Episode 15: The Surging Sparks Meta is..... Evolving?

Hello and welcome back to the Battle Frontier podcast where we aim to help you level up in your journey as a competitive Pokemon TCG player. I'm Aaron Curry. Here with me as always is my co-host John Orgel. This week, we're going to be going over the results from the Rio de Janeiro and Birmingham Regionals this past weekend. We're going to take a quick dip into our Blaine Squadron. We're going to take a quick dip into our Blaine's Quiz Show segment, and then we will just close things out simply going over our expectations for San Antonio, where John will be in attendance as a judge. So, before we get into everything though, John, how did you do this week? What did you get up to? This week, I didn't do too, too much Pokemon. Me and some friends went up to the Air and Space Museum for the weekend, right outside of the Dulles Airport in Northern Virginia. We went to a couple of cool, like a Turkish cafe and a really good Chinese restaurant. So, I just had a fun little kind of get out of town before I travel for Pokemon this coming weekend. Sure. I did build one of the decks we're going to talk about tonight and tested it against our Chaludon. And so, that was good. I think it helps. It always helps as a judge to get an idea of how top meta decks are piloted and how they work. That way, when you're watching for game interactions, you have an idea of what exactly could go wrong or what the deck's trying to do. And that way, you can just do a better job steering the ship kind of thing. Yeah, for sure. Other than that, not too, too much. I started working out again. So, that was tough. Like so many people, New Year's resolutions, I was like, oh, I need to get fit again. So, I used AI to help me with a workout plan. Okay. I mean, I don't love AI. I definitely hate AI art, but I think it's got its uses. Oh, absolutely. Like with workout plans, it's really helpful because I don't have that kind of... I mean, most stuff's stuck behind a paywall or whatever. So, I used that and it was effective, but it definitely made me more sore than I've been in a long time. So, trying to just get back into the swing of things with that. But yeah, that's about it. It's funny you say that because I'm actually right there with you. So, at the start of this portion of baseball season for my son, his coach gave the whole team a little workout sheet. And he's eight, and it's a bit more than what I would expect to have eight-year-olds doing. And I mean, at the end of the day, it's just kind of basic sports strength and conditioning, like lunges, planks, squats, etc. So, he's doing stuff all just with body weight, just giving kids that young shouldn't be handling weights yet. Sure. So, I'm doing the workouts with him, but doing everything, adding weights to things and jumping in from working out like maybe once a week to doing a scheduled regimen that's supposed to be like there's a Monday, Wednesday, Friday section and a Tuesday, Thursday. And it's a bit more than I was expecting. I woke up this morning and I was like, oh, I didn't think I was going to be this sore, but here I am. And just struggling with doing a lot of stuff yesterday and being like, oof, I can definitely tell that I'm in my 30s. Yeah, dude. I mean, but that's the thing. I know we're both pushing our 30s now. And if you're not working out, you're definitely feeling it. Like, dude, I get out of breath tying my shoes sometimes or going up a flight of stairs. So, I was just like, I need to do something about this. So, yeah, you either use it or lose it, I guess. Absolutely. So, we did that. Then just kind of did some board game night stuff over with one of my wife's sisters and her family. What board games do you guys play? We played, it's actually a card game. And you just use like regular decks of playing cards. It's called NERTS. And the way you set that up is you just like everybody's got their own deck of cards and your deck of like everyone's deck has to have a separate unique card back. So, you can identify them when you're doing like points at the end. But you set it up so that you have like one small pile and a big pile. And I think you've got like 13 cards in the small pile, but you're essentially playing solitaire. Only you can move things up, ace up to king out in like the middle of the board is like a community thing. And as soon as anyone gets an ace, they start a pile and anyone can play on the pile and everyone's playing at the same time. So, you're just kind of trying to like, there's like an ace of diamonds out and three people have a two ready to go. You're all trying to like whoever slaps their two down first gets it in there and everyone else is like, but it's fun. It's fun for sure. And when you're all done, you like just count up how many cards were you able to put out into the big like community space and how many you subtract however many cards you have left in your small pile. And so, there's a couple different like moving parts there, but it's just a fun like thing that you can do without any crazy moving parts or pieces and just go buy a few decks of cards and you can do it wherever. Cool. That sounds fun. For sure. For sure. Then, did the Pokemon Pocket has a new like win streak event going right now. I think I'm pretty sure there's no official confirmation of this yet, but they put out a statement that trading is supposed to come before the end of this month and the new set I believe is also supposed to drop before the end of this month. But we have no details about it yet just that it's supposed to come out and we've got, you know, just under 10 days left in the month. As of posting this this week. So, I think that we are very close to that news. It'll probably come out next week and I expect that it's going to be a lot of rumors are that it's going to be Johto themed. So, that'll be really cool. I know a lot of people love Gen 2. And it'll continue to fuel the craze of what we're seeing with Prismatic Evolutions and already with Journey together. Yeah, man. I pulled my first immersive EX card. Okay. From Pocket and then I actually this, I think the same day or the next day I pulled another one. So, I got like, I got, I think I got the Mew. No, it wasn't the Mew. It was, I got a Charizard and what is it? So, the four regular ones. Oh, Celebi. Celebi EX. So, I got the Celebi EX and then I'm like, okay, cool. I'll move back over to the main Genetic Apex. Then I pulled Charizard and I'm like, this is sick. Nice. I think as much as like, I've kind of cooled off on Pocket playing it every day. I still open my packs, but I don't like grind out games anymore. Well, that's the nice thing is you don't have to. Yeah. It is something where if you're like, I'm not feeling this right now. Like, it's boring. There's too much luck in this. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You can still just open the packs and look at that. Like, potential dopamine hit if you hit the cool thing. Nah, yeah. So, I was fiending for some dopamine and definitely hit a little bit. Especially when you couldn't get your Prismatic Evolutions last week. Oh, I lucked out thankfully. Oh, really? The card store I judge at. Shout outs to Unplugged Game Cafe. They were nice enough to hold their product for people that participated in League. Oh, wow. Including holding a box for me as a judge. So, I was able to buy it from them. Did you rip it? For not too much over... Yeah, dude. I don't hold... I have some sealed product in my corner from judge support, but I am not like a reseller or a hoarder at all. Sure. Like, life is too short to hoard more than like a case or two cases of sealed in my mind. But, no shame on anybody that does. I get it. Like, it's cool to have like your, you know, collection of ETBs. ETBs are kind of cool to hold on to. Like, the artworks on the box was pretty sick. Yeah, I don't want to put any shame on anybody that's doing it. But, that's just not me. And, yeah, I ripped it and I didn't really pull too much. I have the hits right here actually. I was looking through it. He's about to pull out an Umbreon, guys. All you listeners, John is just sandbagging me. The best hits were the... Just hold it up, I guess. The Ogre Pawn. Got a Briar. I love the texturing. Yeah, it's pretty cool. The texturing on all the Pokeball cards is really cool. So, the Briar with the Pokeball. The Treasure Tracker A-Spec. Gotta love that. And, this was like the big hit. Oh, nice. The Mela. Yeah, the Mela school kid version. So, I think those are the big ones. I got a couple of other Pokeballs, but nothing too crazy. No Badoos. No Badoos. No Rigid Gigas. I was a little bummed out. I thought, hopefully it's uncommon. Oh, it is. The Gigas is... I think they're both commons, actually. And, Gigas has already dropped to under a quarter each on TCG player. I'm still waiting. Badoo is still over a dollar, unfortunately. Yeah, I can see that. Crazy to me. But, at the same time, I guess it is what it is. At some point, you have to bite the bullet. And, get a couple of them before an event that I'm going to play it at. Yeah. Yeah. That's just the reality of it, I guess. Just getting it. I mean, if you were to wait, it would probably come down a lot more. But, that's the thing. There's a... At some point, you just gotta be like, Alright, I'm going to have to play with this card. And, I think everybody's just... You know, just find a collector, I guess. And, maybe bug them for one or whatever. So, I don't know. So, I think I told you... Oh, no. I told you over text. So, I found out... I had to go to Target on Friday, anyway, to pick up a present for a birthday party that we went to this weekend. And, it was Friday morning. Like, maybe 20 minutes after Target had opened. And, apparently, I found out they had gotten their card stocked and put everything out on Thursday. And, it all got cleaned out then. But, the story that I heard from one of my locals is that somebody just followed the distributor, or, I guess, whoever was stocking product around the county to every Walmart and Target that they stopped at on their route and just bought basically everything they put out at every single store. That's so scummy. So, I do feel bad for those people that ETB prices have plummeted. I mean, they're obviously still over MSRP. It probably will be for a good while. But, I'm hoping that they get stuck with all of that product. Yeah. But, like, that's just... That's the rub, right? It feels bad, for sure. For anyone not being able to go get it. Or, for people who aren't... Even if you're not a player. If you're just, like, a kid going into the store and you're excited about getting some Pokemon cards with your allowance and that Pokemon section is totally barren. That feels awful. Yeah. Like, I went over to Target Saturday just to pick up something random. And, I looked over at the Pokemon... Like, the trading card section. And, it's like, everything that's not Pokemon is stocked. And then, like, Pokemon is gone. Desolate. Everything is gone. Not even, like... You know, everything. Like, just random pack busters of... Yeah. All the hangar backs or whatever they call them. I don't know. So, it's really... It's a sad state to be in. But, you know, it'll level out, I think. There's no reason to think that the scarcity market is... Like, the number of new collectors coming in will get matched by the amount of product being printed. There's no doubt in that. Yeah. Eventually. I mean, this set will probably still be more successful and more popular than Shining Fates was. But, hopefully, at some point, hopefully, we'll have that level of printing and product production that people will be able to get their hands on packs. But, anyway, we're not going to, you know, complain about Prismatic Evolutions and the printing process or lack of product anymore. No, we did that enough last time. We can jump on over and look at some results from the tournaments this weekend. Over in Birmingham, we'll start with... And some interesting developments, one could say. Some kind of more expected things here. So, looking at Day 1's meta percentage to begin with. Regidrago, Charizard, and Raging Bolt were our top 3 decks at 13%, 10%, and 7% respectively. One of the big surprises... We kind of talked about this deck being on the rise, but Archeloudon coming up in 4th place with 6% of people, or 130 players, playing this into Day 1. That was then matched by Gardevoir and almost matched by Iron Thorn's Dragapult. But, still, Archeloudon really kind of making a name for itself after winning Champions League and after getting a big surge in online presence over the past few weeks. It was a bit of a surprise to see that this many people were confident enough in the deck to bring it. But we can look forward and see just the rest of Day 1. We also had Goldengo, Roaring Moon, a little bit of a Tarapagos Noctowl. And we're going to come back to this archetype in particular, or this heading on the official graphic, because it's notably combining the regular Tarapagos decks, like the Tarapagos Dusknoir, with the Palkia Tarapagos decks that obviously still feature Noctowl, but they, for whatever reason, have not delineated Tarapagos Noctowl as a standalone deck from Palkia Noctowl. And I think some of that has to do with just the algorithm that they use to sort these. I don't think it's all done manually. But then we've got Lugia at 4%, Rhydon at 4%, and Cloth Tarapagos at 3%. And then if we look forward and look at that Day 2 conversion, Regidrago maintains its presence at 14%. Archeloudon makes a big jump from that 6% mark up to 10% of Day 2. Charizard stays roughly where it was. That Tarapagos contingent, which once again includes both Tarapagos Dusknoir and Palkia Noctowl Tarapagos, jumps up to 9%. Gardevoir goes up to 8%. Lugia makes a big jump as well, up to 7%. Polt Thorns and Raging Bolt both kind of fell off a little bit. Cloth stayed right where it was. And then we just kind of rounded things out with Roaring Moon, Lost Box, and Snorlax. But I think the big thing here, looking at Day 2, is that we still see Regidrago being number one, which is kind of what everyone expects when you're looking at the Surging Sparks format. But I think Archeloudon kind of coming out of nowhere and being a below-best-of-the-rest deck prior to this weekend in official in-person tournaments, all of a sudden being the second most popular deck. deck in Day 2 has to definitely be something that I would expect to carry forward into future events, unless everyone just suddenly stops playing the decks like Regidrago that this deck is expected to be good into. It is cool seeing something from Surging Sparks finally make like a Day 2 graphic. For sure. Other than I think we saw Lost Box with Pikachu EX right when the set came out, but this is like okay, now we've moved past like the automatic include into an already meta deck. We've kind of, you know, that's always how you see a format develop is you'll see like the auto include first and then the standalone kind of deck that takes a lot longer to craft and build come up behind that. We saw like kind of as a reaction to Archer Luton doing really well in Japan, people were testing that more and more, started to get more play on online events. And then yeah, we see it here kind of reflect all that development, you know, it's it is I don't know. I know people like are saying that this is a stale format and it's played out. But I think the results from this tournament, and we'll get into the final results. I think Speak Otherwise, like these results are way different than we saw for Toronto. Not even that long ago. I mean, Charizard is kind of having a resurgence right now. And then yeah, Archer Luton came up, Terapagos is showing its strength. And I mean, Drago is in first, but it's not like a 20% or 24% meta share. It's pretty, pretty wide. You know, we're seeing after that 14, it's 10, 9, 9, 8, 7, 7, 6, you know, it's it's spread. So which is I think, an indication of a healthy meta game. I know some people, I think people just are getting tired of it, like as rightfully so, but it is counter to that it is still just a healthy meta game, where able where you're able to play like your favorite deck or a large variety of decks and still do well. For sure, for sure. I think notably, like the reason that we see kind of a continued success from Charizard, whereas in a lot of other events, we've seen a drop off is the fact that Charizard does have a pretty good Archer Luton matchup. True. Similarly, I think that current builds of Lugia V-Star that have like a 2-2 or sometimes even thicker Shichino line also have a relatively good Archer Luton matchup and can give the deck kind of a hard time. So both of those seeing higher numbers of play isn't really all that surprising to me. But we can go ahead and jump over and look at what decks made our top eight and kind of making a, you know, return to form here in the European circuit is Aajvind and I cannot for the life of me remember how to pronounce his last name, so I'm not going to attempt it. But with his Pokestop Charizard deck, I think it's Sven Hovold, I'm gonna miss. I'll take your word for it. Yeah, right. You know, generally being, you know, par for the course Charizard, except Aajvind really loves this copy of Pokestop. Slimmed it down from the two copies that were in his last build. But this one Pokestop definitely came up huge for him this weekend when we saw in the final game of the series ripping two Rare Candies on his second turn to be able to kind of make this explosive Thornton play happen, allowed him to Thornton into a Pidgey, Rare Candy into Pidgey, got Rare Candy into Charizard, and just put his opponent on the back foot. I still don't know if I would consider this to be good moving forward. But I think that it just demonstrates that Charizard is a deck that is strong enough that if you put in a card that is as powerful in terms of rostering as Pokestop, if it hits for you, you're going to just convert even better. For sure. I mean, I can, I don't know, I think he got laughed at when he, like, on the stream for whatever stock was a stock, not Stockholm. The last EU regional, he got he got kind of like, not like, I mean, he, he got Yeah, kind of memed on for playing too. Sure. And they just like whiffing so hard last time. But I think his logic was, well, Arvind, like, I don't really need supporters, I need to, if I need that pop off turn two, or just to dig for one last piece, Pokestop is allowing to do that. And I need a counter stadium. As Charizard, you want to be able to counter some of the, you know, tool jammers or the area zero under depths at some point. And I think Pokestop accomplishes that a little bit better than some of the other supporters we see Charizard play once in a while. I don't even know what Charizard is playing besides. I mean, you still see Collapsed, I've seen some of the lists that do play Jamming Tower. Every once in a while, you'll see Lost City, but that's probably not very, yeah. But uh, I mean, to me, there's not a whole lot of surprises. It's pretty similar to the list he ran the last tournament he played. You know, Unfair Stamp is seeming to be the go to a spec for Charizard. And I think that's fair. I think we've seen it overtake Prime Catcher. And Unfair Stamp just allows you to like Charizard wants to come back. And it's probably the best comeback deck in this format. There's so many times where I've played against Charizard and if you're taking that early prize against Charizard, it's such a trap. You know, like you hit into a 70 prize hit point Pokemon with your big EX and then they're just like, okay, cool. Now I'm gonna Defiance Band 240 knockout whatever you attacked with and it's like, oh, you have no response for 330 hit point Behemoth in the active spot and you're just kind of, you're just stuck there. And now they have the prize lead. They have Pidgeot set up so they can get whatever they need. And then even more, like more scary than trying to respond to a 330 hit point Pokemon in the active spot is being Unfair Stamped and then trying to respond to a 330 hit point Pokemon in the active. Like it just, it feels like a impossible task for so many decks. So I think that's kind of where the Charizard deck gets its strength from is just the flexibility and the ability to basically do whatever it wants and have so many different ways to close out games as, I mean, you really only have two attackers in this deck. You've got Radzard and then Charizard EX and you can attack with Pidgeot and I guess, you know, Fezendipity if you have to, but Charizard, Radzard, and that's about it. But you would Briar with, and more importantly with Dusknoir, you're able to just control the tempo, control the game and play how you want to. And like, there's so many lines, like watching, I think it's Ovend, the caster said Ovend, so I'm going to assume that. But seeing Ovend, like just have so many options and then Thornton, you know, like there was that, I think the pivotal turn you mentioned where he Pokestop for two rare candies. He had Thornton in hand and his opponent had overextended using Prime Catcher to bring up a knockout, his only Pidgey in play. He went Thornton, the Lumineon he had in play. So he got rid of that threat liability and then put Pidgey back in play, rare candied into Pidgeot EX and then quick search Charizard and you get the idea. Like it just, it just got to the point where it's just like, this is, this is goofy. This is insane. Like it doesn't feel like a fair fight, you know, when your opponent can just do something like that and all that, all that effort and work you put into and you know, his opponent had a reasonable good turn, but it just didn't matter. Like it's just, it's so just unfair sometimes. I mean, I know that's unfair stamp that's in the name of the card, but that's how it feels. It just doesn't seem like you can do anything after playing against it. Yeah. I think the one thing that I would like to see if like, if you're focusing hardcore, like Pokestop is going to be your stadium choice. And if you're actually planning to use it or healthy amount of times while you're playing with the deck, I think that I'd like to see an additional copy of Knight Stretcher. Like obviously you do still have the two copies of Super Rod, but I think that being able to utilize your Pokestop as a, almost a means of Pokemon search in a way, if you have that extra copy of Knight Stretcher would be at least an interesting way to play out of things and allow you to, if you do like Thornton or Lumineon, suddenly you can do Stretcher for Lumineon to go get it back into play or if you Thornton away or not Thornton, Pokestop away a Dusknoir piece or just one of your evolutions, you can go recover it without having to burn a Super Rod. But I don't know. It's interesting. It's something that's thought provoking to say the least, but I think a deck that's a bit... That would be good to test. A deck that's a bit more thought provoking, just given the variety of decisions that you get to make is this Palkia Noctowl deck. And I know this is the deck that you were alluding to in our intro, John. So why don't you talk us through your experience of playing this deck this week? So this deck popped up, I want to say in the interim between Toronto and Birmingham. We saw this deck pop up in the online scene and I picked it up a little bit ago and played it on TCG Live. It plays a lot different than regular Terapagos. It's a little less aggressive, but it has more options. You're able to use Radiant Greninja and you're able to reuse Radiant Greninja with the Glass Trumpet energy switch and you can attach an energy from hand to power it back up. But there's just a lot of options. And this kind of... Like I was talking with Aaron before the cast, this reminds me a lot of Palkia with Inteleon before we saw Rotation last year. That deck had just so much versatility with shady dealings. So in this case, the Noctowl acts a lot like those Inteleons where we see once you get... Oftentimes the turn one is just getting hoot, hoot, hoot, hoot, putting a bunch of one-prizers in play. And then that second turn, you're just able to pop off and do basically whatever you want to do. You get the Terapagos and then fill your bench up, swing for massive amounts of damage. And potentially if you are... It depends on the matchup what you're going up against, but you can start abusing Radiant Greninja and against Charizard, a turn to Radiant Greninja is really powerful. You run Cologne. You run so many different options to disrupt. We saw lists. We saw some play Judge. We saw some obviously play Iona, but you have a lot of ways to kind of also... It doesn't run Dusknoir, but you're able to control the tempo with Greninja. And then you kind of... 230 is a hard number to knock out for a lot of decks. It has a really good Regidrago matchup. They have a hard time kind of keeping up with you. You're able to take the prize advantage. I think if you're a smart player, you can really just use the deck's setup mechanics to kind of just make sure you don't put a two-prizer in play and then go from there where you're able to go, okay, cool. You know, now I knock out one of your two-prizers, knock out a two-prizer, knock out a two-prizer, and you win the game. But I like this deck a lot. It rewards high level of play. I think we're seeing a lot more Thornton than we've ever seen in this format. Which is kind of exciting. I love Thorn. It's a fun card. When you've got the ability to go search it out with Jewelseeker, whenever you just want to have it, it's really useful. And it combos really well with Palkia, I think, in the sense that a lot of times, base Palkia V is just a liability sitting on your bench. Like 220 is a really easy number to hit, and they know that you need it in play to evolve it into your V-star. And if they can stop it from evolving, a lot of times they can really kind of thwart your game plan before you can get things rolling. And so if you're able to either recover that Palkia after it's been knocked out, or just discard it with an Ultra Ball and then go fetch it back with Thornton after you sit a Hoot Hoot, or your Fan Rotom after turn one in play, and you can go just kind of off to the races from there. And having that ease of access via Jewelseeker really kind of lets things flow a little bit better. And like you said, there are other kind of one-off supporters or one-off item cards that people might include. And you're able to do that because of the flexibility that Jewelseeker provides. Like I know that this deck had seen some play prior to Surging Sparks, like we saw some of it at LAIC, especially from a lot of the DDG guys. But it's interesting to me that it's seeing now a bit more success in this format after we've had other cards introduced than it was when Stellar Crown came out. Everyone thought that this was going to be the big deck, because you saw the results, you see area zero, you see Palkia, and you say, well, that's a lot of damage. Why don't we just do this all the time? And it just kind of never really took off. It saw a little bit of success at LAIC. I think one of them, I think Michael Davidson came in ninth, or maybe he made top eight with it, something like that. But now we're here at a point where he was able to get second at a regional and have a little bit more success beyond that as well. If we look down the list here, we've got two more copies of it in top eight. We do see that Brent Tonneson made third place, still rocking. I believe this is just... How is this different from other lists that he's played? Oh, I think he used to be on 4Research2 Iono, and I think he stopped at the 3-3. I think this was initially proposed by somebody from Europe, I can't remember who it was. But I know I've seen a lot of people flip-flopping on what they want to do. But he did also include the Lugia Respect this weekend. So I'm not sure if that's something that he's been an early adopter of, or if he just expected Lugia to see a bit more play this weekend and decided to include that as well. If we look at these other couple of Palkia lists, we do see a one-off Research here and a one-off Judge. So just being able to go find that option when you need it is really nice. This is the card that I wanted to bring up, actually. This is what we initially had seen from the DDG players who played this at LAIC, but this Ditto being included in this list in place of that third Fan Rotom from the second place list allows you to go get your Fan Rotom with Transformative Start if you don't have access to it via Buddy Poffin or maybe Nest Ball. Or you can go fetch Radiant. Greninja or Palkia or Tarapagos off of a Pokemon that you can buddy Poffin for. So it's just something that gives you more power when you need it. You can actually search this with fan call if you want to. So it's just got a lot of kind of flexible potential, a bit more so than just that raw copy of a third fan wrote him. Yeah, one of the card I want to point out that we saw more play I think this weekend than we have seen in a long time is Kiernan. Yeah, Kiernan. Yeah, go ahead and click on it. And then just to refresh everybody's memory, it is a supporter that has the text choose one. You can either switch your active with one of your bench Pokemon, or it's during this turn your attacks used by your Pokemon do 30 more damage to your opponent's active Pokemon EX and active Pokemon V. So just to buff your attacks, and I think this card kind of pushed this deck a little bit further. You know, it gave it the stretch potential that it needed in a lot of matchups against Charizard and then against Archer Aladon. Archer Aladon seems really, really bad. But if you run the Kiernan, Kiernan, sorry, it just helps sure up the matchup a little bit. This just has a lot of potential like you can get cheesy knockouts with a fan wrote him or something like that. Like there's times where you can play a one prize game a little bit better. And use this card and stay in the fight a little bit better. But I thought it was cool. It was a cool addition I hadn't really seen before. So I just wanted to touch on that. Yeah, for sure. And even though we don't see it included in this list, if we jump back to the second place list real quick, there was the one one copy or one one line of Bibarel with, you know, having that Kiernan as an extra out to switch without having to play another switch or having to burn your prime catcher is also really useful. Fifth place list is kind of more of the same. We the supporter count is obviously a little bit different. We don't see the judge. We don't see the professor's research. We do have the thicker four four knock towel. We see the ditto pop up again. And this just looks like a really streamlined and consistent list. I actually think this would be a great starting point for somebody that wants to pick up the deck. And you can kind of figure out from here where you want to take things out as you want to kind of look at specific matchups and how you want to change the deck. So I definitely recommend Benjamin Grover's fifth place list because you're looking for a good starting point for the deck. Continuing on, we've got another Charizard list and oh, this was the other stadium that I couldn't think of earlier was League Headquarters as another. OK, that makes sense. So Nafume with the League Headquarters Charizard. Otherwise, it is basically the same thing as Oshman's List. I think minus one Arvin or sorry, plus one Arvin, minus one Nest Ball and then swapping the stadiums around. Other than that, the deck looks, I think, exactly. Oh, no, it's also got a copy of Research in Place or something, but it's very, very close. Charizard lists are not crazy diverse. It's a pretty tight deck, especially when you are choosing to include that dust in our line. Yeah, yeah, same kind of promise. Here in seventh place, we have a raw Tarapagos dust in our deck, which is something that we haven't seen see much success throughout Stellar Crown or not Stellar Crown. Wow. Saw a lot of success in Stellar Crown, but has not seen that continued success in Surging Sparks. So, John, what do you think allowed this deck to kind of make this comeback this weekend? Because I know when we do get to Rio, we won't be looking at the seniors results, but I know that Gabby Fernandez actually won the seniors division with this deck as well. Correct. That's a good question. It's tough to say exactly what did this. I think maybe the kind of spreading out of the meta, maybe allowing Regidrago not necessarily to dominate day two allowed this for a deeper run. Sure. I don't know how bad the matchup is against Regidrago, but I don't think it's as fantastic as it is for like the Palkia deck. The Palkia is able to reach 280 a lot easier than this deck is like, yeah, you can use Dusknoir, but it's really just not as easy to get those knockouts on that 280 hit point Pokemon. Right. And they're able to use, you know, Giratina V-Star to knock you out. So they're able to take the prize advantage. I mean, Bouffalant helps with the math a lot against Regidrago, but if they're able to target that down pretty efficiently, it can be or like one of them is prized or, you know, a myriad of different things. It can be tough, but I don't know. It's hard to say. I don't know, really. I don't ever feel like it was a bad call for any of the tournaments. I think maybe top players just were choosing not to play it this until this weekend. I know we saw Tord have a deep run with it as well. His list is very unique, and I definitely encourage everybody to go look at that. I think he's in like 13th or something. Yeah, so he's going to the... He ran Latias, which was an interesting inclusion. Something we haven't really seen these lists run before, but it makes sense if you're running... He's running the 1-1 Regidrago V-Star line, so it makes sense with that if you're running a three retreat Pokemon or three retreat class Pokemon, and then obviously if you start Blood Moon or Saluna, you're able to get Latias and use just the ability on Latias for free retreat. This was a really cool deck. He played it really well. He had some unfortunate prizing. Only running the two Fan Rotom. He had both prized in one of his games that I think he lost, so he missed cut barely. I think he lost that game and wasn't able to make cut, but very cool list. I think he had the Dusknoir prized in the other game, so those were his two losses in Day 2 Swiss, but they had two game losses that ended up in his match loss that made him whiff cut, so he had a pretty good run otherwise. But yeah, it's a good question. We don't see it dominate Day 2. We saw those two make two deep runs, but I think it's still just powerful. All these decks we're seeing have a lot of raw power and have a lot of play potential, a lot of exploitation. You can kind of bounce your own stadiums. I think if we go back to Daniel's list, we see Lost Vacuum, so you're able to kind of have a fake healing card and able to heal damaged Pokemon with that. Yeah, we see the Turo, which allows you to do the same, and Penny even, which Penny is a really, really powerful card in this deck. All of your attackers primarily are going to be basics, so you're able to cycle through a lot of those, cycle through stuff that doesn't get one shot if Bouffalant's in play, so you're able to kind of have that tanky ability as well in a lot of stuff, and I think that's good in this meta. We're seeing with Raging Bolt not converting really well into Day 2, if you're able to get through Day 1, there's not a lot of Golden Go, there's not a lot of Raging Bolt, so you're able to play against more decks that are really going to struggle to knock you out in one hit, so I think that might be the reason why. With Raging Bolt going down, we saw Lugia come back, that might have kept this from making a deep run. I don't know what he lost to, and let me look real quick, have it on the Pokédata. I believe his top 8 loss was to a Palkia deck, because I know that Brent played against Rune, so our last top 8 deck, while John was looking this up, is another Rigi Drago deck, which piloted by Rune Airmans. This is actually the same list that Zach Bakari and John Eng played to this event as well, and this looks like just a very stock Rigi Drago deck. You've got all of your typical dragons, actually has 4 Research and 3 Iono, so making a cut somewhere to fit in one extra draw supporter, and still playing the Temple of Sinnoh. But otherwise, nothing crazy fancy here that rounds out our final top 8. I believe that this, I cannot remember how deep the asymmetrical cut went for this event, I think it may have gone down to 11th? I think it went to 10th. 10th? Okay, so we did see... 9th or 10th, one of the... Lugia. Yeah, Lugia for sure. Into asymmetric cut with 2-2 Chinchino. Nothing really crazy. The Rosian's backup is kind of an unusual inclusion, and we haven't really seen Iron Bundle a lot in this deck recently, but I think it makes some sense, like against Rigi Drago in particular, where you're just trying to... Do you like Klefki over the Screamtail? Or not Screamtail, what is it called? Fluttermane? Fluttermane. I mean, it's kind of pick your poison. They do basically the same thing in that regard, and I don't think that there are many other matchups where you really want to push the Klefki active unless you are just in a bad spot and you have nothing going on. In which case, it is marginally more powerful than Fluttermane for you, but at the end of the day, they're both just a nod of respect for Thorns more than anything. Yeah, exactly. But yeah, I'm not much of a Lugia player, so I can give you my own honest answer, but my initial thought is, I don't know, it just makes things weird with Weirder V and some of your stuff that you're mentioning. Not being able to Luminion when you have Klefki active gets really awkward, and you have to either play a jet preemptively, or you have to just burn an energy to retreat it, and then things get a little weird. But I don't know. Like I said, Mischievous Locke is definitely more powerful than whatever Fluttermane's ability is. I can't remember what it is off the top of my head. But I think that just about wraps up Birmingham. We do still see some Archeloudon lists here just outside of top 8 or top, you know, the asymmetric cut level. I think that we counted earlier and four of them still made it into top 32, which is definitely respectable. That means that at least some number of those Archeloudon players were probably one win out and either lost their winning in, or you know, earlier in the day were just one win short of making it into that asymmetric cut round. So I think the deck has definitely shown that it has potential and will cross that threshold at some point. Definitely pull up Sander's list real quick. I wanted to take a look at that. Sure. It's always cool. He barely missed cut as well. Lost his last round to miss top cut. So yeah, this is if you're ever a player that's like, huh, I wonder how control does. Go look at Sander Wojcik's lists. He's usually like the innovator of control in a lot of ways. So it looks like he's running a Pidgeot control list here, running the melodic, which can you pull that up? I have no idea what it does. So it says you can't play penny or turno. Okay, cool. So yeah, it's kind of like a heel block, but or a scoop up block. And then yeah, you have toad scroll, which prevents you from putting stuff from your discard pile back into your hand. And then you have sob. We see a new card here with pal day and Taurus. This is from this for surging sparks. Yeah. Yes. So it's got two attacks of thrusting horns, does 30. And then it says you may put two energy attached to your opponent's active back to their hand, and then a jet headbutt. So I'm guessing this is it's just for the up thrusting horns for sure. Yeah, there's no there's no water providing energy in this deck. But that sounds like a good attack against like a Charizard or you can spam it in a lot of different cases. And we see the Galissa pod here, right? Is that or no, the black hero? Thank you for Reggie Drago. Yep. So just auto paralysis against against. Yep. So pretty good. And then Genesect to prevent a specs. And then yeah, everything else. So just kind of like an answer for every matchup. I'm sure Sanders spent a long time thinking through every card in this deck. We see a picnic basket for healing. It's just heal 30 damage from each of your Pokemon, both yours and your opponents. So I'm sure there's a use case for that. I don't know over the top of my head. I don't know. You can make some sort of weird saw block happen with especially because he's playing Radiant Alec is Amos is Radiant of choice. Just like you can solve something for damage with a missed energy if you're stuck doing that for some amount of time. And just keep moving damage counters around and move you know, a total of 180 damage out to your opponent's board before you heal everything and then keep going. If you're in a position where that works for you. And then like we said earlier, you've prevented them from playing Penny or Turo with the melodic in play, you potentially have gotten rid of all of their switches via airy or misfortune sisters or just having already done this one time to begin with. So Pidgeot control is definitely a very interesting and frustrating deck to play against at times. And this is definitely not a list I would start with, given that Sander and likes to include a lot of his cards, like you said, for very specific reasons. And if you don't understand why those cards are included, you may end up inadvertently making a matchup worse that you don't understand you're making worse because you haven't put the time in with the deck. So it's definitely a deck that has a steep rather steep learning curve to it, right? I definitely would pay for if I'm a control person, and I'm trying to learn, I'd pay for like, Sanders masterclass or whatever insights he could provide, because I'm sure there's a lot of cool, interesting things like we see counter gain, we see Giacomo, we see stuff for every matchup, like, you know, but I like I always it's always fun to look at, you know, control players and what they come, especially if they're like, players that have had great success in the past Sander, for those that aren't aware, was the one that kind of originated the mute to be union deck, and did really well with that and surprised a lot of people with that. And it since then has just been living like rent free into every in every European mind, whenever they get paired up against them, they're probably sweating it before they sit down. So definitely somebody that is very intimidating. For sure. Last thing to call it here on his deck is just precious trolley being his a spec of choice. Being interesting, I guess, lets you go grab your Pidgey, Rotom, Phoebus, and toad school as appropriate, just immediately out of the gate and have everything set up. Yeah, with so many one of those it's a really good thing to have yeah for sure oh it's actually i didn't even notice this before he's doing that in place of any copies of buddy poffin so he must really hope that he does not prize his trolley often which you generally don't you've got you know what what is it i think nine percent to prize one specific card you would know better than me that sounds right though i don't recall off the top of my head but i believe it's something around that number but interesting tournament nonetheless you know it's far cry from the toronto six reggie drago's and cut yeah very different and if we move over to rio de janeiro unfortunately there was no official coverage for this event but just running down the day two meta percentages real quick it looks somewhat similar to start with when you compare it to birmingham where we still have reggie drago at number one sitting at 13 charizard actually did a bit better down in brazil which is not totally surprising because brazil loves them some charizard sitting also at roughly 13 but then lugia coming in at number three cloth at number four again not surprising cloth seems to do its best down in latin america it does and then we've got uh guard of war raging bolt and again archer luda popping up at that six percent mark so i think if we go over now and just look at some of the results really quick we do see that fabrizio inga silva was able to take the event down with this palkia noctowl deck so this deck kind of like we said had popped up at some point during surging sparks not surging sparks i keep doing that it popped up at some point during stellar crown and then kind of making this big resurgence because players have discovered that they feel that it's got a strong enough reggie drago matchup coupled with the flexibility to play into other matchups effectively enough that it can just come through and kind of sweep things out and again like fabrizio was able to take things all down here and this deck looks pretty similar like we can see here at the bottom this is the same list that got top four in birmingham so i'm not sure if fabrizio and alexander cooperated together playtested together i don't recall ever hearing the two of their names used in the same sentence but there's definitely a chance that it happened or there's a chance that both of them just arrived at this list independently of each other yeah it's definitely powerful for sure um i think it's really cool to see something like just this new uh come up not out of nowhere but with no real uh lead up to this tournament other than some online events right um it's very cool to see some innovation this late in the format yeah definitely uh the other kind of um thing that we didn't call this out during the meta breakdown because it was only i cannot actually remember what the percentage is with day two but there were only four copies of quad thorns going into this event and two of them made top eight and i think that there's a third copy also in top 16 so we look at you know this list is not at all crazy it's actually very reminiscent of the list that was able to take down worlds this year in the hands of fernando safuentes but we've got four iron thorns a bunch of you know draw control and search supporters to allow you to set up and enable your thorns all of the hammers that you would want at your disposal and then lost city still being the stadium of choice i know we were talking about before the cast john you said you thought that iron thorns was kind of sneakily positioned to be effective as this quad thorns deck rather than but it's become more popular with the thorns dragapult and do you think that there's a particular reason for that or do you think that it's maybe the rise of some of these decks that are a little bit more prone to thorns like archer load on is not necessarily weak to thorns but when thorn shuts you down and you have to manually attach three times to every single archer loot on that trade becomes a bit more tit for tat rather than when you're looking at you know like the polt thorns and you can gust around the iron thorns to get your archer loot on setup and get that ball rolling or if you look at if lugia is on the rise like it seems to be like we thought lugia was going to be a fairly strong play going into this weekend that all of a sudden sets thorns up to be a bit more powerful and then like the last deck that i would bring up to talk about this with would be the palkia deck as well i don't think that it's kind of as put off by folks as another thing is obviously fabrizio was able to take that matchup down but still the weakness could play into it to some degree um yeah i think palkia is fine um thorns is pretty slow and you in palkia you have a way to search out your uh one of um canceling cologne okay with so you can like jewel seeker canceling cologne and then just have a pop off turn um and then yeah you can it with palkia you're able to like see with eight you can do 160 220 and if they have one bench pokemon which they usually do you can just start one-shotting their iron thorns and the active and they don't really have an easy way to keep recovering energy they don't run they don't run uh what is it called the uh exp share anything like that in this list um we're seeing that turbo energized chosen over that um it could still be probably a scary matchup i would love to i've watched the finals that might have been interesting that's um but yeah i think you just have a lot of options with it um and i don't know uh thorns is really well positioned though i'd say like if we look at the rest of the top eight uh the rest of the cut we have drago charizard cloth might be a little challenging um you know uh but their turn one's a lot more difficult if they're not able to use their abilities on their roblox pokemon um and then we got guardi and i don't know how hard roaring moon would be i don't think it would be too too bad um but yeah i mean we thorns thorns is just consistent too like um there's not a lot of decks that like when you're playing thorns you don't have to worry about starting a 70 hp basic pokemon and nothing else like i mean sure there's games where you just open up a bunch of energy or like no energy and can't do anything but other than that i think uh you know anytime you're you know if you feel like sitting down you feel like you're gonna have the prerogative in a matchup like you're able to say my opponent's gonna have to deal with me rather than me having to deal with whatever my opponent pulls up and i'm gonna slow the game down and just make it a grind and i'll eventually win so yep uh if we continue down our list here for top eight we've got nico galas with reggie drago um choosing to exclude jamming tower or pokestop in favor of just the temple of sino is the stadium of choice you see iron bundle come in not a huge fan of the bundle without stretcher in the deck personally but i guess i can understand why you would include it just to have for i guess mirror in particular or maybe in something again something like thorns pult but just without the stretcher bundle seems to lose a little bit of its luster in my book that's fair uh next up sebastian martinez with another charizard deck that looks more or less what we talked about earlier is kind of being the standard fair collapse stadium as the go-to stadium here and then all of the standard ball counts standard supporter counts the dust nor line being included and what has now become standard five energy along with that unfair stamp as the ace spec uh but then we have palo in here with cloth drapagos which a deck that's kind of seen a bit of a fall off like it kind of it had exploded in sacramento or sorry came onto the scene in sacramento and then saw a big surge of popularity going into toronto didn't really convert super well there and then this weekend has just seemingly kind of fallen off the map i know between toronto and now we hadn't seen a lot of play with it online um there was a little bit of it present in the kind of future format that we saw in the champions league but that obviously includes badoo which that gives the deck a little bit of depth a little bit of an extra kind of option or tool to play with and instead here just not seeing a ton of success and instead we saw people opt to go with either the palkia or the dust noir variants of tarapagos instead but do you think this deck still has legs as we continue into the last weekend of this format uh i think it does especially if we have a huge influx of terrapagos um sure cloth hitting terrapagos for weakness is nice um being able to exchange a one prizer to get knockouts on two prizes is great um and because cloth is fighting it has a good thorns matchup it has a decent charizard matchup i mean it's not fantastic but like uh you can at least trade okay with the suing electrode and then maybe get a cheap knockout on like a pheasant deputy or something like that on the bench and get your prize exchange effectively um it's just faster than a lot of decks uh can cheese out wins you know you get that cheesy turn one poison combo with the pitcher on promo or suing radiance measler all that kind of stuff i think it's still consistent i think it's still a powerful deck that you have to be able to be respectful of um you know like there's plenty of times where your opponent's just able like this is kind of the donk deck the turbo deck of this format even more so than um roaring moon in my mind this has just low maintenance high power attacks has a lot of cool interactions with poison that you can kind of manipulate your opponent's pheasant nippity draws um to go in a way that they can't use pheasant nippity because it got knocked out from poison so that's always cool um so there's some there's some things going for it um i think it has been a little less um like optimal to play as people have figured out how to play against it this deck if you've played on live in the last uh month it's it's pretty popular on live like people love playing this on live for whatever reason so i think everybody going to regionals at this point has a game plan for this deck even if they don't necessarily expect to hit a bunch of it they'll have an idea of how to beat it or how to play against it so that's one knock against it but um you know it's still consistent um still pretty good so then would you say is it fair to say that the initial success of this deck was largely due to the fact that people didn't necessarily know how to play against it and maybe it's a bit weaker than maybe it first seemed yeah i would say so um i think once you realize that you can knock out brute bonnet and then like can disrupt them like if you just take two knockouts on brute bonnet um or like you go vacuum and then iono and they might have a hard time recovering and getting the poison again the next turn so like i think if you're able to like exploit the weaknesses of the deck which is basically shutting down brute bonnet um it's it's a lot like once you figure that part out it becomes a lot easier of a matchup in my mind sure i don't know has that been your experience have you played against it much i've played against it a good bit and it honestly i feel like a lot of the game plan you have against the deck is very similar to just playing against cloth prior to the inclusion of the area zero package it hasn't it doesn't really it adds options in the sense that the deck is less limited in bench space but and you do have another attacker option obviously but i think that at its core it's still a very similar deck to what it was prior to surging sparks just probably a little bit more powerful than it was then and cloth back then was probably like a c tier deck so i think you know we're bumped up to like b tier where it's viable but it's not necessarily going to be super powerful by any means but i think it's cool to see highlights of cards like oranga revi i'm actually one thing i was considering was is it potentially uh viable to drop the hissy and electrode super effective glasses combo and just totally forego that for the charizard matchup which is the only matchup that it's even marginally good in and i'm not sure what you would include in those two spots but freeing up those two spots that are specifically targeting one matchup in favor of trying to shore up either consistency or power across the board would be something that's worth considering again you haven't put a ton of time into this deck i don't know what two cards you would include in place of that but i think that there might be something there obviously i think that the easy answer as we move into the next format is you drop both cards put in tuba do and you just call it a day but well i don't know see that the weekend after i maybe badoo is good in this i think this deck is one of those that is just you know you're not really trying to set anything up you're trying to just go go go oh no i think but this is the one deck where badoo is a viable attacker oh i see i see you're using the mochi you've either got mochi on your badoo or you have um the ability to just poison something and that additional poison damage kind of acts as like the hypnotoxic laser for your quaking punch gotcha and it can definitely oh man we're back to quaking punch uh for those that listened last week i'm sure everybody's super excited to hear that phrase again for sure we've got another copy of iron thorns in our topic like we mentioned and this again just looks very similar to think what we've seen in the past still lost city um actually didn't notice in the first they're the second place list i don't believe they played pokemon catcher but we see this making a return here um nothing super crazy out of the ordinary otherwise just pull or straight quad thorns being quad thorns uh second copy of charizard coming into this cut again looks very similar very familiar we should say um no stadium in this one which is interesting that's fair instead we see 444 on our ball cards um no yeah no stadiums obviously no pokestop unfortunately i think not having a stadium is actually an interesting decision but being able to include that spot as a consistency slot in terms of maintaining all of your supporter counts while also going to max counts on all of your ball cards just to try to give yourself the ability to get into the game we do see actually the second copy of rodent in addition to the luminion so really just trying to max out your consistency play as many games of pokemon as you possibly can with the deck yeah i think that's like a japanese innovation we've seen yeah um so very cool um yeah i don't i don't know enough about charizard to have a really strong opinion but this just looks a little bit more consistent than some of the other builds maybe a little less option but with the ball suits um you're just trying to get set up turn two, and start applying pressure, so. Yeah, well, this definitely looks to me more like this is the Charizard deck that wants to go first, whereas a lot of other Charizard variants may hedge themselves on the ability to go either first or second. This one says, hey, I'm okay going first because I've got my two Rotom, I've got 12 search cards, I'm going to start with something to get myself set up. And then rounding out top eight, we have Pedro Pertuzzi on Regidrago, and we can look at this, this is the same list that Nico got third with, so again, nothing crazy, we've got the Iron Bundle, we've got no Knight Stretcher, and still all of the typical Dragon cards that we would see included with the deck. Yeah, I think it's been interesting to see how Ogre Pawn went from a four of to a three of, and how Dragapult went from a two of to a one of, and we're just seeing more and more other attackers, like the, in this case, Alolan Executor EX, and the Gudra getting put back in. And so just having more options in favor of, as opposed to being more consistent with more Ogre Pawn and with more Dragapult. And I think that's fair. I think people have realized like, hey, I don't really need four Ogre Pawn for any of my match-ups. If one of them gets knocked out, I run Recovery, I run two Super Rod, so I can just get it back. And even if I prize one, all I really need is two in play. The only match-ups like against Charizard, it's nice to have more, but three is enough. And then, yeah, going down from the two Dragapult, I think people are just realizing like, we don't see Terror Orb anymore. I think that was a cool include when it first came out, but people are just realizing, I don't think it's as strong. And then, yeah, looking at, I guess people are just saying I can make do with, you know, one Dragapult. It's obviously the best attacker for a lot of different match-ups, but we have enough versatility. You know, if I have to Gudra a couple of times in order to get started, and I can clean up with Dragapult later on, or if I Swinging's Fiend for two prizes, I can, you know, keep up that way. So, you know, just having that versatility is, I guess, the focus, as opposed to maybe a consistency focus. Sure, for sure. And you see, like you said, instead of the Terror Orb as an additional consistency card, we get an additional power or option card in the form of that Iron Bundle. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, I think that more or less rounds out what we were going to talk about as results from last weekend. And before we get into... Real quick, just wanted to look at Vinny Fernandez's list, and maybe his brother. Him and his brother have been really the kind of dominant force in Brazil for the last two years. And so we see Vinny get top 10 with Guardi, and then his brother got first place in Seniors with, I believe, Terapagos, doesn't it? Yes, yes. So yeah, this is a pretty typical Guardi list, I'd say. Running Secret Box, no Rare Candy. So just focusing on slow Guardi here with the Mana Fee. Running a Spirit Tomb, which I've seen some players go back to doing. And the Three Dark to just abuse Monkey Dory as much as possible, so. Yeah, it's an interesting list. It's like a hybrid of the slow and fast Guardi. Like, we do have the Secret Box, but instead of, like, Henry Chow's initially popularized fast Guardi only played, like, one Monkey Dory, one Dark. And instead we've got, you know, like you said, the two Monkey Dory here, but we don't have three copies of Bravery Charm. We're back down to two. We're accepting that we're going to TM Evo more often than not, because fast Guardi normally only plays one of those. And just, I think taking this hybrid approach is definitely an interesting thing to do. I don't know. I think a lot of the power of Secret Box is that it enabled you to make that powerful turn two Guard of War play with the Rare Candy. So I would still, personally, I think if you're going to go for this faster option route, I would totally put the Rare Candy back in the deck. Personally. You've been playing some Guardi, so I'll leave it to your opinion. I have no clue. I actually have found that, you know, Unfair Stamp, for a long time, I felt that Unfair Stamp was not powerful enough in the deck. Sure. Just for whatever reason, the way that the meta has swung back around, Unfair Stamp just seems like it's gotten into a much better spot. And I think that it's because as a player base, Pokemon players have gotten much better at playing around Pheasant Dippity, rather than just blindly attacking into whatever was active and triggering it every single time immediately as they Unfair Stamp their opponent. People are getting a bit craftier, particularly with things like Monkey Dory plays in Guard of War or being able to do things with Dusknoir in Charizard decks, and setting up turns where maybe you just hit something, but don't knock it out. So then you can take a four-prize turn the following turn while your opponent wasn't really able to do anything to respond to you. Yeah. Players are getting pretty savvy. Like the format's, like we said, been played out a lot. And so like one of the first adjustments was getting used to Pheasant Dippity. And we've seen, you know, players now have, to be a top player is to learn how to play against your opponent playing Pheasant Dippity, to take that away through poison, through, yeah, like you said, spreading damage with Monkey Dory, all those kinds of things. So that's just like, that's a cool thing. I always love seeing top players figure stuff out. You watch a top level of Pokemon, it's not just people punching. It's chess moves, it's building resources, it's hiding, you know, advantages, it's hiding your A-spec as long as possible. It's all these different things. You know, we see a Spiritomb here even just preventing your opponent from using their A-spec, stuff like that. Or that's the Genesect, sorry. Spiritomb is- Stops Vs. Stops, yep. Okay, so like against a Lugia deck, that's a really handy thing to have or something like that. Or against control, especially. For sure. But I just love it. It's kind of the cool thing. This is why I love doing the deck breakdowns after tournaments is because, you know, going into these events, we were like, oh, well, there probably won't be anything new. Those are all played out. You know, for the last few weeks, we were just kind of going through the motions. And then before this event, we were saying maybe Archer Aladdin makes an appearance and all that. But then we saw, you know, all this innovation even in this interim, which is really cool. I don't know about you, but I haven't really seen too, I wasn't really expecting this much innovation going into these tournaments. No, like we talked about beforehand, the Palka deck in particular caught me off guard. And it's something where, like I said before, it existed prior to this set being legal in Surging Sparks, but we haven't seen it since LAIC, at least not make a good deep tournament run. And when it initially did hit the scene, when it was released with the include, like, you know, the release of Noctowl and Traphicus with Stellar Crown, instead at the time, the more popular Palka deck was the Palka Dusknoir deck. And for whatever reason, we've just kind of cycled to a point where Palka is just back in the position where it needed to be to be powerful. I think a lot of that, at least initially when Surging Sparks came out, like, you know, we saw double Maridon finals. That's probably not a good format for Palka to be in. That's true. Double Charizard is also probably pretty difficult for Palka to play into. And Regidrago just seems like it's a more favorable matchup for the deck that people initially may have thought. But I think that that is enough talking about the past and, well, maybe even the future for the time being. I think right now we need to focus on the present. And what we're going to do right now, John, is jump into this week's segment of Blaine's Quiz Show. So for this week's Blaine's Quiz Show, I'm just gonna do same format we've been doing for the Blaine's Quiz Show. You're gonna have three multiple-choice questions. If you are truly stumped, then you will have the option to use one hint at any point for those three questions. And yeah, let's get going. Today's topic is the new turtle on the block, Terapagos. So question one. So how many pentagons surround the cyan hexagonal gem at the center of terrestrial form, Terapagos? No cheating. Don't. Is it 18, eight, 24, or 36? I'm gonna assume that there's one for every type, but I'm gonna now have to count what types there are. So we've got fire, water, grass, electric. Oh my gosh, I can't do this, John. I have to do like card game types and video game, or I have to do video game types. So fire is fire, water is water and ice, grass is grass and bug, lightning, fighting, ground, rock, steel, dark, poison, flying, normal, dragon, fairy, psychic, ghost. Okay, I'm gonna go with 18, because that's the number I just counted to. Wow, I'm thoroughly impressed. You are correct. So it does have one type. So it does have one pentagon for each type. I could not at all mentally picture what you were talking about when you said pentagons surrounding hexagons. Sure, I see it now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So this is the, I actually didn't know this was the terrestrial form of this Pokemon. I thought the terrestrial one was like the big thing. No, that's the terrestrialized form, I think, or what they call the stellar form. So that's what it looks like when it terrestrializes in the video game. This is, it has its standard form. Oh, it's got the little like baby turtle. Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So it has the standard form when it is not in battle. And then when it is in battle, it switches up to this form. And then, yeah, when it is terrestrialized, it has that like planetary looking thing. Sure. All right, before I ramble on and give you another- Give me an answer, please. Yeah, I don't wanna do that. Next question. Who is credited with the discovery of the, and naming of Terapagos in the downloadable content, the Indigo Disc? Is it Professor Sada, Breyer, Heath, or Arvin? So I'm gonna go with, it's not Sada, because it would have to be applicable to both games. Right. Arvin is like your, Arvin's your buddy, so it's not him. Like this would have already been a documented thing. I know that Breyer knows the name Terapagos, but I don't know if she's the one that named it. So it was either Breyer or Heath. And I know the name Heath means something and has something to do with like paradox Pokemon. And he like had a journal, but I don't know if he did Terapagos too. Is this hint worthy? I mean, I got a 50-50 already. We're gonna guess Heath. Okay, Heath, you are correct. It is Heath, the historic figure. Is that Heath? That is Heath. Okay. That is a picture from his, either Scarlet or Violet book, depending on what game you get. It's the book that they reference a lot in the history of the Area Zero. Interesting. So he's one of the first explorers on that first expedition into the Area Zero and came back and wrote the book. And the book was so fantastical as if not to be believed. And he is the finder and namer of Terapagos. All right. So two for two, pretty good. Let's see if you get the last one. All right. Using the metric of limitless points, which player has had the most success with the Terapagos archetype? Now this includes the new version of Terapagos, Terapagos in addition with Palkia, just so you know. Okay. Is that, can you remind me what limitless points are? All right. Yeah, so I know it's kind of a made up thing, but so is Pokemon. So who are we to judge? But limitless points are assigned based on the strength of it. So I think you get a certain amount. It's a similar ranking system to like maybe CP points where the strength of the victory. So if an IC is higher than a regional and then a regional would be higher than, I think a special event, if I'm not mistaken. Okay. I know Gabe has played Terapagos a lot, but I know Giovanni won a regional with, no, Giovanni won a regional with Lugia. Oh no, he did win with Terapagos. Nevermind, I'm crazy. He got first and second with it, actually. I don't know what Austin has done particularly with Terapagos, but I imagine he's done something notable with it if you've got him on this list. And obviously Tord has been a big proponent of Terapagos since its release. So this is a tough one. I'm gonna see, what do you have for me as a hint for this question? All right. Just to give you a little more information about Austin Ellis, he was the, he finished in. top eight of LAIC with Tarapagos lost to Golden Go piloted by, I forget the guy's name. Okay. But I judged that match. So I remember that. Oh, okay. Yes, I do remember now. Okay, okay, okay, okay. So the top eight in IC is gonna be more than a top eight at a regional, but I imagine a victory at a regional is still probably higher than a top eight at an IC. So I think I'm gonna have, I'm gonna guess Giovanni. Okay. It was surprisingly close. And I was kind of surprised by the answer, but it is actually Tord Recklev. Tord switched up to this deck and kind of went back and forth between this. He went, played Tarapagos, then went back and played Regidrago, played Tarapagos, played Lost Box, and then went back and played Tarapagos as recently as Birmingham. So over those three finishes or four finishes with Tarapagos, he's done incredibly well. I think he had a second place, two second places. And let's see if I have it pulled up. He had a top 16 this week. Yep. Let me pull up Tord here just to flush it out for me. He had the top 16. They had a second place in Gdansk and then ninth in Dortmund with Tarapagos. So that is a total of 11K earnings and 48 limitless points based on their metric. So that is pretty good, I'd say. So yeah, top 16 gets you 12 and then second kind of makes it 11K. And then second got him 24 points. So very, very strong. So yep, you finished, what was it? Two for three. I'd say that's pretty good. It's where I was last week. So I think we're back kind of where we were two weeks ago. So it should be 14 to 10 now. That sounds right, yep. So I'll hopefully keep it neck and neck and keep it interesting. Otherwise, Aaron might just run away with it after next week. I got a little bit tripped up on that last question because I actually started to try to think about other variants of Tarapagos and didn't realize that it probably just meant actual Tarapagos because limitless is gonna categorize Tarapagos as straight Tarapagos, whereas the other decks would be broken out into their own archetypes. But speaking of breaking all those decks out into their own archetypes, we're gonna now talk quickly about how we think this slightly developed or more developed meta rather looks heading into San Antonio this weekend where you will be judging, John. So do you have any expectations of what other major developments you think we might see heading into this weekend? Yeah, I think after the success of Palkia, Tarapagos, I think we'll see a lot of that coming into this weekend. I could see some top players adopting it, maybe getting tired of Regidrago. I don't know if, I'd still say Drago's probably gonna be the top played deck, but I think it might come back down. It might stay at like 14% would be probably a safe assumption. In the U.S. especially, I think people play Drago more than anywhere else. So I think Lugia will still have a good showing. I don't know how the Lugia-Tarapagos mashup goes, but I don't think it would be too bad for Tarapagos in my mind. Are you still talking Palkia when you say Tarapagos? I think either one. I don't know. I guess if they can go dust, no, because they've got 150. I don't. Well, the reason I asked that was I think that, I personally think that the regular Tarapagos is actually slightly better because you have, well, it's weird. It depends, the big thing is the Bouffalant. With the Bouffalant in play, you can prevent your Tarapagos from being knocked out as easily by things like the Lugia. I know at one point we saw the one Lugia list from, I cannot remember the Brazilian player's name, that had Vitality banned in it specifically to knock out Tarapagos, but you prevent that knockout. The big one is preventing Blood Moon Ursula Luna from knocking out Tarapagos, which is kind of one of Lugia's big late game weapons into the deck. So it also kind of depends on the Chinchino count and how quickly you can get Iron Hands rolling and just take extra bonus price cards. But being able to, I feel like it would be able to shut down the Palkia a bit better than it can shut down a standard Tarapagos deck. I can see that. I would love to see that matchup spread with Lugia versus both Palkia, Tarapagos, and just Tarapagos to snore. I don't know off the top of my head. Well, I've got, I actually have PokeHypeTCG's Twitter up here. What a good co-host. Let me just pop this up on the screen real quick. So with this Palkia one in particular, we can see that the Lugia matchup is actually somewhat favorable, at least just based on Rio and Birmingham results. And now granted, small sample size is only 18 games, but nine, seven, and two. So relatively low tie rate. I think that personally, I think that's a great thing going into any event is being able to just finish games more quickly, but coming out slightly ahead in that matchup. It's pretty even though. It's pretty close. And then the big thing for me was just wanting to know, what does this deck excel against and what does it weaken to? And I think interestingly, seeing something that actually has this strong of a stall matchup that it does not have Petra Runt in the deck is pretty interesting and somewhat surprising. But I think just the sheer versatility of something like Jewel Seeker, giving you access to things like Kira and Palpat and whatnot when you want it. So you can deny the Snorlax player from discarding those resources from you and make their stall tactics less effective. Just makes it pretty potent and easy to play around their options. So we look down, if this deck is expected to be popular, what would you want to bring to this event then if you want to have a good time into it? And so we can still see, even though this is, again, relatively close to 50-50, it looks like this Archeloudon matchup in particular is actually somewhat contentious. I'm not sure who was forcing these ties, but we do have an almost 30% tie rate in the matchup across the weekend with a total record of 10, 11, and nine. So slightly unfavored in finished series, but with nine ties out of 30 games, I have to imagine that somebody was on the losing end and just did not want that series to finish. Yeah, it's hard to say. We don't, might not be a large enough sample size to know if that's like a realistic thing or just kind of askew from, I don't know, only 30 games. Right. I mean, it's a decent amount. It's pretty, it's like, I think, yeah, looking at this, it's only two other decks have more matchups. It does have a weird Charizard matchup, and I think we saw that in the finals both times where, yeah, Charizard is able to disrupt with Unfair Stamp and then might not be able to, and then if Charizard can go, okay, knock out with Dusknoir on your lone Hoot-a-Hoot, and then Boss or Countercatcher bring up Fezendipity, and then Unfair Stamp or Iona, and then knock out Fezendipity. Like, this deck starts to struggle when you can't really burn through your deck and find out all your resources. Like, it just turns into kind of a pile. You're missing a lot of your combo pieces. So I can see that. Yeah, and you don't have the Pidgeot that the regular Tarapagos deck has access to as well. So again, you're trading that kind of consistency option in favor of power in the form of the Palkia and the Greninja and having those other options and big attack swings that you would have available otherwise. And then the other kind of last matchup to look at here is just the Cloth Tarapagos, which again, small sample size, worth noting. Only 16 games here representing it, but it's a staggering 34% win rate into the deck. And I think part of that is just, you have so many donkable Pokemon. It is just, I think that you'll have a good percentage of the time you'll open a lone basic and it'll get knocked out. And then you also get to play into the fact, like you talked about, Cloth is good into other Tarapagos decks in general. Yeah. Yeah, you're able to get a favorable prize exchange. And then, yeah, you're able to just kind of bully them early on while they're setting up just a little bit, and then just take the prize exchange from there. Like you're able to do 280 pretty effective with your own Tarapagos. Yeah, with the Binding Mochi. Again, denying the Pheasant Dippity draw with the Poison. I can definitely see how this deck could struggle into that overall. Yep. So as much as we bagged on Cloth Tarapagos back when we were talking about how it performed over this weekend, there's a chance that it actually might be slightly better positioned going into this weekend. Yeah, if we see a huge uptick in the new deck on the block, I could see it still doing pretty good. Yeah, and then just quickly looking at the other Tarapagos list, actually looks like it has a very favorable Lugia matchup. I mean, again, relatively small sample sizes. It's only considering games from these two tournaments this weekend, but going 16 and nine with only one tie in all of that series, there's a chance that that's just a good matchup. I mean, again, with the Bouffalant, you do have access to Briar to counteract the Legacy energy. You have access to just some other kind of powerful tools like Dusknoir to also potentially get around Legacy energy. So if you can Dusknoir to get around Legacy and then Briar for three prizes at some point, you're just in a pretty commanding position overall. Yeah, I think this one has a worse Regidrago matchup looking at the matchup spread. Oh, definitely. So that might be one reason to not play it, but I think it's always, it's good to look at this data, but it's not always entirely accurate. Like one thing that comes to mind is like, who's playing this deck, right? Is this gonna be like, this deck kind of fell off a little hard. So I think a lot of top, the people who are playing this, we're top players. And I think that's kind of reflected in this data. Like we're not seeing it. Like if you look at the matchup spread for Raging Bolt, I'm sure it's not nearly this favorable because you have a lot of players that are less attuned to the game playing the deck. Yeah, we can see, there we go. So yeah, looking at Raging Bolt, the win rate is abysmal at 47.4%. And then yeah, other than like the first two of Dragapult Iron Thorns and Regidrago, you have less than 50% in all your other matchups, which I don't think is entirely realistic. I don't think your Charizard matchup's that bad. No, I disagree. I think Charizard is an absolutely abysmal matchup for the deck. And actually, this is a pretty good representation. It's weird that I'm surprised that this win rate also does take into account like the tie factor. So you've, but this Delta here is actually smaller than I would expect it to be. And I think the thing that brings this back to being closer as a Raging Bolt player is if you are doing what, I cannot remember his name, the Raging Bolt that did make top four in Toronto, and you're playing a copy of Briar in your deck. Without that Briar, this matchup is almost unwinnable as long as they just get a Charizard out. Or, and then the Radiant Charizard as well, obviously, makes a huge difference. Huge difference. Yeah, I guess with Unfair Stamp, it can be hard to stabilize after you do get Unfair Stamp. Yep. That's fair. Okay. But so I think going into San Antonio, the Terapagos decks, those two that we talked about, or Regidrago will probably be the top three. I think Charizard will have a big showing. People will be motivated to, after it won in Birmingham, to bring it back out, maybe dust it off after it's been in the backpack a little bit of time. They'll bring it back out and try it. I think people love Charizard, and rightfully so. It's still a really powerful deck. With Unfair Stamp, you really are able to, I think, be the best come from behind deck. Yeah, and we see it's got a pretty good matchup spread. The win rate's less than 50%, but I don't think that's gonna scare some people off. No. I think a lot of people that are playing Charizard now have been playing Charizard for a while, and probably aren't going to stop any time soon. Yeah, I think the biggest thing would scare me is it still has a bad Regidrago matchup. It's listed as 33% here, and I don't think that changes. I don't think Charizard's found any new ways to improve that matchup. So you're just praying to dodge Regidrago every round, and hopefully make it further into the tournament. It just kind of plays matchup roulette at this point. It's still powerful, and I think there's still some outplay potential in a lot of those Charizard decks, but yeah, just touching on Regidrago next. This is still probably what I would've played. I'm pretty boring. I like the Palkia, Terapagos deck, but I think I'd probably go back to Regidrago. Yeah, I don't know. I don't think that, like even against Raging Bull Lurkerpawn, it's got a bad 40% win rate, but I don't feel like I'm totally out of that matchup. But yeah, you just, you're, I don't know. Maybe I'm just coping at this point, but it's still like, you look at the conversion rate, it's still really strong. A lot of top players are still sticking on it. I mean, we see Brent Tonneson every week playing Regidrago. We've seen John Ng playing it. We see Bradner playing it. We see just everybody. And I know it's kind of beat to death, but it's still good. And it still gives you the outplay potential that maybe Charizard is like the in Terapagos mirror, but I don't think they surpass this deck. Just having such a myriad of different attackers. We've seen more and more attackers get added with Swinging Fiend from... executor, and then the inclusion of Goudreau back into the deck just gives it a little bit better matchups than it had maybe earlier on in the season, but... Sure. I think the thing that scares me or would scare me off of Regidrago now is that we've seen the addition of some more slightly or very unfavorable matchups, like if we look down at the very bottom of the matchup table here for Regidrago, Archeloudon kind of being the new kid on the block, and it being popular at both regionals last weekend and converting fairly well, I don't expect it to really go anywhere this weekend. If anything, it actually might be more popular, especially given that none of the U.S. player base has had the chance to play the deck in a tournament post-Champions League where it really kind of put itself on the map, and if we look at something that, you know, reasonably if Regidrago has a 32% win rate into Archeloudon, then Archeloudon should theoretically have a 68% win rate into Regidrago, and nothing outside of Raging Bolt has been able to say that thus far in the Surging Sparks metagame. So if you look at an abysmal matchup into Archeloudon, a very much so iffy matchup at best into Raging Bolt, I think that this actually might be the weekend where Regidrago drops down to maybe 10% territory, and we might just see like one of the flattest meta graphics we've ever seen. I can see that. Where you can see like the widest possible meta as the format closes out before we introduce Surging Sparks. Or we'll just see a lot of strong American players do just want to play Regidrago because they think it's the best deck, and maybe we spike all the way back up to 18 and it just kind of goes nuts and we end up with six Dragos in Top 8 again. I can really see it going either way, honestly. Yeah, I think I'm gonna side with you on the first time, or not the first time, but I'm gonna side with you on the first opinion. I don't think I realized how bad of an... I mean, I think I knew mentally how bad of a matchup Archeloudon is. But I know from experience, it is a terrible matchup. And I think if we see it like I expect it to be, like how it was played in Birmingham, in San Antonio, I could see Drago kind of, like you said, get down to maybe 12 or even 10%, and then maybe actually have a lower conversion rate going into Day 2 for the first time in a long time. And it's interesting. Like you said, a lot of these decks now are kind of playing matchup roulette, and Regidrago for the first time ever kind of is also in that position where it's seeking to dodge this Cloth Tarapagos deck, this Archeloudon deck, but it wants to hit those Stage 2 variants. Whereas conversely, we've got this Archeloudon deck that's come in, and it wants to hit most of or some of those Tarapagos variants. Like the Cloth Tarapagos seemingly, according to this data at least, has a tough time into Archeloudon as a whole, whereas the Tarapagos Dusknoir appears to have a slightly better time. I can't totally explain that away. Maybe that's the Bouffalant factor at the end of the day, or something to that effect where it's able to kind of mitigate things where even if you have a Star Chronos, you're not necessarily able to kind of just take games over by hitting into things if they're taking reduced damage. Maybe just making the Tarapagos itself tankier makes it hard for the Dialga to kind of overcome it without having to commit far too many energy to it, and then you do have the one-hit KO potential because you have the Dusknoir available, and something along those lines, so you can't necessarily Turo out of everything. So Archeloudon seeking to dodge Tarapagos Dusknoir. It definitely wants to dodge Charizard. Charizard is probably one of the deck's worst matchups of the more popular variants of decks that you'll see, and then Gardevoir has also not been a very good matchup. That's why we saw so many Lisset Osaka playing three or more Jamming Towers in their deck. It was just expecting that matchup to be horrible. So I think, again, I'm going to also sound like a broken record. I would totally bring Gardevoir to this event, especially if there's a chance that Regidrago is going to be on a little bit of a downswing. Tarapagos is also not the best matchup because Dusknoir decks are always scary for Gardevoir to deal with, but this might be the weekend to bring back out a faster variant of Gardevoir to get around that Dusknoir board wipe potential, or maybe some sort of hybrid variant like what we saw Vinny Fernandez bring down in Rio, and something where you can secret box your way into a Rare Candy Gardevoir, get your board set up, have your Monkey Doors move damage around to get around things like Bouffalant, and just play your Gardevoir game where you sit back and you don't have to necessarily just run everyone over, but you have the potential to if that door opens itself up. It's interesting, for sure. If you think Regidrago is going to be down in play, it might be a good pick. I still worry, you know, looking at the bottom there, you still have the Charizard matchup, and I see a world where Charizard comes out in full force this weekend, and you hit two or even three in day one, and your run feels pretty bad at that point. But you know, that's kind of how it goes, right? So if you're confident with Garde, it could be a good weekend for you. You still have other matchups you can take advantage of. So it really, yeah, I think this is probably the flattest format we've seen in a while. I think the two Trapagos decks might have better matchups, but they're not overly powerful, I'd say. The interesting thing for me is that the two bottom matchups here for Gardevoir are things that are able to be kind of teched for, and that's why we saw the Mawile inclusions back in Toronto, and that's something that might make its way back into the deck for this weekend if you expect those decks to be popular. So it really all just depends on what you expect to run into, and we'll see the people that do include, if they include the techs and they hit the matchups that the techs are for, they're going to do well, and we'll see those things kind of rise to the top. The last deck that we haven't really discussed at all because it didn't perform well this weekend, but if Regidrago is on a downswing, there's always the chance that Lostbox will pop back up. And I actually think Lostbox is pretty well positioned into a lot of Trapagos variants. You do have the ability, if you can get an early high Lost Zone count, you can Lostmine away two Hoots to put those Trapagos variants on the back foot, and then you've always had game plans into these Stage 2 decks as well, especially since nobody is including Jirachi in their deck at this moment. You know, the world is your oyster. I think that it's an interesting time. Again, we're right before rotation. Well, I say that even though we're three months away still. We're a ways away from rotation, but the card pool is not going to change drastically prior to that. So we're kind of at the apex of everything. We will get Badoo, and we'll see that going into Puerto Rico in the next few weeks. I think we have Merida and then Puerto Rico and then EUIC over the next three majors coming up. It'll be EUIC before you know it, man. But yeah, we're excited to see. We'll break it all down here. If you guys see me over the weekend, I'll be wearing my judge shirt. I'm happy to be saying I'll be an assistant head judge for this one. Thanks, man. So I have a little bit more responsibility, so I might not have a whole lot of free time to say hi. But just know that anybody listening, if you guys say hi to me, I'll try my best to say hi back. We appreciate your guys' support as always. If you guys have any comments or questions you want answered on the podcast, please reach out. You can comment on any of the videos or message me on bluesky at john.orgel.bskies. I don't know how the naming thing goes, but just search John Orgel, and it'll pull up. And just you can message me. But and then Aaron is underscore Aaron underscore Curry. Is that right? And then yes, that is still on X at this exact moment, but I am probably changing that tomorrow. Okay, okay. All right. Well, we'll let you know. And we hope to hear from you guys. We appreciate your support as always and are looking forward to all the activities and adventures on the battle frontier in the next few months.