Episode 1: A Brand New Frontier

Hello, and welcome back to the Battle Frontier podcast, where we aim to help you level up in your journey to improve as a competitive Pokemon TCG player. I'm Aaron Curry, a longtime player, took a break for quite a bit, but I've been back trying to get back into the swing of things. I've only been to a few majors in the past year and a half, but I'm looking to hit the ground running this season and keep improving. And over here, I've got my co-host, Jon Orgel, who's been around the block almost as long as I have, but didn't take that break. So Jon, how are we doing? Oh, I'm great. I've been playing since 2011, just a little bit about myself, been playing since 2011. And once COVID happened, I switched over to a role as a judge, but I still love keeping my nose to the pulse. I don't know, it's like mixing metaphors, but keeping my finger on the pulse of the competitive TCG as a whole, and I love just talking about it. So that's why we're definitely doing this little venture together, and hopefully it turns out really well. You've been running the league up there in Virginia for a while. So did you guys have anything cool going on this week, any league challenges or anything? The league was kind of quiet. We had our GLC night. We do that every last Monday of the month. So we usually run a tournament, but we only had four players doing GLC. So we just had open play. But over the weekend, I had the opportunity to play in a cup in Charlottesville, which is about an hour and 20 minutes from my house. And I played Reggie Drago, V-Max, and got second, and lost to, if all y'all old heads out there know him, Johnny Ravis, longtime Richmond local. He's like, I think, got a top 16 or top 8 at Worlds at one point. But he was playing Raging Bolt, and that felt like it was my time to, my tournament run was over when I hit him, so that's fair. How was your weekend, man? How, did you do any Pokemon, or was it more about family? I did, actually. Yes. We had, you know, the hurricane blew through, you know, thankfully for my sake, it was on the other side of the state, so weather over here wasn't all that bad. We did lose power for a little bit, had to pull out the generator and deal with all that. But, you know, got our power back and still had, you know, enough going on that went to a League Challenge on Friday night. Did have a relatively small turnout, but I took a slightly modified version of our Palkia Dusknoir list from Baltimore, dropped the Trekking shoes to add in a second Irida, a fourth Duskull, and an Iron Bundle just because I wanted to have another Gust in the deck and have it either be searchable or recoverable with Night Stretcher. The bundle was totally useless the whole night, would not recommend it, but, you know, you don't learn these things without trying them. No, yeah. League Challenge is the perfect place for that. Exactly. Exactly. It's a great testing ground. I did manage to take that down, so, you know, plus 15 points into the void, probably, but, you know, it's something. Yeah. It's something. Boost your ego a little bit, yeah. Yeah, for sure. For sure. So, one of the things we're going to kick this off with, though, is something a little more fun. I believe John wanted to call this segment Blaine's Quiz Show, and so, John, can you explain what we're going to be doing here? So, yeah, I figured we'd just do a little fun trivia section. Shout-outs to Xander Bennett for helping me think through this idea a little bit. He's a long-time player, but also has gotten into being more of like the trivia host of the competitive TCG. So, I just wanted to test your trivia knowledge of the competitive side of the Pokemon trading card game, Aaron, see how much you remember. So, I have a mix of some old questions and some kind of new questions, and I just want to see. We had Ian take this earlier. He got two out of the three, so if he can beat that, that's the goal. He's a dead-broke nerd. Okay. Ian's only been in the game for a little bit over a year, so I think I've got a pretty good shot. I think I've got a pretty good shot there. Great. Love it. All right. So, your first question. It's all multiple-choice. I figured I'd give you a little bit easier a start. So the question is, which A-spec trainer does not have a limitless page, meaning it has not made day two at a regionals or greater? Okay. Is it Dangerous Laser, Pokey Vital A, Grand Tree, or Neutralization Zone? Okay, so this one's going to be pretty easy, and I can run down which events I believe that all of these things have made day two at, except for the one that's the answer. So I know Dangerous Laser made day two at Worlds in somebody's Iron Thorns list. Grand Tree just made day two at Dortmund in a pretty interesting Dusknoir deck, and Neutralization Zone I believe was also at Worlds. But if it wasn't at Worlds, it was in Baltimore. So my answer for this is going to be Pokey Vital A, because that card is terrible. You got it right. Yeah, it was tougher than I thought. I was like, oh, there's got to be some terrible A-specs that people haven't really even tried playing, but Dangerous Laser is out there, man. It's so funny. It is. If I had pulled out something like Crystal Wall or Victory Piece or something, I may have gotten a little bit more tripped up. All right, well, I figured I'd start you with an easy one. The next question might be a little bit harder for someone that's been out of the game for a little bit. Okay. So who was the last Masters player to win back-to-back regionals? Is it Andrew Hendrick, Piper Lepine, Azul, Garcia Griega, or Tord Recklev? Okay, so this is the most recent back-to-back? Mm-hmm. That is tough. I know Andrew did it with Lugia, but I believe that was two seasons ago. And I know Azul won two regionals last year, or he might have actually done three. I think the answer is Azul, and I'm pretty sure they were both Charizard wins. So I think that's what I'm going to go with. Okay, so just to fact check you, Azul only won one regional last year. San Antonio, I believe, Texas. The correct answer is Andrew Hendrick. I know he's the last one to do it for quite some time. Sure. Piper, I think, actually had a gap in her regional wins. I think there was one North American regional between her two wins, but still impressive. I'm going to counter your fact check, by the way, real quick, before we move to question three. Azul did win two regionals last year because he also won Stockholm, but I understand those aren't back-to-back. Also, yeah. I forgot about Stockholm. Man. Yeah, it was Snorlax. That's right. Yes. Yeah, it's just one of those things I kind of erase Snorlax from my memory if I can help it. Most people would. Most people would. All right. Question three. What company ran a supplemental circuit series between 2016 and 2017? Was it Full Grip, Top Cut Comics, Yeti Gaming, or Altered Reality Games? I actually do not know the answer to this, so this is going to be a total shot in the dark. Oh, that's so interesting. All right. Can I? I'm going to have you guess, and then I'm going to give you a hint. Okay. So this was... My son was born in 2016 and had a lot of stuff going on over that next two years, as any other new parent would relate to. But I'm going to say it's not Yeti Gaming, even though Vince's story is great. I don't think it was them. I want to say my gut is that it was either Top Cut Comics or ARG. And I think I'm going to go... I think I'm going to go with ARG. I don't know why. You got it right. You got it right. But that's what's... Okay. Yeah. Sweet. Yeah. So you tied Dead Broke Nerd. Fair enough. But yeah, just a little touch on ARG. I've competed in some of those tournaments, and I actually got second in their Invitational for 2017. Okay. I had the trophy. That's what I was looking for earlier. Gotcha. So maybe I can bring it out another time. But yeah. So I think Friends of the Cast, I think Grafton might have been spawned. No, it was Jose Maria, and I think they sponsored Kyle and Ryan's Able House. So a lot of players, Grant Manley, a lot of players in that era were sponsored by them. They were one of the first people to sponsor Pokemon players. So this was like the pre-DDG era. Gotcha. Okay. Well, cool. This was fun. It's something that we're going to try to bounce back and forth on this. So it won't always just be John trying to quiz me. I'm going to come up with questions for him as well. And hopefully I can come up with some information that's as challenging and interesting as the questions that John posed for me this week. But that being said, we're going to jump now and look at some of the regional events that happened this weekend. There were two regional tournaments. Neither of them were NA, and I personally wasn't crossing the pond or going down south for either of these events, but we had events over in Dortmund, Germany, as well as down in Joinville. So the first thing we'll look at here are just some of the meta breakdown, meta statistics for Dortmund. And you know, this doesn't give you the full picture. This isn't just the day two statistics. So the first thing we may want to look at here are just the official stream graphics. Shout outs to Robin over at Limitless, who has compiled all of this information into a nice, easily digestible format, including the importing of the stream graphics from the stream. So you don't have to go hunt them down yourself anymore, which is a really neat touch and something that I just discovered today. So we look at, to my surprise, after the abysmal performance that it had in Baltimore as far as conversion rate goes, Raging Bolt managed to increase its popularity in the field and become the number one deck at 17%. Ty Charizard, and then we see the rise of Dragapult thanks to that sparkling crystal ace spec. Regidrago has a pretty big fall off. Lugia still sits roughly about where it was, still in the top five. Cardivore still hangs out in that, you know, low, like five to 8% range. And then we look at the best of the rest graphic. We see the appearance of Terrapagos, the only real breakout card aside from that sparkling crystal ace spec from this new set. Roaring Moon still hanging out, Maraudon still hanging out, other turbo decks. And then, of course, the contingent of small but loyal stall Snorlax players. And Ancient Box is still here for some reason. Those are probably just people that are hanging on, not really knowing what they want to trade. And so we jump over and we get to see how did those things transition into day two? And the big story, from my perspective, is that Terrapagos just kind of exploded and converted almost, I believe, 30-ish, 30 to 35% of the players that were playing Terrapagos converted into day two, giving themselves the lion's share of this day two meta percentage as the number one deck. Raging Bolt actually, interestingly, does convert fairly well here, still holding on at almost the same percentage it was at in day one. Charizard is a bit of a drop-off, Regidrago gets on the come-up along with Lugia, Dragapult falls off pretty hard. And then Gardevoir maintains itself almost exactly where it was percentage-wise, Snorlax jumps up a little bit, Iron Thorns jumps up a little bit, I believe previously it was in the unclassified category, Maraudon still maintains a low percentage, Banette jumps out of the unclassified category, this time paired with Gardevoir rather than Dusknoir, and then we see my favorite deck in the world, Pakia Dusknoir, make an appearance on the graphic as its own deck. So, John, what do you make of these, before we look at the overall results, what do you think of this day one to day two shift? I'm surprised that there was so little Terrapagos played day one. I thought, usually when you see a new set, everybody wants to play with a new card, and it's interesting that people are so reluctant to try to try something else. I remember when Palkia first came out, and there was the Australian tournament, where I think the top eight were all Palkia. And so it is interesting, you usually do have a significant advantage playing new cards that people aren't familiar with, they haven't tested the matchup as much, just because the cards haven't been out. So it is interesting that there's only a 5% meta share for that Terrapagos deck day one. But it is not too surprising that it does convert pretty well. You have that unexpected factor, and it has a pretty good power level. I mean, I know you like seeing that Dusknoir paired next to it. So it definitely, I think that's my biggest thing. And then going back to that first slide, looking at conversion rates, it is interesting to me that it's more of the same as what we've seen. And I was surprised that Radiant Bolt did convert as well as it did. Looking at the day one to day two from Baltimore, Raging Bolt, I think, basically fell off the face of the map. So we do see either the meta has gotten more favorable for Raging Bolt, or more top players might be picking it up. Or maybe just had a friendly environment, I guess, with all the Terrapagos, or with all, like, maybe more big basic decks like Lugia, like Dragapult. I could see that having a good Dragapult matchup. Sure. And I think that's, it might be better into that than, like, say, a Gardevoir or Ancient Box. So it is, I guess, maybe the meta was finally good for that deck moving into this tournament. Yeah, it's interesting to me that it didn't actually fall off harder. Historically, Raging Bolt has had a really bad Charizard matchup. I know that that has potentially shifted if the players were including Briar to kind of level things out a little bit. But with the falloff of Regidrago, which was something that Raging Bolt kind of held as a cornerstone positive matchup, or ideally positive matchup, having that go down, maybe it kind of does get replaced by the Terrapagos a little bit. I think the point you made about good players playing a deck, making it convert... really sticks out with the Tarapagos play, because we see players like the Schultz brothers, like Tord, like Grant Manley showing up with this Tarapagos deck, and probably, like you said, having experience and matchups that other people are unfamiliar with being able to convert this relatively powerful card into a position to allow themselves to make Day 2. And so if we want to go over now and look over at just the top eight results from this event, we see the interesting thing, we had this nice rule change from TPCI this season, where players from APAC or the TPC regions are able to actually receive invites if they win TPCI events, even though they will not receive championship points. And thus, with Ryuki Okada taking this event down with this Dragapult Dusk Noir deck, he's got himself a World's Invite now, where in any other previous season that wouldn't be the case. And that's honestly really cool to see. And this deck list is rather unique when we look at it here in just a second, and the other kind of big highlight thing here in this top eight bracket is that Rahul Reddy makes his third top cut appearance in a row at three consecutive major events. And then on top of that, he's playing the same list that he started piloting at Worlds. So three different events, two different formats, not a single card changed in this deck. Yeah, and I watched his VOD today, and he went over like his whole tournament run, and he talked about like he tried putting in some new stuff from the set. I think he tried, what was it, I think some the Ogre Pawn action. So he was using like the Teal Mask, or not Teal Mask, the Cornerstone Seal, and the Wellspring Mask, and trying that out on Lugia. And he was just like, you know, the more I kept playing it, the more I just wanted, like he wanted to go back to what he knew. He tried out some new decks, and he just came back to Lugia, and I can't honestly blame him. I mean, if it's the deck that got you to top eight, I mean respect that you're trying stuff out, because it is a new format. It's just smart to do that. Especially, I'm sure, he's got the great resource of having such a great testing group. Something that's, I think, very instrumental to the success of a lot of great players in this era right now. And you have that great resource, you want to like find something new, but, you know, kind of bring what got you there in some sense. Sure. You know, at what point do Bradner and the rest of the members of the testing group jump on this Lugia list, honestly? They've all been trying to force these Regidrago decks through, and, you know, they've had success here and there, but nothing that really matches Rahul's Lugia success. So maybe it's time to jump on board, guys. I think Lugia is a hard sell to most competitive players. Yeah, I mean, you and I, I feel, have the same kind of attitude about it, where we're just like, I don't feel like gambling to determine my fate at a tournament. I feel like Lugia can get that way. And we saw that in the finals of the regionals here, with Rahul going against Ryuki. And he had it, you know, game one was playable, but game two Lugia just bricked. And like, it was like classic Lugia syndrome of just like, yeah, it just looked like you were just playing a theme deck. And like, all the basic energies came out, all the Pokemon you can't play, you got the Aroma, like the Aroma flips didn't go your way, Mezza goes aflip, you know, all that kind of stuff. And it's just like, guess we lose. And that's, that's just a hard pill to swallow for a lot of players. Especially when like, you're traveling to a tournament in another country, and you're trying to like, position yourself to have a deep run. Are you really going to like leave it up to chance? And it's interesting that Rahul has made it. And I think he even said this, and his whole thing was just like, he's just gotten lucky. And he's like, I'm waiting for the wheels to fall off. And then we just go back to being like, that player that doesn't make day twos or whatever. But I think he's actually just, you know, he's just made a breakthrough. He's found the deck that keeps giving him consistent success. And we've seen that with other players. You know, we saw that with Jesse Parker last year with Maraida. We've seen it with Andrew Hedrick. Although he's, he's won it with a couple different decks. But we see those kind of, some players just find the deck that, you know, that they can succeed with, and that they can play better than anybody else. And they have that confidence to go into the room and say, it's my tournament to lose. And we can actually see that we can see that in this event, too. If we just go to the third place, and you look at Yellow Van Kampen with the Golden Goat, you know, Golden Goat's strongest warrior at this point, I would say. 100%. Yellow's been rocking Golden Goat for quite a long time, and having continued success. You know, no, no wins thus far, but a second at Dortmund last year. A third place here, you know, it's something you can't really complain about, especially with a deck that most people write off as a meme or, you know, tier two or whatever. It's definitely pretty cool to see. Yeah, it really is. It's, it's, I mean, he was fun to watch on stream, too. I don't know if you watched any of his games, but I think he was top four. Yeah, he did the whole, the whole make it rain motion. Yeah, yeah. And the casters loved it. And it's hard not to cheer for a guy like that, you know. He's got a lot of great energy. Moving down, we've got Stefan Ivanov playing the Palkia Dusknoir deck. Jan Housman, apologies if I butcher anybody's name, by the way, but with Raging Bolt, Steven Law on Iron Thorns. And there are some interesting things about these decks. We will pull up the list and go through them shortly. Glenn Bowens on Maridon, James DeBoer on Lugia. Tord was actually originally part of the top eight and lost in the asymmetrical cut to Ryuki, but Tord playing Turapagos Dusknoir. And I believe this asymmetrical cut actually went down to 11 or 12? I know it was more than nine. It might have been 12. So then we also have rounding out that cut, Ioan Barjazak on Regidrago, Tom Cedric Hynes on Raging Bolt, and Giorgio Gatti with the Dragonbolt Pidgeot deck. And so if we go through now, we can just pull up some of these deck lists for the top cut individual specifically. And let's start with the deck that won the event. We've got Ryuki Okada's Dragonbolt Dusknoir deck. And interestingly, Ryuki cuts the Pidgeot out here, thickens up the Dusknoir and Dragonbolt lines, and just says, I'm not going to get three different stage 2s out. I'm going to stick with these two, keep things as streamlined, consistent as possible, play the new additions that make this deck stronger in Crispin and Sparkling Crystal. Chooses to actually exclude Briar as the Temple of Sinnoh, which was probably pretty helpful in that Lugia matchup throughout the tournament. And just, we see the continued success of these, not continued success, rather, but the success of the alternative sort of stage 2 decks that come out of Japan, where they like to include these two copies of Rotom V as a major consistency tool, recognizing that, you know, you need to set up to play the game when you're playing something that's a stage 2 deck. There's a few other interesting things here. We've got the Tatsugiri. Japan's always been a big fan of that. If we go back and look at Kato Arai's Drifgardevoir deck from NAIC last year, on top of just a suite of consistency cards. I mean, when you cut out the extra stage 2s, you get the room to make your deck look more consistent. Who would have thought? Yeah. And I mean, not running Pidgeot is, I mean, you look at any other, I think it was this Ryuki and one other player at 22nd that's also from Japan. Sure. That were playing, they were playing. Oh, it was Kato. They were both playing the same list. And then they were the only Dragapult Dusknoir decks that made day two that were not running Pidgeot. And it is fascinating to see, you know, I think sometimes people like, oh, the Japanese players don't know what they're doing. They're just kind of doing their own thing or whatever. So it's reassuring. And it's cool in my mind to see a player come all the way from Japan and say, no, we know what we're doing. You guys, you know, you can build decks your own way and we have our own sense of stuff. We've run the second Rotom over a heavy ball or something like that. And I think that's really cool to see that there's innovation in the game, that there's different flavors of it. I wouldn't go so far as to say there's different play styles, but I mean, there's definitely different innovations going on in different parts of the world, which is really cool. Yeah, I definitely wouldn't call it a play style thing. I think that there are different deck building preferences between regions. And that, you know, really shows here how big of a difference it can make in your tournament run. We can pull up Rahul's list real quick. I'm sure everybody's seen it several times at this point. The same Lugia Archeops deck, 1-1 Chinchino line, with the Raikou, with the Earthen Vessel, with the basic Lightning. The list is good. Is this just the way we play Lugia right now? Like, is this how we should be playing it? It's hard to argue at this point. I would say I think if the meta stays the way it is now, I would be on board with that. I think that you could make an argument for making the Chinchino line thicker if the meta calls for it to be that way. Yeah, definitely. I'm not a Lugia expert by any means. I don't know what that meta would look like. I would want to hear Rahul's take on it. I mean, he obviously thought it was good enough going into this meta. And there's definitely a lot of flexibility with the second Lightning and the Raikou V. You have a lot of good stuff going into some matchups that you would have our time normally. It helps so much in the mirror. Helps so much against area zero, like a Palkia deck, anything like that. Having that Raikou, being able to just kind of thread easy knockouts on your opponent's side. Sure. We can pull up Yela's deck for the individuals that would be interested in this. If you are playing Goldengo, I would almost say assuredly that this is the way to play Goldengo. There are a couple of card counts here that, from the consistency fiend in me, are off-putting, like the single PokéStop. But I guess when you have three Cypher Maniacs, you can kind of get away with a call like that. And you're using it almost more as a counter stadium than anything, or just giving yourself the ability to kind of churn through and draw additional cards. I think the rest of this looks pretty par for the course for Goldengo at this point, honestly. This is interesting. There's no Super Rod. The only recovery is the Knight Stretchers. But yeah, everything else is kind of interesting. Yeah, I don't think there's anything that's revolutionary at this point. Six Water, four Lightning. Seems right. It just seems weird. It looks at my eyes like, oh, you're attacking with Metal Energy. You should be running more of those. But I think you definitely want to see more water early so you can discard it and use Palkia's ability when you need to. Absolutely. Yeah. If you need that Moonlight Shuriken, then you definitely need to have the waters dumped early. Right. Stéphane's list. I'm not going to spend a ton of time talking about this one either. If you go watch Episode 0, if you know, you know. But if you go watch Episode 0, you'll see I talk about this deck at length there. This is essentially the same list that we played in Baltimore. This has the Irida in place of the Rotom. And Stéphane is playing the quote unquote good Duskulls. I still don't own these Duskulls, so I will not be putting them in my deck. I don't think you're going to lose games by not owning them. I think that's right. I mean, sure. Like Pokemon players love that, don't they? I mean, you're min-maxing on the nichest of scenarios. And you know that actually, that absolutely, I will admit that could win or lose you some number of games in your tournament run. But I'm not sweating it at this point. The funny thing, the one thing I will say about this list is that it actually is the exact list that we had the night before Baltimore. And the minus one Irida plus one Rotom was a decision that we made that night. So somehow, independently, the French group that Stéphane led in choosing this deck list arrived at the exact same 60 as us on entirely different parts of the world. That's pretty cool to see that. Yeah, it is very cool. I don't think that Dusknoir matters as much in this because you're not running Psychic Energy. I think it does matter a little bit more in Dragapult, where you're able to attack with it and potentially confuse your opponents. Yeah, I could see that in either this or Banette Dusknoir. I think that the argument people make against the Shrouded Fable Duskull is if someone puts up a Mew with a Defiance Band, they can kill you in one hit. And I think if I'm in a matchup in a scenario where that is happening, I've probably already lost the game. They're putting a Mew up for you, like they're taking a one-price knockout and you're able to get a return KO on a two-pricer that has three energies attached to it. Usually three energies is a pretty steep commitment to a squishy two-pricer like that, so I'm like, okay, maybe I just bait them into taking that knockout and now I'm in a much better spot than I was the turn before. Or anyway, not to get bogged down in hypothetical scenarios. Jan brings out the evolved version of what was hyped going into Worlds of the Raging Bolt with Dusknoir, but also including the Briar from Stellar Crown. This also looks like a pretty stock Raging Bolt list at this point. I wasn't totally surprised to see people wanting to play this because of the Champions League results with Raging Bolt winning that event. I thought some of them might be scared off by how poorly it did in Baltimore, but it is a new format. You know, people want to add new things, try new things, and you know, it's Raging Bolt. It's pretty straightforward. You slam your cards, you do big damage. Yeah, do you like the Dusknoir in this? No, I actually don't think it really adds anything. Well, I think you kind of need it. Okay, sorry, I shouldn't say that. I shouldn't say that. I think it's, yeah, exactly. It's cute with the Briar, but 90% of the time your opponent's going to be on a 2-2-2 map against your deck anyway, so it really doesn't make that... that big of a difference. Right. Next up is Steven Law's Iron Thorns deck, which is relatively actually different and I'm not sure if it's in a good way. What do you think about this, the inclusion of non-Iron Thorns Pokemon in the Iron Thorns deck? I think it's a smart pivot. I think we've seen players adapt to being able to knock out Iron Thorns or like have an answer. I don't think it does enough to convince me that it's probably the way to go forward, but I honestly haven't tried it yet. I'm kind of curious if it does open up matchups, like maybe he's looking at his matchup spread and he's just like, oh, well, I have a hard time against Charizard if they get set up turn one or turn two before I can, for whatever reason. So maybe he puts in Mimikyu and Cornerstone Seal just to share that matchup up. So it is just like a meta call. And I think that's any good anti-meta player is gonna like read what's the expected meta going into the event and go from there. Yeah, but I don't know. I think it is kind of an interesting, like, does this make it better? Does it make it like a better deck to have more? I mean, it's kind of cool. You can attack with both of them with the legacy energy. So you can just kind of go solo, like Cornerstone Seal. Sure. And then like keep penny looping it potentially. Well, not keep penny looping it because you don't run Pal-Pad, but get some value out of it for sure with that energy. The thing that scares me are matchups where you do want to go straight Thorns and you open not Thorns, which is not a low percentage of the time. And then your opponent, until you find that penny, your opponent has the ability to gust out of your Thorns lock. That's the one thing that kind of puts me off for wanting to do that. I do like the nods of respect toward Terapagos in the inclusion of the Enhanced Hammer, the inclusion of the extra stadium bump for area zero under depths. But at the end of the day, you know, like you said, it's kind of a metacall deck, similar to how we saw the Neuvern deck pop up in Baltimore. I think Iron Thorns will continue to be that moving forward. And if we do continue to see Lugia be as successful as it has been, maybe Iron Thorns is a better play than people are giving it credit for. Yeah. Next up is another deck people kind of hyped up going into this event. Thanks to that area zero inclusion in this nice Terra Mewtwo, we see this Enhanced or Evolved Maridon list from Glenn Bowens. And this honestly still just kind of looks like a pretty stock Maridon list for Stellar Crown. That's an interesting thing. You get the extra Maridon, you get the extra Raikou. The Raichu is different, I will totally give him that. That is something that people have been cutting en masse, and now we see it kind of pop back in. One thing that I don't see here that I thought had the potential to be interesting would be either an extra copy of Zapdos, or I've also seen people including a 1-1 or 2-2 Regieleki VMAX in the deck to help you be able to one-hit KO things. So instead of the Raichu, either adding these extra damage modifiers, be able to hit those higher numbers on specific Pokemon. He does run a Vitality Band. I think that kind of accomplishes the same thing as that Zapdos. He's running, I think the interesting things are he's got a lot beefier of a Pokemon line, which makes a lot of sense with area zero. He still has like one state Academy at night, which I thought was interesting. So I guess he's not giving up on the whole, I can just make my generators guaranteed at least one energy, which is kind of cool. But I don't know how much value that is. I don't really know. But the Secret Box is what is fascinating to me. I guess when you have that option to get a different stadium with Secret Box, you can go Arvin for Secret Box, and then get Secret Box, get the stadium, get a tool, get an item card, so you can get your generator, the Academy at night, go ahead and do the whole combo, put up with the escape board or rescue board, sorry, something else. And then, so you have a little bit more guarantees. It doesn't just, it might not boost consistency as much, but it like boosts the strategic or it decreases various, I should say. So like you have a more guaranteed, like I just need one energy to get the KO here. And I don't wanna like have all my generators just be coin flips. So like the 15 energy is a little lower than what we've been seeing, I'd say, at Worlds and after Worlds at Baltimore. So I think you gotta kind of pivot strategies a little bit. You use Raikou V, which is like a less energy intensive attacker. So you don't necessarily use many energies, but you still have a hand centric, like iron hands centric gameplay. So you still need some energy hits early and often. So it's an interesting take on the list. It's a little bit different than what I've seen for some people. I think a lot of people were just playing Jesse's list, like minus a couple of cards and putting in the Mewtwo in the stadiums. So this definitely adds a little bit of a flair to that. So it's cool to see some innovation. Okay, yeah, I mean, that's totally fair. And something that I expect with some of the cards we have coming up, Surging Sparks, we get a nice, Mewtwo's Time in the Sun which is relatively short-lived since we do get a one retreat Electric Terra Pokemon coming out with the Pikachu EX. That'd be a nice upgrade to the deck. And I think like you called out, the Academy at Night is a little interesting here when with the decreased energy count, you wanna make your generators more consistent by making your board wider faster. So I would think that you almost always wanna have Area Zero in play early on. I guess maybe Academy at Night is more of a mid late game thing. But obviously it worked out for Glenn and congrats, top eight, no easy feat. Just real quick, you can always bump your own Area Zero with that stadium. And then if you've got a Bravery Charmed Iron Hands that just gets damaged by something for like 200, 220, you can then just clear all that damage off which is such a huge thing in that deck. So it gives you a little more strategy to work with. Yeah, that's fair, totally fair. I think extra stadium bumps is never a bad thing. I mean, maybe it also gives you a little bit more counterplay into that Terapagos matchup. We have James DeBoer on a more standard Lugia list. Still a slightly slimmed down Chachino line. Nobody's wanting to make that jump back up to three, three. The big interesting card here is kind of the slept on powerhouse of the format in my opinion, and that is Klefki. I think that if someone figures out the way to break this card and keep their deck consistent while doing it, they will probably win the next event. Personally, Klefki is a monster right now, especially into all these turbo decks. I mean, every stage two deck runs Rotom, runs Luminion. Almost every deck runs Fezendipity. A lot of these turbo decks, I mean, we see the Squawkability in James's deck. Squawkability has become a mainstay in Lugia. Squawkability is a guaranteed inclusion in all of the turbo decks. A lot of these Fast Dust Nord decks are playing Squawkability. You also shut down Fan Rotom in the Terapagos deck. Klefki is really, really strong, and I think it's being kind of underrated right now. Agreed. And it is interesting to see like we're moving, like now that we don't have a cardi-dominant meta, we're trying to put Klefki in different decks. Right. And we're seeing it in Lugia. We're seeing it, I mean, I don't know. I guess I haven't really seen it too many other places to be honest. No, and that's the problem. Yeah. A lot of decks don't have the ability to easily pivot into it on turn one because they're either running low energy counts or their starters have more than one retreat cost so it's hard for them to move into it. Or they're not a deck that wants to wait a turn and hide behind it so they don't really care. Yeah, and having the Thordon's really cool with Klefki because like Klefki is really, really good early game and then its value diminishes as the game goes on and you just need to get your attackers out. And now you have, okay, I can Thordon back out one of the Mencinos and evolve it into a Chinchino and then you run the Knight Striketrooper to combo with it too. So I think that's really, this is a cool list. Yeah, three Mysts, I think we're seeing a lot more Mysts coming into Lugia decks just as Dragapult comes into the format more. But yeah, I think everything else is pretty typical. Don't think there's anything too crazy that is like- Yeah, the only other thing that would jump out at me that I think, because I'm pretty sure Ruul has it, is that I think Lugia is a four boss deck at this point. Oh yeah, the three. Three bosses is kind of crazy. If I come back here, I mean, three boss has been standard for quite a while up until the past couple of formats, but yeah, Ruul has four boss here and that's how Lugia closes out 90% of its games. True. It's just bossing around the big thing to either take the knockout with a Bloodmoon Ursaluna or take a knockout with an Iron Hands or something to that effect. And being able to offset your price trade with Legacy and then follow up with that knockout is pretty important. Next, we get to look at our first Terapagos deck of the event and with Tord Reklev here running almost like a merge, I would say, of the kind of tank Terapagos with just the fast Dusknoir Terapagos decks. I'm personally not a fan of Bouffalant. I get that it's got some merit to being used for Mirror or for Charizard, which can be, you know, Mirror is obviously difficult. That's almost entirely a coin flip matchup as it oftentimes should be or would be. Bouffalant being able to offset that is kind of interesting, even though they can potentially just Dusknoir your Bouffalant and it doesn't really make a difference. Charizard, obviously it makes a much larger difference being able to let your Terapagos survive hits up until you've taken four prize cards. And, you know, that's a relatively big deal, but I'm not sure if it's worth the two spots in my opinion. A lot of times you don't have the bench space to put them down. Yeah. Or if one's prized, it just loses its value immediately. I don't think it's terrible. I mean, if they're, like if you, the play you said were in the Mirror, if they're using Dusknoir to KO your Bouffalant, that means they're not using Dusknoir to set up math on a two-prizer. So that's pretty good. And yeah, I think, I think there's, I think this is kind of standard tour practice of doing the one-one Pidgeot with a Thordon. We saw that in his Baltimore lists. He ran Pidgeot control, I think. Yeah. And so this is kind of a pivot version of that in some ways. There's some, no, there's not a lot of control aspects, but it's pretty aggressive looking. But you do have a countercatcher, which is nice. Yeah, I guess that makes sense. And then, yeah, the only recovery being the Knight Stretcher, which makes a lot of sense if you don't run basic energy. He's not running anything other than the four double turbo energy, which is, I think, smart. There's not any real threat of that coming back to bite you if your opponent plays the Sinnoh down, then you have the stadium response. So yeah, I think this list makes a lot of sense to me. It's able to butylize, or it's able to abuse the Blood Moon or Selina really well. And yeah, I don't know. I don't think that, this first Tord, it's like one of those things, like Tord always has that great quality where you might not know how to play a list, and then he plays a deck, and then you're like, okay, yeah, that's not a standard, because now we've determined that whatever Tord does is generally, he spent the most time prepping for this tournament. I'd say more, I mean, maybe, we don't know. I'm assuming, but he's put the effort in, put the time in to figure out the optimal list for the tournament. And I think this is pretty close to that. I think, yeah, you could make the argument, like, hey, maybe Bouffalant's not needed, or not optimal, but if he said, like, well, if I'm expecting a lot of Myr, if I'm expecting a lot of Charizard, and there was a good amount of Charizard at this tournament, then I think, yeah, it does help in those matchups, like you said. Yeah, I mean, like I said, there's some merit to the card at times. I think in your general matchup spread, it's not winning you more games than it's doing nothing, though. But we'll see moving forward, I guess. Yeah, for sure. We do see Regidrago pop up here. Oh, give me one second, John. You're good. There we go, okay. We do see Regidrago pop up here, played by Yuan Barjazak. This just looks like Regidrago. Yeah, no Goudra in this one. He's only running the two-rod, which I think Bradner was running for the longest time, and I think that's kind of become the popular way to do it. Running three Iona instead of that Goudra, I believe. Instead of two, right. Yeah, that's probably, like, the only real changes I've seen. I think a lot of players going into this tournament and at this tournament were cutting down to one Dragapult, but I kind of like, I like having the two. Like, it's, honestly, the attack you use, like 80% of the turns that you attack with Regidrago V-Star, and so, like, not having access to that turn two is so painful, and you just need, and just being able to discard it, like, from your opening hand or from your second hand with a Vessel, with an Ultra Ball, naturally, it's just so much better than, you know, sweating it, trying to find it with the V-Star ability, because that's not recommended. No, no, obviously you want to hold onto that as long as possible, but unfortunately, no Stellar Crown cards. Deck's not that interesting, in my opinion. If we can move on. We do see another copy of Raging Bolt coming in at the asymmetric portion of top. Cut, choosing to use Slyther, yeah, Slytherwing, right? Yeah, Slytherwing, rather than Sandy Shocks as the one prizer of choice. Better in the Iron Thorns matchup. Worse in almost every other matchup. I guess the other thing you'd call it is that it can, yes, exactly, it can one hit KO the turtle. I don't know how often that's coming up. You should generally be wanting to one hit KO the turtle with your raging bolt anyway. Yeah. I guess the interesting thing here is a lot of other people, like we saw the Champions League list did cut ultra ball completely. The other top eight list ran one ultra ball. A lot of people have been trying to cut that card down in the deck. And personally, that scares me. I've tried running a few games with raging bolt, despite the fact that I don't find it to be the most enjoyable deck to play. And I don't know how people set up when they only play four ball cards. It's just like, I don't see it. If you draw well enough, then hats off to you. Yeah. I think the Sinnoh is interesting. I guess just to help your Lugia matchup, that can be a challenging matchup if they're able to abuse weird air and abuse. Just playing around the legacy energy in general, shutting out gift, things like that. We also see the bravery charms here as a nod to try to improve your matchup against the Dust Noir decks. Yeah. But other than that, you know, pretty cool, yeah. And the last one we've got is another Dragapult deck, this time with Pidgeot, as is expected from most Western players. And, oh, but we do still see the kind of Japanese influence in the second rodent being included. So we've got the thinner Dust Noir line. Well, there's a Dracloak that was cut to fit in this 2-2 Pidgeot, 2-0-2, I should say. Still no Briar. League Headquarters is an interesting inclusion. Other than that, like, obviously the big things that made Dragapult work, we didn't really highlight this when we talked about the list earlier, but Crispin being added to the deck as a means of energy acceleration, as well as functioning as a pseudo energy search. You'd be able to fully power up a Phantom Dive in one turn, along with that Sparkling Crystal that you can Arven for. You know, the things that make Dragapult viable in this format when it wasn't viable as a pure Dragapult deck in previous formats are the fact that you can more easily get into your big attacker on turn two. Yeah. But a lot of this, I mean, does anything from this, I know that you play quite a few online events or monitor them pretty closely. Does this look pretty standard from those kind of results? Yeah, I'd say so. I don't think I've played much Dragapult, but yeah, I think it's so interesting to compare this list to what one. You look at like the Pokemon lines, because they're so much thinner, like 2-1-1 Dusknoir line, the 4-2-3 Dragapult line, was opposed to like the 4-3, I think 4-3-3 was the winning one. You get to see like where the cuts had to be made for the Pidgeot line. And like just running tests. No Radiant Alakazam? No, no Radiant Pokemon at all. Not even Radiant Charizard in this, which I think makes sense. I've heard a lot of Dragapult players complain about starting one of those two. And just not being able to play the game because of that. You know, you don't see any switch cards in this. So other than Rescue Board, which is just kind of a pseudo switch. So yeah, you don't really have any way to get it out of the active outside of attaching and retreating. So yeah, that could be really, really damaging. But yeah, I think this is pretty standard from what I've seen the last few weeks. Oh, so that'll round out Dortmund for us. Well, let's jump over to Joinville, which like I mentioned earlier, unfortunately wasn't streamed. Still had a relatively healthy number of players. 578 is, I believe, pretty standard for South American events that aren't ICs. And we see, you know, pretty big Charizard dominance as expected from Brazil. They generally have a pretty strong Charizard contingent. Raging Bull continues to be successful. Tarabagos converted fairly well. Regidrago was up a little bit. Snorlax was up a lot percentage-wise compared to Dortmund. Iron Thorns also being up there. Lugia took a bit of a hit, perhaps because that Iron Thorns presence was a little bit larger. Dragapult still being present, low percentage. Kloff making an appearance, and we'll get more into that in just a moment. Pagiot control showing up here. Some more Palkia decks, Roaring Moon, and rounding it out with a single lost box deck, which I believe is Sablezard. Yeah, and this tournament was basically, what is it, like a fourth or a fifth of the size of the one in Europe. It's only had 578 players versus 2,000-something for Dortmund. So yeah, we're definitely seeing the cuts a little more tighter, and I think that does make matchups more important. Like you said, there's always a Brazil contingent of playing Charizard, so that might factor into your decision to play an Iron Thorn. So to play an anti-meta, like Snorlax has a really good Charizard matchup. So I can see where some players were like, hey, these guys are always playing Charizard. We need to kind of figure something else out. So yeah, going into the whole breakdown here, that's kind of where you see some of these decks like the Cloth, the Snorlax, all of that come into play. Right. Now honestly, I'm actually not sure if there was an asymmetrical cut at this event, so for the sake of that, I'm just gonna look at top eight. We do see Lugia winning the event, piled by Yuriko Valencia. I'll look real quick while you're talking. Sure. Following that, we have Giovanni Sasso with another Tropicus Dusknoir deck. And the Cloth that I mentioned earlier, we have Alejandro Luciano Ejo coming in with Cloth Electrode, a deck that most people still consider to be a meme, but maybe has a place here because it's a fighting type that can one-hit KO Toropagos as a one-prizer. And if you've got a large Toropagos presence, maybe Cloth is the answer to that. Rounding out top four, we've got another Dusknoir Toropagos deck. Iron Thorns and Snorlax start off our top eight, followed by a Charizard Pidgeot, and rounding that out with another Raging Bolt deck. Yep, and Nika Galas did make the asymmetrical with the same match point as Antonio here. So we did have one more. So we had one playoff here, presumably it was Antonio versus Nika Galas. Okay. Yeah, I just wasn't sure if Antonio was eighth seed going into top cut. Yes. Actually, let me look. It's actually Giovanni Sasso. Okay, so it was a Toropagos Mirror in top, in the asymmetrical round. Yep, yep. So we'll start off. We've got the Lugia list that won the event, probably by Yuriko Valencia. And we see some of that Wellspring tech that you said Rahul had mentioned as a potential option in the deck, as well as the Thornton that we saw from the other top eight list from Dortmund. So there's kind of some cross-referencing here, some interplay that we don't see from everyone else. We don't see the inclusion of the Squawkabilly. We see Great Ball still being maintained in the deck. So there's some definite changes here I feel like without the Squawkabilly, I feel like you have a hard time discarding Archeops early consistently. Obviously still worked out for Yuriko here, but I'm not sure if that's correct. I think Squawkabilly is probably the play. It's interesting. I don't know that discarding chops is harder. It might be in some ways, but I can say that with the Great Balls, you definitely have better chances of getting chops in hand to do that. Sure. So that might've been the decision he made, or I think the goal of every Lugia player I've seen is just playing the game, right? If you're able to set up, you're the best deck in the room. You have the best just raw power out of any deck. So yeah, I think that's the idea with Squawkabilly is if you just have a Nest Ball, that just allows you to play the game because now you can Squawk. And even if you have to discard three energy, you're still doing something as opposed to not having a supportive return and just passing. Sure, sure. That's fair. That's fair. Like I said, the other thing to call out here is obviously the Wellspring Ochre Pawn gives you a sniping option, another legacy energy attacker to potentially Sob Trap somebody with a double turbo. That's kind of place. It's kind of something that people have always considered in or out of Lugia decks ever since it was released. Yeah, and you can get some cute little, the snipe attack, you know, when it does 120 to the active and 120 to the bench. So that's really, it comes up more than you would think, especially as people start to cut Manafee from their decks. Sure. Next up, we have the Tropicus Dusmar from Giovanni Sasso, which this list looks more like what I envision people bringing to these events this weekend. With a thicker Noctella line, I like the 101 Pidgeot in the deck a lot, especially if you have Thornton to back it up. I like three Duskull in these decks a lot. I think I would still like to see a Dusclops in here, but a lot of these numbers fit more in line with what I was expecting to see from these decks. The one thing that, the one takeaway I did have, we didn't really look at a lot of the other Tropicus lists from day two in Dortmund, but a lot of people made the decision to really, really slim down their supporter lines to the point that a lot of them were only running one copy of Professor's Research, maybe two Ionos, and then one of every other supporter, and some of them would play a Pal Pad to compensate for that, but you expect that you're gonna win a lot of your games within your first three, maybe four turns anyway, so you really don't need that many supporters, especially when you can just search for them with Noctella or Pidgeot. So seeing them be so thick here, I guess Giovanni really just wants to make sure that he can get into the game and set up as consistently as possible. Can't really blame somebody for doing that, but you see some of the concessions that were made, like the cutting of that Dusclops or the choice here to play Energy Lotto rather than Chloris Tenacity. I like that. Just wanted to commit that supporter line to Iono or Research for the turn instead, and just a little bit slimmed down on the consistency cards as far as Ball Search goes. I like the Vitality band in the deck. Yeah, I saw that. Either Vitality or Defiance, I think you play one of those band cards just to try to give yourself some sort of damage modifier to get over that 220 hump. 230, yeah. Right. Or get beyond that 220 cap. To get over the hump. Gotcha, gotcha. Yeah. Yeah, I think that some combination of this, I don't know if the perfect 60 has been found yet, but I think by Louisville, we may see it, maybe. Yeah, it's definitely like, if you're playing the deck, I definitely would go back and say, look at Tords, look at all the ones that were in top eight, top 16, and kind of just go from there and just start testing out different ideas and have like a notepad of like, hey, cut this, bring in this, cut this, bring in that, you know, and go from there. Right. Next up, we'll look at a lot of people's favorite deck. I know that our mutual friend, Ian, absolutely loves this deck. I don't know why, but Cloth Electrode, still trying to- How could you not like Cloth, dude? Still kicking around in 2024 somehow. And I think I said, like I said earlier when we were talking about this, the thing that you're taking advantage of now are that a lot of people expect a Charizard to pop back up. So you've got the Hasuyan Electrode V with the super effective glasses to be able to one-hit KO that. You have Cloth that takes advantage of a lot of these turbo decks, honestly, especially because of that binding Mochi. You can one-hit KO Ogre Pawns after Poison is accounted for. You one-hit KO anything weak to fighting. And you can sometimes donk some of these evolving decks with that Promo Petra run. So, I mean, Cloth's got some interesting options. The thing that scares me looking at this deck is just the sheer number of tool cards that you can play that could lead to you having totally unplayable hands. Yeah, it's 11 tools. It's a lot. Yeah. Yeah, it's a pile of cards for sure. It is just so wild to see when you put it in paper. You're running all these cards that are just goofy, dude. The Hasuyan, Radiant Hasuyan Sneazler, the Promo Petra run, the Brute Pawnette. I mean, they're all just like... I would expect this to be a league challenge, but here it is in the top four of regionals. And it has power. I mean, Cloth is a one-prize attacker that can hit for huge amounts of damage. Fighting weakness is really good right now. I know you know that playing Greninja EX, you found that out in Baltimore. And there's just so many cool plays you can do with this. If your opponent takes the knockout and it's still poisoned, you can put up the Petra run and kind of take cheesy KOs with that. And poison's kind of cool. If you get the knockout with poison as opposed to taking a knockout with damage, Fezendipity doesn't activate because it's going into your turn as opposed to on your opponent's turn. So you get a lot of cool play with that. So there's just some really interesting thoughts. Like, it's gonna be a fun deck. I think we'll see this kind of pop up from time to time. I don't think it'll ever be like a top four or five Metashare deck ever. No, I don't think so either. I think that a lot of Cloth success is going to depend pretty heavily on the success of Terapagos or other fighting weak cards. Because I think if you walk into a room full of Lugia, you're probably not having a good day. I can see that. Next up, we've got another Terapagos list. And this, am I? Okay, no, this is the same list. So fourth and second place, brand identical 60s. I have to imagine that they're testing partners. We already went over this deck though. It's pretty cool to see two people running the same 60 make top four in an event though. Yeah, very cool. It's a fun car ride home. Right? This is a more standard Iron Thorns deck. From Matthias here, we see the inclusion of the Enhanced Hammer from the Terapagos. Um... Yeah, other than that, we jump back to Primecatcher being the ace pack of choice. I think a lot of this just looks like... This is what I would expect Iron Thorns to be in this format. Three Cologne is interesting, actually. Oh, that is interesting. You're just like... Anything you can do, just the one-upmanship. Just keep leveling, yeah. But yeah, this looks very similar to the World's List from... Yeah. And that guy was from Chile, so that does make sense that we see a decent... Yeah, it's similar, the way that played out. Next up, we've got a heavy handheld fan. Snorlax stall list. I'm not a stall player by any means. I think the Chi-Yu is interesting right now. It might be a good call. It's played in almost every Snorlax... Or every Pidgeot control list. So yeah, it is interesting to see a Snorlax stall. I mean, it was played in like a Zool's List when he won Stockholm. He played Chi-Yu. So yeah, I think sometimes you need to close out the game a little faster than just the Misfortune Sisters... What is it? Yeah. Any of that. ...be a pretty standard fair Charizard deck. I know that there's been a lot of discussion this week for, is this the right direction to take Charizard? A lot of people are questioning, why are we thinning our Charizard lines down? Is Dusknoir actually good in this deck? I mean, we don't even see Briar in this list, so you can't even make the argument that you're trying to do prize shenanigans to make Briar function on the turn. So, I'm wondering... Thornton I totally understand the inclusion of, because you want to be able to recover a Charmander if they're all knocked out on a given turn, and still get a Charizard out. But if you're doing the bread and butter, the bread and butter, I want to get Charizard on turn 2, is the right way to do that by maximizing your consistency and playing 4 Charmander and 3 Charizard. I don't know. I haven't put a lot of time into it right now. I think it's something that's worth exploring, though. Yeah, 5 Fire is interesting. I don't think I've seen a count that low. I think it's mostly been 6. The Mist, I guess, is for Roaring Moon. And then the rest of it makes sense. Max Belt is interesting. Yeah. It's not unheard of in Charizard. I guess the logic is, if there's a lot of Terapagos, you're like, I have an answer for turn 1. Or turn 2, rather. Without having to use Dusknoir. So that's kind of nice. Rounding out top 8, we have our first Raging Bolt from Joinville. And this just looks like a straight, charmless Raging Bolt, except for the inclusion of Crispin, which I've seen people talk about here and there, as the 5th Sada for the deck. Also see the exclusion of a 1-Prizer. So this list is more so forcing your opponent to go to that 2-2-2 so you can use Briar every game if you want to. Yeah, this is the list I lost to in my cup. Oh, okay. So you're really familiar with it. Basically, I think Johnny ran the new Raging Bolt, basic non-EX. Johnny always has to put his own little spin on stuff. But yeah, he ran the Crispin as well. And he was just saying it's just a 5th Professor Sada's vitality. It's hard to argue with that. You just want to see energy. You just want to attack energy. You just want to see energy. You just want to attach energy every turn. That's all you want to do. Even if you're not getting that extra draw effect, you don't really need it too much once your hand gets built up to a certain size. Yeah. Yeah. I can get behind that. And then, like you said, rounding out our asymmetrical top cut, we've got another Tropicus Dusknoir. And this still looks relatively similar to the two lists that made top 4, aside from we've got the inclusion of the Jet Energy here. The Pidgeot line is thicker. The Noctowl line is thinner. I really am a fan of 4 Hoothoot in this deck. Yeah, if you're going to run that many, you might as well. Like, if you're not running any other… I guess you're running the Pidgeot still, so it's not unheard of. Yeah. So we've got, like I said, thinner Noctowl, thicker Pidgeot. Personally, I'm a fan of 4 Hoothoot, regardless of what your Noctowl count is. I think you could run a 4-2 and still effectively say, I'm going to discard this and Nightstretcher it back. Maybe that's a stretch. But I think 4-3 is a pretty good spot. 4-4 might be even better, just to be able to get around not having to discard it. But, you know, a lot of this, there's nothing really that stands out here as well. We've got the inclusion of that Jet Energy, I guess, is something that we could talk about real quick. A lot of people have been putting this in their Terapagos deck to give you a switch out, or to give your Fan Rodent the ability to take a prize on a Charmander or something on turn 2, rather than having to commit a Terapagos. So you give your opponent the situation where they have to present you with a Gust, in addition to taking out… Wow. Have to present you with a Gust if they want to follow up and take out a Terapagos as a response. I don't know. It's like one of those cards where I see it, and I'm like, it looks cool. I haven't really tested this deck as much as I want to. But, you know, it's one of those things like, does it really help your control matchup? Maybe. Does it really help, like… I don't know. Well, like, when is it really helping you win? Right. Because it doesn't really help you attack more. Yeah. Maybe like you said with the Rotom, it's kind of a cool play, but it definitely is like a supplemental. Like, if you're doing that, are you really wanting to do that? Or is it you're doing it because that's the only thing you have, you know? Sure. Like, if you had a double turbo, you would just rather be doing that with Terapagos? Like, you just mentioned control. The one argument I could see, and you'd have to kind of retool the supporters to make this work, but you could play like a Jet, a Penny, a Silene, and a Palpad to go through, like, I'm going to beat control with this deck, and I'm going to Jet up my Rotom or a Terapagos, and then Penny the Jet and the Terapagos back to my hand, and then I can Silene my Penny back in, and Palpad the Silene, and it's like, okay, cool. We've got our control matchup locked down. I don't know if they really need to go to that length to make that work, but there are definitely scenarios where the Jet can be helpful. I know that most people don't play it, though. Yeah. Yeah, it is an interesting thing to think. It's good to keep in mind. Like, as I was talking about, I forgot, like, yeah, Blood Moon, like, you can reset the attack on that. Sure, absolutely. With a, like, switch or a Prime Catcher, and then, you know, Jet Energy to back up for a game. So I think that's pretty good. Right. So, yeah, that closes out our two regionals for the weekend. The next thing that we wanted to do is transition into a segment that we're, at least for now, calling Time Capsule, where we're going to take a look back at some of the more retro decks, given that John and I are both old, and we're going to go back and start at the beginning of the Nintendo era. The deck that I've picked out for this week is Chris Fulop's 2004 second place World's Blaziken deck. And so for those of you who are unfamiliar with older decks or just retro Pokemon in general, you'll look at this list and it'll look really weird. There are a ton of supporters in here and not very many item cards. And how does this deck even work? And the thing that you'll eventually realize, if you ever actually get the chance to sit down and play with some of these older decks, games took a lot longer. The rules were a little bit different then as well. You could attack on turn one, but you couldn't play a supporter and things like that. So you would see things like this Dunsparce from the Sandstorm set be included as what we called starter Pokemon. And Dunsparce's attack would let you search for three basic Pokemon, put them on your bench, and then you could switch Dunsparce if you wanted to. Most of the time people just left it active. But that would let you go find two Torchics and a Skitty or two Torchics and an Electrike, something to help your deck get set up. And instead of our draw and search being powered by item cards, everything would either be onboard abilities for draw or using supporters to draw cards. And so we've got some supporters in this deck. We've got the Oracle, which functions exactly the same as Cypher Maniac's Codebreaking. That would be comboed with the Ruby Sapphire Delcatty's energy draw to allow you to draw three cards by discarding an energy from your hand. That energy would in turn be recovered by the Ruby Sapphire Blaze Against Fire starter ability, which functions very similarly to any host of abilities that we've seen throughout the game. We've got the Electrike from Dark Explorers. I'm sure that there's one that I'm blanking on. It's kind of like Psychic Embrace from... I don't know. For modern Pokemon, it's probably the most similar to Psychic Embrace, except you could only put it on a bench Pokemon and it wouldn't damage them. But I digress. To get around the fact that you could only put them on bench Pokemon, Brace included Team Aqua's Manectric. This is pretty much a mainstay in this deck, with the Power Shift Poke Power that would allow you to move energy attached to one of your Team Aqua Pokemon to any of your other Pokemon. So you would Fire Starter to your Manectric and move the energy from Manectric to your attacker for the turn, which would either oftentimes be the Rayquaza EX, which just gave you your big one-hit KO ability. Its attack is very similar to Raging Bolt's attack in that you would load up a bunch of energy on your board, blow all of the fires off, and one-hit KO whatever your opponent had active. Or you could attack with a Blaziken EX and use this Volcanic Ash attack, which would discard two fire energy to do 100 damage to any of your opponent's Pokemon. And while these damage numbers don't seem as impressive now when we look at some of the fully-evolved Stage 2 Pokemon from back in the day, you'd have a fully-evolved Stage 2 that your opponent had to take the time to figure their candy out or evolve manually up to, and they cap out at 100 HP. So you're knocking out a lot of things, not just little piddly one-prizers or basics. The other big inclusion for Chris's decklist at this time was the Belossom. I guess he had heard some rumblings, perhaps, of the Team Magma decks that Japan ended up bringing and winning worlds with and sought to counter that by including a Grass attacker, but I know that one of the other reasons was for I believe the Walrein matchup. It kind of offsets some math by being able to heal itself and having resistance to water. The Walrein deck could literally never KO this Pokemon. And it's something that, you know, innovations like that that you don't necessarily see all the time that can definitely pay off, especially when you have them show up at big tournaments like Worlds. One thing that I really wanted to call out here, and we don't get to see it too often nowadays, we did see it in Gardevoir two seasons ago before we had the rotation of the gosh, I'm blanking on what that ability was called the non-EX Gardevoir. Oh, the Shining Arcana. Thank you, Shining Arcana. I like when evolution lines are able to split between the two-prizer and non-two-prizer, and that's something that this deck does very well. I think that's really interesting. Just as a reminder for those that aren't too familiar with this format, Rare Candy has a very different text than what we're used to right now. Very true. So it plays a lot different. Honestly, if you look at it, the big thing that you may not notice at first is the exclusion of the clause that you cannot do at the turn the card that the Pokemon was put down. And so the thing that you were able to do was Rare Candy into stage twos on turn one, which in this deck isn't that big of a deal, but the fact that you could do it also the turn you put a card down meant that even if your opponent was able to wipe all of your Torchics off the board, you could Rare Candy out of stage two and still get your deck rolling from there. As I mentioned before, we don't have as much item-based search, so we had to go search out our Pokemon using the Strike and Run attack, or just by drawing them by using Oracle and Energy Draw to draw into Pokemon, or using cards like Steven's Advice, which is very similar to the current Morty's Conviction card. You just draw cards that include the number of Pokemon your opponent has in play. You can't use it if you have more than seven cards in your hand. We had Copycat. Hand sizes would often get very large in this format because Delcaddy was included in several decks, along with the Magneton from the EX Dragon set that would let you discard a card from your hand to put two Energies back into your hand and kind of worked in tandem with Delcaddy in a lot of lists to be able to discard a card, put Energy back in your hand, draw three cards, and you can see just from that that's plus four cards to your hand for no resource input as far as not playing your supporter for the turn. It's very powerful, but ends up giving you a giant glut of cards in your hand. Your opponent can say, okay, my hand's not very good. I'm going to Copycat, drop my hand, and draw eight cards. This deck's a lot of fun. It's very versatile. If you're going to be revisiting the format, I would definitely recommend picking this up. When we get into our next session of this segment, I think that we'll probably revisit another deck from this format, perhaps one of that Magma list that won the event, or maybe something else. We'll have to see. John's going to pick something interesting, I think. I'm not quite well-versed in this format, so it's awesome to see some of this stuff. I was just counting the Pokemon lineup as we're going over all this. We see, I think, 24 Pokemon in here. Almost a good two-fifths of your deck is Pokemon, I guess? Quick math, I'm sorry. A lot of that ends up being off the back of, like I said, there were starter Pokemon back in this format. We have four of this Dunsparce rather than including four Nest Ball in the deck. You get a nice trade-off in that regard. You look at this, the trainer section is so thin compared to a modern Pokemon deck that space has to go somewhere. In this list, it gets divvied up pretty healthily between the energy count. Yeah, it's very theme deck-like where you have the 20 Pokemon in the deck. It's a lot of fun. 2020 but yeah not quite you still have more Pokemon very thin comparatively to the modern form like standard format now and a pretty decent amount of energy I mean I think that as the game has evolved energy has gotten smaller Pokemon have often gotten smaller and trainers have just become more and more and more of a percentage of a decks makeup but hopefully that taught you something about the deck I know I rambled a little bit there it's kind of hard to touch on every single thing that you could with this deck without really covering the format as a whole so with that being said we're gonna kind of close out that close out this episode by just talking about what do we think of the results of those two regionals and how are they going to affect the upcoming Louisville regional here in North America it's a good question I think it's you know always fun to look at the first two tournaments coming into a new format to see what people come up with and my takeaways are like there really wasn't a whole lot of you know meta archetypes coming out of Stellar Crown we had Tarapagos and that's about it there right isn't really like we had Hydrapple being hyped up a little bit you know like Pokemon TCG live always gives you like cars to start out with at the start of the ladder for the new month or the new set that comes out and they gave you Tarapagos but then they like gave you a Galvantula deck and people were trying to build Hydrapple I mean it's just like it's one of those sets where I don't know feels like Obsidian Flames where there's like that one thing that's good and then the rest of it's just like bulk like and there's some you know it's not complete trash it's not complete garbage I don't think it's that it's a little too drastic to say that but like we saw that reflected in tournament results where most of the top eight decks other than Tarapagos all of them were stuff we've already seen before so I think as a new player coming into the game or continuing to play this game it definitely can be a little discouraging but I don't think that we've seen the end of this set we haven't definitely seen the end of this format I think like there's still innovation to be had within Tarapagos still innovation to have with a lot of these Dusknoir decks I'm seeing kind of the rise of those the innovation by that as people figure out what's like we looked at all these Dusknoir decks they're all running different Dusknoir lines they're like 3 1 2 2 0 2 3 0 2 1 1 1 2 1 1 like all these crazy like there's no like standard way to run it and I think you know that's kind of cool to me it's trying to figure out how does your deck go forward with the information that you have from these two tournaments and yeah I'm excited to see kind of the innovations that we can't see going into Louisville so my question if I just touched on Dusknoir my question to you is what's the best deck to partner with Dusknoir right now I know you were big into Palkia Dusknoir question well but do you think it's so I'll say do you think it's better than Tarapagos Dusknoir I'm gonna be totally biased in this answer but I do okay I do because I think the deck is more versatile overall sure I think that Tarapagos does one thing it does that thing very well and I think that it being able to take advantage of this new Noctowl engine I know that you mentioned a lot of the marquee cards in the set the EX's were kind of more unfortunately bulk cards they're just kind of there they're shiny they're not very good but this is a very support heavy set and we see that Noctowl engine being added with the Jewelseeker Noctowl with the Fan Rotom with the Area Zero Under Depths to let you go wide with all these tarot Pokemon and the card that they want to support with all that is Tarapagos and being able to attack for a single energy card is very you know beneficial being able to thin your deck down because you only have to include three or four energy cards so you can fit all these other things in getting access to Pidgeot is very nice but I think what the deck lacks that the Palkia deck has are it does the one thing it only hits your active unless I'm popping a Dusknoir to hit your bench whereas with Palkia you can attack for multiple types so you can hit multiple weaknesses you have the ability to hit bench Pokemon either with the Terra Greninja EX or with Radiant Greninja and if you're playing against an Area Zero deck you can just hit huge numbers of Palkia especially if you get to activate that Area Zero by Rare Candying out the Greninja EX I think in a lot of ways it ends up being potentially more high rolly and maybe it's a little bit less consistent because you're having to use Pokestop as part of your engine rather than using Noctowl but I think the ceiling of the deck is higher that being said I think it's going to have a lower play rate because a lot of top players don't like to play high what they would consider high roll decks they would rather play the consistent thing so they're going to play like your Regidragos or your Terrapagos or you know back when it was more powerful they would play Charizard because they know they have confidence that they can do the thing and they memorize their flowchart or their lines of play to where they can do the same thing every time without having to rely on any level of randomization whatsoever you know a lot of top players tend to shy away from randomization if people hate coin flip cards because they feel like they want to control the outcome of their game and I think a lot of times Pokestop kind of fits into that category as well. Did it surprise you to see Stefan Ivanoff playing it in top 4? Um I thought it was really interesting that the list was as close to what we arrived at but did it surprise me no I think the decks very powerful I did it if anything it made me more excited than anything I was super hyped when Tuan was on stream and day one and then to find out and it also kind of didn't surprise me when I found out that Tuan was testing with Stefan that Stefan would arrive at a somewhat similar list at least because I imagine he started at the same base that I did by discovering Hare's list from Japan and Tuan's got a lot of Japanese contacts does a lot of translations for the community I think alternate formats yeah I know he's big on expanded yeah so it doesn't surprise me that he's trying to innovate with off-the-wall kind of stuff like he's more comfortable doing crazy stuff than the average player so it kind of makes sense a little bit but just kind of going from Guardia Worlds to now using the Dusknoir engine I think was kind of cool to see yeah the one thing I will say like I said I don't think that Palkia is going to see a big spike in played because of Stefan's result I think more people would gravitate toward the Terrapagos decks because you saw more big-name players playing them even though the Palkia deck did finish higher because they're gonna say oh well a lot of it's gonna ride on the back of Tord played this deck and it also it coming in second at Joinville is gonna play into people's minds as well I do think we're gonna see a big spike in Terrapagos which also means that we should see a big spike I feel in Palkia because I feel like especially with that Terra Greninja EX it's got a lot of good plays into Terrapagos being able to do something like Mirage Barrage and take three or more prizes in a given turn is really hard to not want to do but we could see some response from some of these Terrapagos decks being able to potentially block some of those plays in other ways yeah yeah it's a it's a it's a cool question I definitely want to see how like global meta shakes out I definitely will expect more Terrapagos than Palkia Dusknoir even if there's a higher power level I think yeah people just like you said aren't afraid or are not afraid but people don't like Pokéstop decks all that much and I get it just feels crappy to like I mean I guess people like Raging Bolt but top players don't right anyway all right the next question I had for you so what decks are you looking forward to playing now that you see in these results like you have an hour between tasks and you have to boot up live what deck are you playing after I probably still just jamming Palkia Dusknoir I haven't I haven't put it down I've been just trying different cards in the deck honestly if you if I if I pull up my TCG live deck roster I think I have eight variations of the deck built and most of the obviously they're only different by like one or two cards but just different things just trying things here and there that's a lot of fun but I'm gonna turn that back around I'm gonna turn that back around to you then what do you want to play most following these two events I mean the first deck I saw I love the Dragapult deck by Ryuki I definitely want to play that I think I watched a little bit of his little stream today he's playing that and I'm definitely like oh yeah let me get my lines figured out with that I'm just having the more like you know having it's a little more you have to get your combo pieces you don't have Pidgeot so you have to kind of draw into stuff and get your work handy and find your ways to like win so it's a little more thought-intensive I say then just quick search get whatever you need to win the game sure but I think that's cool I think that rewards good sequencing good play I'm excited to play that and I'll probably build cloth at some point just have fun I might build it for like a league deck and you know bring it to Pokemon League and kind of if a new player wants to come and play against cloth that's always fun you know they're like boys like anytime you're using status conditions and the TCG I think that makes it fun yeah that's true that's true you're getting and you get to like the supplemental damage from a suey instincts or from the Petra promo so it's a fun little I mean it's not little but it's a fun deck for sure cool well hey well we'd love to hear from you what decks following these two events are you interested in playing so let us know down in the comments of this episode or we'll have a link to the discord where you could come reach out to us and interact with us if that's something you're interested in doing and with that being said John I think that we've kind of covered everything we wanted to cover this week did you have any final thoughts before we close things out no thanks for doing a great podcast with me I'm excited to keep doing this in the future learn a lot of cool retro stuff and kind of have some good moments talking some segments I want to feature in the future I want to look at the CP leaderboard for North America I've been keeping track of that just teasing that so definitely be on the lookout for that and then lead up to Louisville hopefully we'll get an episode up before Louisville going into the meta for that and then going into the CP leaderboard and all the implications from the last few months it's you know the end of the season will be here before you know it and it's always cool to keep kind of track of who's doing what and how they're moving out of the shaken so sure absolutely keep it going have a little venture on the battle frontier sounds great to me so hey look forward to that and like John said we'll look forward to seeing you on our next adventure in the battle frontier