Episode 2-21: EUIC Opinions

Uh, yeah, on Friday, my hair like naturally does that anyway, so I just kind of lean into it. That's like my, I sat down with my barber and he asked, Oh, you want to do anything different? And I'm like, dude, I can't do anything different with my hair. Like I've got one haircut at this point. That's how you know, you're like in your mid thirties, but it's like, you just have the one haircut. Like I changed the way I part my hair for the first time and a lot like, and I did it last year and I have to, I think it looks a lot better. Like it, I don't know, it looks better, but it just, it felt like, I don't know, like I was somebody else. Like I looked in the mirror and I'm like, in a good way, but also just like in a, like you just get used to doing things a certain way for so long, like in your mid thirties, like your, your morning routine does not change. No, no, no, no. It was a little interesting. Although, so with that, like cold snap that we had, and I'm obviously you guys had much colder weather than we did, but with it, so we had, uh, like plants that were, I'm not sure if they're going to recover, but in addition to that, it was super dry for like a week, week and a half down here to the point where like, I could just, I could feel it in my skin and everything. And I don't typically, you know, as a Floridian living in a super high humidity environment, I don't typically have to worry about like moisturizing or anything outside of, you know, like wash, wash my face, put on lotion so that you don't like break out or whatever. It's like typical skincare stuff, but you don't need to kind of go above and beyond. And I noticed I'm like, wow, my hands are like really drying out. Like the skin on my face is getting like super dry to the point where it's like before I would even do anything. It's like, okay, I'm going to get some lotion and we're, we're getting, we're getting back to normal, but it's funny, like the, the grass, the grass and everything around here, like you wouldn't know that it's Florida driving around looking at like the foliage. Yeah, it's, it's been a kind of crazy time for like, I mean, us, like we've had, I think this is the longest I've ever seen snow on the ground. It's melted pretty much like 70, 80% today because it got to about 60 degrees. But before today, it snowed for last Friday for a little bit, like two extra inches. And we had snow basically since, I think like second week of January. So when was it, when was it, when we got back from Toronto, the weekend after that? So yeah, it's been basically for like almost a month, we had just snow on the ground, which is unheard of in Virginia, even for like, I know we were complaining about, like, I say it's cold, but like, it's not, it's not like a Buffalo or Minnesota cold or like that, or even like Toronto the week after Toronto regionals, it was reported that it was like, I think negative 20 or something Celsius. I'm like, no, no, thank you. Nope. Don't don't take me there. And it reminds me of you. I said, you may not have seen this movie. It's like early 2000s disaster film. The day after tomorrow. Yes, exactly. Well, it's like the whole world. It was like everything. I think it was everything north of Mexico, essentially, is like an ice age at that point. And it's like, how close are we to this? Yeah, I mean, volatility. Yeah, this, this, this feels like it could be happening very soon. Oh, yeah. Is Jake Gyllenhaal gonna save me? No, probably not. Probably not. He's too old to do that now, right? Yeah, right. But yeah, outside of that, just I don't know, Pokemon stuff. Like I got, I was trying to help Hunter test for EUIC. And then I got a little bored, like halfway through and said, forget it. I'm gonna play play Ascended Heroes format instead. And I feel like it's been a lot more interesting. All right, dude, we gotta get it. You and I gotta like sit down because I gotta I gotta get like, I'm, I'm, I've been testing. We can get into it a little bit, I guess. But I've been testing like, just the same decks over and over. Like I went to league last night, played Dragapult and played Golden Goat. Today I went and played. I started coaching a new kid at our locals. Like he's been okay. He's like a junior that his dad was like, hey, do you want help with him? Get ready for regionals. It's the second regionals and he wanted to like get better at it. So he played the Golden Goat mirror open handed and like, God, dude, I, I enjoyed it a lot, but I like got done with it. And I'm like, I'm physically tired. Like just the amount, like, I know it's not a hard mirror. You're looking at me like I'm, you know, climbing on, but a mirror's a mirror. Like when you're teaching a younger kid that just doesn't have a lot of like, um, and I tried to make it as simple as possible and easy to digest because I know like it could be overwhelming if I try to like just shove every single thing I'm thinking of in my head, like, and tell them about it, you know, like talking about, like I was able to impart some cool stuff, like talking about prize exchange, like I, the first game was kind of a wash for him, which was okay. Like it built some confidence for him. And I'm like, okay, this is, if I was playing in a tournament, this is where I would scoop, you know? And he's like, Oh, that makes sense. And it's like, Oh, and like, I told him, yeah. And since I lost, I get to choose where I want to go first or second. So he wasn't familiar with that concept. Okay. Then we went into game two and he's, he had an okay setup. I had a decent setup, but I knocked out his only, like, I didn't have a great setup, but I knocked out his only gimme ghoul in play after he used like a baby golden go to take a knockout on my active soul rock and that put him like a turn behind, but he was able to maintain a one prize board for a lot longer. He was like, he kept trying to put two prizes in play and I, and I would be like, Oh, you could do that. Or, you know, let's see, let's see how it plays out if you don't do that. Sure. You know, so kind of steering him back towards a point where he was just using one prizes and I went to three prizes and he was at four and then took two prizes. And I, or, you know, we were both tight on prizes, but he had a one price board. I had multiple two prizes in play and he was able to push the prize advantage from there. And so that was cool to see, like, it play out in real time, you know, him learning a new strategy and implementing that and beating me. It was pretty cool. He's a smart kid. Like it was fun. Like it was, it was good to have that kind of be a challenge. He's like, yeah, you're kind of playing two decks at the same time. And I'm like, yeah, but you were like, you were helping me out. Like it was kind of, we were both learning together. Well, it's like, so I think that that's a little bit, but the, um, I mean, it's different now just because I'd been out of the game for long enough that like coaching wasn't really a thing when, you know, I, when I was still more active and I was also like young enough that I probably would have just been like, ah, I want to do it that. And now like, I don't have the quote unquote pedigree and I don't go to local stores often enough to have anybody in my local area. Like, I just don't have the time to really be able to commit to it. Sure. Um, sorry. I was trying to pull up. We had a comment on last week's episode on YouTube that I wanted to, I had actually responded and told them that I was going to bring it up so that we could discuss it on this week's episode. And for some reason I can't find it. So give me one second to take, take it down now. So we have, uh, from at wither gaming four, six, five. Uh, I personally think special. So this is related to our discussion of special sets. Probably in particular, my thought of saying I hate, well, hate, it's a strong word, but I dislike special sets and would prefer to just have regular sets. And that will circle back around to my thought on this as a response to their comment, but they said, I personally think special sets are very important for the Pokemon scene. The primary advantage of special sets is that they provide reprints for highly playable cards, decreasing card prices and increasing the accessibility of the game without special sets. We would have very few reprints at all. Now, in order to sell a set of mostly reprints, they include a high number of chase cards. This is a net benefit because it means collectors scramble to rip the product for chases, ultimately resulting in many copies of each reprinted card being opened, nearly everyone benefits players get reduced prices. TPCI sells product, collectors get more cards to chase. As you mentioned, the stores don't necessarily benefit because they have to deal with the hype, but they are guaranteed to sell all their product at a profit, potentially outweighing the cost. And finally, special sets allow the format to change more than four to five times each year via the introduction of a few meta-defining cards like Pokepad or Bidoo. I'm not a fan of Shrouded Fable or Black Bolt White Flare. However, because they don't really reprint anything, changing the format is still nice, but it's not a significant enough thing to outweigh the cost. And so I just said we'll highlight this address and address this comment on this week's episode. And, you know, that's kind of what we're doing right now. So the overarching thought I know previously, I just said special sets are bad, right? Get rid of them. And I think what I really mean by that is that I don't like the gimmick of only releasing products with, you know, blister pack bundles or ETBs being the primary way to open a pack of a set. Not great. I like my reference for that. You look at Japan as an example. So their equivalent Ascended Heroes set or their equivalent Prismatic Evolution set still released with booster boxes. Like you could still buy a box of whatever. Was it like Mega Dream? I think is what Ascended Heroes is called. And you get it normally. I think that they have a different number of packs than what their normal sets do. I think normally their boxes have 20 packs and then the special sets, which they call high class sets normally released around holiday time, and they only have 10 packs per box. But they also have the caveat like this may not have been true for Mega Dream. So take this with a grain of salt. I know it was true for their version of Prismatic Evolutions, where when you opened it, you got a guaranteed SIR in every box. And so it's basically like a souped up booster bundle. And if we had that equivalent product, I don't think anybody would be mad about pull rates. And I think card prices would be drastically slashed because the market on SIRs would probably be flooded. And I mean, the card availability thing is still going to circle back and be an issue at the end of the day, no matter what you do. If someone has a hookup with a distributor and they're siphoning product away from other stores or out of the hands of other consumers and eventually trickles down to players, that causes its own issue. There's not really a way to solve that without handling the supply chain as a whole. But I just wish that there was a better way to achieve product without having to buy ETBs or tech sticker collections or insert super duper jumbo box that comes with a bunch of junk that I don't want when I only want the packs of the set. Yeah. Yeah. It sounds to me like it's more of a product distribution problem than the special sets being quote unquote bad problem. Like, I don't think the sets in and of themselves are the problem. And I think the, I forgot their name, but they laid out a really well-reasoned argument. Yeah, absolutely. I think I can see a lot of the points in there and I hear it and I acknowledge it and I think it's really salient. And yeah, like it provides, like before Prismatic Evolutions, Buddy Buddy Poffin was a harder to find card necessarily because it was from, you know, an older set. And with Ascendant Heroes, we're getting reprints of Night Stretcher. We're getting reprints of... What's up with cards? Badoo. I mean, not super high profile, but there's a reprint of Fez, which is a pretty big deal. Okay. Yep. Sure. So a lot of cards that, yeah, are harder to come by. And I mean, the only argument I was thinking of as you were reading that is Pokemon's already done that with price packs in theory. So they're really, they're already addressing that in a different way. And I don't think that you need to have both things. I think the market would be fine if we just had the price packs. But I don't begrudge, like not everybody has organized play. You know, this allows people that don't necessarily have price packs to still find playables and stuff like that. And I just don't know if it's quite solving the problem this way. Like it just becomes bloated with a bunch of filler stuff that makes it even harder for collectors to find what they want or for me to find a Pokepad. Like the pull rates are atrocious because there's just so many cars in this set. But that's not because it's a special set, though. That's just because of the size of the set. And we've seen issues like that. Now, obviously, Fusion Strike was a bit weird because there were also the issues with distribution people stealing cards from the warehouse. But the larger set size, that's something I would absolutely love to see them move away from. And it looks like they are a separate issue. Like Perfect Order and whatever the Mega Greninja set is that's coming after it both look like they're going to have under 100 cards in them before illustration bears and whatnot, which is great. But my bigger takeaway from all of it was just that I think it doesn't need to have all of the specialized tertiary products associated with it. Why can't it just release as a booster box? And you have two ways to approach it. You either keep the same release schedule we have right now, where we oftentimes combine products from Japan, combine sets from Japan when we do have larger sets. And we get our quarterly releases for quote unquote main sets. And then we have these infusions of these special sets that do happen from time to time. I think it's what twice a year. Typically, it's in July, like right before Worlds and then the holiday one that's normally in January. And I don't see why those, though, couldn't just have booster boxes like that's my big thing is just give a you can keep all of the other stuff. That's totally fine. And they do releases. other boxed products throughout the year for other sets to like the premium collections, ultra premium collections, et cetera, if you really want to keep those because they do make money from a business perspective, I don't care. Just make it easier to get paxes. And then the alternative, if you do want to also then potentially like tackling the set size issue, if you want to avoid the bloat and everything, we would have to eventually end up on a release schedule that is in line with Japan's where we get a new, they get a new set, I think every six weeks. Or thereabouts, sometimes it's less, sometimes it may be a little bit more, but that I think has its own problem, especially when Pokemon's already having issues, printing product, keeping up with availability, adding more SKUs to your business models, probably not going to be a way to really quell that demand. No, it's, it's, you know, Japan's the smaller, it's crazy to say it's a smaller market, but it's just geographically wise, maybe not economically, but it's just, you don't have to have product travel as far in Japan as you do in the U S or Europe or Brazil or any of those, like, you know, but they've had issues with card availability to Africa. Like you go back and look at when, when worlds was in Yokohama, I remember we went to Pokemon center. We went around like the whole country and went to almost every single Pokemon center store and every single one either didn't have packs at all, or they had a limit of three packs per person and only had a few sets available and you would have to go, my understanding is prior to this, you could, they had packs like available in the store. You would just grab them, go take them up to the counter. Like you were at some kind of shop. And instead they had a thing where you walked up to the counter, like after you waited in line and everything, you went through, bought your other merch, your plushies, uh, I don't know, sleeves, et cetera, whatever the heck you wanted to buy. And you'd go up to the counter and they say, okay, we've got, um, oh my gosh, what were the, the Chien Pao and Ting Lu sets? I don't remember what they were called, but they eventually ended up becoming Paldea vault. And we've got these two and we've got the Charizard set, but we don't have 151 and you can get three packs for each person in your party when you check out total, not three packs of each set. You had to pick and choose like which set you wanted to do. And then on top of all that, Japan's packs are structured differently. Like you only get, um, five cards. You're not guaranteed to have a hollow in every single pack and it just gets a little bit kind of wonky from there. Yeah. It's like pocket size packs. Right. And all that to say though, that it, the card availability thing is not exclusive to the Western scene. Okay. Yeah. So I don't know if we really fully answered or address, address this. I think that like I've can respect that somebody would have the opinion that they think special sets are good. And I think that their main takeaway is they like the reprint aspect, which I fully agree is a great thing to have. You know, you see reprint sets and other card games and they're often very successful because it helps players not be priced out of playing competitive decks. It's a little bit different in Pokemon because Pokemon is already pretty financially accessible compared to most other card games. And you can build basically a top tier meta deck for 60 bucks, whereas you look at others like Magic, Yu-Gi-Oh, Riftbound, Lurkana. I'm not super familiar with Lurkana's prices, so it may be a little bit different there, but for the most part, like top tier competitive decks in these other games are over a thousand dollars and you're going to just have to shell it out if you want to be successful at a tournament, let alone wanting to play more than one archetype, whereas in Pokemon, you know, for a thousand dollars, you can buy literally every card in standard. Yeah, yeah. You could and then buy another copy, right? I'm saying like play sets are pretty much pretty much every card in standard, so you can build literally any deck you want to for a thousand dollars easily. Yeah, I mean, and. The main thing with Pokemon is like a lot of the items and supporters all transfer from deck to deck. I mean, you just swap out some Pokemon and energies and you have a new deck and that's pretty cool. Yeah, I don't think the product availability for players has been an issue. It's just when distribution is a different like when they choose to use distribution, like when they when they when they do this whole piecemeal approach of special sets, that's I think when the pain really starts to hit as far as getting a hold of products and I don't like, you know, it it it stinks when you're like a Pokemon player and you're just like, I don't want to fight scalpers and the collecting public at the moment to get just the cards. I need to build my deck, right? I don't want to have to wade through that mess. And, you know, like I could go to a card show and probably pick up pokey pads, but even there, it's still going to be inflated. You know, I'll probably go to a card show next month, like on the 14th or something like that after the sets like ATVs and stuff start coming up. So that might be where I go to get like my play set or whatever. But I don't know, man. Yeah, it is it's it's an interesting problem to have, you know, but I think hopefully I'm hopeful that like in a month from now or two months and a month and a half from now, we won't be talking about it like it's the end of the world. It'll probably just be like. You know how prismatic evolutions was with getting the dues. Yeah, yeah. It's just trying to fable as well as with getting feasibility, you know, that kind of stuff. And it's that's expected. Like, I don't think any player is going to be like, oh, my gosh, it's impossible to get these cards. It's like it's not, you know, it's it's a hassle, but it's not impossible. And that's that's where I think the pain point, like as long as the player doesn't feel like I have to. I don't know, go on the black market and buy Pokemon packs or something. Right. Like as long as long as I can go to a local card store or TCG player and pay a normal price and get them in a normal time frame, it's fine. So I don't know. I don't think I really added a whole lot. All that to say, well, but hopefully, hopefully that addresses the comment well enough. And if you have any other comments on the availability of cards or how how you would fix special sets, yeah, like John said, let us know the rest of today. We're going to be kind of doing a brief look back at how the metagame started, how it has evolved post the. Well, no, this was all still had been after winter break, but kind of how it has evolved the last two sets of most recent tournaments and how we expect that to shift going into EUIC. So I think that we might as well just jump into it then. So the first screen I've got here is the combined data set of Toronto and Stuttgart. So kind of early metagame, more or less for the Phantasmal Flames format. And just looking at. You know, variant grouping off, if we turn it on, it'd be a little bit different, but most popular deck overall for these two tournaments. Goldengo by a large margin. And then you see Dragapult, the two Gardevoirs making up a large percentage of Charizard being right there in the mix as well. And then a smattering like you've got the the quote unquote the dark decks making up about 10% of the field. And then everything else. And it's just kind of like all the riffraff nonsense, bad decks, fun decks, aggro decks, et cetera, all at the bottom. And we have this kind of big four setting that we've talked about a couple of times where you have Goldengo, Dragapult, Charizard, Gardevoir all sitting at the top. And they're likely to be there overall moving forward. But if we go ahead and I just wanted to look at kind of the conversion rate so we can see if we can tell a story with this as we go from early metagame to later metagame. And so we have both a European and North American event here. So we do get to see that kind of mishmash of things. Maybe they average each other out a little bit because you do tend to have better Gardevoir players over here, maybe better Dragapult and Charizard players over there. And Goldengo players are probably equal skill, no matter where you go in the world. But look, look, looking at things just we've got terrible conversion rate from things like Endzor Arc, some of the newcomer decks like Tank Kangaskhan, Lopunny Dusknoir, Alakazam with its resurgence still only converting at 15%. And some of the holding on dark decks like Mega Absol and Grimmsnarl heading that like 17.5% in the big four, all converting at 20% or better, proving kind of why they are the big four in the early metagame. I know the first tournament was taken down by the Terrazard deck. But then we saw Jelly Garde take down Toronto. And we're seeing these things where. These decks just prove why they are the best. So then if we just jump forward into the next set of tournaments, and so for this one, we've got Santiago, Sydney, Merida and Birmingham. We're not going to do a super in-depth review of results from Santiago or Sydney. Nothing super crazy happened at either event, aside from Alakazam making its debut into Acem, which. I don't know, maybe we'll bring it up. Maybe we can bring it up in a prediction for EUIC. Sure. But outside of that, nothing super. Well, maybe maybe Poltzard coming on the scene. And well, you can see that kind of indicated here as well. Poltzard making its comeback, as it were. And the the the big story, I think, for the second half is probably that Poltzard factor, as well as the rise of Grimmsnarl and seeing this shift in things like the Mega Absol box going from the typical like introductory list that Tord had Cornerstone and moving to the Toad Scroll package that we've seen popularized in especially Japan. I know the Japanese players absolutely love playing Toad Scroll in this Absol deck. And John and I were talking a little bit right before we started recording about how Mega Absol box seems to be the quote unquote top player deck. If it's a top player that doesn't fall into the camp of I'm a Guardi player or I'm a Dragapult player. It's kind of the default third deck for the player that doesn't want to play either of those. And they're tending to shy away more so from Charizard and Goldengo. And I think you can kind of see that the big shift here. We've got Goldengo falling down slightly and just a big rise in Dragapult over the course of this. These last four events. Yeah. And it's interesting to me that. I mean, I guess it's not that interesting. The top four, the state of the top four, but like the fact that Dragapult was the one that came out on top, because I don't feel like. It got better, like it didn't get better positioned in my mind, like it didn't mean maybe it benefited somewhat from some of the Goldengo's changing their lists, like removing Picnic Basket, removing Lucky Dory, removing some of the second Turo. But I don't feel like. It beats Gardevoir consistently. I don't feel like, you know. It doesn't feel like it's just in a better spot than it was at the start of this format, so it's interesting to me that that's the one that kind of rose up. But I guess somebody like something had to change. And I guess that's what it was. I don't think it's a huge rise up, but like you look at the win percentage and it's not significantly higher now than any of the other big three. We can filter this for day two just to see if that happens. Yeah, I guess that's fair. And it doesn't doesn't change a whole lot there. Now it is higher than Charizard Noctowl, but I think you and I probably feel like that's a fair thing to see and take advantage of. But yeah, you look at it compared to Golden Goat or no, I guess it is higher than Golden Goat and higher than Gardevoir, like straight Gardevoir. So I don't know. Maybe it is well-deserved. And I'm just spouting off about nothing. But yeah, I mean, hmm. Maybe people just have started removing the text for Dragapult for some reason. You know, we don't see we don't see the Psyduck in as many decks as we did at the start of the format. You definitely don't see it in Gardevoir or I mean, I guess it's still in Charizard to some degree. Yeah, most Charizard lists have it. I would say that I think the things that account for the rise in Dragapult, the increase in play percentage are one, players moved off of Golden Goat. They needed to go somewhere. And typically a player has to make a decision at some point in this format, like. Arguably, most people believe that the two three best decks are like we talk about big four, but if people were to say what they believe, the three best decks are, most people would say Dragapult, Gardevoir and Golden Goat. And so if they're done with Golden Goat, they have to pick between Gardevoir and Dragapult. Most people tend to believe that Gardevoir is the harder of those two decks to play and therefore will default to Dragapult. And I think a lot of the reason why somebody would choose Dragapult over Golden Goat is one. They believe that they can take their Dragapult deck to be able to beat Golden Goat. But the other the other big things, there are other two big factors. One, Charizard has seen a pretty large increase in play, especially with Nikolai winning the first event in this format and then still seeing a strong Charizard presence in Toronto. So having a good Charizard matchup was a plus. A lot of people believe Golden Goat has a bad Charizard matchup, and therefore we want to shift away from that. We're going to find something else to go to. Garde tends to want to shy away from Charizard as well. So Dragapult seems like the natural fit there. And a lot of people also like Dragapult because they feel like they have agency in their game, regardless of the fact that a lot of times you don't draw on energy and there's nothing you can do about that. Or you don't find a Dracloak and there's nothing you can do about that. Or you don't open Buddy Poffin. You just want to claw your eyes out. Like you still have kind of the pitfalls of inconsistency or bricking that can happen with any deck. But just people like doing things like saying trade or saying coin bonus or saying recon directive and making decisions in their game because it allows them to. Show some level of skill expression, especially, I mean, maybe less so with coin bonus, because that's just kind of a sequencing thing. But sure, with, you know, trade or recon directive, you make a decision and therefore it kind of creates a separate fork or alternate timeline within your game that you have some influence over. Yeah. I am curious, though, could you play a deck that has a lot of like it doesn't have any. draw on the board with Grimmsnarl, and do you think it's a fallacy that players feel like they have more agency, but at the end of the day, like, I mean, I guess we can assume that skill expression is still real for these decks, but I don't think it, do you think it's any higher for like a Dragapult player than it is for, I don't know, like a Charizard or Grimmsnarl player that, or do you think it's just like all, all in the player's head that they're having more agency and like they're playing more games because they're using recon directive and able to take, you know, spread damage with Dragapult and all that kind of stuff? I mean, I don't know if it necessarily gives them more agency overall, but it definitely, I mean, their deck is inherently more consistent than decks that don't have access to that ability. You know, you, you think about, well, okay. I don't feel like you play more games with Dragapult. They're actually, I know we said we're not going to talk about the results from the events this weekend. There was a Dragapult list that played a Squawk ability. And so that's a card that gives you access to more games, just like seeing a whole new hand, but you do get the recon directive, seeing two extra cards per Dracloak you have in play every turn is powerful. It is an inherently powerful effect. Dragapult likes to play the game where it sits behind a Badoo where you get this critical mass combo based board state and you try to wipe your opponent off the board and win in two phantom dives most of the time. Can you do that every single game? No. And a lot of times, if your opponent is able to play out of your Badoo lock or pressure you out of your Badoo lock before you're ready to go, because you haven't drawn enough energy cards, or you didn't get a dust goal down or whatever the case may be, then you fall on your face. But you still, I would say, Dracloak has a very snowball-y ability in the sense that your first recon directive makes you more likely to perform your second recon directive. And for every recon directive that you announce during a turn, you're more typically, your percentage of executing your game plan is higher than if you didn't have access to that ability. Now, I just don't know if the deck, they obviously, it's gonna sound really weird to say this, because I think the Dragapult and Dusknoir are both extremely powerful cards, but I don't know if the deck is powerful enough to kind of merit the play rate that it has. Right, that's where I'm at. I know it's good, and I've played it, and the games, I think we've talked about this on this podcast before, where the games that you get Badoo, and you get your Buddy Poffin, and you get your Energy Attachment, and you get your turns to Dracloak, yeah, it feels like the best deck in format. It feels like nothing can beat it. And then the games where you open Monkey, and no Buddy Poffin, and no Energy, and you just sit there until you lose the game, feel miserable. And there's, I mean, that's Pokemon. I'm not gonna pretend like variance, and bad hands, and bad starts isn't a thing. Like, Law of Averages. But it just feels less like that's the case when you play, you know, a Noctowl deck, or you play Gardevoir, or you play Golden Goat. I don't feel like I've lost as many games just because I'm unable to have, or you just, you whiff, like, Energy at any point in the game. You only run, like, five energies, or six energy, and it's just, I mean, you get some new tools in here with Hilda, and all that, but I don't know, man. I think you're right. Like, I mean, it's warranted the play rate it has, but I would say that the general public moving away from Golden Goat and moving to Dragapult, well, it might feel like that's the right way to go, but it just, it doesn't really, I don't think it pays as much dividends as they want to believe it does. And maybe that's just me coping, or something like that, because I moved off of it. But I'll say that with my chest. Like, I'm not afraid to say that kind of thing. So do you think the issue, because for the most part, I assume that what we've been referencing when we say Dragapult during this discussion has been Pultnor. Do you feel, and you know how I feel about Pultzard, but do you feel that Pultzard fixes any of those problems, or is better positioned than Pultnor going into this weekend? That's a good question. I wish I had, like, Jesper, or somebody that has played the deck a lot more to answer that question. I don't have a good assumption. Like, anytime I've played that deck, I don't walk away feeling like, oh yeah, this makes sense. It just feels painful. Have you talked to Omar about it at all? A little bit. I think he might be moving off of it for UIC. Oh, deck's dead. Deck's dead, move on. Deck's dead. Right? That's kind of where I'm with it. And so if he's moving off of it, and he's had, he won a regional with it, like what does that say? But no, I mean, it is, it is, it's not a bad deck. I'm not saying that, but it's just, yeah, I don't, I don't follow the logic entirely. I mean, the two things, it goes back to what I was talking about with Dragapult, where the games where you are able to function. And like, if you could stack your deck and like draw the perfect hand, I'm sure it feels like the very best deck in the format, but there's just so many pieces. And if you get the wrong pieces at the wrong time, and it just, it just feels pretty, pretty awkward and weird. And I don't, I don't think like you don't have as many tech cards for all the matchups you want. You're relying upon, I don't know, weirder stuff and less of the good stuff as you would in Dragapult Dusknoir. Yeah, I don't, I don't, I don't know. I want to hear, I would love to hear if you have, you know, insight, if you want to leave a comment, like I would love to talk about it some more. That would be something that would be really helpful. Get bailed out by listeners, you know, but absolutely can only hope for so much. I'm definitely not a fan of Poltzart overall. Like I just think that it's worse Charizard and worse Dragapult. And honestly, I don't know if I like either of those decks going into this weekend. So the, the, the, just to stick on Dragapult and then we'll move off of it and kind of be done with it for the week. But I think that my, my reasoning for not liking Dragapult is kind of threefold. I already mentioned that we're going to see more, better Gardevoir players this weekend, which I think is just inherently bad for Dragapult, regardless of what Gardevoir variant they're on, as long as they're kind of respecting it enough. You know, we're not playing the like one Kirlia, no TM Evo, the two rolls and our turbo Gardevoir. And that you also have the other decks that I think are on the rise. There have been on the rise in this latter half, which are Grimmsnarl and Mega Absolbox. And Dragapult is inherently bad into both of those decks. And as players, you either have better players playing the decks or players become more proficient in those decks. They're just able to better exploit this large chunk of the player base. And, you know, if your two most popular decks do end up being kind of matching this trend for the last four tournaments, so far heading into EUIC and your two most popular decks are Goldengo and Dragapult, you know, I, I would be hard pressed to say that, I mean, really no surprise here. Gardevoir is probably the safest play if you're trying to win the event. But I also think that like, you know, Absol and Grimmsnarl are both pretty well positioned. And there's a little bit of an asterisk on top of that. But I just think that with those two decks on the rise and Gardevoir continuing to be as powerful and popular as it is, I don't see how Dragapult has any shot of winning this event. Well, I don't think it's that drastic where it has no shot of winning. Like, I mean, you're going to see one or two in cut. Sure. Yeah. I mean, there's variants, like it depends on who plays against who. To say it has no shot of winning, I think, would be hyperbolic. But it is, it does feel less well positioned than some other decks at this point in time. You know, and I think you brought up the two decks that are probably our favorites and one personal favorite for you. But I think both of those, the Absol box and the Grimmsnarl Froslass, I think they're late bloomers in this format. Like, they're not, I don't think they're leaps and bounds better than the top four decks that we've been discussing. But I think that you can find an edge. And especially right now where those, the players playing Goldengub, playing Dragapult, playing Charizard, playing Gardevoir might not have played against Absol box in a minute. Might not have played against Grimmsnarl going into this. I mean, maybe the top players have been because they've seen. Oh yeah, by now people have tested against it. But you'll still, well, yeah, but you'll still get through day one, maybe a little bit easier than somebody playing Goldengub who, everybody has played against that deck and like has a strategy for that deck. And you know, that stuff matters, like making your record, cause your record carries over from day one. Like, so if you're able to stack wins and get to a better position for day two and have a deeper run because of that, like, I think that adds up. I mean, it'll be interesting to see what decks come out of day one at the top. And if they carry over well into day two, like I could see a world where you have a Grimmsnarl, you have an Absol box go undefeated and then lose three or four games in day two when the quality of opponents changes. So I don't know, we'll see. And I'm very excited to talk about it. And yeah, we should probably, I guess we've been dancing around a long enough. You want to move over to talk about UIC in just a minute? Yeah. Before we get into like the rest of UIC, we're probably not going to talk about Dragobolt again. We spent long enough on it right there. But before we talk about the rest of the decks here and getting into UIC, we can go ahead and do Blaine's quiz show. And I'm going to try to catch up to John this week. If he has been kind in his question designation. But I'm assuming he has not. We'll see, we'll see. I mean, yeah, I don't know. We'll find out. I don't think I've been that mean. I don't feel like I am a spiteful quiz maker. We'll find out. All right. Just as a reintroduction, we're going to do Blaine's quiz show. Can you see everything fine? Yeah, yeah. You're good. Okay. All right. We're going to do Blaine's quiz show. Players will be given three multiple choice questions. If a player is stumped, they are allowed to ask for one hint at any time. If a player answers all three questions without the use of a hint, a bonus point will be rewarded. Aaron, I believe I am up two points currently, right? Yep. What's the scores? 17 to 15. Okay. So this week's category, in light of a Super Bowl commercial that came out and some information we got, we didn't really talk about it too much, but Pokemon did announce its product release for Pokemon Day and some of the merchandise and all that for upcoming, at the end of this month, the 27th, which works out kind of awkwardly because there's like a regionals that same weekend in Seattle. And so I don't know how you're supposed to host Pokemon Day and then go and... I'm running side events that day. I think that happened last year too, honestly. Yeah, I think they did. So it just makes it a little bit harder and we'll have to figure it all out. But yeah, this is Blaine's quiz show sponsored by Pokemon Day. So first question, which of the following Pokemon has not been featured in a Pokemon Day promo card? Is it Sylveon, Cerulege, Eevee, or Charizard? Okay, so I know Sylveon and Cerulege both have, because those were the last two years. The other two options are tough though. They're both very popular Pokemon. Eevee kind of seems like it would be a Pokemon Day card. Yeah, we'll say... I'll go with Charizard here. Charizard is correct. It has not been featured in a card. I think Eevee was like two or three years ago now. So yeah, it's only been Pikachu, Sylveon, Eevee. Yeah, because they haven't been doing official Pokemon Day promos. No, at least since 2017. Yeah. They did do Pokemon Day like 10th anniversary celebration stuff. And most of all of those were with Pikachu. But it is pretty new that they've had ones like specifically given to leagues to give out for Pokemon Day. That's a newer development. So, all right, I gave you an easy one to ease you in, give you false sense of confidence. That's okay. That's okay. Which of the following Pokemon did not receive a special promo as part of the Mythical Collection from Pokemon's 20th anniversary? Was it Darkrai, Dialga, Manaphy, or Meloetta? So the answer to this one's going to be Dialga because it's the only one here that's not a Mythical Pokemon. Oh, see, this is where I just start to fall apart because I don't know any of this stuff. Yeah, you're right. It's Dialga. I'm not going to prolong it. Dialga is a pseudo legendary. No, it's just a legendary. So, anything that is only available via a promotion, like you had to go to Toys R Us or GameStop or whatever to get it, is a Mythical. Or you had to get it from, I think, Manaphy originally released from some other side game that they did and you had to download or complete something in that game and then you would get a mystery gift thing that you could do with your Pokemon Ruby or Diamond. Whatever it is, Manaphy came out of. Is Fioan not Mythical then? It's a legendary? I honestly don't know about Fioan because Fioan you get from Manaphy. I think that it's a Manaphy egg and normally they These things can't lay eggs, so I don't know. I don't know all of the like entomology of the Pokemon classifications, but I do know that Dialga is a box art Pokemon, and that inherently means it's a legendary. I see. That's fair, that's fair, I guess that's a good way to look at it. Yep, so I gave you another easy. We're tied up, man, we're tied up. Let's go. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. Well, we'll see if you can pull ahead. Which Pokemon is not part of the 20th anniversary Super Bowl commercial that aired in 2016? And this is a hard one. So this is can I ask why Lucario is on here twice? Oh, well, that's your that's your hint given for free, so I'm not going to give you another hint. So was it Lucario, Dragonite, Magneton or Lucario again? I'm getting a little, you know, gosh, I have no idea what the answer to this question is. I, I, I, it's not Lucario. I'll give you that. That's that's your 50 50. OK, so I briefly remember, like, is this the commercial? If I remember correctly, this was the commercial that they it was like the Pokemon Go advertisement. So, I mean, that would explain why it wouldn't be Lucario, because it would only be Gen one Pokemon anyway. But they showed like everybody running through the street, right? I think. And then people like came together and there was like a Mewtwo that was in Times Square or something. Lucario was in this commercial. Oh, really? I'm saying, oh, so which Pokemon is not part of the 20th anniversary Super Bowl? I think you're misremembering. But am I thinking of a different commercial? You might be not trying to remember. It's like the one where it says like train on. And I think that's where they got that first tagline and got used. OK, OK. Well, I can do that. I think was like repeated by multiple throughout the commercial. I watched the commercial to make this question, but I'm going to go up. I'll go with Magneton. I don't I don't know between Dragonite Magneton. I have no idea, but I'll go with Magneton. Well, Aaron, and you came close to beating me this week, but we end up tied leading into next week. So sweet it is. You know, now we're at a nice competitive point in our time. It was Dragonite. Hold on. Hold on. What the heck was Magneton doing in this commercial? It was so there was a trainer that was at the end of it battling another trainer and the other trainer had four Pokemon Lucario, Magneton, Gyarados and. Oh, man, I thought it was going to be like one of the things where you see Charizard was the fourth one. Like people were doing tasks or something, and somebody is like training and they like I could see Dragonite being involved in something like that. Magneton just kind of floats there like it's it. That's lame. Oh, well. Oh, well, is what it is. I'll take my two points. Can't be good. Yeah. So I don't know. How do you feel about all the stuff that got announced with? Have you even looked at it like I did or not? Really? I saw people complaining about the merch. I haven't looked at the whole catalog, but I saw that. I saw that the deck box is like the same kind of Pikachu that they used for the 24 celebrations, and they just changed it to a three zero instead, which I feel like it's cool if you've never seen it before. This is how I feel about like all the EUIC merch and all the regionals like competitive, like the regionals have started doing merch now. And I saw it. And the first time I saw it, I'm like, that's kind of cool. And then now I've seen it at every single regionals and they give me like a wristband to go and buy merch at. What? And I'm like, I don't need a wristband. I'm not I'm not saying it doesn't look cool. I'm just saying, like, I've seen it before. I'll just pass on this one. And that's kind of how I feel a little bit about this one. Like, it's always cool to see Pokemon celebrated and come into, you know, the mainstream culture for a little bit. But I don't know. It was cool to see. Like, did you see the commercial? Did you watch it? I did. I did see the commercial. And I've seen discussion on that as well, where they're like where people said there's no way. Oh, my gosh. What was the soccer player's name? I can't remember. Oh, yeah. I forget. Where his favorite favorite was like Zygarde. And the people saying, oh, he's a complete form. Yeah, he he's a plant or, you know, he was given a summary. He was given a script that says that he has to say this Pokemon. He has no idea what a Zygarde is. And I don't know. I mean, regardless, I feel like that commercial was less interesting to me than the original, like Pokemon Go based one or more Pokemon Go, like focused one. And I'm sure that, you know, there's it's higher budget inherently because you're using celebrities in it instead of average people. I thought the whole kind of like twist nature to it where initially you don't know it's a Pokemon commercial. That was kind of neat. Yeah, but it's like every commercial the Super Bowl was doing that where they were just like, oh, here's a funky, funny thing going on. Like it just it kind of felt overplayed by the time we got to that commercial. But, you know, yeah, I think it was cool. Like, oh, Charles Leclerc is like, you know, big enough ones. I'm like, oh, that's cool. Seeing like a kind of popular or like Trevor Noah, like a popular. Yeah, person from pop culture and like Lady Gaga. I don't know. Like, yeah, you're right. Like, how authentic is it? How how well does it read for the general audience? Like, you know, Danny DeVito, what's his favorite Pokemon? Like that kind of level of like, well, hold on. What what would Danny DeVito's favorite Pokemon be? Oh, that's a good question. Probably something awkward. You know what? No, Mr. Mine, probably. OK, I could see you can go one of two ways with this, probably. Yeah, there's either a oh my gosh, what was the movie he was in with Arnold Schwarzenegger, where he's supposed to be like his twin? Oh, yeah. Like twin brother. I forget something referencing that. Or I think his favorite Pokemon would be Prinplup for his time with Batman movies. Yeah, the penguin or like maybe an always sunny in Philadelphia reference. Right. Somewhere in there. Like, like, yeah, like I tried to be like, you know, yeah, like a Trubbish or something for human garbage. I don't know. I don't know. Oh, it's like he's not he's he's a great character. He's a good human being, too. I think the problem is you can't operate that same commercial with your average person because people can associate those celebrities if they know anything about Pokemon, you can associate a given celebrity with the Pokemon that they were talking about. I was very easy to make the representation of or the leap from Lady Gaga to Jigglypuff or Trevor Noah. You can I mean, maybe maybe other people won't see it as easily, but I feel like Trevor Noah to side is also a kind of thing, because I think it's typically like a gag Pokemon. I'm like, oh, cool. He's a comedian. Ha ha. That makes sense. That's funny. And or like you said, like F1 with Charles Leclerc, you know, with with Arcanine like that, all of that makes sense. And I think we're fast and drives a red Ferrari. Like, yeah, it's too easy. Yeah. Yeah. So some of it lines up in that you wouldn't be able to make those same connections with average people. And I also don't know if that camera lands as a camera. Well, that commercial lands as well with the non Pokemon fan audience. If you don't have the celebrities anchoring it. Sure. Yeah, I think it makes it more. It makes it more memorable because it wasn't action heavy. It wasn't like overly. It was more of an emotional connection than a than a physical or like a visceral like, oh, wow. They weren't going for a wow factor. They're going for like, yeah, the whole emotional like, yeah. Oh, man, what's my favorite Pokemon? You know, and then you go on Pokemon's website and it's converted at all. So like you upload a photo and kind of put your favorite Pokemon on there. So like they've kind of converted their whole thing to that for this week. And it's all about. It's about connection where. Yeah, and I think that's really powerful and really like, especially as we get older and all the all the 90s kids grow up. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug. Like, well, you like you look at living testament. It's it's themed well, I think, like you look at the other commercial in the 2016 hype and it's all about Pokemon Go and go outside and be active and train on and connect with people that way. And now it's like, oh, people are more digital. How can we connect with each other that way? Oh, let's do a selfie because social media is super popular. And here here's my favorite Pokemon. Oh, look, there's yours. Ha ha ha ha ha. Oh, look, grandma's favorite Pokemon is Squirtle. I love that for him. Yeah, I don't know. But it's themed well, and that's something that Pokemon typically does really well with branding and commercialization. So and maybe because it's more of like the emotional side of things, maybe that's somehow going to tie into the expected like Gen 10 reveal for Pokemon Day. I hope so. We get insert whatever game any news for. A future generation of like new Pokemon are always cool. So, oh, yeah, I mean, that's like always so hyper. You like you remember, like I remember when. You know, like when you see a new Pokemon for the first time and like you're talking with your friends about it and like people's first impressions of it and like, this is my new favorite, like anything. And yeah, it's it's fun when like somebody is like, now this is my favorite Pokemon, you know, like that's how I felt like with quacks quacks that got released. I'm like, oh, this guy's like awesome. Yeah, yeah. Unfortunately, he evolves, but you know, can't hold it against them, I guess. I mean, they all evolve like like I don't think any starter Pokemon holds a bigger L when they don't, it doesn't evolve. It. Oh, OK, whatever. Whatever you can have, it's like bridge. I don't even know how to segue from this in the U.S. No, I know we're way off track. So thanks for listening. During one of during one of those, you know, like reveal things. For Gen six, they showed us a bunch of mega Pokemon. And you know what has mega Pokemon on its merchandise and everything this year? You, I see. And so like just talking about other decks for you, I see this year. Obviously, I'll pull up that same graphic just so you can still or the same page just so we can still talk about the decks as we bring them up. But you've got. Now, we already talked about Dragon Ball, kind of to death. And I do. I'm on a conversion right here. They pay no attention to it. This is just kind of background viewing pleasure. So you weren't just staring at John and nice faces the entire time. Like we don't want to go through and do a whole tier list, but kind of next next thing on the block, the thing that was the most popular deck has now fallen and is typically been the second most popular deck following the first two events. How do you feel about Goldango this weekend? And are there any kind of particular cards that people either have been choosing to exclude? I know you mentioned picnic basket was being taken out. Is it something that we would see being added back in? And, you know, Gabe Smart played it to his second place finish this last weekend. Is it like are the successful Goldango is going to have it overall? Are we going to see people continue to try to just focus on mirror and frillish text more or less? Yeah, I don't think I worry as much about frillish. Like, it seems good, but it seems like a lot of people are moving away from frillish and maybe just doing the one maybe one frillish. I guess I guess that's enough. You don't need jealous unnecessarily, but it is it is. Hmm. Now, I think I I personally would run picnic basket. It has a lot of versatility and a lot of different matchups. And like we talked about, like Grimmsnarl's on the rise. So that really helps that matchup. I don't know. I think it's a good card. And like, I feel like there's other cards that I would like, I like, I like Gabe's list a lot. I looked at it before we started the podcast, and I think it makes a lot of sense, like cutting down from four to three Goldango EX. Yeah, we can look at it. Sure. And then just it made some smart cuts where it could and didn't like seem to. Hmm. It didn't really strike me as like a totally new take on Goldango or anything like that, but it was definitely just like it did what it needed to do for the most part. And yeah, I think you kind of give up some of the mirror like it lost in the finals to a Goldango mirror. Like it doesn't run, you know, premium power pro and vitality man. But I think I like the like the one like this is pretty optimized at this point. You have a Cramorant, and I think that's just enough for the mirror because you can boss around for your first two prize cards and then use Cram. And then at that point, you should be able to close the game up. And I mean, bravery charm, like bravery charm functions as a mirror. Oh, true. Well, right. That is a nice deck for the mirror. Yeah, sure. So I guess that's a little bit different. Bravery charm instead of vitality man, which I like because it allows you to maybe set up a Goldango or under like the threat of Dragapult Dusknoir where they can get like a Duskull and like board wipe you necessarily like that allows you to maybe, I don't know, push, push it a little bit better. And I like moving back to Mega Mawile, then I like to make a loop on you, but I feel like I like Mega Mawile a little bit better right now. It allows you to free up some space like you don't have to run Team Evo or Ultra Ball. And so that just it's still a good card in some matchups specifically. But I mean, I don't know. Maybe you cut it and just make your deck better in other ways. Well, I'm thinking is Cornerstone going to be kind of still on the downswing potential? No, yeah, I don't. I don't see Cornerstone coming out and having a like big showing or something like that. If anything, like people are going to be playing the Toad Skrull to counter this deck. Sure. And that's why I think Prime Catcher is really important is that allows you to get access to knockout Toad Skrull before it evolves into Toad Skrull. You know, assuming they don't have Team Evo, but even if they do, you can still kind of take a knockout with, you know, you can get one or two knockouts before it gets too bad. But no, I don't know. I don't feel like I feel like it's in a good spot. Like I don't. kind of similar to dragapult dust norm where it's inherently a strong deck, but Even has a bigger target on its back than dragapult does at the moment and People have played hundreds of games like if they're going to an I see they're there. They're ready for this matchup You're really not pulling out anything that they haven't seen before You're not doing anything, you know high skill ceiling wise as far as like outplaying your opponent like sure there are things you can do to add that element of skill and add that edge like you know the bravery charm putting that on something that can then kind of take a hit or like evolve up from there or Whatever. That's a nice element, but I don't feel like It's not like, you know Absol box or Trying to think of like another rogue deck that Everything's kind of just played out at this point in this format. It has been talking about it for three months months at this point yeah, since December so I Don't know man. It's just it's getting to the point now where Are you really like surprising anybody by changing one or two cards in a golden goal? Let's know but it still gives you a good chance like when the deck like the deck I think has the best Early like has the best overall consistency has the best highest highest power level, but it's also like the easiest to kind of pick apart if you know, I Don't know like if if you can find an edge and you make them miss that one turn like there's no recovering for the Golden Go player for the most part. Yeah, so now that that's a really good way to view it Like if it falters the games done Yeah, it's because at the end of the day it's kind of like a it's an aggro deck that tries to pretend that it isn't An aggro deck. Yeah For the most part and I think the thing that has made Goldengo kind of falter and struggle not just in-game But as like overall in the tournament meta as the format has gone on is that it has to choose what to tech for And you have to make that decision. Do I want to tech for mirror? Do I want to tech for Grimmsnarl and Dragapult like the spread decks do I want to or need to tech for Gardevoir? Do I need to? Tech for do I need to tech for cornerstone, you know Do I need to have something to deal with toad scrool? and that's where the Mawile and Cramorant are kind of soft answers to toad scroll just because they can both one shot it if you've taken a couple of prizes and you can kind of Potentially play through the Cramorant to get a KO on it and maybe that gives you enough time to then set up the Mawile to then just you know gobble down for the rest of your prize cards and not have to worry about your Goldengo and I don't know. I I think that this list is fine. I Like the vitality band a lot. I think that maybe that that's something that you would add in the place of the the second Turo Potentially and that it's a tough cut like you've got to make a call somewhere. I do think yeah Goldengo is gonna have to play picnic basket to succeed this weekend. Yeah That's my call and I I think that you might need picnic basket and bravery charm to be successful overall this weekend Okay That's kind of my main takeaway. I don't think you bother with the Lana's aid. I think that that's just it Yeah, you you can you can deal with the frit like a lone frill ish As long as your opponent's not able to play around cram super crazy effectively You can deal with it with cram or you can take enough early prizes that you can then just run through it with your mega Mawile and not be too bothered by it overall and You just kind of move on from there. I think I mean You've got to take a bad matchup somewhere. So you'd have to select elect like what am I gonna tech for? What am I gonna just let fall by the wayside and not worry about it? And I I think that even though we're gonna see good players playing Gardevoir this weekend one I think most of them are gonna play straight Gardevoir and To because Gardevoir is generally split even though it'll be kind of a 12% archetype You will see like 7% here 5% here I think that jelly guard is gonna be that 5% and I wouldn't necessarily Bother taking for a 5% deck and it's weird for me to say that when I did say tech for Grimmsnarl But I think that the advantage of teching for Grimmsnarl is that your techs also double as techs for Dragapult Yep, 100% Yeah I mean That's the two Turo and the picnic basket if you can play them and like make sure that your opponent Just keep dust goals off the board like you're winning that matchup every time Like they're just not able to do enough. So yeah to pull it to pull away and if they're like, you know having a two shot at golden go like that feels really good for a golden go player, but Yeah, I don't know. I've Been on this deck for a minute and I still feel like it has a lot of things going for it You know, namely just the power level and the consistency If you're playing at EU I see like consistency Matters like you're playing a long tournament. You're playing a long day you're playing and like this is a deck that you're gonna get rewarded for good sequencing and good sequencing is something you can just build Up with reps and so like I don't feel like it's overly complex But it's it's it's complex enough to where yeah I like more skilled players with the deck will rest the top and can find some edges here and there in matchups and like find like weird lines or like there's you know people like I know Aaron you like to Kind of make fun of gold to go players on this podcast But I will defend them here a little bit like there's There's some things you can do it's not all just like I'm gonna Bunga throw energy down and take knockouts It is there's like finesse, you know, there's there's a little bit of like finagling and positioning your Pokemon in the right time and like, you know knowing where what when to extend when to hold on to resources when to when to push for a knockout or want to just kind of Allow your opponent to like, you know, maybe put some chip damage into play or you know that kind of stuff Like I don't think it's all just I Don't know it depends on the matchup But I think there are times where you can have some skill expression building. Oh, that's sure. Okay. So with that being said Yeah, let's go ahead and do our first prediction for you. I see Okay, and the question that I will ask here is over under 1.5 gold Angos in 1.5 gold Angos in cut in that will include a sim Okay Now go ahead and say I'm gonna go with the under I do think one will get in but I think it'll stop there I'm gonna take the over for sure. Okay. I Mean we do have prominent players that do play gold and go like we said we like Gabe smart I'm assuming Gabe's gonna go to EU I see like if he was willing to travel to Australia I don't see why he wouldn't be in London and you know, he's been playing cold anger for a while You've got Daniel Magna Milos long. I'm gonna say Daniel's been the king of you. I see for a lot of time like last year and Sure two years ago. I think he got Second or third country. I remember I hadn't pulled up 2024 he got 2025 He got sixth and then 2023 Well, it's 25 he did well at LA I see but anyway getting off topic yeah, I think there's enough good a European players and good American players and Other players that are gonna play it that that will find success with it for sure Okay. Yeah, my my undertake is just that I think that This will be and it's kind of weird because in a lot of ways I sees are just fancy regionals But as far as scale goes, but you do still tend to see that that for whatever reason You know the best of the best show up and tend to play their best for the ICS Maybe they take them more seriously. Maybe they're more prepared going into them But for whatever reason when you look at a top cut of an IC almost all of those players are players that have made cut or won other events and I would tend to say that most of those players will not be playing gold and go at this event and that's where I'm like we'll get one of them that sneaks in there and That's just gonna be where it stops Fair enough I have another question before. Yeah What uh, I said one of the questions I had or predictions I wanted to make was pick a road deck that you want to you think we'll make top eight, you know I was looking back at some of the past EU ICS and we've had some real road decks come out You know, we had going back to 2023 or 2022 and look Yeah, 2022. We had Frank persic with whimsicott V V star sure making second place, you know 2023 We had the Goudreau deck that had a deep run with Aiden goose. Yep and 2024, you know, we had Pidgey I control from Alessandro Cremasoli and Another Pidgey I control from Burrell Walters and then of course last year I'd say one of the biggest Surprises, you know It was it was a known deck coming in but not many people pick cloth to take it all down and the rookie Okada did all that with his deck So I think you I see historically has been in place for a lot of rogue decks We've seen kind of come up through the ranks Is There a rogue deck that you think well, well, what's one rogue deck you think will make top eight? That's that's the prediction. All right for the purposes of this I'm gonna Take like my cue from just looking at these meta Percentages for the last four events and say that a rogue deck is something that typically has 2% or less representation. Okay And that being said I didn't think I kind of I was thinking about this when we were talking about gold dingo I was trying to figure out a way that I was gonna fit this deck into our conversation at some point Because I do think it's kind of been on an upward trajectory and I think that it is Decently positioned in the main metagame currently It also has been more popular in Europe Even though it has been picking up a little bit of traction elsewhere And that is the Greninja Pidgeot dust Nord like a kind of green tree pile that originally came out of Europe I cannot remember which player started that I believe it was a British player, but The deck just seems like it's in a good spot and I'm a sucker for anything that can do like snipe and spread attacks Inherently, but it even though I I know I think that this this event is more most likely gonna be won by Gardevoir Which is a very boring thing to say. I think that Greninja Does fairly well into most of the other decks? and then I think it's kind of like More explosive drag up hold in a way and And maybe that's the reason I didn't get to bring this up when we were talking about dragapult before but the reason that dragapult Kind of feels kind of blah compared to most of the other big important decks in the format Is that all of them tend to have explosive turns or explosive points in the game? whereas dragapult you just kind of methodically slowly build things up and Greninja kind of flips that on its head where you still get that like these big board wipe turns and following like curse blast from dust nor or dust collapse and then the My goodness mirage barrage, that's what it's called and just sniping things off the bench and Doing that consistently with the help of things like ignition energy It's got a shot I think Okay I'm gonna be going a different direction. Sure I'm gonna go kind of pick a pick a deck with a player in mind. I'm gonna pick flurry on knock down. Yeah Yeah, yeah, I mean I'm sorry. It's it's like low-hanging fruit at this point but Emma Hagen's been on a tear with it dude and the kind of pick against her would be criminal like she She's the main pilot for that deck pretty much the only one that's made consistent day two runs with it And I could see her having a good time at a UIC like, you know The format hasn't changed since she's made top cuts. So why would you pick against that kind of thing? So the reason I would pick against it now granted this again a knock against the deck that I picked as well is that you will see more Skilled and better representation of skilled players on guard of war, which is a matchup that flurry only kind of struggles into But again that also goes for Greninja. So it is kind of six and one half dozen Okay, as far as other major decks like we've talked about guard of war a lot but I think that we're gonna probably like close on that the other thing at the start of this format was Charizard and that's one that I I feel like in a lot of ways it's fallen off and Where it started off it was this big explosive thing and you saw these dawn Dawn's art lists come out and be super successful super impactful tearing up tournaments everywhere because it's pretty dang good and do old ango and then as a response dragapult rose back up and Has kind of pushed all the Charizard decks back down because drag does inherently good into Charizard, you know, it doesn't fuel your your attacks you're not doing getting your bonus damage as the game progresses because they choose when their knockouts come into play and they just kind Of hold you down and you can't do a big board wipe turn because you typically take one knockout at a time Unless you're doing a dust or that's also giving them a prize card it's a one-for-one as opposed to when dragapult does it they KO your two prize or and KO your little guy off the bench and You just don't get the prize trades in your favor in that matchup in particular the Kind of other things that have popped up throughout the format like the again mega absol and grim star Oh, I think are both also pretty dang good into Charizard typically. I Do we're gonna have some staunch Charizard defenders? Like I do expect a lot of the hardcore dawn's art players to stick with the deck I don't see why you would change at this point. You've played at the whole format Same thing. We'll still see probably like Armani and in oven will play Pidgey Zard because that's just what they do and they're inherently very good with the deck. They've been playing it for a long time but I Don't I just feel like Zard is very poorly positioned going into this event Yeah, I don't I don't like Charizard Noctowl I feel a little bit better about Charizard Pidgeot I mean, it's not as bad as it was. I feel like people aren't gonna be running Team Rocket's Watchtower, like, hard counter the deck. That's fair. Like, in the numbers that they had been in Merida and in some of the other regionals we've had in this format. I think that'll kind of fall off a little bit as people readjust and try to counter Dragapult and Golden Goat and Gardevoir. Because I don't know if that lines up super well for Charizard still. Like, I don't know. The games that you open Fan Rotem or a way to get Fan Rotem feel really nice. And you don't get Ionode feel really nice. And then all the other games where you whiff that turn one and your board just kind of looks like poop. You have to like, kind of, yeah, it's not fun. So maybe that's just like a painful, like, anecdotal bias. But I don't see the deck in a highlight. Like, I like Charizard Pidgeot because it has been, it's a proven concept that's been really well hammered out and thought through. And like, Ovin's been playing the same list for going on two and a half years and still working for him, you know what I mean? So like, there's a lot of proven consistency and all that. So I think there's still power in the deck, but yeah, it definitely feels like out of the big four, it feels like the bottom of the big four pretty, pretty, pretty much at this point. Okay. So I agree with you there. Any other like crazy thoughts on like card inclusions or anything with Charizard before we make a prediction about the deck? Not particularly. Trying to think. Yeah. I didn't have a- I didn't have a time to say that. Clefki's really nice. I think you can still run that. Like, that's just such a powerful card still. Sure. You know, but no, I don't have anything beyond that to be honest with you. Yeah, I didn't have a ton to say about this one either. Like, it's just, it's kind of there. I mean, maybe this is personal bias in not having played Charizard a ton. Like, I don't think I've even played one game with Dawnzard. Yeah, I played a little bit when I first came out, but- It's not a card that I've ever really like gravitated to and had a desire to play. Like, even when Charizard was the best deck and it was the like 26% deck in the room, I was like, what can I play that beats this? Instead of being like, well, let me learn the mirror. And I don't know. But so the question I would ask about it, so as far out of the three and three loose terms here, Charizard variants, so Pidgeyzard, Dawnzard, and Poltzard, which one will have the most representation within top 32? Not necessarily which deck will place the highest, but which of these three archetypes will have the highest number of decks within top 32? I just play like Law of Numbers, probably Charizard Noctowl, but I think you'll have like Ovend and like one other player in top 32 with Charizard Pidgeot, like maybe a Brazilian player comes down and plays there. So I'm gonna go Charizard Pidgeot just to kind of pick something different. Fair enough. I am going to do a complete 180 on my stances on this deck as a whole. And I'm gonna go with Poltzard. Now I do think it will be the same number that you just stated for the Pidgezard. I think that there will probably be two of them. I know it's not gonna be some crazy breakout performance, but Charizard as a card doesn't feel super crazy well-positioned to me. Dragapult as a card also doesn't feel crazy well-positioned to me. Maybe together they can kind of shore up the weaknesses enough that somebody can prove to me why they think that this is actually a good deck and go on a run where the Charizard half of the deck beats all the Gold Angos and Gardevoirs and the Dragapult half of the deck wins you your Charizard mirrors. Yeah. We shall see. If you write the script up, that's what it's gotta be, right? I guess so, man. I mean, yeah. I don't know. You're gonna have a hard time giving it to me that it's the play for you, I see. But yeah, I mean, there's a world where it's still powerful. Like we've talked about it enough. I mean, we talked about this point quite a bit at this point that every deck we've been talking about for the last few minutes, for the most part, is a proven deck that has done well in this format at one point or another. And I wouldn't be surprised if it did well again. Like it just, there's enough... All of these allow for skill expression at a high level other than maybe like a... Gold Ango. I don't know. Raging Bull. But like even that, like I'm sure the Raging Bull player would be like, sure, have you played it and like done well with it? No, then you don't know what you're talking about. Like, I think, I don't know. Well, that's, I mean, that's just like- We're seeing top players keep coming back to the top. Like that's a good sign of the format for the most part. Yeah, yes. Yes and no. I think that like every Pokemon player feels like their deck is the best deck and the hardest deck to play. And, you know, I play this deck better than everyone else. So only I know all of its inner workings and secrets and no player feels that more so than our Gardevoir players, I'm sure. Oh, yes. All of the Gardevoir players believe that they are the biggest brained individuals. And in a lot of cases, they're right. I mean, I do think the Gardevoir too, yes, you can have the games where you go, like turn to Candy Garde, play research, discard three Psychics, Earthen Vessel for two more, Ultra Ball into Screamtail, have another Curlia that you drew off of the research and where everything just goes to plan and goes right. You don't have to think about those games. But I've seen some games where, particularly the Gardevoir Mirror and just players having to play these really grindy back and forth, position-based games, having to understand board states when it is or is not okay to bench certain Pokemon. And I've heard both Aban and Henry talk about, oh, I played a Gardevoir Mirror and I knew I lost the game because I had to bench Fez. And so I didn't have, and it wasn't inherently because Fez and Dippity was on the board specifically, it was because that bench space was taken up so it couldn't be a Monkey Dory or a Screamtail. And things like that, having to think about that, a lot of other decks don't need to worry about that as much. Obviously your bench space is a constant resource for every deck that doesn't play Area Zero Underdepth, but I feel like the precision of Gardevoir is something that doesn't necessarily get felt or dealt with by most other decks in the room. No, I mean, yeah, there's a, it's like one of those decks that I think has to, you have to commit a lot of time and energy and effort to understand it in a way that you can play it at a high level. But it rewards you by doing so. I mean, I don't think that the players of Gardevoir are better players than of other decks. I think they have put more time in with that deck than other players have with their decks because it's been in format for a lot longer. It hasn't, the main principles of it haven't really changed since NAIC where we had Monkey Dory first introduced. I think since then, it's been pretty much a well-established archetype. You got a little bit of buff with adding in the Frillish, but for the most part, it hasn't changed as much as, you can say the same thing about Dragon Pulse and Golden Goat for the most part too. But we're at a format that all these decks have been in format for so long that to do well with them, you have to put a lot of time into them. And Gardevoir players, I feel like, are reaping the most from the time that they've put in with the decks more than any other deck because it is inherently a harder deck to not necessarily play, but play at a high level, if I will say so. And play with the clock in mind and play with all that kind of stuff going on. Anybody can sit down and say Psychic Embrace and use Roaring Scream or use Adrenaline Brain and just doing the attacks, doing everything is easy, inherent. Pokemon is not the most difficult game in the world on its face, but I think that, see, Gardevoir is one of the decks where you do have more options than most other decks do, not just in terms of like with the Dracloak discussion we had earlier where you do a recon directive and you make a choice. You have actual impactful decisions of what attackers do I need to have in play, and where do I commit my energies when I'm using Psychic Embrace? When can I weave in a dark energy attachment for turn on a Monkey Dory? These things are decision points that aren't always as flow charty as some of the other decisions that other decks get to make because it can vary from game to game, depending on how you are trying to also manage the level of psychic energy you have in your discard pile and building up that resource as you progress throughout the game. But I think that a lot of the predictions about Gardevoir would be kind of boring as far as like placement or which variant's gonna be more popular. So I thought of a little bit of a fun one. What country or what region will have the highest placing Gardevoir placement in this event? I got you. So we've got Europe, Oceania, Latam, Japan, and North America. Which region will have the highest Gardevoir placement? And some of this kind of bleeds into potentially pick a player to win in my mind because I do expect Gardevoir to be the odds on favorite to win this event. But on the off chance that it doesn't, it's still gonna place very high. I think there'll be multiple Gardevoirs in top cut. And we do have some good representation coming out from worldwide availability of the deck. Like we've got solid South American players, mostly South American, and there might be some decent Mexican players that also play it. But if Latam, I think would be mostly represented by South America, probably primarily Brazil because I think Pedro and William are kind of the standouts there. I don't really have a lot of European Gardevoir players. No, Europe's kind of. They're slacking. Yeah. They're slacking on that. But North America, we've got the Henry Chow Aban kind of brain trust. Isaiah Bradner actually may be making it out to this event too. I'm not sure. And I'm sure he'll be playing Gardevoir if he does go. But then Japan, I'm not really aware. They haven't really kind of been on the Gardevoir train either. So maybe at the end of this, and then your last option is Brent Tonneson is going to be the highest placing Gardevoir, I think. Yes. That's like the easy answer, right? Sure. But I'm going to go, I'm going to have some patriotism. I'm going to go with North America for this one. Sure. I mean, that's a good pick. There definitely is a high concentration of high school players that play Gardevoir coming from the US, spearheaded by Henry Chow and all his disciples and whatnot. So. I mean, I don't know how you pick against Brent. Like that seems. He's done well. Yeah. He's done well. I mean, I'm going to probably, even if it's the smallest region, I think, I don't know. I think if Natalie Millar plays it and Brent plays it and like Henry Brand. Well, Henry Brand is going to play Dragapult. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. There's enough like good players from Australia that can just carry for the most part. I wish I could like lump in Japan with Australia, you know? It's considering they're geographically the same region, but yeah, they're definitely not politically. So I get that. But yeah, I'm going to stick with Brent. I think, you know, that's, if I can't have the US, I'll at least get, you know, down under and pick Australia. So. Okay. And then the kind of last thing, I mean, we could talk about a lot of other decks like we could talk about, do you think Raging Bolt is well-positioned or, you know, Maridon and whatnot. But I think that the last kind of discussion grouping would be the dark decks. So, and Zoroark, which I still kind of would want to leave out of this discussion because I don't think that it's particularly well-positioned like maybe Liam Halliburton's broken the deck again and he thinks that he has the secret sauce even without Zekrom in it. But when they announced the delay of Ascended Heroes, I know Piper went on Twitter and said, oh, this deck's dead again, don't play it. So it's like she was probably Zoroark's second strongest soldier after Liam. And if she's saying the deck is dead, then I'm going to just take her word for it and not worry about it. So then that leaves us with Grimmsnarl and Mega Absol as far as dark decks go. And again, we mentioned earlier, we feel like both these decks are kind of on the rise, but do we think, I guess the question becomes for this event, have they risen enough over the past couple of weeks that people will respect them more and that will prevent them from doing well this weekend? It's a good question, right? Like everybody thinks that it's kind of gone under the radar but I would disagree. I think a lot of people have seen this and have started testing against it. I mean, Grimmsnarl won a regional. Yeah, yeah. I mean, Grimmsnarl, I guess, maybe not Grimmsnarl, but like Mega Absol, I think has been kind of like the hot deck coming in, the secret deck coming in. But yeah, I don't, I don't know. Like you test, like Grimmsnarl I think you can tech for, Mega Absol, what do you tech? You just... No, that's a good point. You can't. You can't do this. You have to play a one-shot deck and that's that's very that's a different conversation Like if you're a guard of war, maybe you run mega Dianci or make it like the drift loom with the bravery charm Or something like that. Yeah. No, that's exactly what it is. Yeah, so I guess those are factors yeah, I think I'm thinking you respect both of those decks like Knowing that percent not that not knowing that they're not gonna be like huge Percentages but knowing that it'll be like a big deck that converts well on today, too And we'll be played by higher players like, you know towards gonna play absolute box at this point You know a lot of Japanese players probably. Yeah, it's a lot of Japanese players, you know, and there'll be a lot of people on grim snarl after it's been doing pretty well the last few tournaments and People can play grim snarl. Well, like you've seen Kieran Farrow play it really well I mean that might be he just went back to it because it's his favorite deck I think that's what he was saying on his podcast but you know, maybe that just gives him the motivation he needed to Show up and do well with it Like, you know when you do well with a deck like that and you'll enjoy playing it You're definitely highly motivated to keep playing it. So I don't know. I think you got to respect them this weekend You can't just kind of check out and say oh, well, they're only gonna make up 10% of the meta so it's not really worth my time and effort to figure it out Like at least play a couple games against both of those decks. I think that that'd serve you Well, if you're going to you I see No, I agree. I think that the big the big thing that's going to tell you whether or not grim snarl is successful is whether or not golden go plays picnic basket and Whether or not golden go plays picnic basket and then how popular is absolve because that matchup is just unwinnable Like legitimately, I do not think that groups are all can beat absol There's nothing you can do in that matchup Just because it has the same problem in to absolve that drag up all does where you put you can't one-shot their guys So then they just move six counters over to your guy and ko you with terminal period and what do you do? And then a lot of them as well Like we've seen that the kind of development in the mega absolve X where they're also playing a jumbo ice cream So you can't even to shot the absol because they move but they monkey a bunch of damage over It's it's kind of the same effect that the Gardevoir lists that popped up at any I see last year to attempt to counter grip star where you've got the turbo energize in the Deck already so you can turbo energize to two monkeys Suddenly you're ahead in the monkey race and that just kind of shuts the door on the grim snarl deck and your pressure by using Oh My gosh, I cannot remember what absol second attack is called But using absols other attack and just to shouting a grim snarl while also discarding a resource from their hand is Way more impactful than what a shadow bullet does to you in return And you know I guess somehow like the grim snarl game plan is to hope that you can keep enough monkeys off of their board that they can't just take a clean one shot, but I just don't I don't see that happening, but if you can keep like if you can dodge the mega absol which is pretty likely like it's a low population deck and The golden goes on and mass are not playing picnic basket. I could see grim snarl having another deep run As far as mega absol is concerned It's in an interesting spot. Like we saw everybody just ditched cornerstone They started playing toad scroll instead as an answer to gold and go and I think overall that's been to their benefit It's been more successful It also has applications and matchups like Gardevoir like once you can't with the scream tale. It's gone for the rest of the game Unless because you know unless you're up in prizes suddenly and you can also potentially prevent your opponent from having a Gardevoir on board if they prized one or had to discard one off of an ultra ball or a research or something in just weird kind of Weird scenarios that can come up sometimes in that matchup Just being one of the decks that can beat Gardevoir. I think is a big plus to both of these decks Yeah, I I think that they're inherently good into all of the other stage two decks I mean mega absol in general, I think it's inherently good into all of the stage two decks except Charizard So they like both of them kind of have a deck that they falter against But they just Do you get to play the law of averages and say that we're good into the three most popular decks in the room? Let's just try to run the table that way and call it a day. Yeah. Yeah, that's not a bad strategy So, I think yeah, we've talked enough about those two which one out of the two I guess if you're gonna make a prediction, which one of the two would you think will place higher at the UIC? I'm gonna be selfish and probably wrong and I'm gonna say grim snarl. I'm gonna have something. I'm gonna have some faith in the gang It's not a bad pick but yeah, you know, I'm gonna pick the other way around if towards sure I mean it you got it. You got to go with that. I know I'm picking players pretty heavily No, I mean and then that's but it makes sense That's definitely a solid strategy, especially in this format worth had players playing it for so long, right? And you're like if you're trying to win the prediction game You're probably in the right camp because still between the two decks The on average the caliber of player between the two decks is higher in the mega absol camp mostly because Average average to bad players do not play the deck anymore. So that only leaves good to above average players playing it Whereas grim snarl just seems to have more appeal to The wider player base so you get kind of both ends of the spectrum Mm-hmm where you'll have excellent players and then you'll also have abysmal players playing it Which is funny to say given that its popularity is only marginally higher than apps all box But right those percentage points can make a difference Yep. Yeah. Yeah, we'll see All right, I think we're right in the corner here any other decks you want to talk about before we kind of wrap this up Nope, you know shout out to the alakazam people. I think your time will come it is not this event Yeah, this is the same thing with team Rockets Porygon and oh my god That Porygon deck is so bad It's stuff and I say that from the place that I have run into it So many times and not even if it's like I've had situations where Recently on TCG live lighter where I'll run into the same person back-to-back because we just yeah You up as soon as we're done with the game but I've run into multiple different people playing this Porygon haunt Crow deck and I just don't see how it wins games and I know we talked about it with the Ascended Heroes kind of set review thing that we did last week where we said and Or I said at least that I felt like it was very similar to ancient box where it can get to the finish line But it will not be able to cross it and that's exactly what has happened in my experience in every single game that the deck is Played maybe it gets better post rotation. Maybe I'm totally willing to admit that that's possible Yeah, but I don't know way that I see it coming back into a conversation where it's a competitive revival Like it's fun. I think that's got it's got that going for it. You know, sure Thematically cool with Rockets, you know, you're playing a whole different supporter engine. So that's kind of cool But yeah, definitely It's time will not come at some point maybe but yeah, not not not that's weekend. No But I'm excited. I'm gonna be watching as much as I can I'm celebrating my birthday this weekend over in Virginia Beach I'm gonna go hang out with some friends and then I think we're gonna do like a poker night when I get back when I kind of do that for My birthday on the Monday, so we'll uh, we'll see how it goes. Um Probably won't watch all of it, but I'll definitely try to tune in where I can In the morning, you know before people wake up. I'll watch like a little bit of it That's kind of it's kind of nice in the morning to have on while you're eating breakfast and sipping coffee or something So for sure especially with the time difference like being able to catch it in the morning as opposed to having to wait till some God-awful evening time to watch something but I'll be in mostly the same boat So, I know I mentioned previously my wife's pregnant We're actually going to have a baby this week that is happening. It is scheduled for the day that this episode releases So congrats man as kind of thank you. Thank you as an update for like podcast land I Cannot I'm not gonna fully commit one way or the other like going on a hiatus or anything But as long as my schedule allows for it, we will continue to have weekly episodes John and I have kind of talked about it off-air and Again as long as we can make it work We will continue to have weekly episodes and I will apologize in advance if there are any weeks where we do miss things just new Parent life adjusting to different schedules and whatnot and trying to piece everything together Thank you for understanding in advance. And if you choose not to understand and don't want to listen to us anymore. I So be it that is what it is. Yeah Singles here We'll be all right, I'm not carry on yeah, for real for real, but you know, thank you for those that I have been listening and supporting throughout the whole process of Doing this podcast and you know if if stuff changes moving forward Just know that you're still being you still appreciate it. Even if we don't have a episode for you every week you You're your community and your fellowship has meant a lot to us over the months and almost two years of this now at this point So we're not two years. I'm tripping No, we're like we're like at a year and a half a year Somewhere there abouts because we started like right around Baltimore last season. That's right so we should be right there at about the one one and a half season mark and Yet, we still have no news on Pokemon XP. So at some point that will come and We will cover that on a future episode. Yeah to your podcast, but Oh, that's true that probably that probably will happen That's a good point, but we will hopefully be back next week to talk about the results of EU I see I do like the eat like the icy wrap-up episodes I think that they give a lot of information there no typically a nice way to either say hello to a new format or say goodbye to an existing one and And as with this one, it'll be kind of the sign-off for the phantasmal flames format Even though there will still be another event afterward and that's just gonna Yeah, that being said if you want to plug in with the show more you can hit us up on YouTube comments As well as follow myself John and the show over on socials We'll have links to all of that down in the description of the episode And if you are on Spotify give us a follow for an Apple podcast Give us a follow and if you are over on that YouTube channel a subscription goes a long way helps other people find the show And comments as well will help other people find the show So if you want to help grow this community We would appreciate that very much so and we look forward to seeing you guys on the next episode of the battle frontier Have a good week