Again, idealized world. I. In my mind. But I hate boss because I hate my thing being bossed up. And back in my day, we didn't have boss's orders. Yu-Gi-Oh But I think that it would also potentially lead to some cool deck building because you could see people include like a one one hops, dub wool. And now you have to incorporate that into your deck. You have to get that thing out. It takes a turn to evolve so your opponent can See it coming. You're eating a bench slot in order to kind of get that online. And you could incorporate something like that more. Or there's a. I think there's a floris in the format or maybe it rotated. Now that did a very similar thing, except I think it was a Pokemon catcher as the thing instead of a boss. So you've got. But you had the opportunity to do that coin flip every single turn and you could see something like that. Like tech cards being included in decks and actual deck building decisions rather than just, welp, my deck has to have at least two bosses orders in it if I want to make sure I can KO Meowth and Pheasantipity once a game and then KO my opponent's main attacker one time to close out a game. Yu-Gi-Oh Yu-Gi-Oh I mean the formats where the boss hasn't been in there, like if you go back and play like 2011 and you have to like evolve up to use Luxray or something like that, or 2010. Sorry, if you. It feels so much like more strategy dependent than just like, oh Yu-Gi-Oh here's boss and now I one-of-one Yu-Gi-Oh And I know that's like not a new hot take or anything like that, but like, I don't think dragonflight's the problem. I mean, it feels like it is the best second format and it is more powerful than anything else. But I'm okay with that. Like, I think it'll rotate eventually. Yu-Gi-Oh it'll rotate eventually. It's like Reggie Drago was where we're just kind of waiting for it to rotate and then the. The next format will be really good. I hope so. Hopefully. So we'll see. Well, we'll be back here complaining about the next. The next thing that grinds our gears. Although I will. I do think that it's been pretty evident, like as we've synced up with Japan's release schedule a little bit more. And our sets haven't been the amalgamation of two sets plus whatever random starter decks hit the shelf that quarter. And it has just been kind of one to one. Like our Pitch Black is whatever the heck their Mecha Darkrai set was called. Or our Greninja set was their Greninja set. Our upcoming Rayquaza set that we're gonna get in November looks to be the set that they're gonna get here in a couple weeks. And everything's one to one without all these additional cards in it. And the card pool isn't becoming as bloated. We've had kind of this Negative power creep effect with these smaller sets with these cards that it seemed like they're almost intentionally designed to be weaker than what we had had during the Scarlet and Violet format. And that's the reason why Dragapult just kind of sits on top of the throne is they're not printing anything that's as powerful at it as it or more powerful. Because I think if you get into that arms race mentality, you kind of end up with the tag team format. And that was one of the most hated formats of all time. So right now you're just having to weather the storm and this kind of happens at the same of every era. That's kind of how Regidrago became Reggie Drago. It was one of the last Level X's in the format. Reggie Drago and Lugia were two of the best decks in that format and they were some of the only Level X's remaining V Star. Sorry. Yu-Gi-Oh Dragapult is one of the last Terra EX's that really is like a big beat stick. Terra Ex remaining in the format. And same thing with like Ogre Pond. It's still a really powerhouse card. Same set. Twilight Masquerade is going to go down as one of the best sets ever printed in terms of competitive cards. And once that's gone and we do rotate to well, next year would be a not team up. Oh my gosh. I am really bad at set names today. Owners. Thank you. Yu-Gi-Oh once we get to journey together on which I think is lined up to be the next rotation, that's really a step back in power. I mean Zorark will probably be the new Big Bad that everybody's gonna hate because it is going to be one of the only things that has a draw engine and has transformation tome and and is a fully self sufficient engine in and of itself. But we also one-of-one have Buddy Buddy Poffin. So maybe things will be a little bit different. Right. We'll have to see take those things as they come. It just kind of feels bad in the moment right now. And I hope that as we get continue in the mega format or as we get into what is likely to be the winds and waves format next year that things take a turn and the game becomes a bit more interesting. I think the biggest thing that grinds my gears about it with Dragapult is that it's not that it's beating you down, it's more like it's bleeding you out and there's nothing you can do about it. Yu-Gi-Oh Yu-Gi-Oh Really. It takes four turns or three turns to set up a lot of the times, because you don't run rare candy in most builds. And then, Yu-Gi-Oh I just kind of. You don't lose all at once. You kind of like, Yu-Gi-Oh like you said, get. They just line up all the Prizm cards and take them all at the same time. And it's tough. And I, you know, I. I'm sure, like a lot of players, that if you're getting into the game for the first time, you really just rally against Dragapult. I will say this as a player that's been playing for a long time, like, it'll feel like this goes on forever, but it'll eventually go away. Like, there'll be a time where we'll look back on it and say, oh, Yu-Gi-Oh it was a really, you know, long period of time where Dragapult was the best second format. And we just kind of weather through it and it does get better. Like you, you know, Rady Drago rotated, and after that, we had a lot of good competitive Pokemon and Gardevoir rotated and, you know, we had. I mean, maybe that's not a bad example, but, like, it. It does not. Well, the only. The only reason that that's. The only reason that's a bad example is I still will contend that last format was one of the best formats of all. I agree. Yep. So we're stuck on that. Not nothing. Our opinion hasn't changed at all. I want last year's ice cream, John. I don't want this new ice cream screen. I want that one. Sorry, Aaron. It. It's rotated. It doesn't exist anymore. It's. It's gone forever. Can't recapture that. I know that is what it is, but I mean, I'm still excited, like. Like I said earlier, I'm still excited for competitive Pokemon moving into the season. Even if the same old, same old persists, people will still find new ways to innovate within that. We'll find the edges. You know, Dragon Pulse runs two different Topps of energy and has to run, you know, doesn't want to run more than two on a Pokemon. So you can. You can find ways to, like, hammers it off or get rid of energy or something like that. There's, like, ways to disrupt it, and I'm excited to see what happens, man. It'll. It'll be really cool to see kind of where we go from here, and hopefully we'll talk about it some more. I want to get Alex Wilson on, if I can, in the next few weeks and have a retro episode. That's one thing we've been teasing for forever. And I'm really, I really want to make it happen this summer before we get into worlds and kind of restart the season. But just have a good retro discussion. Maybe we'll try to do that in the next couple weeks. Do like a retrofest before we get into worlds. So. But the world is coming up and I'm excited to, you know, even if we're outside looking in more than in the thick of it, we'll still have a good time talking about it and breaking it all down for you. Yep, sounds good. I Goldin have said it any better myself. I have personally been looking very much so to that retro episode. And I know that if you've been listening to the show for a while, I've mentioned, hey, we're going to do this really soon for probably the last three months worth of episodes. But we do, we swear it's going to happen really soon. So stay tuned. We appreciate your patience as we took our summer break from the show. We are still in season two. As is usual, John and I, we didn't have a planes quiz show this week. We have no clue what the scores are. We'll have to figure that out at some point and we may have a couple more of those to see if, if it's close. We may have to decide on a true winner there. Or maybe I just give it to John because I'm pretty sure he's winning right now and I don't know if there's any chance that I can catch him. But you'll have to stay tuned till next week's episode to figure out if that's the case. So thank you again and we will see you guys next week on the Battle Frontier. Have a good week.