#287 Pokemon's AI Tournament & Delta Reign

So good, so good, so good. New summer arrivals are at Nordstrom Rack stores. Now get ready to save big with up to 60% off brands like Rag and Bone, Levi's, Adidas and free people. Join the NordicLub to unlock exclusive discounts. Shop new arrivals first and more. Plus, buy online and pick up at your favorite rack store for free. Great brands, great prices. That's why you Rack, study and play come together on a Windows 11 PC. And for a limited time, college students get the best of both worlds. Get the unreal college deal, everything you need to study and play with select Windows 11 PCs. Eligible students get a year of Microsoft 365 Premium and a year of Xbox game Pass ultimate with a custom color Xbox wireless controller. Learn more@windows.com studentoffer while supplies last ends June 30th terms at aka Ms. CollegePC. Hello and welcome to the Metapod podcast, Pokemon TCG podcast. It revolves around the evolving meta. I'm Jake. I've got Sean over here, my co host for the last 200,000 episodes of the Metapod. And we got another good week here for you. But how are you doing? I am good. I am good. I'm well, I'm very warm. It is, it is boiling in the Netherlands right now. And I know people are going to be like, well, some of the days are only in the mid-80s. How is that? How is it so bad? Well, nobody has ACs in their apartments or many businesses. And the buildings here are sort of designed with winter in mind, so they're designed to keep heat in. And so that usually, like the room that I'm sitting in now, it is like 81 degrees outside and it is 86 degrees inside of this room. I am sweltering, Jake. It's. That's. It's just so hard to like, conceptualize because, like, here in Vegas, it gets hot in Vegas. Very hot in Vegas. Yeah. And the summers are brutal. And we're at that time of year where it's, it's, it's stupid hot. You know, it's like 115 every day, which is fine so long as you're in the shade or you have a nice AC unit at the apartment. And even when, like, there are, there are times where we're gone from the apartment all day. So, like, there's no AC. The house doesn't even get above like 82, I think, I think the highest I've seen it at without AC going or anything like that is like 80 degrees. And we leave the door open, we open the windows so natural light comes in. But it's just crazy with the infrastructure on, like how things are different to where. Yeah, that's. That's wild because it's not even 90 degrees where you are not right now. It's getting into the mid-90s. And also for any of the European listeners who are like, you're. You're in Europe now, Sean, you. Celsius, or said it before, and I'll say it again, Fahrenheit is the superior scale for human livability. I am not water. I don't care at what temperature I freeze or boil. Yeah, that's actually kind of bad. If we. Yeah, well, you are water, actually. I mean, yeah. Is it 60% water? 70. Yeah. Like, we're all. There's a lot of water in us. But if I ever get to anywhere near a temperature that is boiling, which is what Celsius is based off of, frozen in boiling water. If I ever get anywhere near the top end of that scale, I am literally cooked. So, no, I don't. I don't need this. I have a different scale that makes more sense. Now, the weather, we can talk about that all day, but there has been some Pokemon news within the week that we are going to talk about. Not necessarily like regionals or anything like that, just general Pokemon news this week. A little bit slower into the week. And this is kind of the slower time as well, heading into the World Championship. So if you want any extra Pokemon TCG content, Sean and I on Monday nights, Pacific time or Monday afternoons, Pacific time, Monday afternoons, officially. Final answer are going to be doing some retro format gaming. We're going to play the different years leading up to the year 2000. I've got a Slow King deck prepared for this week. That was a real Slow King, by the way. Yeah, that's a real Slow King that I have. It's definitely not a PSA 10 or a PSA 9, 8, 7, and probably not even a 6. But I have added and it's a real one that I own. That's sick since the dawn of time. But anyways, we're going to be doing that every Monday afternoon. If you want to go check it out on the YouTube channel, it's going to be live streamed and then we'll cut up into individual years for episodes. Episodes as well, which should be coming here soon. Apologies for not doing it last week. We were just a little under the radar. So you know what? It's fine. We can build. We built in our schedule to have a week off, but we're Going to be playing this week, 2002 to 2004. Yes, yes indeed. Which is the end of the Wizards of the coast era. And then the very first year that tpc tpci. I don't know if they were known as TPCI at the time, but the first year that the Pokemon company took it over, so. And the first year of the actual World Championships, 2004. So cool stuff. Yes. So that's gonna be exciting. I am up 2:1 by a surprising finish. I, I should not be 2:1, but I ended up being 2:1. So I'm winning right now of the Metapod and I hope to continue that streak. But anyways, let's go off into the news. Sean, what do you want to talk about first this week? Well, we can start with the future. We have a couple of pieces of news here about future sets and trademarks and whatnot. The first one I wanted to mention is Storm Emerald and Delta Rain TCG sets were officially teased along with Pocket is going to get a similar, you know, Mega Rayquaza themed set as well called Ruler of the Skies. But yeah, we, we, we knew that we would be getting a Mega Rayquaza for a while now. We knew the Storm Andrelda teaser. We, you know, but the question was like exactly when is it going to come? But Jake, when are we expected to see the return of Mega Rayquaza? Mega Rayquaza EX will return and release on 7-3-31st in English store member Aldo's releasing as Delta rain on November 6th. So if it sounds like Pocket's going to be getting it before the west in terms of this Mega Requaza said, but curious that they're releasing the same themes at the same time but in the two different like platforms. It's not something that they have done as of yet. I think. Yeah it is. You're right. It absolutely is. Very interesting that like the Mega, like the timing has synced up. Now what I don't know. Like, okay, they talk about Storm Emerald and Ruler of the Skies, both sets of feature Mega requires it and released July 31st. Okay. And so like the Japanese said, Storm Emerald and the Pocket set Ruler of Disguise is releasing at the same time. What's strange to me though is that our set, Storm Emerald, the English version is going to be called Delta Rain and it's releasing November 6th. I don't know why, but I would be very surprised if Japan has mega rayquaza ex 7-31-19 and we have to wait an additional what, August, September, October, three months. Yeah, like That, I mean, that's the. That's the big conversation that I think has been happening online at least in the last week that I've been like scrolling and seeing. This is, you know, we've had like Chaos Rising. It's like a month or two later, you know, Pitch Black. It's like a month later, month and a half later that we get it in English, but now it feels like, you know, we've been inching closer and closer, but now we're going a step backwards with this huge timeline change of having to wait now like three months for this set, watching Japan play and all that stuff. And I. I wonder if part of that is because of the World Championships. But then that still doesn't even make sense. I think a part of it might be to do with celebrations, because Celebrations. Yeah, yeah. Our set releases in mid. Mid September, which is the same as Japan, but in the past, like Pitch Black now is releasing, you know, in a. In a few weeks. And then we are waiting until our celebration set. I think that that's our next set. And then the question on my mind was like, are we going to get an October set? Because we've usually had like, you know, sometimes you'll get a specialty set and then a month later, another mainline set. I don't know if we're going to get another set between Celebrations and Delta Rain, though. Yeah, I don't know if we will either, to be honest. And also what'll be interesting is July 31, if they are getting their Storm Memorial to set, then technically it will be legal in the Japanese metagame by the time Worlds rolls around. But obviously it will not be legal for Worlds because none of nobody, no other region will have access to these cards. But yeah, it's just a three, three and a half month gap between, between Japanese and our set is actually a lot longer than we've had in the last few years. So I'm my. My best guess is that we just sort of had a weird timeline because we're in this switch to like mini sets like Japan and we have celebrations the same year. Maybe that's just like really thrown everything like all over the place, timing wise. Feels like a hiccup that was either looked over right when they were doing the planning and stuff like that, or it's a hiccup that just nat. That just has to happen because of something maybe we don't know yet or something of the sort. Yeah. So I, you know, I. A big part of me hopes I'm looking at Delta Rain. Yeah. It says available November 6th. That is official artwork from Pokemon. So I don't think this is a misprint. I don't think. I think that probably we're just not going to have an October set. And so it's just kind of crazy too because our world's Meta is going to be around for a long time. Like the Pitch Black, you know, legality coming into worlds. It's. It's going to be that format for a long, long time. And let me tell you, Pitch Black does not look like it's going to bring in anything too crazy. We will get the celebrations cards. The celebrations are very. And Mewtwo, but they don't, they don't do anything for the Meta. But I mean, I guess the Mewing Mewtwo could do things for the Meta. Yeah, there will be some cards. It's gonna be a smaller set in terms of what's competitively legal, but like maybe all you need is like two. All you need is dragapult. Right. All we need is a Dragapult equivalent power level card and then the whole meta gets turned upside down. So I don't know. All we need. All we need is a Meta equivalent of a deck that truly does not have a bad matchup and can beat anything. Yeah. Is its worst matchup, which is crazy. Yeah, I guess. And even then, I don't even know if it's like totally winning. It's probably winning, but it's probably still like a 55, 45, 60, 40 where it's like it's winnable, but it's going to be really hard. Jake, what is the other piece of future facing information that we got? I'm going to go ahead and move up to the are you perhaps with Team Rocket quote that was trademarked and filed by the Pokemon company, Pokemon Japan. It's registered under the same categories that are used for TCG name sets and products. So are you perhaps Team Rocket more than likely just hinting at more Team Rocket products happening? I guess they saw what happened with like destined rivals, you know, and in that set when they brought back the Team Rocket era and they were like, oh, this made a lot of money. We could do another one of these. So it's really interesting because also as quoted by Poke beach, there's never been a set with a question mark in its name. So this, this trademark is very unusual. But there have been other products in the past that maybe it can be associated with. Right. They reference the Battle Academy that happened, you know, that could be like a little fun introductory kind of game that they do. Or it could be something like the 20th anniversary Team Rocket special case. Could be something similar to that, where it's like a product. We don't really know any information besides the trademark and the. The actual name of what the trademark is, but there's a lot of guesses around. Yeah, my guess is it's probably a product rather than a set, I think a set. Like, are you perhaps with Team Rocket, like, if that was a name of a set, that would be crazy. It just doesn't fit any of the. You know, how sets get named in Japanese or in English. So I. I don't think that that's probably a set name. I. I might eat my words, but, yeah, probably some sort of special collection. I. I think that's a very. A very likely scenario. Yeah. So we'll find out more, especially with the 30th celebration releasing this fall. I mean, they did that Team Rockets case during the 20th anniversary back in 2016. So maybe this is just like an anniversary thing that they've got coming up. Although I feel like they would have trademarked this a little bit earlier. But, you know, the. The anniversary runs for a long time. It's not just the day of the anniversary. It's like for a whole calendar year. And they release products as time goes on throughout the year until they hit the 31st year. Right. So it's probably something along those lines. I mean, that's really all the quote unquote news. There's one other piece of news that I actually think we should turn into a larger discussion, and that is. Let me go back. I actually. There we go. I don't know if you saw this news, Jake, and I. I don't have a fully formed opinion yet, but the Pokemon company, and explicitly, I'll just say the Pokemon company, not the Pokemon company International. I don't know how much that matters, but they have launched a competition on a platform called Kaggle, which I'll get into in a bit. But the goal is for people all over the world to build models, agents, if you will, AI agents. AI models that will play the tcg. And the competition is basically who can build the smartest, best, most capable, whatever, effectively model NPC agent to battle against other agents and AIs. And the prize is, you know, $300,000 plus total prizing. I think the actual winner gets like 200 grand of like the full thing at the end, but a lot of money. A lot of money. I. So this is something that's not like, new in terms of games, right. Chess, shogi, there are plenty of other like long standing games that have this kind of model. The. It's a weird thing because I'm like why don't you just have people play it, right? Like why don't you just have toward reckless. That would be a regional Jake. If they just. That's the way championships. I would rather this personally. I would. I. I am boomer and let me just preference. I hate most most a lot of things AI. I understand that AI is very useful in a lot of things like helping, you know, certain things, whatever. There are good uses. But and where AI is right now and how it's being abused. I'm like why isn't this just another regional. Well, that we can do. So the way that I understand this is this is the Pokemon company and the platform is also Kaggle, which is owned by Google. For context. It may matter to some people out there. They exist and they do this for tons of ton and tons of projects like either it's community created or companies come to them and pay them money to host competitions. And basically it is an open call to say hey, build a model that will play the game for us. That will play the game. Right. Why they're doing it is I think a big open question for interpretation. You could read this as the Pokemon company saying, hey, Pokemon TCG Live, it does have an auto battler, right. It has a way for you to train against an npc. Yes. This could be a system where they want somebody to build a much better version of that that they can then take and fine tune put into some sort of a system. And that way if you want to play, you can play against effectively a bot rather than a person and you can maybe customize how difficult you want the match to be or, or whatever. And this exists in chess simulators, right? Like you can play chess against bots that you set to different difficulty levels. This has existed for decades now. Yeah. And so I, I do think that that could be one rationale is like why are they doing this? And Pokemon TCG is way more complex than chess from the perspective of all of the different options and choices. And like chess is a much simpler baseline game, right. You have pieces, those pieces can move, you have a two dimensional like board surface and. And that's it. All information is known otherwise. Yeah, when all information is public, it is. I mean chess in itself is a, in extremely, extremely complex game. But when what we're trying to say and what Sean is trying to say is that when there is, when all the information is public on the board. It is way easier for an AI to be more effective for being able to play out different moves or help you, like, build strategies and things like that. But when information is private, it is way harder, more than likely, for a game like the Pokemon Trading Card Game for an AI to be developed, because in AI can't learn what they don't know. In a sense. I don't know if that makes sense, but it's. It's, like, hard to teach unknown information to something like that. One of the other things as well is the finalists will present their approaches and methodologies. An additional $50,000 will be awarded to first place, and $30,000 will be awarded to second place. And I think the top eight teams from the strategy category receive $30,000 in advance to the final stage because it's split. The competition is split in, like, two different stages. Whatever. I wonder why you only get $10,000 for winning a Pokemon TCG regional, but you can get $30,000 for getting second place, not based on your overall placing, but because of your presentation and explanation of your AI. Well, that is something that I'm like. Well, it. You're. It's. I. They are different. They're very different things in kind, which is like one of very different things you are developing. You know, I don't. I don't know all the technical details, but you are developing an AI agent. You are training it to understand how to play the tcg. And in theory, everybody has all the exact same rules. And it's not like the AI agent you're building. You're not like, picking a single deck for them to play. I don't think. I think you're building the agent to then, I guess, build its own deck, understand deck building, and then also understand gameplay. And that agent, then it's a. It's a proof of concept that, like, hey, I built a system that understands Pokemon enough to not only build its own deck, play its own deck, and then beat other AI agents. So it is very. It's very different than a regional. It does mention that in the competition, the card pool will consist of 2, 000 cards from the standard format. And then Pokemon will provide battle environment, official rules, and a simulator for training and evaluation. Yep. So I. I don't know. I. This is interesting to me because on the one hand, I can understand like it is. It is not the same kind of AI that I think is in most headlines today, which is. It's not generative AI from the perspective of it's not like you're asking it to create art for cards, you're not asking it to create new mechanics for cards. It is largely a machine learning type impact where you're just like, okay, here are all of these sets of rules. Create an agent that executes these rules as, as effectively as possible. I don't know Jake, if you've ever seen the videos of people who do a similar thing where they train a bot or an AI agent on certain racing games. Have you ever seen these videos? So like people try to find like what's the best line in racing game X or Y or like Beam NG or whatever. And they'll use an AI model and they'll just have it run the race a hundred thousand times at once right through their simulations. And then through that the model itself learns what paths to take, how fast they should drive here, how much they should slow down, whatever. And eventually they try to find the most efficient path from point A to point B in the race so that they get the best. This is basically the version of that. Like you're just training a system to work. So it is different than generative AI. I will get them, I will grant them that. And I think in theory, you know, I don't necessarily have anything against building a better npc. That's really all it is. You're just building a better NPC and a better auto battler. But I question, I have two questions. One, what is the actual point of this, right? Like are they actually going to use this to implement something? And then two, the actual point is not to hold an AI tournament just to see who wins. I mean, I like that. No, like what's the underlying thing like at you can't take this as face value. Yeah, like there has to be something behind this of like you're saying like this is going to be for TCG Live or TCG Pocket and it's going to help the, the, the game that we have in general. I had a few theories that I want to bounce off you, Jake. I'm going to start from the most boring. Interesting, huh? I wonder if this is going to help with like card testing. So like before they build cards. Well, I'll release them. I'll start with that then. Yeah, that was a theory that I had. Right. Because it's being run by the Pokemon company, which is the Japanese arm, as far as we know, that's the group that is responsible for really managing this. It could be a system that they want to have developed in order for the developers of the Game creatures and game freak and all of the. For those people to play against these auto battlers as they develop new cards so that it's not just them and their small groups doing the testing. Now, on the one hand, if that theory. This is all theories, by the way, if that theory were true, I think it's a pretty interesting use case. But I also worry that that means that they will hire or maybe even fire some amount of their play testers. Because if you have a very effective system for this, you don't need that many people on staff, right? Yeah, you just need like one person to monitor it. Right. Like, how do you fix the problem of creating cards and strategies that are way too overtuned? You know, in theory, you could build a system that will call out any strategies that are Dragon Pull DX that are dragonfall. Right. You. In theory, you could build a system that would have figured out Dragapult's a problem. But I, I don't know. What do you. How do you feel about that theory? I'm curious one on the card pool because I. If the card pool includes Dragapult ex, how long does it take for the AI systems to figure out that Dragapult is the best deck and then is it just Dragapult mirror matches and they just get really good at One of the things also is like, I mean, I don't, I don't. I'm sure it's been obvious if you've made it this far in the episode. I am not overly tuned of what AI is or its capabilities or whatever. I wonder like when it's learning, how much of the learning is like general TCG knowledge versus oh, I'm really good at playing Dragapult ex. Like if the AI chooses a card which is Dragapult EX because it recognizes that this attack is very good. How if you were playing it, but then. But then realized that Oak Clefairy EX is really good against Dragapult and it switches decks, how long does it take then for it to learn another place? Are you. Are you starting at square one with the, with the AI or does it take the things that it learned? Like, because when you play card games, right, and you play one deck, sure, when you switch decks, like you have to learn how to play that deck, but you own the fundamentals and you own the like regular learning, I guess you could call it, of every deck that you would ever play in any deck of that game. So like, does it bring that along as well? And maybe, I don't know. Is that what they're trying to figure out. I mean maybe my gut would say it's all going to be like, it's all neural networks. Right. So it's all like there's some, there's some amount of machine learning that is a bit of a black box. Like you can't say for certain. Yeah. Why it made decision A versus B. But my guess is that like as part of the process it's not like they become hyper focused on Dragapult and then if you set a Lily's clefairy deck in front of them, they have no clue what they're looking at. I do think it will mimic some amount of like human behavior in terms of like understanding how to play any given deck. And odds are if you build a really robust system with a card pool, it will have a pretty good understanding of how to play any deck composed of most of those cards. And then what it will just do is optimize towards, you know, on average what is the best strategy. Which to your point it, in theory you might say like a system might say on average the best strategy is Dragapult. But also if I, if, if the AI realizes that most other AIs will come to that same conclusion and then it chooses to counterpick something like a quad lilies clefairy like you know, that that could be what is born out of this is that like your AI understands Dragapult and you have tuned it to be more counter meta than meta. Like that is a choice that it's going to have to. Or not even like counter meta. Of just being aware of like, of being like an actual player. Yeah, I hate that I said that, but I, it just doesn't, it doesn't make me feel great because it feels like they're investing a lot into this and I would love some more investing into Pokemon events. So here's real Pokemon events. Here's my other sort of couple of theories wrapped into one. This is run on a platform called Kaggle, which is owned by Google. I'm not super familiar with Kaggle, but what I do know is that Kaggle is. Do you know what GitHub is? I've. I know GitHub. Yeah. Yeah. So Kaggle is a platform akin to how GitHub is a platform for code bases. Kaggle is a platform for people to run machine learning simulations and competitions. And it's all community oriented. Right. So everything on there is submitted by the community. There's no walled gardens, there's no like, you know, hidden stuff that is on There, I guess. Yeah. And. But it is owned by Google. So ultimately all of the data that gets generated on something like Kaggle, Google has access to it. And in this new world that we live in where Google is competing against OpenAI and competing against Microsoft in this sort of like grand AI race, if you will. Yeah, I could. And also AI has a pretty bad reputation right now. This could be rather than thinking of it like the Pokemon company is doing this because they want a product at the end of it and they're investing this money to get that product. You could look at it sideways and say, is this a PR play by Google and Kaggle where they are saying I want positive press for the work that I am doing in AI and I want data as well. Like that's fine, like, but the data you're going to get from this is going to be very specific and maybe useful, but who knows? But it could be more of a PR play where it's like Google partners with the Pokemon company and maybe Google is fronting the $300,000 and not Pokemon because they are getting the world's most valuable IP holder to agree to do an AI program with them and promote it on a company that has never really done any public exploring of AI. Right. And look, you could argue both companies theoretically benefit because AI is super hot and people are going to be like, oh, Pokemon company is so innovative. And like I could totally see people in a Japanese boardroom being convinced that it will be good for everybody. Right? That like, look, your card game, it's like in the 21st century and blah, blah. But ultimately I think that in theory this has more benefit to Google and its subsidiaries than it does for the Pokemon company as a PR thing to be like, you know, in six months or a year, Google can, at Google IO, say we partnered with the Pokemon company to redefine the future of gaming by this competition or whatever. I that's. My other tinfoil theory is that this is actually similar to the way that. Do you know the story behind Pokemon Go, Jake? No, but I know that Pokemon Go has done like an AI tournament or something like that. Poke beach said in their article that Go has done something before in some sort of scale. So Pokemon Go, what's interesting about this is there was originally, way back before Pokemon Go, I want to say 2012, 2013, there was an April Fool's joke where Google partnered with the Pokemon company to do a way in Google Maps to catch all 151 Pokemon. Did you know this? I don't think that was an April. I, I do remember this. I don't think that was an April Fool's joke. It was. I think that was, it was. I think that was one of those things is we're going to call it an April Fool's joke, but secretly behind, behind, you know, locked doors, we're actually doing this. I mean, maybe we're just trying to see public perception. I can't say for certain what all of the intentions were, but I, I was working in advertising at the time when it launched and it was launched on April 1. It was touted as an April Fool's joke and it was wildly successful. If you managed to catch all 151, you could submit to get a certificate that said you're a Pokemon master, yada yada. Not long after that, Niantic, which had been working on a separate game, was like, oh, this went really, really well. Let's put a skin of Pokemon on top of this. Niantic was also, I think at the time either a spinoff or like was owned by Google. So all of this is like Google owning this and then through all of this data. Now Niantic, which I think might be spun off now, but point being, Niantic now has so much value because Pokemon Go players mapped all of the world through Pokemon Go and now they have a whole platform they can use to sell to as a data set to advertisers and whatever. Yeah, yeah. Two thoughts for me. Yeah. One, I think there's going to be way more eyes than just the Pokemon company and Google on this because I think any card game that has any sort of client is going to be severely interested in this. Right. Because as we've talked about, you know, like chess and Shogi and stuff like that, it's all public information. There's not really a system that does it with private information like Pokemon does of Decklist Hand etc. So I think this is going to be a big one that's going to explode if this is moderately successful. Because I think a lot of companies like, you know, Bandai has the Dragon Ball client, trying to think of other card games. Magic, Magic, Magic the Gathering. Right. Wizards of the coast, they'll be really interested to see who actually creates like a really big program. So I think. So similar to what you're saying with like the April Fool's joke where there was like, there was a lot of things that actually came out of this, I think this is kind of in that same boat. If it's successful. Yeah. I mean, but it's to Me, it's like, I don't know for sure what the end goal is if it is largely a PR play. Where it is. Let's partner with the Pokemon company. We will front some or all of the prize money in order to use your IP and have you promote it for us and just make our platform and what we are doing in AI look good. Because I could tell you right now, Jake, that is 100% an idea that someone in the marketing department would have. Having heard not dissimilar ideas in this past myself. Yeah, I'm sure. But also that's my pretty cynical view. Is this just a PR play? And then the other view is that this is actually like hopefully a real thing. Maybe it's only for internal use by creatures in play testing. Maybe it's to develop an actual platform for auto battlers that they can then sub license to all of these other card games like Wizards of the coast or. That's what I'm hoping. Because they have given up on Pokemon TCG Live, so they've asked the community to fix it. That's my final thought. But that's my final thought. The last piece that I have though is like, even if it is an interesting idea of like, okay, cool, if somebody develops a cool system that can build a good AI system to battle against, it's a good auto battler, basically in a vacuum, I'm like, that's kind of interesting. But the question that I also have is like, what are we doing here? Like, the whole point of trading card games is about, I think playing with other people. The. Well, I think one of the things that they could try to implement is offline gaming. Because like Pokemon TCG Live, for example, and I think Pokemon Pocket 2, you have to be online to play those. You have to have Internet. You have to connect to the servers, things of that nature. And so if you had an AI battler, you could actually do like a set of offline gaming. I'm not sure how that would look because you have to log into your accounts and things like that and all that stuff. So that I think would fundamentally have to change. But I think one of the cool things that could come out of this is offline gaming because I have been in places with Pokemon TCG Live, you know, where it used to be, or even way back in Pokemon tcgo, like when I would travel, where I would play and it would be like awful, spotty Internet or something, or just Internet not worth using at all. And then I'm like, oh, I can't play Because I'm in a location to where I can't even play physically. Right. So that could be a good way. Especially because they've so much done mobile. It could be a way to be able to implement like offline gaming in some form or fashion. Yeah, I guess. Yeah. It'll be interesting to see where this nets out. The one thing that's important to note if you do want to participate in this. A, you need to start like now, basically. Yeah. And B, the Pokemon company does, in their terms and conditions, get access to all of the systems and data and whatever that gets generated as part of the competition. So if you do win, that's great. Or if you get second, you know, it's great. You'll get a certain amount of money. But then the Pokemon company will be able to use whatever code that you created without paying you another dollar. So, yeah, you forfeit all rights to be able to sell it, essentially. Well, because they're gonna, I mean, if you, if you make a good one, they're going to make it and then they're gonna trademark it. Well, that's, there's some copyright law there that I'm not clear on. But, but hey, you, you, you joined it and you gave away the rights. Well, you do that. You definitely, I don't know the, the terms and conditions perfectly. I think that the terms and conditions include a sub license to the Pokemon company, but I don't know if it's an exclusivity sub license, meaning like you might be able to take your stuff and use it yourself too. But you definitely are giving the most valuable IP in the world this information and they can use it. And is it worth 50 grand? Like is it, it might be more than $50,000 worth of your time. So. Yeah, that's the other thing to keep in mind is that if you really do think you've got something good here that you could sell, this probably isn't the best way to get it out there. If you have a real business model around that. Yeah, I don't know. So I'm not paid to know these things. Yeah, it's, it's fascinating. I, I, like I said, I, I don't know how fully I feel about it because ultimately TCGS for me are about people playing against other people. That's how I personally like to experience it. So whatever the outcome of this is, whatever auto battler gets made it, it's, anything public facing it will still have absolutely no impact on me because that's, I just hope that it goes into, I Just hope it goes into live. Please make live better. Yeah, you guys neglected LIVE for year now. Years now. Jake, would an auto battler actually fix the problems with live? Genuinely might actually help learning of what could be improved in live because it's playing live so much. Maybe this is true. This is true. That's my hope. It would be. I. I will say, if there's an outcome of this, that they make an AI agent and then they get the best players in the world to play against it. Are you familiar with Deep Blue, Jake? No. That was the IBM program that played chess and they got it to play against the best chess players in the world back in the 90s and early 2000s. So. So there's like a whole documentary. I think it was Gary Kasparov played against it. But point being, I do think it would be a very interesting content series if they created a really smart auto battler and then they put people like Azul and Tord and Sander and like all of these, like, you know, I think it would actually be insufferable if that happened, because the moment that the AI wins one of the games, for whatever reason, you'll not hear the end of it. You'll not hear the end of it. I guess the question is, it's like, yeah, is it too much of a reputational hit to those players if they can't beat the auto battler? It's not even the reputation of those players. It's just the. The obnoxiously loud group that is the Crypto Bros. I'm just saying. I think it would be a crazy content series to watch. And I kind of. You're right. And it would probably be very successful, but I would hate it. Yeah. For you. You are. You are unsubscribing when you see that content series. I am not watching. I am hitting the not interested tab, which you can do actually on YouTube, by the way. If you do not know, you can wait for telling people to hit the not interested button. This is crazy. I mean, if you're. If you're seeing. And you see on your, like, home feed or you see in your. When you're watching a video, you know the videos on the side. The recommended. If you see something that you don't like because like, oh my gosh, that is explicit or this like, I most. All. Most all videos that have like an AI thumbnail. I do this. Yeah. I hit the three dots next to the video. I hit. Don't recommend channel because I don't want to see that channel. But you can also just hit not interested if it's like, maybe one of your favorite creators that, you know just did a video that you're like, I don't like this. You can hit not Interested. And I recommend it because it makes the. It makes the feed way better. That's fair. That's fair. Yeah. So, yeah. All right, well, that's enough of this AI discussion. And that's, that's also all the news we really got. It's like I said, it's a slow week. Next week we're going to do the pitch black set review, so get excited for that. I am. And Jake, anything else from your side? Not really, I don't think. I think it's just hanging out and waiting for more things to happen. Yeah, I don't know. No, that's accurate. There's not. Not a lot going on between now and Worlds. I don't think so. Yeah. Yeah. Hoping that's gonna be it for this episode. Oh, sorry. Yeah, that's gonna be it for this episode of the Metapod podcast. Thank you so much for watching or listening, whichever you do. And again, join our Discord server. We now have a role specifically for the Pokemon Q. So you won't get pinged every time a Pokemon queue pops up. If you're not interested. We have a specific role, so make sure to do the thing that Sean set up. Thank you for setting that up. Of joining the role. I'm Jake, that's Sean. I'm just ready to play 2002-2004. I'm hoping it goes well for me. We'll let you know how much I'm either up or down after this week. This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50 page restoration block. Or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it, ready to make anything online make sense. There's no place like Chrome. Check responses, set up required compatibility and availability various 18. Your next chapter in healthcare starts at Carrington College's School of Nursing in Portland. Join us for our open house on Tuesday, January 13th from 4 to 7pm you'll tour our campus, see live demos, meet instructors and learn about our associate degree in Nursing program that prepares prepares you to become a registered nurse. Take the first step toward your nursing career. Save your spot now at Carrington Edu Events. For information on program outcomes, visit Carrington Edu. Sci Fi.