#283 Mega Greninja EX Decks & Scalping Countermeasures

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Sean, how are you doing this week, my lovely, lovely co hosts? Where the the sun is bright? Jake? I am good. I am hot. It is. The Dutch don't believe in air conditioners. We did get a few. Really? They don't really have them as much over here. I did get a few to put in windows, but like, they're not, they're not the greatest. And we don't have all the equipment yet. And it's like 85 degrees up to 90 degrees this week in the Netherlands in New. Which is crazy. What's the humidity? Is there humidity there? So, like, I mean, it's, it's like basically at sea level, so I guess there's some humidity, but it doesn't feel like. It doesn't feel like Florida. It's not like the Midwest. Yeah, it's not like Florida. It's not like the Midwest kind of humidity. Interesting, because I hear like 85 and I'm like, oh, that's a cool, brisk day. Especially when you're inside. Like right now, I don't know what that is in Celsius, but the temperature in this office that I'm in is 28 degrees Celsius. If you want to. That's pretty good. It's hot. That's hot. Just me sitting in a room with no ventilation. Anyways, I, I used to, I used to use Celsius for like five years. Oh, look at you. So, so when we. I think it was in the middle of when we were doing the podcast because I had a lot of teammates in college as an athlete that were not from America. So they would ask me what the weather was like and I would say 75. And they're like, what? Jake, I'm going to give you a hot take on that. Celsius. The us The US does not do a lot of measurement systems. Right? I'm going to grant the whole world that. But Fahrenheit is superior to Celsius when it comes to temperature for people to live at. Do you want to know why? Zero to 100? It's pretty easy. Well, no, Celsius is zero to 100 too. Right. But I think Fahrenheit is a better thing for temperature. And the reason is, yes, Celsius is 0 to 100, but I. I hope to never be in a situation where it is 100 degrees Celsius. That is boiling water. Right. But Fahrenheit 0 to 100 is a totally reasonable set of temperatures for a human being to exist at and sometimes above and below. So I'm like, that's a more human range where I'm like, if somebody tells me it's 90 degrees, I don't need to know anything about Fahrenheit to know that 90 is hot because it's big number and 0 is cold. But when you tell me it's 30 degrees Celsius, I don't know what that means. Anyways, that's my hot take. But then you could talk to somebody where you live and they would be like, no, 30 degrees is big number. That means hot. Why do we have to go so aggressive into the hundreds? All perspective, Sean. I think for temperatures at which people just exist, Fahrenheit is a much more sensible standard for all other purposes, like, you know, scientific and cooking and all of that. Yeah, no, we don't. I don't need to cook things at 400 degrees Fahrenheit. Like, that's crazy. That's unnecessary. But anyway, we told you that there was chaos in the Metapod today, and I promise we're a Pokemon TCG podcast that revolves around the evolving meta. We're not here to debate measurement systems, I guess. But anyways, in the meta this week, there was Australian regionals and also the Master Ball League, I believe in Singapore. That happened over the weekend. I'm going to be so real right now. It's. It's Dragapult. It's Dragapult. Dragapult. Hydrapple has been having a little bit of success, which is kind of exciting in there. But it name of the game is Dragapult. I know there's a Big honchkrow group in. In Melbourne. That did pretty all right. Yeah. So that was really cool. Tim Danklin, Azul Garcia Griego and a bunch of other people doing that. But we. We're not going to go over the results too much, but we do want to give a shout out to Asher, one of our longtime listeners over in Australia, getting second place in the juniors division. It's either juniors or seniors. Either way, he's got more medals and top eight playmats at regional championships than I have. And yeah, so you're the best one out of the podcast between Sean and I. But congratulations to you. That's super exciting. And I. I will say, though, with. I will say. Oh, my gosh. So the discord is right. We do say that a lot. Yep. I lost my train of thought when I tuned in a little bit. I was able to tune in a little bit to the Melbourne regionals. And I just need Pokemon to take Australia a little bit more seriously because I love that they had a stream for Melbourne. It was awesome. It was very cool. But I'm pretty sure it was like a grassroots stream of. It was either like a grassroots stream or it was Pokemon just doing a little bit for. Not enough. I think it was grassroots because I don't think it was on. Shout out to the. Yeah. Shout outs to the grassroots stream because it's awesome. I know what it takes to run a live stream of a championship and of any tournament whatsoever. And it is a. It's a ton of work, it's a ton of equipment, it's a ton of money, it's a ton of manpower. So congratulations to you. That's awesome. But Pokemon needs to step in. Small indie company Pokemon, I think, needs to just spend a little bit more money to give you guys a regional. They took away the IC and they. So they should help you with the regional. That's all I'm gonna say. And I love my Melbourne people and Australia people. I know. I know that Australia has the capability to do an amazing regional stream because just I think a weekend before Riftbound had their Sydney regional stream and yes, you and I. Talk up, talk up the. How good the Pokemon regional streams are, like, compared to, like, in my opinion, every other tcg, including Magic. I think the Pokemon ones recently have just been, like, top tier. Watching the Riftbound one, though, like, in terms of production quality, all of that, like, I'm not going to get into some of the details about what the casters are not. I'm not really a. A good judge of that, but it was really good. It was a really good stream. So I think production is. Yeah, is up there. I mean I think they're. I think especially because of the fact that they're. I mean I think Pokemon and Riftbound have been pretty on par with each other in terms of the production quality in there and then. But I think especially with Australia now, you know, with both organizations having like Australian major events that get streamed, very obvious that I think Riftbound's the number two. I still think Magic's number one. And I think a little bit has to do with casting on that because casting in Magic is so enjoyable for me to listen to when I'm working. I don't even know how to play magic really, but it is just so great to watch old pro tours and listen to them. But yeah. Anyways, congratulations again to Asher. You know, second place at Melbourne in their division. Super awesome. Can't wait to see more and see at the world Championships, I assume. But anyways, we're gonna get into the news pieces. We got a couple news pieces that happened within the last week or so and then we're gonna talk a bit about some of the newer decks that are coming in, especially Greninja Ex. We've been getting some questions about it and some discussions and things like that. But first, Pokemon Japan is now going to require government ID for select TCG purposes, limiting access to scalping and overseas buying. So I think I've talked about it a little bit on the podcast before with Pokemon products and things of like that when you order them, you typically need to have a Japan address, you know, a proxy, you know like PO Box style thing where it gets sent to there and then it. Eventually if you pay the fee or whatever, you know, it's like having a storage box or mail. So then you can get like these products and things like that. But in order to stop scalping and the influx of overseas buyers, Pokemon has Japan that starting this fall, customers will need to verify their identity using a government issued my number card in order to enter lotteries and purchase select TCG products from the Pokemon center online. And this also means that you'll have to use these for specific official events to be able to compete at. I know some people have talked about like rule ready. He's not going to be able to compete in the. Oh my gosh. What is the. Certainly not the Champions League. Yeah, the Champions League. That's the. That's what I'm thinking of like City League. My number card. My number card is Basically like a Social Security card in Japan to my understanding. Yeah, yeah. It's basically whatever an official ID that you can get and it's only available to people who our long term residents. Right. You can't go over there on the six month digital nomad visa which exists. You can't go there, get a my number card and then use it to do this. So it is going to cut off a lot of. I think the scalpers part is fine actually. Like I'm frankly totally on board with them being like we got too many people drop shipping or using these things and getting people to like send it over to them through these third parties. Yeah, that's valid. I think the, the awkward part is the registering for events piece because Rahul also mentioned, I don't know if you watched his video but like he also mentioned that like him toward Rec Lev. I know friend of the pod, Tuan Le Antoine Boule Twan is they also travel to Japan and I'm sure that they would have enjoyed competing in the events as well. But if you're just traveling as a tourist or for short periods of time, I don't think it'll be possible to compete in Champions Leagues assuming that this goes through. So yes, gone will be the days of seeing you know, a western player topping these Champion League events events which is, you know, which is so sad. It's so interesting because like they, when Rahul did, did that and they made a absol box. Yeah they had him on stream a couple times I'm pretty sure and they were like they were hyping him up a little bit as like this guy that's just come in, this non Japanese player that's come in into this brand new format and he's made like this incredible deck and it's, it's weird that it's being limited with events specifically and I'm wondering if that's because they sell like new products. I don't know how Champions League goes in terms of outside of the tournament. I don't know if they like if they have a Pokemon center kind of thing or well or whatever. I don't know. Rahul Dead mentioned that with the events the problem they've been happening having internally is that people have been registering for the lottery multiple times using different accounts that they make because oh if you do know that it is a lottery system you can only apply so many times and then you can theoretically only get in like a couple. So if you're really serious about competing in Champions League events and you have to go through a lottery system, you are incentivized weirdly to cheat the system by creating all of these extra accounts and then correcting it afterwards when you are selected on one of them. So obviously if you have to have a government ID verification, you just, you can't create multiple accounts like that because. Because like you only have one Social Security number equivalent. Right. That's what Rahul said that the reason they're doing it for events is it's just one of them is like the scalper piece is like not is like stopping foreigners and tourists from getting these products. But then the other part. Yeah, it's really just foreigners. I mean Japan in itself is starting to have like a huge scalping problem. Yes. So this doesn't stop any of that. It doesn't. At least internally. Well it, yeah, it doesn't stop the purchasing of products from Japanese citizens. So it's combating foreigners on one hand. But then the other, the same rule is intended to combat cheating by people living in Japan and, and is inadvertently hurting the very small number of foreigners who want to compete in these Champions League events. Which is just. Yeah, I think on that one Rahul is just catching a stray so to speak. Just like ah, you know, as someone who, or if speaking from rules perspective or towards perspective or Twan Le's perspective, you know, people that have been so dedicated to like showcase, you know, the Japanese tournament series and because Rahul, I mean I don't, I don't remember exactly how long he was in Japan. He was in Japan for a really long time this past couple months. Yeah, like doing the Champions League like he has, I'm pretty sure he's like full time now creator and he's like, he was focusing a lot of his content on showcasing and he was collaborating with a lot of people like oh my gosh, what's his name? Daichi. Oh yeah, Daichi Shimada. And people like, yeah, Daichi Shimana and people like that. So it's just, I mean it's just, it's a sign of the times. And is it a sign of the times? Is a sign of the times. There's a part of me that hopes that the Pokemon company, Japan, the Japanese arm, if there are high level players that want to compete in Champions League events, maybe they will offer a route to like apply as a foreigner to be like hey yeah, like you, you have to show your government id. Well, or like we have a very limited number of spots that we will open up to select foreigners. Right. And it's basically it might Even be like an invite basis. So in theory they could do it where like, yeah, you're allowed to compete if you're a Tord Recollect or a Rahul. But you know, I don't know, it's a little weird because it creates sort of a two tiered system which probably wouldn't go over well with a lot of Japanese players. So maybe not. But that's. I'm really curious how this is going. I'm really curious on how this is going to affect the like car, the Japanese card market here in America of like with stores. Because I'm not sure. I guess I don't really know because I know how like you get English products like from distributors and things like that. I would imagine that in Japan it's a little bit different. I think a lot of stores, maybe it doesn't change. I don't know if it changes. I think a lot of the stores in America, from what I heard, they still get it from a sort of middleman distributor. A middleman? Yeah, yeah. There's usually some sort of a middleman. It's not a distributor proper, but it's also not through Pokemon center orders either. So they're still ordering it from someone in Japan who has distributor level access to the product. Yeah. And is then okay, you know, shipping it overseas. So I do think that it has gotten a little harder given the cost and the demand of Japanese products. Yeah. The. While the, the, the government making it harder to import things. Yeah. And then here into America there's also. We didn't talk about this on the pod, but there's also the really awkward thing of resealed Japanese packs coming out of China. Do you remember this? I don't think we talked about the news story, but I feel like I saw a tweet or something of the sort about that. So like a month or two ago a couple of Japanese sets had their artwork for like their packs and everything. All the specs leaked. And then it turns out that there was a couple of factories in China that were making perfect replicas of the packaging and then putting bulk cards, bulk Japanese cards inside of that and selling it as if it was sealed, you know, legitimate product. So I don't think that this has necessarily become the standard for every set. It's just that a couple of set specific packaging art got leaked somewhere. But it does sort of put a little bit of like a. Where are you actually getting your Japanese boxes from? And odds are it's still like not that big of a deal yet. Or else Everyone would be talking about it all the time. But another little wrinkle in the Japanese sealed market. I think it's just. It's crazy and it's just continuing to be crazier. But you know what's also crazy, Sean? The 30th anniversary, and people are excited about the first partner illustration collections we talked about. I think it was last week. Yeah, the. The series two of the illustration collection. Remember that's going to be releasing on June 19th. The next box for that. But we already got news of the third box, the third series that's going to be releasing on August 7th. So have those two dates written down. June 19th for series two, which is going to be the Johto starters, Unova starters, and Galar starters. And then series three, which is looking to be the Hoenn starters, the Paldea starters, and the X and Y, which is Kalos. Kalos starters. Yeah. That's coming out in August. Same base price, if you can find it. But good luck with that. Well, yeah, you can't find it at that price, but you can find it on that day, I guess. So that makes it. They've done three different generations for each pack, Right. Which gives us nine. Are there. How many generations are there? Are there only nine generations? Are we at 10 now? I think there's only nine. Sure. Wind and waves is 10 generations. Yeah. Yeah. So this. My guess then is that this starter pack will be the last of the first partner collections. Yes, there is nine of them now. You know, it remains to be seen if we'll get anything. If there's like an announcement of Wind and Waves, an official announcement later in the year, maybe they'll release a special collection featuring the. The gen 10 ones as well. It would be kind of weird. Yeah. I mean, we. Do. We know who. They know the starters, though, right? Exactly. So it would be kind of weird not to do a Gen 10 special, like, little thing. But that. That would be. My quick little prediction is that maybe in November we'll get something. And then we also need to still find out the, like, anniversary set in general, where it's like, you know, are they gonna reprint old cards again and, like, make some new cool variants? Like, I would love just. And I hope. I just want them to do the same thing that they did for the 25th anniversary, because that's just what scratches my itch. And it's a personal thing. I get it might not be the best thing, but it's my thing and I want them to put a break card in there. Illustration rare Metapod break card. Yeah, that's all I want. It doesn't exist. There's an illustration rare Caterpie and there's an illustration rare Butterfree. There is no illustration Rare Metapod. I think the Pokemon company hates us actually. I think they genuinely do. Last little bit of news is the Archeops promo that's being giving out, given out at Chicago's Pokemon Fossil Museum. So pretty cool museum in Chicago. I think we covered this when they announced it, but it's actually opening up as of this last weekend, I believe. Yeah, I'm pretty sure it's open. Yeah, it's open now. So it'll be open for about a year between the end of May. So now until about April 11th of next year. Looks super cool. I think it's probably very similar to like the things that you could have found in the fossil museum that was in Japan. I don't know if you remember there was a couple of years ago they had a similar Pokemon fossil museum in Japan. So my guess is that some, some similarities there. They have the Jumbo. They have the Jumbo card. Pikachu at the. The fossil Pikachu at the museum. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that jumbo card. We talked about that a couple weeks ago again. So this card though is not a jumbo card. They have gone back to the normal sized promo for this one. And it's Archeops. You know, I don't think it's. It's. Is this art any different than the normal Archeops? It is. I actually don't know. I don't think it is except for the stamp. I mean I've heard people are going goo gaga over this, but I think that that's, you know, I have no idea anymore of what's actually going to happen long term with these cards. But I would not go gaga over an Archaeops with a. It's got a cool stamp. Don't get me wrong. It's a cool stamp. But like I don't know man, it's. It's giving special delivery Charizard or Bidoof. People in the Discord were talking about how people into the Discord were talking about how it's about $500 earlier this week. But looking on ebay right now you can definitely get the card for under $200. And they also have like plushes and things like that. Like they have a Pikachu plush in an excavating outfit which I want. Like the card is. I want that because that just looks so beautiful. But you can get that and the card at least it sold for 215usd. So it looks like the prices are going down on these. So. And we have no way of knowing at least right now if like this is gonna, if these cards are gonna be given out throughout the entirety of the year that this is going to be open or if it's just a, you know, it's there until it's gone and then it's there. I'm trying to see if to attend the exhibition you must purchase a general. Because I plan on going to this, actually not necessarily to get the card, but I just want to go to it. It's in Chicago, I got family in Chicago and I think that this would just be like a really, really cool thing to be able to go. So you have to purchase a general mission ticket and then a timed entry ticket to the Pokemon Fossil Museum as an add on. You can purchase them online or in person person at the entrance of the exhibition. Visitors can present their exhibition ticket to redeem a card. Okay, that's interesting. And then the store with the merchandise is in a completely separate spot. Ah, okay, cool. Yeah, I mean look, if you're trying to go, please, stuff like that, if you're trying to go, make sure you're getting the add on far in advance. Because my guess is yes. If people think that they can flip this card for even 200 bucks, basically it makes your whole trip to the museum, what, $150 of profit. I don't know, man, I, I, I hope they print this for an entire year and it's the McDonald's Pikachu and not the gray felt hat Pikachu. You know what I mean? Like that's what I want. I need people to calm down. So I'm looking at the, I'm looking at the website, right? I'm looking at the museum website. If you are in Illinois, it says on Wednesdays, Illinois, you get into the General Museum for free. Actually Chicago natives, $21. Guess $30. So $30 for the museum is actually not that bad. But I just clicked on it and I am on, I am in line. Oh, I'm zipping through the line. I am through the line now. So I guess there's not really any of that. And then the fossil museum trying to see if there's like a price on it. Maybe it's something that you have to, when you're like checking out your ticket, you can get click on. But yeah, 30 bucks to get into the museum is, that's fine. Actually quite nice. Yeah, yeah, I mean, and then the fossil museum. Ooh. So the fossil. Okay, so fun fact, I'm doing research now because I am heavily invested into doing this. So it just took me to today, which is Monday, May 25th. Not to spoil when we record the podcast, but May 25th you can get a ticket into the museum, but in the exhibitions it says the Pokemon Fossil Museum for this day specifically, is sold out. So that's interesting that they only have like a select amount of fossil museum tickets per day for. For that. So I guess, yeah, I'm gonna have to do a bit of planning on when I go over there. I mean, what I want to do is I. I have a twin niece and nephew that's like six years old. They're going to be. Yeah, they're going to be six this winter, this Christmas, basically. And they like Pokemon and one of them likes dinosaurs. And I think this would just be a cool thing to go to. I think they're at that age where like, you know, a Pokemon themed museum would be really sick. Yeah, they didn't have this stuff when we were kids. So dope. And they also got Pokey Park Kanto in Japan. And I can't go to that. And it's. I want to go somewhere. Oh, boy. Well, that is all the news that is fit to, I guess, talk about this week, Jake. We have new decks on the horizon, on the agenda. I don't know. And one of the most hyped, talked about decks going into this format was Mega Greninja Ex. Question, though was, okay, what kind of deck is it? Who are we gonna partner with? Mega Greninja. Is it even good? So what do you think, Jake? There's a couple different ways to play Greninja in the new set, especially with all the new cards and especially with Greninja. You know, there's that Terra Greninja Ex, the fighting type that you can also include within your deck. So there's a couple different ways that you can want to do it and then like, the aspects could vary as well to whatever you want. So let's just go down the line and go with one by one. The first one. I don't know if this will surprise a lot of people. Just pair with Dragapult. Right? This is the easy one that you can do. Dragapult's already the best deck in format, so why not just add some other cool cards? We did it with Blaziken Ex. We did it with the Dun Sparse. Right. We did it with Dusk Nor. We did it with it all. So why not just do one more with Greninja ex? If you do not remember what Grenin Mega Greninja's EX attack and ability is, remember It's a stage 2350 HP water type Pokemon 1 energy retreat cost. So it's basically like just switch up Blaziken and put Greninja in instead. In this deck, it has an ability called Mortal Shuriken. Once during your turn, if this Pokemon is in the active spawn, you may discard a basic Water Energy card from your hand in order to use the ability to play six damage counters on one of your opponent's Pokemon. This is basically like you don't even need to run Dusk nor anymore, right? Duskno and Dusclops. You KO it Give your opponent a prize card to be able to put, you know, some damage counters on. Just trash a Water Energy instead in your hands. Pretty solid. And then two water energies ninja spinner 120 plus. If you put a Water Energy attached to this Pokemon into your hand, this attack does 80 damage more to do 200 damage. And with your ability that could be 260. 60 damage. I know how to do quick math. Well, it could be more if you have. Because this list we're looking at here plays two of the Mega Greninja Ex, two of the Regular Greninja ex. But the six damage counters is not once per turn. So in theory, if you were to get two into the active, you could put 12 damage counters. That's 320. That knocks out an opposing dragapult. And what's great about that attack is that you can use Neo Upper Energy as your attachment for turn. Because you attach it, you attack with it, you put the Neo Upper back into your hand. It's safe. And then next turn you just keep doing it. You can guarantee 200 damage every single turn with that. And especially with this list. At least you can do that cycling because of Air balloon. Yep. Air Balloon Surf Card. And also. Yeah, surfer, another switch card in there. Surfing beat. Pretty solid. Yeah. And yeah, Surfing Beach. If you do not know the stage. Because I totally forgot about this stage from the Mega Evolution set until I looked at this decklist once. During each player's turn, that player may switch their active water Pokemon with one of their benched Pokemon. Especially because it's a proactive stage card or stadium card that you can use on your turn. It's very easy to be able to get this off. Yeah. So I mean this is really interesting that it is. In some ways, it is a dragapult. The dragapult in this list is very thin. Right. You have a three three drag cloak line and then just a one of dragapult. So it is not. The version that we're looking at here is not super heavy on Dragapult, which I think makes sense. The Neo Upper is the only way that you're attacking with this Dragapult second attack. So you get to put it back in your hand every turn with the Megas Attack. But really the Dragapult EX is just there to, I think, close things out, make some math work late in the game. But otherwise, this deck does not suffer from what current dragapult lists suffer from, which is Energy Denial. Because it's just usually one attachment a turn and you're fine. And it doesn't really get trapped in the active as easily because you're playing the switching cards. It's. It's interesting. But you mentioned Jake. There was a Greninja Ex as well, a fighting type Tera. And the reason this one is so good, it's got two useful attacks. The first is just Shinobi Blade 170. Search your deck for a card, put it into your hand. I think that's a super strong alternate option. Maybe you're hitting something for weakness and so you can clean up damage that way. But then the second attack, I think is what makes this Pokemon so good in the deck, which is a water and two colorless Mirage Barrage. Discard two energy from the Pokemon. This attack does 120 to two of your opponent's Pokemon. So a good Snipe attack alongside the two ignition energies that we run in the deck. Yeah. Especially with Ignition Energy at the end of turn already going to the discard. You can just then use Mirage Barrage to choose your Ignition Energy as to Energy, because it specifically asked for two Energy, not two Energy Cards. Ryan. Since Ignition Energy technically gives three, you can just choose the Ignition Energy to pitch and then boom. It's almost like you didn't really discard anything for Mirage Barrage. So this is one way to run Dragapult. To run. Jeez. Oh my. The Freudian slip. Oh, yeah. To run the. The format has spoiled our minds. Has completely ruined it is chaos here for the Metaph. This is one way to run Greninja. But it's not the only way. There is another. This list here. I pulled this one up. Super interesting list that I think was very different. Yeah. In the Tournament of Doom, I had not even considered this variation of it. What I'm looking at here. For those of you listening, it is running your two 1, 2 mega Greninja, but very thin on the Greninja end, right? Like the Greninja itself is actually not your main attackers. It is instead a setup damage Pokemon. You're going to be switching this in and out. And what are you setting up the damage for? Well, you're setting up those six damage counters for things like Mega Absol to take an instant knockout, for things like Mega Kangaskhan to clean things up and Monkey Dory and Yveltal. There's three Yveltals in this lip list to trap something in the Active while you spread a bunch of damage counters turn after turn. How are you feeling about this list? This is crazy. I really like this idea. Right? There's no switch cards in here. You know, we talked about in the last decklist how there's surfer, there's the beach stadium, there's the air balloon. But you don't actually need that in this variant, especially with these Dark type Pokemon like Yvel. Like Mega Absol. Because of Petront Ex, right? Petron Ex. Being able to switch Dark Pokemon into the Active means that you can put up that Mega Greninja up there. Use that ability. Water Shuriken or Mortal Shuriken. I'm sorry, Water Shuriken is a completely different ability, I think on Greninja in the historic past. Not dating myself, but Mortal Shuriken, you can use that ability and then just use Petron Ex to be able to switch it out of the Active. Right, With a benched Dark type Pokemon like Absol or Yal as you're talking about. And Yal, right, has free retreat. Anyways, so if you have Mega Greninja in the Active, switch it with Yal. Y can just go ahead and retreat into something like a Mega Kangaskhan to be able to hit those big numbers to obtain those knockouts. Right? We're running a heavy count of three Crispin in this deck. To be able to get all of those energies onto something like Mega Kangaskhan as well as having, you know, Team Rockets Petrol. Team Rockets Petrol kind of surprised me a little bit as the. As the full count of four within this deck. But when your items are so important, like Precious Trolley, right, Being your aspect, we talked about how good that ASEC can be, especially trying to find it on the first turn. But you also have some high impactful trainer cards that are just simply one ofs, like special Red Card Poke Pad, Mega Signal Ultra Ball, Lively stadium and Team Rockets Watchtower. So it's pretty interesting. Listen, a pretty interesting way to play. I also like the Brock scouting in the list. Right. Trying to find two basics or one Evolution Pokemon to be able to put out onto the field. So yeah, it's pretty solid stuff. I think this is probably where I would want to go, having played a little bit of Absol Box if I was going to play Mega Greninja. Exactly. I think if this list really starts getting more play and starts seeing some success, which, who knows, but if it does, this list of any other list I think that I've seen, this is the biggest, like Mega Evolution style list I've seen to date. Because it's not just like Mega Lopunny was Megalopany, but also dudunsparce. But this list is like playing three different Megas. And so I think this is the first time I'm feeling that like tag team era vibes again, where you're just like, you don't care that it's three prizer. You're like, I'm gonna outpace them. I'm gonna do all the damage. I'm gonna take advantage of all the broken mechanics they are putting on these three prizers. Just wanted to point that out because it is interesting seeing how many Megas are being used in this version especially. It almost just feels like a regular like Absol box kind of thing. Just now, instead of Ogre Ponds, you have Mega Grinja. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it. It does feel a lot like the old Mega Boxes, but yeah, you have that Greninja to do stuff to do something to fix your math at least. The last Mega Greninja list that I want to talk about here is probably not much of a surprise if you've seen how things like Dragapult have evolved. So, you know, it does not feature Dragapult, but it is, I think, heavily inspired by the Dragapults of the last few weeks, which is. It is Greninja box plus the Dunsparce engine. That's basically it. The Dunsparce just being heralded as a really good draw support Pokemon. Right. Being able with that runaway draw to be able to draw three cards. It's great for consistency. Right. Especially trying to find these different supporter cards like Lily's Determination, Hilda, Wally's Compassion. Right. Having a couple copies of Wally's Compassion in this list can be very nice just to be able to heal damage, especially on your Mega Greninja Ex. Because it is worth. Right. Two Prizes. So I think this list is fun. I think this list is interesting. I like the Dunsparce. This is also taking advantage of one of the other new cards, which is Pat Rat. So the ability Watchful Eye Damage counters on each Pokemon can't be moved. So as opposed to the list we just looked at, which is relying also on Monkey Dory to move whatever damage your opponent does to you. This list. Just saying, I don't need Monkey Dory, but I'm also going to make it impossible for you to use Monkey Dory. If I have this Pat Rat down. And I love this Pat Rat. I. It's a little frustrating that, like, we have. We have a need to play cards like Shaman, Psyduck and this Pat Rat in the format because you can't have this many bench sitters. It's just. And so, like some of the smaller decks, like the Festival Leads or early Alakazams, in certain situations, like, you might want to play all three of them or at least two or three at the time, and you just. You can't fit the space. But deck like this is basically like, I don't think. I'm not worried about, you know, bench damage with Shaman. I'm not worried about Dragapult. I'm just worried about Monkey Dory. Nonsense. Yeah. Especially if it kind of goes in that direction a little bit away from, you know, like dust clops. Dust. Nor if we kind of stay away in that area because the format has moved a lot in the direction of, as you're saying, like Dragapult to Dunsparce as the choice for just raw Draw support. So, yeah, I mean, if. If there's no need for damn Psyduck anymore to be able to stop the dust clops and stuff like that, that just frees it up to make your choice for Pat Rat or Shaman or something like that as your key option there. Yeah, I really like the one of Great Hall Net in the deck as well. I think this is a funny little supporter card that's very nice for Greninja. Yeah. In a lot of situations. Right. Being able to choose one of either shuffling three water Pokemon from your discard pile into your deck or three basic water Energies from your discard pile into your deck. Kind of give a flexibility of like, you know, are you using a lot of water Shuriken or do you need to basically get a line of these Greninjas back in Jake? It's actually one or both. You can do both. This card is broken. This card's broken actually every. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's one or both. Yeah. This card's broken. I like this. I mean, it's like we lost Super Rod. And then for water decks, they were like, what if. What if I gave you two Super Rods on one card for the price of one? Yeah. So I. I don't know. Between Mega Greninja and the reveals that we got of, like, Walord and Water Kiaweh, like, maybe it's. People are saying it's not good. Water is getting a lot of support. Water Kiawe. Yeah. Did you not see. I don't know what you're referring to. Oh, so there was a. Okay. There was a announcement. A reveal, I think, last week or two weeks ago, where they announced a supporter that you. If you use it, you can search your deck, I believe. I think it's the deck for four. Water Energy. Yeah. And then put it onto one of your Water Pokemon. And if you do, your turn ends. And I'm like. People were like, oh, this card can't ever see play. It's so bad. And I'm like, I don't know if it will be good in our current format, but a card called Kiaweh did exist when we started playing, and it was very good. Now, you could play a supporter going first on turn one. That's a pretty big difference, I would say. But still a lot of water support I'm seeing being printed. And I'm still Jake. I'm still just waiting. I'm waiting for Blastoise. That Mega Blastoise. I feel it. It's on the Playmat for Naic. I feel that Blastoise announcement coming. When is it? When would it come, though? I don't know. I announced all of a Biscay, so, like, I don't. The fall set, I guess. I don't know. I'm confused, too. I'm very confused. Someday we'll have it. I. I wonder if. I mean, I wonder if you can run, like, Misty's Energy or whatever with, like, the dun. Sparse engines. But anyways, this is a Greninja segment. We'll talk about Waylord and stuff like that when the time comes. But, yeah, these lists, there's good variation I feel like, within the format right now. And obviously, you know, when we get into the actual, like, regionals and, you know, the legality and, like, tournaments and things like that, a more cemented way to play will probably come up and exist. But it's really cool to see how there's, like, three very different variations with the new stuff, because I think a lot of people were seeing Mega Greninja and then looked at Dragapold and said like, is the format really going to change? I mean, I don't know if it's going to change, but I, I like the double Greninja package, like the two different Greninjas, because it does force your opponent to make decisions. Right. One Greninja places damage, counters, the other Greninja can snipe the bench. And until they're all evolved, you don't really know what you're up against. So you force players to, to honor, to like, to, to be honest with, like, okay, I should keep me honest. Like, I got to play my shamans. I got to play this. And like, the more you force players into these awkward situations where they have to like search for a bench sitter like Shaman instead of one of their other pieces, you know, I don't know. I mean, that's honestly part of the reason why Dragapult is, is so good is that all of the counters to it are just very resource intensive, like Rabska or your battle cages or whatever. So you're out here looking for all these like, extra pieces and, and maybe Greninja will have some similar effect against players, but it'd be huge if Greninja has the ability to consistently like one hit KO Dragapult. Right. Because the big thing is Dragapult can one hit KO it. That's. So. Yeah. If you've got. If you've got a consistent method to be able to one shot and just really sway the prize trade favorably, then I think you could be in a pretty good spot in the meta. Yeah, I mean, it may be worth even considering either going a much heavier switch route if you expect to play against a lot of Dragapult in order to do that. Right. In order to get 2 drag mega dragapult procs and then take the knockout, or do you start running like crushing hammers like we've seen in Dragapult the last couple weeks? But I don't know how tight the list is. It feels a little. You're running two different stage two options. When you get that way, it can be. Well, I mean, like the, it's not even like the drag the dragon pull Greninja variant that we talked about. It's just. It's not even really two stage twos. It's really like a stage one line and then a stage two line because the primary. For the primary focus. Primary. The primary focus, yeah. Is that correct? That's accurate. That you got it sound correct. It's to get the Dracloaks online and just get a draw engine. Right. So it's. It's not even really like two stage twos. Like it is Dragon Ball Blaziken, where that one. You want two stage twos onto the field. The. The Dragon pull is just like when you. When you need the attacker and you've got the Neo Upper to be able to do the thing. Maybe you can't water Shuriken or anything like that, but you can slam Dragapult's attack and do 206 somewhere. If Mega Greninja is very strong. I. I need to read it again. If it's six damage counters, as you'd like, or six damage counters on one. Okay. Six damage counters on one Pokemon. Okay. You have to pick the six on one, which is fair. So that's like the difference in why like some situations you'd probably want Dragapult to be able to like clean up and put like one damage counter here for a knockout. Two damage counters here for a knockout. Yeah, yeah. Because I was gonn like against something like Festival Lead. I don't know if this deck is good or bad into it, but the answer of Rabska is it's a. I think Rabska is only 70 hp, so it is a little annoying for the Mega Greninja to have to use its ability twice. But in theory, you use the ability twice, you get rid of the Rabscot and then you go in with the Dragapult to like take out two or three other. It's just so gross. So gross. Yeah. You got to have a high octane engine and in Festival Lead to be able to get around this guy. Yeah. I don't know, man. But that is the three options that you have in Mega Greninja. In terms of other decks coming out of this set, I think legitimately there's really only one other deck that is like viable, and that would be Beedrill. So it is a deck that. When we talked about the set, the set review, I think we probably mentioned that it had done well in Japan. So the question would be like, you know, Japanese decklists don't always translate to the west, so is it going to do all right? And the answer is, at least in some online events, Beedrill has been performing pretty well. If you don't remember, the Beedrill is a stage 2310 HP grass it for one grass energy. It does 110 times. 110 damage for each of your Beedrill and Beedrill Ex in play. So goal here is pretty simple. Get three or four of these on the field and then you're doing 330 or 440 damage for one energy. Absolutely insane numbers. I think this deck, it feels like an Alakazam deck. I mean, I'm looking at the cards. I see a dun sparse line in here with the Runaway draw, which drawing cards. Very, very nice. I see several copies of dawn in here to be able to find your Stage Evolution line. And I'm seeing Lucky Helmet in here. Yeah, to be able to draw cards when you get attacked. So it feels like an. It feels like a new Alakazam line in a sense. You know, the great thing about this list too is you get to run Forest of Vitality. So where Alakazam needs to draw cards and needs to take turns to evolve this deck, just like, nah, I'm just gonna go all the way up the chain and you could just get your beedrills online, turn two and get, you know, two or three of them and then four. Doing 310 damage against this beedrill is actually going to be quite hard for a lot of decks, unless you're playing against Alakazam or, you know, a couple of other very specific decks out there. I think Ethan's typhlosion probably eats this deck alive, but that's about it. Yes. Yeah, but like, other than that, I. I think that you're doing enough damage and your main attacker is beefy enough that you're probably not going down too fast. And the Forest of Vitality gets you just over that hump against Dragapult, I think where you don't have to leave little guys on the bench. I think the biggest thing about. I think the big thing about this deck surviving in the format, especially against Dragapult, is going to be how often you can get into Kakuna, Right. Like your Weedles. You have to evolve your Weedles into Kakuna because, I mean, you can't evolve. You can't evolve a Pokemon on their first turn. So it feels like your first turn of the game, you have to put down like as many wheedles as possible. And then you need to evolve them right away to be able to hit like these big numbers and make sure that they just don't fall over to Dragon Pole. Because we don't love the little guy. He's only 50 hp. Though Kakuna being 80 hp is a little bit more difficult outside of Monkey Dory madness. To be able to work around. But again, the force of vitality. If you could just draw, draw, draw cards with the Dudun Sparse line with Lilies. Dawn, the bug catching set being used in this deck, which I think is very, very nice, you can, you can find some good stuff. You know, it's especially nice. I don't think I've seen. I could be wrong, but I don't think I've seen another grass deck that's using the Dunsparce as a part of their draw engine. And the reason I say that's so nice is because usually with the Dunsparce, yeah, you'll draw cards but like you might then want to play a Lily and then you'll have to shuffle some of the cards that you drew back into the deck. It's, it's, you know, not optimal. But if you're drawing into your grass types and you have the forest, you could just put them straight out of your hand onto the board evolving. And you can kind of empty your hand of these Pokemon pretty, pretty quickly. So I do think that's a pretty cool additional bonus I. I guess of running to Dun Sparse in this list. So I also like the secret box that's in this list as the ASEC of choice. Right. Because it's not like you need Neo Upper energy. It's just a one energy attachment to Beedrill to get going and stuff like that. So especially with that focus of force of vitality that we're talking about, this is really one of the only ways that you have any sort of stadium search within decks in general in the Pokemon trading card game. Right now the only other way I think really is like Colvis's Tenacity or Team Rocket Petrol. But you'd rather use your supporter for either Lily's determination, as you talked about dawn, to be able to get those evolutions or whatever and Boss's orders, right, obviously, because Boss's orders is going to stick around for another like three years. Yeah. So super good. I think this is super interesting deck. If you're running at locals. I don't know the matchup spread, but I think that you'll probably have a pretty good time with this deck at your locals, you'll draw a lot of cards with the Dun Spars, you will have an answer for that one random crustle player at your locals because you're running theoretically a copy of Dudun Sparce Ex. All good stuff. This is all great. So I, I think that it's definitely worth looking into if you're looking for Something. Yeah, yeah. If you're. If you're a fellow Alakazam player, maybe just transition into B Drill, I guess. Yeah, just like. Let's just play B Drill. Make it a clean. A clean cut. Guys. We pack it up. Let's go home. Alakazam's cooked. We have Mega Greninja and Dragapult. Nah, we Audi. Yeah, we're. We're going B Drill now. Oh, yeah, yeah, speaking. Jake, we got to do a topic at some time in the future. I just thought about this. Like, the number of cards that Pokemon has printed that just say, place damage counters in different ways. At a certain point, I've started to think I was like thinking about counting them and I'm like, man, could you build a deck that never needs to attack? Could you build a deck that takes all of its prizes just from damage, counter placement, effects and abilities? Like, I don't know. I don't know. That's a topic for another time, but interesting. Jake, I think that's gonna be it for us today. I think ANYIC is still a couple of weeks away, right? It's middle of June. Yes. Yeah, it's middle of June. Okay. And that's, I think, the first state. I think that will be probably the first major tournament where Chaos Rising is going to be legal. So there may be one. Yes. Yeah. Because Indianapolis is this week and it is not legal. There's actually special event Turin, where I believe it is legal over in Italy. That's happening. And then NAIC is a week later. But the special events are typically much smaller than like your average US Regional or IC or something like that. So we actually have two events. I'm pretty sure of this because it released on the 22nd. Yeah. It should be legal on June 6th for Turin, Italy. I don't know if it'll be streamed or anything. But this is also another weird one where I think this format is going to be just special event Turin and NAICS for this entire format. And then we're going to get all of our pitch black stuff and then we're going to have worlds. So it's going to be a very tiny format competitively. But that makes sense, especially because of the. The break time. Right. The new break structure where there's not going to be league cups challenges on after naic. So we just kind of have like this weird summer of. What do we do? Glc? Maybe Sean and I will try to play some retro formats. Maybe we'll try to play some glc. Would you guys want to see, like, a tournament series where Sean and I proxy up, like old decks. Yeah. Play like 2013 format or show you guys, like, different eras of Pokemon, something like that, to play on, like, stream or videos or something like that. Let us know, because I've been thinking about what we do, you know, if there's, like, no news, I have an idea. We'll chat. We'll chat about it after the pod. See if you're down to clown. Sure, Jake. That's gonna be it. Sign us out. Thank you so much for listening to the metapop podcast, Pokemon TCG podcast that revolves around the evolving meta. My name is Jake. That's Sean over there. We'll get you guys next week with more great stuff. Stuff here on the pod. And hope you're enjoying the chaos that is chaos rising. We'll see you soon.