Episode 17: New Set Shakeups in TWO Games?

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, Jon Orgel, and this week we're going to jump into that time capsule that we had to unfortunately miss last week, do a short review of 10 impactful cards from the newly released Space Time Smackdown expansion in Pokemon Pocket, hit up our Blaine's Quiz Show where I can try to increase my lead over Jon, and then do some kind of hot or cold takes heading into the Merida Regionals this weekend down in Mexico. But before we get into everything else, I did first want to jump back and see how your League Cup went this weekend. Yeah, so we had a League Cup at the store I run my league at, Unplugged Games in Midlothian, Virginia for those that are curious. We had a pretty good attendance, we had 22 players, and 18 of those were Masters, so we had a top 4 cut. It was interesting, we had like a decent spread, there was more Ogre Pawn decks than I thought there would be. We had like a couple of Raging Bolts that did really well. I think two, one or two made top cut. And then one made it all the way to the finals. I think, yeah, that sounds about right. Yeah, I think it was in top 4 we had Dragapult playing against, I don't know, I watch, like I judge the match. It was a Dragapult-Mirror, and then the other match was Archialadon versus Raging Bolt. And then Archialadon lost to Raging Bolt, and then obviously one of the Dragapults won in a Mirror match. So we had lots of Dragapult, and then we had, yeah, a little bit of Raging Bolt. And Dragapult ended up winning, the Dragapult running, I think, just one Bidu in the list. There was still some limited availability for some of the cards from the new set, and I think that might have affected some of the plays in my area. It's been really, really hard to find the new set in my area, so I know a lot of players are trying to borrow stuff from me or from other players. So hopefully that gets sorted out. It shouldn't be that hard to, I mean, thankfully the two most played cards in this set are both commons, right? I think maybe an uncommon for Regigigas, I don't even remember. But it's definitely not rare, so it shouldn't be too hard to find copies of all that. But people seem to be somewhat, you know, if not excited, at least reluctantly playing in it, and I think enjoying it. But yeah, it's always fun to see what people come up with. I didn't see a whole lot of innovation. I think that's kind of due to what we've, like what top cards are in this set. It's just really Bidu and Regigigas from what I've seen. But yeah, I know you commentated a cup down in Florida. How did that go? I think you probably had a better, you had more matches to watch than me. I was having to run the whole thing. So I'm sure you have a little bit more to say than I do. Yeah, I did. Got a last-minute message from the guys that run tournaments over at Versus Games down here in Oviedo, you know, just outside of main city Orlando. And headed over there on Saturday and got to cast with Charlie Kerr as my co-caster. You know, long-time player, wants to take a short break at least from tournament play, he said, until rotation. Just is not a fan of the format as a whole. And that's totally understandable. But we definitely saw some of the same pains that you spoke about. And I think that that definitely affected people's deck choices as well. But for the most part, the players that did tend to do better were the ones that were either able to get their hands on some of these other cards to be able to make their decks a little bit more efficient or work better in the matches where those Bidus and Regigigas are necessary. So we saw for the most, like the big breakdown for our event was the top three decks were undoubtedly Lugia, Gardevoir, and Dragapult. And then number four was probably Maridon. And you know, the ones that were more successful of those Lugias, Dragapults, and Gardevoirs all either had Bidu in their list or Regigigas in the case of the Lugia. And they kind of needed those to take down or slow down rather some of the other things. We still had a few Regidrago players. And I think without the Bidu, the Gardevoir just has a much tougher time into that matchup. Dragapult also has a much tougher time into that matchup. But we had, I think, 37 players total. So we cut to a top eight. Had two Gardevoir, two Maridon, two Dragapult, a Palkia, Noctowl list, and I cannot for the life of me remember what the eighth deck was. But they didn't make it out of top eight because I know the top four ended up being Gardevoir versus Maridon and Palkia, Noctowl versus another Gardevoir. And the Palkia, Noctowl ended up beating the one Gardevoir. The other Gardevoir player actually scooped to the Palkia, Noctowl player, or sorry, to the Maridon player because he had already hit his best finish limit on cups and just wanted to give his friend an opportunity to get points. So finals being Maridon versus Palkia, Noctowl, and Palkia, Noctowl surprisingly actually came out on top in that matchup, despite the fact that the Maridon was packing the copy of Pokemon Go Zapdos. Had a pretty unfortunate game three where he just kind of, on turn one, did two generators, whiffed energies on both of them, and just kind of did nothing for a little bit. Prized for a sealstone in game two, which really slowed down his setup as well. Just made things really, really, really awkward. But it was a lot of fun. Getting to commentate was the first time that I've gotten to do live casting with a co-caster, and I'm hoping to go back and do it some more. So you know, we talked about our goals when we did our first episode of the year, and that was one of the things on my list, and so I'm happy to have already checked it off at least one time. I'd like to go back and hit that well again at some point, though. Yeah, a lot of fun. I think the format looks pretty cool. It's nice to see some new things in the meta, or some changes to the meta at least. At least fluctuations in those percentages, and I'm sure that we'll talk about that more here at the tail end of the episode when we get into what we expect to see down in Merida. But first, I wanted to give you a chance to jump back in time and hit up that time capsule that we unfortunately didn't have time for last week. So with that, I'm going to pass it over to you, John. Okay, so for those of you that have visuals, I have on the Limitless Deck Builder, James... I don't know his last name, so I know it's just James G. He's kind of a mainstay in the retro community. So before I judged San Antonio Regionals, I had the displeasure of playing a Team Up Through Evolving Skies format 2021 COVID format retro tournament. I say displeasure because as much as I like some of the cards in this format, I just didn't have a fun time. I went 0-1-1 drop, so I had one win, one tie, or one loss, one tie. And I just wasn't having fun, so I just decided to go do something else. But I mean, there has to be a winner at these things, I guess. And we gave it to James, who he's very... If you go to play retro at a regional or an IC, and James is there, he's usually really generous about loaning out decks, and was always down to play 2010. I played him a lot when I went to NAIC last year. I remember one point before our flight left from New Orleans, I got to the airport around like 2 in the morning and just kind of stayed up until 6 in the morning when my flight left, and me and him just played a lot of 2010 for like 3-4 hours. So that was kind of a fun thing to do. But we're not talking about 2010, we're talking about 2021. So not even that long ago for a retro format, but all of these cards are rotated out. The format, I think that's kind of the requirement for retros. All the cards have to be out of format. So some of these might look familiar, but those are just because they're reprinted. But everything in here is pre-Brilliant Stars. So Evolving Sky is the set right before Brilliant Stars. So this is brand new retro, if you will. And this deck seeks to use Mewtwo and Mew GX tag team. So this is an interesting format where you have the combination of tag teams and GX Pokemon, and then some V Pokemon, and we'll get into that in just a minute. But the main attacker and the thing that makes this deck versatile is the Mewtwo Mew GX tag team. It has 270 hit points as a psychic Pokemon. That's a basic. So a huge amount of hit points for a basic. Has the ability of perfection. It says this Pokemon can use the attacks of any Pokemon GX or Pokemon EX on your bench or in your discard pile, and you still needed the necessary energy to use these attacks. So it can just copy basically anything that's in play, as long as it has the energy to do so. So you use this as an attacker. And being a tag team, it is worth three prizes when it gets knocked out. That's kind of the gimmick of this format, if you guys aren't too familiar with the new older stuff. And then it just has a bunch of one of GXs in here to use as attackers. So you have Greninja and Zoroark GX, and all of these have GX attacks, which are similar to like V-Star attacks, where you can only use one per game. So this one, I think the main attack you're using on this one is Dark Pulse, which for a dark and colorless, it does 30 plus 30 more for each dark energy attached to all your Pokemon. Yeah, you're not using Dark Union. Muk and Alolan Muk GX has Severe Poison. Severe Poison is a good one because it allows you to interact with stuff that you wouldn't normally be able to. So like a Decidueye, this allows you to put damage counters instead of attacking for damage. So that's kind of a cute mechanic. And then Nasty Goo is actually crazy. For no energy, it basically has... It's a GX attack, so you can only use it once per game, but it's put 15 damage counters of one for poison between turns. If it has four extra energies attached to it. And then your opponent's active is now Paralyzed and Poison. So it starts out with Auto Paralysis and Poison, and then if it has four extra energy attached to it, it is also then damaged 15 damage counters between turns. So you can always buy a turn with Nasty Goo and then kind of work from there. So this is kind of like your tech for some bad matchups, but also has like a stall slash sneaky damage attack you can use. If your opponent doesn't run a switching card, it can really kind of just destroy that. I think Neganadel and Guzzlord's a really strong attacker. You have Chaotic... So Jet Pierce is whatever, but Chaotic Order GX is a really strong attack. It says for one colorless plus... So all the gimmicks of the tag teams is for extra energy, you can do extra effects. This starts out at turn all of your price cards face up. And then if this Pokemon has at least one extra psychic and one extra dark energy attached to it in order, in addition to this attack's cost, take two price cards. So you can just, for those three energy, a psychic, a colorless of whatever, and a dark, you can just take two price cards. So pretty broken, you know, can just kind of win the game if you're at two price cards, which is really, really nice. So I'll get into my game against James. I did have the misfortune of playing one game against him. There's Neganadel GX. The main attack you're using is Venom Shot. It's psychic and three colorless, and then it just says discard two energy from this Pokemon. This attack does 170 damage to one of your opponent's Pokemon, so just 170 snipe. And then Injection GX is an interesting one you might use once in a while. It's for one lightning energy. It says add a card from your opponent's discard pile to their price cards face down. So you can just stack their price cards with more prizes to take, which is always kind of funny. So those are the main attackers. There's one more I want to talk about. Yeah, I think... Oh, no, there's two more. So there's Vioplewm, which for the main one is Massive Bloom for grass colorless. It does 180 minus, so it does 10 less damage for each damage counters on this Pokemon. So this is a good attack to use on Mewtwo. You can use it first turn, technically. We'll get into how you use this attack and use Mewtwo primarily, but you can usually get two energy on Mewtwo fairly easily, and this allows you to do that and just hit for 180, which knocks out quite a lot of Pokemon in this format. And there's also Latios GX, which I think the main reason you're using this is for Clear Vision GX. It just shuts down Arceus Dialga and Palkia's GX attack. You can use this turn one and then just prevent ADP from using their GX attack. Clear Vision GX for one psychic, it just says for the rest of this game, your opponent can't use any GX attacks. Arceus Dialga, Palkia, their GX attack basically says you're drawing an extra card. in doing extra damage and I think you have extra hit points I'm trying to remember it's you do plus 30 damage and then if you have the additional energy you also take an extra prize card right thank you so yeah so that is a pretty stacked GX attack that you want to shut down and tank purge isn't bad it kind of provides some immunity it's it's non GX attack for psychic color color it does 120 and it says during your opponents next turn you prevent all damage done to this Pokemon by attacks from tag-team Pokemon so you can copy that if you're like going up in the mirror or something like that or going up against another tag-team deck you can kind of wall with that attack so those are the main attackers you do have some other stuff you have these two that are support Pokemon so you have Jirachi GX which has the ability psychic zone it says don't apply psychic weakness when this Pokemon is in play or yeah don't apply psychic unique weakness when Pokemon both yours and your opponents take damage from attacks so it just shuts down psychic weakness for all Pokemon in play and then Mawile GX has the ability captivating wink which when you play this Pokemon from your hand onto your bench during your turn you may have your opponent reveal their hand and put any number of basic Pokemon you find there onto their bench so it just allows you to fill up your their bench for if they're trying to like I guess play around not wanting to bench the denny's and crow bats for whatever reason you can pull stuff out of their hand and Mawile bite is a pretty good attack for low energy cost for psychic or sorry for metal colorless does 30 plus 10 plus 30 more damage for each of your opponent's bench Pokemon so it's a good what is it called Eternatus counter in some ways so you can kind of use that to your advantage and knock out stuff like a crow bat or something like that if Eternatus is playing it so Eternatus is kind of a big bad of this format and it being a big bad Pokemon you have to worry about you have the Galarian Zapdos V so this saw a decent amount of play in Arceus when Arceus was really big too but this is mainly included into because the Eternatus its ability allows you to attack for one colorless less for each Pokemon V that's in play and Eternatus plays the Eternatus V, VMAX, Crowbat all those kind of guys and it's basically Galarian Zapdos has one attack it's thunderous kick it does 170 it allows you to discard a special energy from your opponent's active so you basically this is one of the few attackers that you're not trying to use through Mewthree or Mewtwo Mew attack team you would use this one on its own because it has that ability that lowers the attack cost on the way that you're able to use all these different attacks that take metal take energy that isn't dark is with Aurora energy which is a special energy it says you can attach this to one of your Pokemon only if you discard another card from hand and then as long as this is attached to a Pokemon it provides every energy type but only provides one energy at a time so this allows you to get around all these different energy costs that would normally be pretty behavioral if you look at them though like pretty much everything either takes dark or takes one energy type that is not dark right so you're able to be pretty efficient with your Aurora energy you run seven darkness energy and then you run what is probably your most important Pokemon besides Mewtwo Mew is the Galarian Moltres V this has the ability dire flame wings which just says once during your turn you may attach a dark energy from your discard pile to this Pokemon you can't use more than one dire flame wings ability each turn so this allows you to accelerate dark energy kind of get around the whole attaching one energy per turn and then you use energy switch which is just move a basic energy attached to one of your Pokemon to another one of your Pokemon use you would go Aurora energy to Mewtwo Mew tag team dire flame wings and then energy switch and put it on Mewtwo Mew tag team and that allows you to power it up pretty quickly from there the rest of this is focused on consistency and just kind of getting your Mewtwo Mew tag team set up and discarding all your important attackers so you run some really powerful draw support in the sense of the Dene GX which has the ability Dede change when you play this from your hand onto your bench during your turn you may discard your hand and draw six cards and you can't use more than one Dede change ability each turn and then you can supplement that with Crobat V which has the ability dark asset when you play this from your hand onto your bench you may draw it so you have six cards in hand you can't use more than one dark asset ability each turn so that's kind of why you run the split is you can't really you can kind of use these in conjunction with each other and so that's really nice so yeah you go like turn one Dede change discarding as many Pokemon as possible maybe a couple dark energy and then you can follow that up with dark asset from Crobat and then you can also get more dark energy into play using Viridian Forest which is a stadium card that says once during your turn each players or once during each players turn that player may discard a card from their hand if they do they can search their deck for a basic energy card reveal and put in their hand so you can get rid of all your attackers get rid of dark energy and just get another dark energy so just kind of you see how it starts to piece itself together after all that you're getting dark energy in the discard pile you're getting dark energy back out of your discard pile with Moltres and then you're moving it over to Mewtwo and the Mewtwo is able to utilize all these different attackers with great efficiency this deck is really just versatility is the name of the game right so you're just using cherish ball it can pull out GX Pokemon quick ball all your stuff or all your Pokemon are basics so quick ball lets you get a basic Pokemon from your deck with just having to discard a card which is a pretty big advantage in this deck and then you're just running for research for Marnie three boss for switch just to get your Mewtwo Mew tag team into play a lot of these big basic tag teams have pretty beefy retreat costs so we're trying to move those out of the way and make room for Mewtwo here but yeah I think that's pretty much it I guess this guy's not a basic vileplume it's a stage two but that's the part again Adele or not yeah you're right you can search in both the cherish ball and it just really highlights cards that I'm almost glad we don't have in the format today I mean obviously if we had Aurora and quick ball Lugia would just be ridiculous again they're both cards that are highlighted by broken Lugia back when it was broken but I think it's cool to see cards that I feel aren't super great by themselves like the muck Alolan muck or then again Adele Guzzlord I mean they're both decent cards and again Adele Guzzlord was a little bit different when you look like I know it's all play and expanded because it had access to double dragon and things like that but you know as a whole in a standard format the card was not super playable but seeing the stuff and then you get to see just kind of how the game has evolved from some of these cards like we have dead a change versus you know the modern squawk and sees or it's not only limited to only using one but you can also only use it on your first turn now but this looks like it should set up pretty consistently just about every game yeah so I had one game against James I was playing Decidueye Inteleon so Decidueye had the ability I think leafy green camo or some forest camo or something like that I'm sorry if I'm misremembering but it's basically just a safeguard ability that prevents any V's or GX's from damaging it and so I tried to get that set up as fast as possible and James did a really good job of disrupting my setup you know he would boss something up and knock it out I think he used vile plume turn one to knock something out before I could get it set up and then from there he using a Ganondale to snipe something on my bench and then I believe he ended the game with the Ganondale and Guzzlord chaotic order for two price cards and so that just feels pretty unfair right when your opponent's just like okay cool I win it's like oh okay great well I guess that was fun for you I will go back and just sit in the corner and feel sad so that's uh I don't know it's it's uh it's this format um yeah ADP was a thing uh Eternatus was a thing I don't love it if I'm honest but this deck I do like how versatile it is it really rewards deck building uh James kind of made this out of his own um experience with it and testing um he took kind of the Mu-3 core with a Moltres engine and just chose the right attackers he thought we would need for this tournament and it paid off he went undefeated I think it was just four Swiss rounds so he went 4-0 and won this tournament and with a cool deck and I think that's why I wanted to highlight it in today's time capsule and I definitely encourage you guys if you ever have an inkling to go into retro James has got his own discord I'll shout it out here um it is the old format Pokemon TCG discord if you go to like a couple of different places I don't know where the best place to find it but he's pretty active in uh PDCG Legends uh their discord server and uh beyond that. Is he on Snowpoint Temple on Facebook too? That I don't know I would imagine so I'm not on Facebook too much anymore yeah I just know that that at least used to be a retro group I'm not sure how active it still is yeah he's pretty active and he's on Twitter I think I'm not too sure but if you ever go to regionals and see people playing retro 90% of the time if he's at that regionals he'll be there playing retro with him I think he told me like he playtested for this tournament more than he playtested for the regionals he played in the next day and it definitely shows not to say that he didn't do particularly well at regionals but he definitely did well in the retro event so I know you know you got to go where your heart lies and definitely I think that's commendable right like you're focused on what brings you more joy and that's fair um but yeah I just wanted to focus on his Mew3 deck and uh shout outs to James so cool nice nice well awesome thank you very much I'm glad we got to highlight that um it was a little bit of a shame we did run out of that time for it last week yeah but cool to always fit it in there and now we're going to go ahead and jump over and you know you reminded me at the end of last week's episode that there was a new expansion dropping for Pokemon Pocket and the at the time of recording that we didn't know you know any of the cards in the set really I think that we had seen the Palkia Dialga EXs and maybe a handful of other cards but now we've had that full expansion release we got to go through a whole list of all of the cards and John and I have selected um right around 10 maybe a couple of extras here to talk about and we're not going to do these in any particular order but you know I wanted to start with the trainers both be it items supporters uh we did also introduce tool cards in this expansion for Pokemon Pocket they function exactly the same as they do in the TCG you just attach it to a Pokemon and it does whatever the card says so I think the extent of those right now are either you give your the Pokemon that it's attached to plus 20 HP it has a 20 damage um not buffer I'm trying to think of the I don't remember what the word that I'm looking for but I guess like a reflection almost so the same thing is the Druddigon's rough skin ability so when your Pokemon gets attacked you do 20 damage to the attacking Pokemon and then a Lum Berry that heals status on whatever Pokemon it's attached to um so nothing super crazy nothing groundbreaking there's also notably no tool removal right now but there are a few cards that interact with those tool cards but the first thing and one of the most impactful trainers that I think got released in the set is this Pokemon communication just real quick there is one Pokemon that can remove tools uh I believe is this Starly like the basic Staraptor I could not have told you that yeah I just looked at all the set recently so not to be like actually but actually there is tool removal in that okay cool but that is it so that's all you got one little basic bird that seems pretty costly like since I'm assuming that's an attack and you it's more than likely you're gonna get knocked out after you do that I don't think it's worth running but I just figured I'd correct you before we get roasted by the comments I'm glad that exists in case some kind of busted tool ever comes into the game for sure but um in an effort to make stage twos or just decks in general more consistent they gave us another Pokemon search card in the form of Pokemon communication and it's a little bit different from how it worked in the paper TCG in the paper TCG you would reveal a Pokemon put it on top of your deck search your deck for a Pokemon reveal it and put it into your hand and in Pokemon pocket they don't want you searching your deck so you don't have to reveal a Pokemon because the game just does it for you you just select a Pokemon from your hand it goes back into your deck and it gets switched with a random Pokemon from your deck I haven't actually tested this to know if it works when you have no other Pokemon on your deck to see if the card just fizzles and does nothing or if it returns the same Pokemon but the big thing for this is just the fact that it has made stage two decks so much more consistent than they were with just genetic apex and mythical island like you would make a stage two deck and if you just didn't get lucky enough to draw into your stage one at the right time followed by your stage two at the right time you wouldn't set up and you'd get run over whereas now you can kind of sit on things until like okay I need the communication right now because I haven't draw my stage one, but I need it. And this just really smooths things out for you. So it's a great inclusion, probably a two of in most, if not all stage two decks. And you could just splash into other things as well. Yeah, very, very strong. I mean, any Pokemon search of this time is definitely worth consideration, if not including automatically. Uh, the next card we have looking at is, uh, Cyrus. You can get the cool alt art looking, uh, Cyrus here. Uh, this is a very strong card. It says switch in one of your opponents benched Pokemon that has damage on it to the active spot. Um, so similar to bosses orders, but that you have to have something that's damaged and in this game, they really are like, you know, a base set of Pokemon TCG, I believe they gave us gust of wind and in pocket, they are very, very reluctant to give us that kind of same attack or same effect. Um, this is as close as we've got so far, and this card is pretty good in a lot of different decks. Um, the most notably I can think of, there's a couple of different options you can play with the Greninja that snipes, um, a bench Pokemon of your choice, you could do that and then follow it up with a Cyrus, um, to bring it to the active, so you can kind of target down maybe a Gardevoir that's powering up a Mewtwo or, um, just a bench sitter. That's like a Vaporeon or something like that. Um, that's kind of the engine that would normally be safe. You can bring it up to the active with Cyrus and go from there. Um, there's a couple of other cards that were printed that, um, in this set that I don't know if we'll get into, but I would definitely want to shout out Spiritomb at this point. Um, it's a good combo with Cyrus. It says for like one dark energy, it just does 10 damage to all your opponent's bench Pokemon. So then that sets up, uh, the ability for you to use Cyrus later on. And there's no bench barrier or anything like that in this game yet. So, um, yeah, this is a really strong supporter. I don't know if it'll replace Sabrina entirely. Uh, I think they serve different purposes, but it is definitely like really, really good. I think we've seen it on a couple of online tournament deck winning decks, um, especially with Greninja. So yeah. Yeah. And the nice thing, I mean, now you have options and I think that options in a card game are really cool and they allow for expressiveness and deck building, and you can maybe get into the intention behind why did somebody play two Sabrina instead of one in one Cyrus, one Sabrina, or why did they play two Cyrus or why did they play one of each and you could actually go through the deck iteration process and testing to figure out which of those combinations, if any of them is optimal for a given deck and it's just really cool to have that effect for sure. Another cool effect that we've got now is in the form of the Dawn supporter, which simply says move an energy from one of your bench Pokemon to your active Pokemon. And one of the things in pocket, given that has some pretty limited energy acceleration, is that a lot of times where you put your one energy really matters. And Dawn not, it's not a get out of jail free card, but it allows you to be a little strategic in that you don't have to pre commit energies to something when you want to attack, or it allows you to diversify things to maybe allow two different attackers to be prepped, depending on which one fits that situation a little bit better. And it opens up some combo plays with some other cards, you know, some of the ones that we're going to talk a little bit later down the line, like the Infernape EX in particular, that just wouldn't be possible here. It also brings, there's a card from the Genetic Apex set, Magneton, that just accelerated lightning energy to itself. Suddenly now that's a battery that can suck a lightning energy onto your field and move it to your active in one turn. And you've gotten around the restriction of only attaching one energy return. So it's just a pretty strong effect. Obviously it's your supporter for the turn, but I think, you know, we don't, we're not going to see an energy switch at any point in this game. I feel like that would just be way too broken. Yeah. Not, not for a while. If we do. I think similar to like Gusto wind, they're really reluctant to give us really, really strong item cards, even the item cards. Like if you look at Pokemon communication, compare it to the TCG it is very nerfed. You're not allowed to grab whatever Pokemon you want on your deck. You're getting a random Pokemon and same thing with like Pokeball. You're getting a random Pokemon. A random basic. So I think that's just the design choice that they've made. And I think it makes sense for when your deck is so small to have that random element. And when you're limited to your one supporter for turn, it slows the game down a lot more, makes it a little more, I guess, strategic. If you have to think, okay, what one supporter do I want to play? Do I want to play a professor Oaks and draw two cards? Or do I want to dawn or whatever? So it's a good design choice, I think. But it's definitely. Yeah, this is a cool card. I like it a lot in a lot of different decks. The versatility factor is really nice. It allows you to cycle through different attackers and kind of surprise your opponent with some plays that they might not have seen coming, which is cool. Yep. Once one other card, we actually know that I'm thinking about this, that combos with this, that we did not include on this list. There's a Giratina in this set that has a levitate ability. Just if it has an energy attached to it, it has free retreat. So you can, and it has 120 HP. So notably you can just have it sitting active to kind of soak up damage while you try to build up something on your bench. And at some point you would just attach an energy to it, retreat it to your bench, and you could dawn that energy off. So it's not a wasted attachment. And just go from there with whatever your big attacker is that you were hiding behind that Giratina with. Also works just for a few other things like X speed is really powerful with this card too. Yeah. Next card we have up is Yanmega EX. It's a grass stage one with 140, which is a decent amount of HP for a stage one, I'd say. It has one attack. It is air slash. It does 120 damage and it is three colorless energy. And then it just says, discard a random energy from this Pokemon. So this is a cool card. It's got a lightning resist or lightning weakness for grass, which is nice for grass to have some other type coverage. But I think this card is unique in that it's entirely splashable in any deck. So you can power it up with another card that we might talk about later and kind of combo this. It has a one retreat cost, so you can kind of flip between two different ones. But it's kind of a beefy, big hitter, which sounds crazy to say if we're looking at other card games, but yeah, air slash for 120 is pretty strong. The downside is not too drastic compared to some other attacks that do similar amounts of damage. And then, yeah, just the fact that you can kind of splash this in other decks, like a psychic deck with, with, uh, Gardevoir, or we'll get into some other stuff in a little bit. But yeah, I think this is a, it's definitely worth thinking about if you're like, man, I've got a decent engine going, but I need a good attacker. Here's Yonmega to kind of solve your problem. Sure. And like you said, that 120 is a really nice break point for a lot of things. I mean, I know it looks like when they were designing cards for the set, they wanted to try to shake up some of the old mainstays like the Mewtwo and the Pikachu decks, and notably having this Yonmega, even though it is weak to lightning, it can survive a hit from Pikachu and it can knock that Pikachu out in one hit. So just powering this thing up on the bench and being able to take out those kind of what would be big basics of the format as they were, was definitely an interesting design inclusion. And the three colorless attack cost, like you said, is really cool too. It fits in a variety of things. Next up, we're going to talk about one of the immersive or like flagship cards from the set and highlighting the Palkia booster pack. We have the Palkia EX, 150 HP water Pokemon, has a one water for Slash and three waters and a colorless for Dimensional Storm, going back Slash does just 30 damage and Dimensional Storm does 150 damage and you discard three water from this Pokemon so the attack can also do 20 damage to each of your opponent's bench Pokemon. So combos with Cyrus sets up most things to die or get KO'd by your follow-up Dimensional Storm. And there are a variety of ways to power this up. The next card we're going to talk about, spoilers, it's Manaphy, has a water acceleration trait to it. You can just use Misty with this. You could use the Vaporeon from Mythical Island with that wash out ability to pile energy up on your bench and then move them up to the Palkia. And a lot of times, if you can get off two dimensional storms in a game, you're probably going to win. You know, 150 is a really big number, knocks out Palkia, knocks out Mewtwo, knocks out most basics, if not all basics, I think, and realistically knocks out almost everything in the game, with the exception of, I think, Charizard, Venusaur, and Blastoise, knocks out pretty much everything else in one hit. Yeah, it's really, really strong. I think it is probably currently one of the strongest attacks we have in the game. It's really a beefy cost and a pretty heavy thing to power up over and over again, but it's, like you said, not undoable. I mean, we've seen some other stronger attacks, like the Mewtwo attack that makes you discard two energy. There's ways to power it back up pretty efficiently. So yeah, Palkia, I think it's one of the two feature legendaries of this set. And I love this artwork. I have to shout that out real quick. One of my favorite is MC Escher, and this definitely, like, draws from the really, really cool one set. Yeah, the Palkia illustration rare from Astral Radiance that just has, it's kind of like a different, right, just a different perspective of that card. So this guy right here, I just want to shout that out real quick. One of my favorite cards of all time. So I'm definitely really hyped to see this as an immersive card. I haven't really pulled it yet, so I'm excited to see the video for that when I do. It's really good. No spoilers. It's really good. Yeah. Yeah, I'm, I'm very excited. It's, you know, I love, we don't really talk about Pocket too much. And, you know, that's fair. I think it's a more of a casual game for a lot of players, but there's still a competitive aspects of it. But I do love how much Pokemon company seems to really care about just the artist and artistry of these cards. Even if they're not being printed as physical cards, they're really putting a lot of effort, the artists are especially in designing all of these. And it really pays off when you get like that, a really cool card like this. So I just wanted to shout that out real quick. I've actually seen complaints from people that, you know, why are they putting so much effort into these digital cards when we, and why aren't we getting them as physical ones and just not understanding that you could have two nice things instead of just one, right? Yeah. I think it's missing the point a little bit. Yeah, sure. We are a little envious that these aren't physical. Like we can't, you know, hoard them in our little binders like I just showed you, but it definitely, yeah, we can have nice things and, you know, appreciate it for what it is. Sure. Sure. Speaking of the energy acceleration that you kind of hinted at, here's the star of that show with Manaphy. It is just a wimpy little 50 HP basic Pokemon, but it has a really strong attack in Oceanic Gift that does no damage, but it has the effect of choose two of your bench Pokemon for each of those Pokemon, take a water energy for your energy zone and attach it to that Pokemon. So this is definitely like the most efficient energy acceleration we've had so far. We've seen Misty, which is probably like the high roll version of energy acceleration that can accomplish more than one energy extra per turn. And I think there's a Cyrus, right? That we got. What is the other energy acceleration? There's one that, oh, Valkner for lightning, but that's specific to two Pokemon. And we're really won't get too into that one, but this one is probably the, let's say most splashable for lack of a better word, pun intended, but it's the most splashable for lack of a better word, pun intended, uh, energy acceleration that we've seen so far. Sure. It doesn't, it limits it's so it uses water energy and it can accelerate water energy, but there's lots of good water attackers. Um, we have Gyarados, we have that Palkia that came out, we have Articuno in, uh, we have, I guess, Starmie as well, if you want to throw it in there, but lots of cool water attackers, lots of good water support with Vaporeon with, um, Misties and if he's definitely, um, you can just make a deck centered around using this and kind of go from there. Um, and so I really, I don't know. It's definitely, it inspires some creativity in deck building. Um, and that's kind of cool. Yeah, for sure. I think that the thing it does the most is just allow you to succeed in a water deck without having to like a high cost water deck without having to high roll on Misty. Yeah. So, I mean, just if you start Nanafee and you have your, you go second, so you get the first energy down and you're able to get an Eevee and a Palkia down and you use Oceanic Gift, you've got three waters on board suddenly. If you, now this is obviously still a pretty like fortunate scenario to happen, but if you have Vaporeon and Expeed in your hand, you can use Palkia's big 150 attack on turn two, potentially with no supporter involvement whatsoever. Yeah. So. That's really, really cool. I think, but most of the time you're content just spamming Oceanic Gift for like two, three turns and then you just build up all that energy and you're cool with your opponent knocking out Nanafee after like two turns. Um, and you can like power up two Palkia for the whole game and that's really cool. Um, or like Gyarados I think is kind of underutilized potentially. That'd be cool. inclusion adds like a huge energy cost. So like all those cards that were like just over overwhelming energy costs, this kind of works in your favor with that. And we'll get into maybe, I don't know if we're going to go over it, but I definitely thought like the Licky Licky EX, you can utilize this or like the Regigigas, like some of those that have overwhelming energy costs that those are thoughtful inclusions potentially. For sure. Just to shout those out real quick. Yeah, I had left them out of this list, but you're right. They're both just for reference, they're both colorless attackers that need four energy to attack. So any means of powering those up more efficiently is welcome. Next one we wanted to highlight is the Infernape EX. And first I want to say this artwork is absolutely amazing. Very cool, yeah. Very Goku reminiscent, like riding around on the cloud or something as opposed to this, I think it's supposed to be a rock, or maybe it is a cloud. It's kind of hard to tell, but something. 170 HP stage two fire Pokemon. Notable trait is that it has free retreat, and its attack only takes two fire energy to do 140 damage, but you have to discard all fire energy from this Pokemon. So this is the one that I kind of hinted at earlier, works really well with Dawn. So you can do back to back 140s, and in many scenarios, you know, that should take two knockouts for you. Or at the very least, knocks out one thing, takes you one prize point, and then really softens up something that's probably worth two prize points if you don't get the second knockout. And then, or you can just retreat that Infernape to the bench and attach an energy to it back there, hide it for safekeeping until you're ready to come back out and swing again. So I don't know if people have really been exploring this card a lot, but I think that it has some potential, you know, 170 is a lot of HP. Truly. Yeah. Water weakness is an ideal, but I think there is a lot of upside to this card. It being like, I didn't really look at the lower evolutions. I think some of them are allow you to accelerate energy, if I'm not mistaken. No, both of his are just do damage. Oh, sorry. I must be thinking of something else. But it's a pretty low energy cost for that high amount of damage. I think that's probably the most efficient attack we've seen out of this set. So definitely a really cool fire Pokemon, really cool artwork again. But yeah, I definitely have nothing else to add. I'm just kind of vamping over what you've already said. Well, no fancy artwork for this one. But, you know, John, why don't you tell us about Magnesone? Yeah. So this one might seem underwhelming when you look at it at first. I definitely kind of glossed over it. And then Aaron brought up to my attention. Oh, don't forget about the Magneton. And I'm like, Oh, oh, yeah, that's actually really, really good. So Magnesone is 140 hit point stage two. It has Thunder Blast for lightning and two colorless. It does 110. And then it says discard all lightning energy from this Pokemon. So like, I kind of glossed over this, to be honest with you, I didn't really think about it. But then you brought up the Magneton from the base set. I guess I should know the name of it by now. Genetic Apex, where it allows you to accelerate one lightning energy from your energy zone to that Pokemon, just a free energy acceleration. And so what you brought up was a really cool point that I want to echo here. You don't have to run this in a lightning deck, you can run it in literally a water deck, a fighting deck, a fire deck, anything else, because you can pull energy from the energy zone. Not you don't have to attach it, you can just pull it straight out of there and get like a free, free attack with a lightning attacker. And yeah, Thunder Blast. And then you can just attach one energy from turn and discard two lightning energy and then do 110 for out of nowhere, basically. So really, really efficient attacker. And yeah, Magnezone is 140 hit point, kind of bulky, kind of hard to set up. But like, once you do get it set up, it really goes from there. So yeah, you can discard the and it's just discarding one lightning for 110 is pretty strong. Like you said, when you evolve Magneton from Magnemite, you can accelerate one lightning and then go ahead and before you evolve to Magnezone, accelerate another lightning and then power it up from there. So just keep using the 110 spamming that is pretty strong, I'd say. Yeah. So the big notable thing there, like you said, so you're guaranteed to get two lightning onto your Magneton before you evolve it. So you are guaranteed two Thunder Blasts for the low, low cost of, you know, one energy attachment for the first one, second energy if you need the second one to follow up. And the big combo right now, at least from early online grassroots events has been Magnezone with Darkrai. And the big thing there is like the Darkrai, which we will talk about in just a second. So spoilers here, or I'll just pull it up now as we talk about it has the nightmare aura ability that whenever you attach a dark energy to it, it does 20 damage to your opponent's active Pokemon, and then it just has a three energy attack for 80 damage. So there's a lot of like interwoven things here because Darkrai's attack is too dark and colorless. You can go attach dark, do a 20 ping, attach dark, do a 20 ping, evolve into Magneton, suck a lightning energy from your energy zone to the Magneton, use Dawn to move that to your Darkrai and swing with only two energy attachments, kind of surprise somebody. Or you just sit there and have that 20 damage pings from the Darkrai kind of complement the 110 damage from Magnezone and allow you to achieve knockout numbers that you wouldn't otherwise be able to reach. Like I guess, notably, you do 120 ping to a Palkia and then all of a sudden with weakness, your Magnezone is knocking that Palkia out. And so it's just a combo that isn't readily apparent when you just kind of scroll through the set, but works out really interestingly as a result of just kind of the utility aspect of both of these cards when you put them together. Yeah, really, really cool. Yeah, definitely. It's always fun to see what people come up with. We're referencing, just for those that are listening, there is grassroot tournaments on play.limitless.tcg. And those are always something that is fun to look at if you're trying to build a deck or get some ideas for deck building. That's where me and Aaron usually start out a lot of times is looking at what some other players have been playing on those tournaments. Sure. And most of the time, they typically are free to enter, and some of them actually have cash prizes. So if you have a spare day and you just want to kick it around and think that you have what it takes, go for it. But like, fair warning, a lot of times they take several hours. So be prepared to carve out a large chunk of time to do it. But yeah, I really think that that's kind of enough about Darkrai too. It's an efficient Pokemon. I think that this card almost single-handedly kind of pushes Mewtwo out of the game, in the sense that it just puts a lot of pressure on that deck really quickly and hits it for weakness. Yeah. But yeah, you touched, I'm gonna follow up Darkrai with another really good dark EX Pokemon. This one's a stage one Weavile EX. It has 148 hit points, and it just has one attack for one dark energy. It does 30, but then it says if your opponent's active Pokemon has damage on it, this attack does 40 more damage. So you're doing 70 damage for one energy, which is probably the most efficient we'll ever get in this game, at least for now. And Weavile, I think it's probably one of my favorite Pokemon, just from a design standpoint. I really like the look of it. Sneasel and Weavile are pretty cool. But this guy, we've seen some online success with it already. You can run it with Spiritomb to kind of spread some damage out, and then really efficiently go right into Weavile the next turn and start taking knockouts doing 70, and then if you're at 80, and then you can power it up again. Like if you have a Darkrai on your bench, you can just spam Darkrai, like attach to Darkrai, and now you're hitting stuff for, you know, 80 plus whatever damage is already on there. So some really cool synergy we've seen. It's a little underpowered, I think, which says something. It's strong, but it definitely has some fragility in only having 140 hit points and, you know, it not doing a whole lot of damage, but it's very versatile. So I could see like a world where you're just trying to get in there and get in some early damage with Weavile, then maybe transition to a bigger attacker later on in the game, like a Darkrai, which is probably where a lot of people go with it. Sure. And I think that's totally the intended way to, like the way the cards were designed and intended to be played together. Nothing really else to add about it. The card's decent. It's not super great, but I love Weavile too, and I wish it was a little bit better. Yeah. We're going to talk about the other poster tile from the set. This one also has a really cool movie attached to it with its immersive card, and that is Dialga EX, and that has the metallic turbo attack for two metal energy, does 30 damage, and allows you to take two metal energy from your energy zone and attach them to one of your bench Pokemon. And its other attack is two metal and two colorless for heavy impact, which just does 100 damage. So Dialga is not really like a big main attacker. It's more so kind of an engine Pokemon in the sense that, you know, 30 damage into 100 damage doesn't really knock anything out. Without the use of something like Dawn, you're not doing the 30 into 100. It would take you two more additional turns, and a lot of times I don't really know if you're going to get three attacks off with this thing unless your opponent is just doing nothing all game. But it does allow you to set things up like Yanmega, or like that Licky Licky, or the Regigigas, or you could do Magnezone with this still, and just kind of go from there and get these extra energies on your board so that you're ready to power through whatever your opponent has active that Dialga potentially couldn't handle by itself. Yeah, I don't really need to add. It's just a good engine. You know, just a really powerful guy, and 150 is a decent amount of hit points for a basic Pokemon. Sure. You know, and fire weakness is pretty nice. There's not a whole lot. I mean, like you brought up the Infernape, but I think that's probably an outlier. There's not a whole lot of fire if you look at like tournament results. So it's really hard for something to knock it out in one hit. Yeah, the only other fire thing that would see any play is Charizard, and that does 200. So it doesn't matter what type you are, you're knocked out. The other notable thing is the artwork for this Dialga is like the Palkia in that it is kind of a different take on the Art Rare Dialga from that same set, where he's kind of like jumping in the air, and you can kind of see the solar flare in the background. This one looks a little bit less like that than I feel like the Palkias look similar to each other, but the movie for this is also really cool. I don't know. Have you gotten to see this one yet, John? No, I haven't pulled any immersives yet. I kind of dragged my feet a little bit over the weekend. So today was kind of me playing through all the challenges to start getting some packs. So I'll probably be doing that tomorrow. I got to do some online training. So I got to, you know, do that really hard while I'm playing Pocket is probably my strategy. It's the same online training I do every year. So like I know all the answers, but I have to sit through it because it's like, anyway, enough about enough about my my my problems. But yeah, Dialga is pretty cool. Yeah. So I just wanted to give a couple shoutouts if we're while we're still talking about Pocket. We talked about some cool, really, really cool cards. Some other ones I think that are worth mentioning is Mismagius EX. It's a psychic Pokemon, and it has an auto-confuse attack, I believe. So that was pretty cool. I like Gallade EX a lot for two fighting. I think it does 70. And then I think it has the secondary effect of you're putting me on the spot. It does 20. It does 20 more damage for each energy attached to your opponent's active. Yeah. So attached to the Pokemon you're hitting. If we get into a format where there's a lot of energy intensive Pokemon that aren't discarding, it'd be good for that. But then you can also run it with one of the other cards that we didn't really talk about, Lucario, which buffs fighting Pokemon. It's a stage one, and its ability says all your fighting Pokemon do 20 more damage for their attacks. And you can theoretically stack it. So you could do 40 more damage for, you know, I've seen some early decks with like him on top, him on Chan, or not him on top, him on Chan, him on Lee. And you can kind of use those in addition with Lucario. And Lucario is really good. But yeah, there's a lot of good stuff. This set, I think, I was kind of shocked to see how many good cards were in here. When I first started looking at it, I was like, Oh, there's probably you know, like we had the kind of the aim, like the set one, a and then set one or set one and then set one and this is set two or whatever. Yeah, it's like a one a is the the mini set. Yeah, so the a one a the mini set didn't have all I had some decent cards, obviously, but we're definitely more to talk about with this one. And we'll definitely kind of keep an eye on this as we are going along. Hopefully, we can see some more online results and see how people choose to use all these new cards. Yeah, that's our pocket talk for the week. Yeah. Anything else you want to add before we move on? Just like the for people that are interested in pocket, the rumor is that the next mini set or next set not really sure if it's a mini set or not, is potentially dropping on Pokemon Day at the end of this month, which is a lot sooner than what we had last time. But I guess like the trade off this set only has two packs, whereas the base set at three, maybe it balances out that way. And yeah, like it's at some point, I think that pocket has some amount of depth to it more so than people may want to give it credit for. And I think that I would not at all be surprised if we saw it on the Opie circuit at some point. Yeah, I think that that's kind of the onus for why we've been covering it on the podcast. I mean, it's that it's like TCG adjacent. Yeah. And there's a chance that it would actually have competitive play to it at some point. I mean, I think there's enough strategy like this is early days. still. And if you go back to like any beginning TCG set, it always feels really stripped down and bare for the first few sets. And then yeah, eventually stuff like a metagame starts to form as we get a larger and larger card pool. So yeah, it's exciting to see. And yeah, I could see a world where we start playing pocket competitively, start judging it, start having, you know, real money and real prizes on the line. You know, and I'd be cool with that. I think that's a, you know, some people might grumble about it, but I think, you know, that's the reality of having so many cool options. People were kind of griped about like Pokemon Go being a part of the competitive circuit. But I think if you've played the game on a competitive level, you definitely would stop doing that. There's lots of really interesting and cool competitors and all that circuit. And it is worth something that is like, you know, competing at a high level for. So I don't know. I definitely see a world where pocket gets to that level eventually. Eventually. Yeah. We'll just have to see what else is in store. And when those new cards do come out, we'll probably talk about them at least a little bit. Sounds good. Yeah, we can go ahead and move on. And I want to see what you have in store for me on this week's edition of Blaine's Quiz Show. Okay. So last we left off, I scored one point last week to bring the total from 10 to 11. And so I'm still behind Aaron, 11 to 14, I believe. So we'll see how you do this week. So for those that are new to Blaine's Quiz Show, the format is three multiple choice questions. And then within that you are allowed one hint. Basically, I'll try to come up with something on the fly to help Aaron out with the question. This week's category is repeat performance. So last week, or two weeks ago now, I guess. Yeah, in Toronto, in San Antonio, sorry. We had a repeat winner in Henry Chow who won in Baltimore this year. So this week, I wanted to focus on questions that kind of mirrored that. So question number one. Before Henry Chow, who was the last player to win two or more regionals in the same year? Was it Azul Garcia Griego, Gustavo Wada, Andrew Hedrick, or Brent Tonneson? So I know it's either Azul or Andrew. I know Andrew won multiple in La Lugia format, but I swear Azul won two last year, and I'm pretty sure he won one with Charizard and one with Snorlax. So I'm gonna go with Azul. But if I'm wrong, I know it's Andrew. Right, okay. Well, you're off to a good start. It is indeed Azul Garcia Griego, and exactly with those two decks. So yep, moving right along. Question number two. Which player won the most regionals in a single season during the modern era, 2016 to present? Was that Caleb Gettemer, Tord Ratcliffe, Jimmy Pandarvis, or Daniel Altavia? I want to say this was Jimmy, because I believe there was a year when he was on the team with Igor and everybody, and he won, I think, like four regionals. I might be wrong about that, but I'm gonna go ahead and lock in Jimmy. All right. Well, maybe these questions were a little too easy for you. It is indeed Jimmy. He did win four in 2018 through 2019. So yep, two for two today. You're on a hot streak. And I don't think it's gonna get any better for me, if you will, on the third question. I think I might have give you a softball to heat it up. It's question number three. Which player has not won a multiple, which has not won multiple international championships? Is that Tord Ratcliffe, Azul Garcia-Griego, Gustavo Wada, or Stefan Ivanov? Which of these four has not won multiple international championships? Okay. So I've got it down to 50-50, but I'm gonna go ahead and use my hint and see what you can offer me. Okay. I will eliminate probably the two easier ones for you, just to make it more interesting. Tord Ratcliffe and Azul Garcia-Griego have won multiple international championships. Yeah, yeah. You couldn't give me the rest of the softball, Jimmy. I had to give myself a chance to get some bit of a fair fight next week. Sure. Because I know Stefan won NAIC. I think it was the second NAIC. Okay. Maybe it was the first one. Gustavo won. I can't remember. It was either EU or LA, and it may have been both. I don't think Stefan has ever won EU. I don't know if he's ever been to LA, I see. I'm gonna guess Stefan here. Okay. And with that, you are perfect this week. Stefan only won the one. Gustavo actually won back-to-back EU ICs. Okay. He went in Berlin and then in Dortmund, I think 2017, 2018, maybe. That sounds about right. I don't know around there. Sure. Stefan got close last year. Yeah, he did. That's kind of why I wanted to pick him, because I feel like that was a good red herring in some ways. He's been a really good top competitive player for a long time, and it wouldn't have been too surprising to see him have won two of these. But nope. In fact, he has only won one IC. So it is exciting to see replete winners. I think that's why I like this game a lot, is that this game does reward high-level players in that kind of sense, where you get a lot of the same names at the top, but you still get new names too. But there is a lot of skill expression, and we keep seeing that over and over again. And that's always fun to see throughout the years. So thanks for playing Billions Quiz Show. You're up to 17 points now. I am woefully behind, but we will see if I can make a small dent, or at least have some fun next week when Aaron gets the chance to quiz me on my Pokémon trivia knowledge. So yeah, that's Billions Quiz Show. Thanks for playing, Aaron. No, thank you for providing the questions. I don't know. I think it's a lot of fun. I love it no matter what. Oh, I liked it too. I wish I had... To be fair, maybe I need to spend more time on these questions. I always come up with a topic and then go from there, and I'm just like, you know, what would be an interesting topic? And I think that's interesting, and they're good questions, but Aaron knows too much about Pokémon trivia for this really to be any actual competition. I need to just pull stuff from, I don't know, Pokémon lore or something like that, or like... Well, I shared with you before the cast. You slayed Unite. I can't pull out Unite either. That tag team era is kind of my black hole era, and I think if you isolated that, I would probably have a very, very tough time. But maybe I'll go out of my way to kind of study up on some of that to be better prepared for it in the future. Yeah, so anyway, the last thing we were going to close the show out with was we wanted to do some predictions and kind of a preview of what we've experienced with the Prismatic Evolutions metagame, but do it in a little bit of a different format. And so we're going to call this Hot or Not. And what's going to happen is John and I are going to take turns providing our take on items that we think are hot, which would mean they are either up and coming or are poised to do very well in an upcoming event, and things that are not. So things that are cold or on the decline, on the down trend. And the first thing that I'm going to open up with is that I think that Lugia is a very hot commodity right now, you know. Lugia got that brand new Regigigas. It's going to smash all of the Dragapults, does 330 damage. It's a basic. We can cut some of those rats out of our deck so we don't have to worry about discarding them with our researches. I would still keep a 1-1, though. I think that that's 1-1's a nice sweet spot to have. You can replace those two cards with a Regigigas. You replace one of them with a Thornton so you can get your second Regigigas back, and then you just smash all the Dragapults. You can one-hit KO the Charizards. You don't have to lean on Weirdeer and Chinchino as much, and the deck gets a little bit of flexibility into those matchups specifically. I'm buying that. Yeah, definitely. I think I pretty much wrote down something similar as one of my hot takes. Lugia will be the BDF when all the dust settles, is my hot take. But I definitely can see that. I think Lugia, we've already seen it recover some of its lost grandeur before rotation. We've had some Lugia believers keep playing it throughout the season. I think it's in a really good spot right now. If Badoo's pushing out a lot of setup decks, like the Charizard, that might have been a harder matchup for it. It allows Lugia to pop up, take advantage of Iron Hands, take advantage of all the other great attackers that you have right now. And I think, you know, people love to complain about Lugia's consistency. That's definitely a factor, but I think we're reaching a point where the format slowed down just enough to where you're able to set up Lugia more consistently and achieve, once it's set up, it has like one of the highest power levels in this game. You have basically an unlimited damage cap in Chinchino, and I think you should still run at least a 1-1 in your Lugia. I don't really love the Drapion V builds all that much. I definitely would run a 1-1 if not a 2-2 Chinchino. I like, personally, I've been playing a 2-2 Chinchino with one Regigigas and no Thordon in mind, but I can see a world where Thordon's really just a good include. It allows you to have some more flexibility and some surprise factor, obviously. But Lugia, yeah, I'm buying Lugia. I think it's a really good deck right now. In a weird world where I've been playing Regidrago all year, I think my hot take to counter your Lugia take is that Regidrago is getting freezing cold right now. I would sell my Regidrago stocks and invest them in other areas at this time. I don't think it's going to come back before rotation. I think we've seen the last gasp of Regidrago. Okay, okay. I'm going to give you a little bit of pushback on this because I think there's room for innovation here. I think that you'll see people have to adapt in how to play Regidrago into this new Badoo world in particular. Given that Regigigas kind of impacts the Regidrago matchup for Lugia, and that you can one-hit KO Ogryphon, but that wasn't something that Lugia really struggled to do to begin with. The bigger thing was dealing with the Regidragos. So that matchup kind of hasn't really changed at all. The big thing has been the Stage 2 decks have Badoo as a weapon, so you cannot just go early Kirram to board wipe them and just deal with that afterwards. A lot of times if you do that, you're just going to be, you know, up the creek. You won't be able to recover. So I've seen the ideas of you can run Powerglass to potentially recover under Badoo. I'm not sure if I'm fully sold on that. I think instead we'll see the audible back to including Hawlucha and focusing on Phantom Dive again. You can also see the inclusion of Latias EX in place of Switch I think could be really interesting, and potentially allow these decks to run Badoo themselves. So like sometimes you would have a game where you retreat to Cleffa and use Gasping Draw... Gasping Draw? Grasping Draw? Whatever Cleffa's attack is called, and instead you get a Badoo out and you switch into that Badoo because one thing that I noted this weekend was when these Stage 2 decks don't open with a search card, if you Badoo them, that Arvin in their hand is totally useless now. Well, mostly useless. Like you could still find a Forest Sealstone potentially or a TM Evil if they already have a basic on the bench, but when they struggle to find basics on turn one, they don't open Nest Ball, they don't open Buddy Buddy Poffin. If you drop a Badoo on them as the Rinty Drago player, you're likely to be able to just kind of get to a point where you can board wipe them or establish enough energy on your board that you don't care if you get Badoo locked at a certain point. I'm not saying it's great, I'm not saying it's still the BDIF, but I think that there is some unexplored potential to the deck in this format still. Yeah, I'm sure like it's a still powerful deck. I might have been hyperbolic, I think that's kind of the tone of the segment, but yeah, there's definitely some light at the end of the tunnel for Rinty Drago. I'm sure it'll come back in favor once people have figured out this format a little bit more maybe, have figured out maybe some counters to Badoo like you could run I think Rocky Helmet or something like that where they're having to head into your guy to you could search that out or something. I don't know, I'm getting a little bit wacky. That's a bit of a stretch to me. Yeah, I think maybe that's the power glass makes a little bit more sense, honestly. Like in particular, like the Itchy Pollen, you say, okay, I get my energy back, I don't really care. And then you don't even have to really fully commit to that same Rinty Drago. I think that the struggle you hit is really just the skill testing thing rather, is knowing when you can utilize things like Hiram. And I think you'll really see a bigger separation in the skill gap of Rinty Drago players, or we'll just see it fall off the face of the earth, like you said, because people that weren't as confident with the deck will be less likely to pick it up now. But moving forward, I have another take for something that I think is cold in the ice deck in my mind is Archeloudon. Despite winning that Champions League over in Fukuoka, I think that Archeloudon is losing some of its, what I would expect to be positive matchups in the metagame, because we do expect Rinty Drago to fall off a little bit, or a lot, really. And I think despite, you know, getting maybe a little bit better matchup wise, because Charizard is also probably going away a little bit. I think that you're going to have trouble with the Gardevoirs. You're going to have trouble with the Dragapults in some sense, especially because a lot of the Dragapult lists that we've seen that are doing well, especially in online events, are including Charizard. And Charizard as a whole has just been the deck that Archeloudon cannot deal with. You know, you get to a point where Charizard itself can one-hit KO your Archeloudons, and you have to either fully commit your double turn combo with Dialga if you play Dialga, or you just crumble underneath the foot of Charizard. And you just can't really handle all of that pressure. Yeah, I can buy that. I think it's still too early to say the ultimate fate of Archeloudon. I think the inherent consistency and then maybe a bit slower format do lend it a little bit of credence that we haven't really seen. I haven't seen a whole lot of online results for it, to be fair, and so I can see that that kind of bolsters your viewpoint. But I still think it's a little early, and we have to kind of see how this plays out a little bit. You know, if we get it back to a format where Rigidrago is popular again, and then yeah, now Archeloudon has that advantage of being able to deal with Bidoo, slowing everything down. You know, it's a really slow, it's a really, doesn't need a lot of items to get set up, and then can just start swinging from there. So Bidoo doesn't really affect it too much, as opposed to other set up decks, and other powerful attacking decks. Another deck that I think I'm cold on, in addition to Rigidrago, is Raging Bolt. I don't think that if we're going to see huge Bidoo turnout the next few weeks, I would not play Raging Bolt at all. I watched in the finals of the cup I judged over the weekend, one game where the Raging Bolt one game, or yeah, one game won, and then game two went first, and then the Dragapult player used Bidoo turn one, and then they proceeded to do nothing the rest of the game, because their deck just turned into a pile. And I think that's kind of the fate for Raging Bolt for the next few weeks, until they can figure something else out. And I think they're an even worse position than Rigidrago in a lot of ways. You're not being able to recover energy when your deck discards a bunch of energy to attack. Really puts you in a vulnerable position. If your opponent's running multiple Bidoo, it's even worse. But I think, yeah, even just slowing that fast of a deck and taking away its probably number one advantage of being the deck that can attack turn one, going second, really takes advantage of just the strength of Bidoo really well. Yeah, for sure. I think you summed that up pretty perfectly. If we expect Rigidrago to decline in any capacity, Raging Bolt's losing a really good matchup. If Bidoo is up, like you said, you can't recover energies. Similarly, you know, not going to spend a lot of time on it, but Goldango is probably not a good play anytime soon. Anything that really relies on superior energy retrieval, so Goldango, Chien Pao, things like that, are going to really struggle in a metagame where Bidoo is at all prevalent. But one thing that I think will not struggle, will help people not struggle, rather, and this isn't a deck per se, but just a tech stadium inclusion that could really bolster decks into either Dragapult or, more notably, Gardevoir, is Jamming Tower. And I think that Jamming Tower is definitely going to see some play in either Lugialis, or we have seen it in Archeloudon, maybe Serraledge, or just maybe including a Jamming Tower in your Dragapult deck if you feel that you're struggling with Gardevoir. It really impacts Gardevoir the most. They're pretty heavily tool-reliant in the form of either Bravery Charm and, really notably, TM Evolution. A turn one Jamming Tower can just put a major halt to any of Gardevoir's game plans, as they want to really ramp those currently. Is that early? Yeah, and Dragapult obviously wants their ace pick, which they've pivoted to, with Sparkling Crystal. The tool that reduces its energy cost for its attack, and Jamming Tower definitely shuts that down. So yeah, I could see a world where Jamming Tower's stocks are way up. I don't know if it's an auto-include and everything, per se, but if you're definitely struggling with Gardevoir, and a lot of decks probably will be struggling with Gardevoir in this format, I think Gardevoir is moving up higher and higher on tier lists and whatnot. Definitely thinking about putting Jamming Tower in is definitely a way to go. Perfect. Do you have any more takes to add on here, John? I'm good. I'm sure that will look silly in a couple weeks whenever Archeloudon wins Merida, and then Regidrago wins in what is it? Puerto Rico? Yeah, but until then, we'll be very confident and happy casters. Well, we can revisit this next week and see how we fared and how we projected things to go, because we do have that Merida Regional coming up this weekend on the 8th. I don't think there's going to be any coverage for it, unfortunately, but we'll be on the lookout for those results on Limitless when they do come up. And I think that that just about does it for us this week. So once again, if you've reached this part of the episode, thank you very much. I know that we've gotten some new followers, so thank you very much to anyone who does follow the show online on Spotify or subscribes to it on Apple Podcasts. We really appreciate it. The more people we get doing that helps other people find the show and just allows us to continue doing what we have fun doing on a weekly basis. So again, thank you from both John and myself. If you did want to reach out to us on social media, you can find me still currently on xat underscore Aaron underscore Curry and John is at No, is it at John? John dot orgel. I looked it up. So I I want to get it right this time. It's John orgel one word Dot b sky dot social so i've been saying it wrong for like four weeks now Um, but john orgel is all one word and then dot b sky dot social is the handle But i'm sure if you like search john orgel it should I mean there's not a lot of john orgel's out in the world Thankfully or I don't know Undankfully, I don't know we want to your viewpoint on john orgel But that's my social handle for the moment being I'm somewhat involved in that. Um but yeah, uh, thank you for listening to um the battle frontier we Always value your feedback. So feel free to leave a comment ask a question in any of our socials or any of the the necessary channels, um, and I definitely look forward to Journeying together with you further aaron. I'm excited to see kind of how stuff develops next few weeks in preparation to euic That's definitely what i'm looking forward to so Yeah, sure for sure and we've got some other stuff planned for those upcoming episodes as well So stay tuned for those and we will see you next week on the battle frontier You