Episode 2-24: The Next Big Retro Format

There's the announcement a couple of weeks ago, maybe it was last week, actually, about the new draft thing that's coming to leagues. Do you have that? Honestly, I wasn't at league on Monday. I was there the week before for the pre-release, but I had to like run that. So I really we did get some stuff in for league. It's like two little kids, but I didn't open them up, if I'm honest, because I didn't have time. Sure. Sure. Like run a 37 player pre-release by myself. That's crazy. Wow. It was it was a big turnout. Yeah, it was kind of wild. I'm surprised, considering how people are touting perfect order is like the worst set in history or the worst set in recent history. Yeah. I mean, hopefully it kills some of the hype. You know, just the lack of Charizards and Gengars and Pikachus and general Pokemon in general besides Meowth. But I saw something where it was like a I don't know if it's a crypto guy or just a collector that was saying competitors need to look out because, you know, that we're going to have fewer collectors ripping packs and therefore the price of your singles for competition or good is going to go up. It's like, no, I don't think you understand how things work when the set is 88 cards. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the only card that really is worth anything is Pokepad. As far as like literally, literally, I guess, but Pokepad, Meowth. And if you want to bling out your what is it? Rosa's encouragement or something like that. But yeah, Sydney. So I opened up my packs for free release like the you get judge support, I guess. Sure. Yeah. So I opened up like 20 something packs, I think, because I had so many people attending. So that was nice. But Sydney, Sydney's I've created a monster, essentially. She said as much so she won't she won't be sad. I said that. But I came home from league one day and I had a Ascended Heroes ETV and I opened it by myself. And then I left the TV box on a kitchen table or something like that. And she saw that like you open packs without me. And I'm like, you were asleep. I wanted to open them. I bought it. Famous last words, man. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm like, all right, I learned my lesson. So I waited when I when I got home or I texted her on the way home. It's like, if you stay up, you can open packs with me if you want. So we opened up, you know, 10 packs each or whatever. And she pulled the SIR Rosa. So that was a OK. It's a cool card. I think I have it up here. Honestly, I think that it's not a bad card either. But, you know, we're probably overdue and miss the boat on doing any sort of a set review. But kind of the short version of it is there's not very many good cards in the set and look, you know, we'll see how they pop up as post rotation. Things come into view. But if you look at, you know, the results of the Champions League tournament that they had recently, the only relevant card was Meowth. So Rosa. Yeah. Oh, it is encouragement. OK, she's she's eating a little Pikachu ice cream. It's pretty adorable. And it's that's a good way to attach two energies from your discard pile to your stage two Pokemon or something like that. You can only use it if you have more price cards than your opponent. Attach two basic energy cards to your discard pile to one of your stage two Pokemon. OK, that's definitely worse than I thought, but also still pretty cleanly slots into Dragapult. Yeah. Yeah. Especially with Meowth. Now you have ways to search it out. Like it gets a lot more being able to force a price deficit. Mm hmm. Yeah. So we'll see. One of my league players was hyped to like try it in her Cynthia's deck. So that's pretty cool. OK. Yeah, I can see that, too. I can see that. That card like that deck kind of needs energy acceleration. Just I don't know. I think one of the benefit benefits of Garchomp has always been that your only two prizer is Garchomp, and you put the power weight on that guy and he's like 400 HP or whatever and just very difficult to knock out. So if you're putting things like Meowth or whatnot into play to try to tutor that card out more efficient or, you know, more frequently. We'll see. We'll see. We're not there yet. We're still in a pre rotation Ascended Heroes format for a couple more. We're better for worse. We still have two more weeks of it. No, this I've unfortunately, I love this. I love this format. And I feel I feel sad almost that we have to say goodbye after two weeks more. Well, that's what I'm saying. The fact that this this format should have existed at EUIC. And I think that we would have seen so much more exploration and and an evolution. This is going to be a format that I think after rotation is going to eventually be picked up as one of the favorites for retro deck building. And you'll see a lot of evolution of this format over time. I'm going to keep a lot of my decks from this format, I think, because of that reason. I mean, it reminds me a lot of some lot where people are like, you have comeback mechanics, you have like great like like Monkey Dory. And like there's I like like there's some counterplay you can do and a lot of good strategy. And I really think like we've seen that time and time again the last few months. But yeah, just judging this weekend kind of confirmed all that again. And I feel the same way. Yeah, I saw you up on the the stream table a couple of times. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I was. So we can get into that. So, yeah, I went to Houston regionals this past weekend, which wasn't too bad. I got a direct flight out of Richmond and left Friday night. I got in around like seven. So it was like two and a half, three hours flight. And then I was the assistant head judge for the TCG stream stream team. So I was the one responsible for I had a team of six judges. We had like two groups of three each. And so we had like a rotation where like two judges would be on stream when we'd be spotting behind stage and kind of coordinating with a head judge if they needed a call for a ruling or something like that. So I was the one figuring out the teams, figuring out the rotation up there a little bit. I kind of let because I had a lot of experienced judges. I kind of let them like manage themselves a lot. So that was good that they all kind of be self-sufficient in a lot of ways. Like, I don't know, man, I don't know about you, but like when somebody is up for when you're making teams, I can make like the team, but I don't really want to like assign roles within the team as much. I think people have a better idea of where they fit in. Then if I try to suss it out after like one or two conversations and I try to gauge it, like if there was a new guy, I'd pair him up with somebody more experienced or somebody who's specifically good at one thing. I would try to keep that in mind. Like, hey, let's lean on this person for this thing if we can. But the challenging thing was it wasn't just me being responsible for judging on the stream. There was also feature tables, which is something that we've seen a lot at ICs. And then more recently at San or sorry, at Seattle, we started incorporating them at regional level events. So they have the two that you were on one, I think at one point, right? At NAIC last year for like they had them demoed out and we used them for the 2010 event. But you know, Worlds, I never I never ended up on it. Oh, OK. But yeah, so that was the premise. It's the same thing where you're playing and there's a TV camera. Yeah. Or like just a regular camera really over top with lighting. And then it's directed locally. And that was fun. But I also was responsible for like staffing those. I wasn't originally I was told that I would be able to get like other judges to help with that. But just the way it worked out, like logistically, it started to make more sense for my team to cover it. And I was like, well, it'll provide better experience for them like early on and then later on, like if there's technical issues or if there's something that needs to be done, they are more like they're already in that area. They're not rotating out of that area. They know how to do everything on stream already. So it just kind of like made sense. So we kind of pivoted away from trying to have as much of a rotation. And then I was also just a floating assistant head judge near the top tables, like approving penalties, helping coordinate judges throughout the play area, dealing with any, I don't know, crazy, weird just like interactions that the judges weren't sure exactly how it was to go. So we I checked every single Ascended Hero decklist for Ascended Heroes Pokepads before they went on stream. I didn't personally do it, but our team did. And I don't think we caught a single one. So, you know, we'll try harder next time to crush the dreams of all the players. But, you know, not successful this one. We were we were thwarted, you know, you know what I mean? So we'll try. I think it just means that everybody had everything all buttoned up. Everybody had the appropriate Pokepads and there was nothing to worry about. Yeah, I mean, and it felt like we didn't really talk about it because we haven't had a podcast in the last couple of weeks. But man, I hate it. Like I as a judge, like I get it. Like you have the rules and the rule book and you have to follow the rules. As a player, though, like it's not it's not where I want our community to be. So that was frustrating to, you know, I mean, we're going to force the rules as judges is kind of what we're there to do. But none of us are like doing it enthusiastically. I know I was just making that kind of joke there, but it was just a joke. Like, I don't think like we honestly, if a player did have Pokepads that were POR, I think we had a set backstage to where we just swap them in so they could go and play and then they could replace them before their next game. Like it wasn't going to be like you get a game loss. Like it was just going to be something like that where you get a warning and it's told to replace them. So we were never like I think that was a stance a lot of judges took. And I think that's the way that we should have. We should approach it like spirit of the game is just as important as the rules. If you know, I mean, the rules in tournament integrity are really important, but tournament integrity aside, like we all want stuff to be fair. And sometimes the rules, although they have to be enforced, like we're not like. We're not like in a vacuum trying to just get people for stuff like that, I think, like we're really sympathetic and stuff. You go ahead. I understand where you're coming from and I understand the sentiment. Also, you know, having the boomer take a back in my day, like we paid 20 to 40 to 60 dollars for singles, for different things like shamans and mega primes, like all sorts of stuff. Tapu Lele's all the time. From my perspective, is the pokey pad ruling frustrating from a player's perspective? Absolutely. But also, you should have had your ascended heroes pokey pads before the week of the event. Right. As just like being a responsible competitor. So I don't really have a ton of sympathy for somebody that didn't wasn't able to get their hands on them. Like I wasn't even going to Houston and I still had ordered pokey. I had a really weird situation, actually. So I mentioned that I had bit the bullet and ordered them when they were still like seven or eight dollars, except and I ordered that through TCG player direct and they somehow lost my order. So I got it fully refunded and then repurchased them when they had dropped to being like three dollars a card and they showed up like the next day. So that was crazy. And I had an interesting windfall. I've never had a TCG order. No, it's literally no. It must have been from Florida or something. I have no idea, man. But the the. I don't think that the price of pokey, if they had been like $20 each for a common card, I might have been on board with saying this is absolutely ludicrous, nobody should be paying these prices. And is it frustrating? Like when Pokemon catcher came out or something like that? Exactly. Like there have been examples of this. Like when Buddy Buddy Poffin came out, it was like a seven dollar common. Maybe it was an uncommon, but regardless, the common uncommon are basically the same rarity in the grand scheme of things. When you look at how many, how often you open them in a pack of cards because there are more commons in a set. So even though you are more common slots in a pack, especially with the size of Ascended Heroes of the set, that common card is not really a common card. So the rarity symbol is just kind of like a mark on the card. It doesn't mean anything. And the value of the card is not necessarily associated with that rarity. But I don't know. I mean, nobody's going to have to worry about this in three or three weeks. It won't matter. Not even next week. Like the set releases this Friday. And if you've been in two weeks from that day. Oh, yeah, no, literally. Yeah. As of this Friday, you can use them. So it's like who really is going to care at the end of the day? But I have to imagine that nobody was truly or nobody would have truly been negatively impacted this weekend, even if people weren't sympathetic to it. Yeah, I I haven't heard any stories. And, you know, I'm I'm not I didn't do deck check this weekend. I don't know. I wasn't in like a situation where we were given. Like, I don't know what exactly all the penalties history for everything. You know, it's a huge event. And I did see like we had a you know, we had some discussion about people getting like deck checked for it or like it was pointed out. But like, I don't think anybody even inside it, like, I don't know. I don't think anybody was truly. I can't speak to it because I don't know exactly everything that happened at the event, but for my interactions, yeah, it was it was a nothing burger of a, you know, story at the end of the day, which is what you want, right? Like you don't want even though it was blown up into this whole thing. People just want to make a mountain out of a mole, right? It's it's almost always like, you know, vocal minority, especially when you see discourse on the Internet, regardless of what the topic is. The vocal minority, like you've if you know, circling back to just avoid anything political or sports related to try to knock anybody off. When you look at sure they did the announcement with Nintendo Switch game cartridges where they said if it was over a certain file size, it was going to be on what they're calling a game key card where only a portion of the game is located on the cartridge. And then you have to download the rest of your system, which things like Xbox and PlayStation have done things like this for years. So it shouldn't really be anything new to people. But I guess the concern is that, oh, if I'm having to download that, it means that it's hosted somewhere. And therefore, if Nintendo disappears one day, this game will be inaccessible to me, even though I paid full retail price for a physical copy of it. It's like, OK, yes, that's a thing. You may not be happy about it. And yet you still have like Pocopia being the best selling Switch to game period so far. And like one of the best selling Pokemon games of all, I think it's literally the best selling Pokemon spinoff game of all time, like it. But people swore high and low when the switch to came out and they unveiled that feature that it was going to be the death of the system. And, you know, there's always there's doomsaying about everything. Regardless of what fandom, people that are really like physical media is the only media that I need to buy in my life. Like I don't stream anything. I wish people that are like that. I can see some aspects of it. Like it does stink when like you can't like somebody company goes out of business or I don't know, like it's funny, I sold some PlayStation portable movies to a game store, like to a used video game store because like they've been sitting on my shelf because my brother had a PSP back in the day, but he lost it or he got stolen or something, but he saw the movies. And so like there's a whole contingent of people that love old physical media. And so that was so great. Like, I'm like, I'm surprised that their PSP still work. I mean, it's me, too. It's it's such a yeah. Physical media has like a cult following. I'd say like the same kind of like with with classic consoles and stuff. like that. And now like the PSP is a classic console. You think about that. It's 20 years old at this point. So I think I have one in a drawer somewhere, but it's like, yeah, does it work? Is the battery leached out into everything? Yeah. That's a good question. I'd have to, I'd have to try to turn it on. That'd be fun to figure out. But the funny thing was the most expensive thing I sold. And then we're just, we're just yakking here was, uh, I had some game like Prima game guides for, uh, heart, cold, soul. So I think it's gold and silver, not heart, cold, social media, physical media. And it was, uh, those, uh, had one for a link or a legend of Zelda four swords and another one, another legend of Zelda game like the, but they were like, people love that stuff. Like I went to that store and like, they were selling like the Pokemon ones for 50 bucks and people will buy it. So I'm, I'm not, I'm a, I'm a weirdo. I turned around and use that money to buy like weird Japanese records. So it was like, you know, vaporwave and, um, city pop for me is, you know, it was, it was fun. It was a fun little outing. Me and Sydney did, I think last weekend. Um, so that was good. Yeah. But, um, or not last weekend, the weekend before it's been a while, but yeah, but yeah, it was, it's a good weekend in Houston. Kind of get back on topic for me. I really enjoyed that role of kind of coordinating logistics on everything, but also like making sure everybody's in the right position at the right time. And also having like, and support it. Like I'm supporting them. Like one of my judges needed water. I went out and just like, here, just, just take this water. Like they didn't have a water bottle. So I'm like, I'm going to go get you a water. Like, don't worry about it. It worked out. Um, and just stuff like, you know, kind of assessing out where a judge is a judge might need to like refocus their efforts. Or if they make a call that like, they come at me with like a weird call, like not necessarily beating them over the head with it, but like, Hey, why did you think that that was where you wanted to start with that? Like, why do you think it was a game loss instead of a double price card penalty? And like, let's talk about that. We're not in the heat of the moment, but like as a, like a debrief or something like that. So that was a lot of fun to just kind of have those interactions. Um, and like part of the weekend, like I worked, one of the guys on my team was from Chile. And so like for dinner, Sunday night, I went out with him and some other judges from Mexico and Peru and stuff like that. I love that aspect of Pokemon where you just get to spend time with like people from another country, even though I don't speak Spanish all that well, I still had a great time. Um, and we were just chit-chatting about different things, like what organized play looks like, like they have a whole, I think it's called play LATAM, which is like their Arcanine and that system's awesome. Like they can use it for locals and just sign up for stuff on the fly and they can, you know, they use it at giant tournaments like Arcanine. So I think we'll get there. Like the Pokemon has Pokemon access now, hopefully that gets developed into something similar. And I think Pokemon even like pulled aside the guy that developed play LATAM and was like picking his brain on how to best kind of make that kind of app for a larger market. But just like that kind of stuff, like learning, like what what's cool in your area and what, what are you guys up to as far as organized play and like talking about, he worked, one of the guys worked deck check and he was just telling me like how different deck check is in North America compared to like Mexico or South America and just the level of decks you're expected to check. And like, he was telling me like one of his friends went to a tournament in I think Mexico or Brazil or somewhere, I don't remember where, but like they did a 20 minute deck check and then he got his deck back. It's like, I get a time extension, right? And he's like, no, it was just like, okay, that's really, but just, I mean, I don't know if that's, that's the story he told. I, that might've just been hyperbole or something like that. Yeah. I don't know. I'm going to walk it back. Cause I, it was a story told off hand. I don't remember what tournament I don't want to insinuate anything, but it was definitely just like, Oh, there's different ways to do stuff in different countries. Yeah. That's so weird to me because I would, I would think like checking a deck is the same thing no matter where you are. And the only reason that you would say like the volume would be different here is just because the tournaments do have larger numbers. Yeah. Right. That's part of it. Like the teams, the teams are pretty small compared to how many players there are in North America for that check check. And like, you're expected to get, just get through more decks and do more deck checks per round than you would at other events. And like in, in Europe, they don't have a deck check team. They just do like different roles for different teams every round. So everybody does deck check at some point or like they'll, they'll do a one round throughout the tournament. Okay. So like, that's interesting. That's an interesting way to do it, but I don't know, just different regions do judging differently, do organized play differently, you know, and it'll be more standardized. I think as the game progresses, like we're already seeing like a lot of Japanese judges come over and judge in North America. I would love to see the inverse of that at some point. That'd be pretty cool to see like North American judges go and judge, but it's, it's tough when you don't speak Japanese, you know? Right, right. And I think that there's also like a, there's, there's also a cultural barrier there where for the longest time, like it may not, it doesn't sound very nice to say this, but like when you look at when you have had Western players that have been able to go over and participate in like a champions league is an example. It almost seems like the organization over there, like the, the Pokemon company, I guess is who runs their tournaments is averse to putting non-Japanese players on their streams. You know, it's kind of like how we treat crustle over here is how they treat non-Japanese players where it's like, like, yes, that may be a great matchup. Maybe you have like Daichi playing toward, but it's very unlikely to end up on stream unless there is no other option available, or maybe it gets relegated to being like a sub stream game. And you know, they just may not have time to get to it because they prefer to feature Japanese players. Yeah. I don't, I don't know. I, there's just not that many, but yeah, I'm sure that that factors into it too. Some that's on some level. Speaking of crustle, we had a crustle mirror match on the feature tables. That was a mistake. You know about us. I saw, I saw somebody had posted something online about how like the first feature match in the, well, yeah, I guess it would just be if the feature match table was a crustle mirror on day two. And that is just such a misguided thing to have happened. It was awesome, dude. What are you talking about? That's not a joyful energy. They had all the crazy texts going. It was great. Geez. No, I'm a, I'm a sicko. I'm a truly, you know, crustle did seem like it was pretty well positioned this weekend and even made its way onto the metagraphic right on day two. Oh really? I missed that. Yeah. So we can go ahead and actually talk about the tournament. So real quick, just before we talk about the tournament at large to kind of recap what I've been up to. So obviously, you know, we've been, we've missed the show the last couple of weeks and, you know, some of it's like scheduling conflicts where John or I weren't necessarily available on my end. It's mostly been for baby related reasons. And then one night, John, I was willing to stay up later, but eventually it just became too much for him. Oh my gosh. It was like 10 30 or something. I know. I know. Yeah. That's late now. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. For me, if I'm not recording a podcast, I go to bed by 10 most days. We're at a point now where it's like now this, as of this week, I'm back at work too. So I'm trying to further readjust my schedule and everything. And in some ways it's been a little bit easier. The baby's been more consistent the past couple of days, even though it isn't what my wife and I initially thought our plan was going to be when I was going to go back to work. I was going to try to go in like earlier so I could be home earlier to make things work out. And instead the baby's been like, no, I'm going to wake up at like the most inconvenient time possible for you to do that specifically. But it's been up to a point where I've been getting like an extra hour, hour and a half of sleep. So it's like I can't be mad about it. But also it's a it's a mild inconvenience. And I wish it was a little bit different. But in addition to that, you know, outside of family stuff, I've also been playing a lot of Pokemon because I was planning to prepare for Orlando regionals until I had this realization yesterday that my son has baseball team photos, and he and my wife have a team related function for like all the moms of the team and all the kids that are on the team. And that's been planned for three, four months now. And for some reason, it was just like not on my calendar. And so had the realization that was happening. It's like, cool, I guess I'm I'm not going to Orlando anymore, which is unfortunate. And I'm not I'm not gonna say I'm happy about it, because I would like to participate, especially because I had a deck that I was really interested in playing. And so I was playing a lot of ladder. I think I mentioned a few weeks ago that I was like, all in on like, for a short bit on like rare candy, dragapult, or a rare candy based dragapult list. And it was seemed really good. It was flowing really well. And coincidentally ran into someone who actually listens to the show, I learned his name is Reed Casterlin. And he was playing this young mega deck with four battle cage and Psyduck with, you know, it's got super hard to recover the Psyduck. And he messaged me on Twitter afterwards and be like, Hey, did we just play and we started talking about the deck a little bit. And it looks interesting, to say the least. I was like, Oh, cool. Like, it looks like your dragapult matchups really good. But it seems like your goldengo matchup and your guardi matchup goldengo matchup matchup looked like an auto loss. And guardi matchup look, it would be extremely difficult for how the deck looked at the time. So I started fiddling with it a little bit, we were messaging back and forth. And eventually, the end result of that was a list that read actually ended up playing to Houston. And until he had a rather unfortunate run in day two, I legitimately thought that he was like, potentially going all the way because the deck is interest is it's well positioned, I would say and you have this it's kind of unique in that sense, too. And that's this this scratch the itch that I have been looking for in the game for a long time for like, a quote unquote, rogue deck and something that is truly off meta, but still has a chance to actually compete, which I feel like is really rare in the modern game. But there's a lot of interesting synergy here where you just have a grass attacker, good typing, you know, you hit all the grass with things Charizard, which is lesser played at the moment, but Zoroark really big player Grimmsnarl really big player and the jet cyclone from Yamaga also does 210 damage. So you knock out Fez, you knock out ogre pawn, you knock out all these like bench sitting Pokemon. And it also has the side benefit of thinning your deck because the buzz boost ability pulls three grass out when you promote it to be your active Pokemon. And then you get to jet cyclone those three energies back to your bench to either diversify your threats by you can park them on a Yama that you have on your bench. So it's like, Okay, well, do you want to take out the energy or you want to take out the two prizer? Or you can load them up onto a Kangaskhan because then you just have another big attacker ready to go you can load them up on Fez and deputy, which is something that you do pretty frequently and you end up doing cruel arrow quite a bit. Like one of your main lines into drag up hold because most people still aren't playing rare candy is if they have a lone Drac look, you boss it up, jet cyclone it to KO it and then just start cruel arrowing drag cloak every single turn until they can actually answer your Fez and deputy, which proves to be fairly effective most of the time and you just like that matchup in particular. If you hate drag up hold, you either play Gardevoir or you play this deck in my mind. And it's like we're still playing three battle cage, you have Psyduck still, you've got super rod and night stretcher for recovering of the Psyduck. And then you also we found one of the additions that I came up with was picnic basket in place of the fourth battle cage, because you're never going to need a fourth stadium in that matchup. However, sometimes they'll bump your stadium because battle cage is kind of a defensive thing. So it's not it's only so effective, right? Like sometimes they'll bump it with a jamming tower and then hit you with a phantom dive, put the damage counters on your bench. And one of the big kind of wombo combo plays the drag up what would do is they bumped your stadium at one time, they put six counters on Psyduck. If you don't specifically find Turo on that turn, even if you have another battle cage, they bump at a second time play hallucinate KO it, then they can utilize the dust snore on that turn or a dust clops. And they get to do this like wombo combo six price turn. So you get to interrupt all of that by just playing a picnic basket and not have to worry about it in any capacity. And then the other problem was tackling the goldango matchup. And that's where the additional toe scroll came in. And that legitimately it's a flowchart at that point. Like as long as you can keep toad scroll on the table, the matchups and auto win. And that was something that was really appealing to me coming into this tournament. Like the one thing that I would say Gardevoir, it's a tough matchup, it's not unwinnable. And I would like to say that against a less experienced Gardevoir player, maybe somebody who is only used to playing against meta matchups, it might be harder for them to come up with a plan on the fly, which would make the deck inherently more successful into it. And just to look at, you know, we did end up in top 128, ended day one at 603 after the first nine rounds, and admitted that in round eight here, where he tied Evan with this right on deck, that he totally forgot that Psyduck could shut off Magneton, and also felt that he had played a little bit, you know, more cleanly in this matchup, it should have been a win. He also said he ended up playing Sam Liggett in day two, and at one point miscounted how many grass he had remaining in his deck. So he promoted the young but only had two grass, so he was unable to attack with it that turn. And then like double bricked against Sebastian lashman. And then I'm not sure what happened in this matchup. But just, you know, running kind of running the gamut as far as like outside of this typhlosion deck and this Mariton deck, like playing against Yeah, all meta, all meta. That's crazy. Um, I don't know, honestly, that's a very good question. I guess maybe you're just attacking with Kangaskhan. And so the a spec he ended up playing this week, we went back and forth a lot between unfair stamp and prime catcher as to what was actually the most effective. And he decided unfair stamp was like the fit for this event. And he told me there were several games where he would drop like watchtower unfair stamp, or like counter catcher fez unfair stamp, and people just brick. And so it's effective, you know, and it's a nice diversification. It's just an interesting deck. It's something that I wish I was going to Orlando, I really wish I was going to Orlando, because you could play literally this list as is we've talked about a few changes, you do have the option if you just want to disrespect gold into gold dingo completely, you drop the toad scroll line. And then you have the ability to kind of respect something more like crystal if you wanted to play like one one low punny into second Turo. And just finding ways to kind of fit things in there to where that matchup changes from being an auto loss to at least being semi playable. But just really fun deck, it was a kind of a breath of fresh air. And the type of thing that I think will be interesting to have built moving forward, like if you discount the unfair stamp as a majority, that's like $40 costs, it's like $18 right now. So if you discount like unfair stamp and pheasant deputy, the rest of the deck is like 20 bucks. And literally, the only cards you might not have for this are probably the young megas. And it's like a 50 cent card. So you know, if you're looking for something different to play, like go play it and just give it a few games before you write it off, because I promise you it's better than you initially think it is. Yeah, I struggled with it i played a couple games with it and i'm not gonna lie like it was mostly a pilot error like i would miscount my grass energy and just get burned by that most games sure starting out um so but i'm sure like yeah it's one of those things like you said it's a flow chart so once you get that down it's probably not too hard to like if a equals you know this then b then put do this that and the other and now you're fine um i how do you beat the mega absol i guess you hit mega yeah they literally can't attack with absol and you have the um so because we aren't playing low punny some of the lists that played cornerstone were potentially an issue so we added in vitality band and that's where you can take a page out of liam haliburton's book and you can watch tower your kangaskhan with a vitality band to hit them for 210 which if they don't have a bravery charm as a knockout or if they have a bravery charm and you flip a heads they're still knocked out so that'll get you one ko there um second cornerstone is kind of impossible to deal with you know you can try to mute them and that's where it ends up being like this weird kind of cat and mouse thing where are they benching monkey dories if they are you're bossing them up and ko'ing them and trying to power up a muse so you can genome hacking demolish and doing that a few times or that matchup ends up coming down to kangaskhan swinging into each other and whoever can flip two heads and as unfortunate as that is that sometimes is the the end result but if they open up with like peturant or latias or absol like you and just end up taking prizes for free and again like for people that just aren't familiar with it with the deck like if you open with psyduck or padu or latia or like literally anything that's not a yanma they might still put an absol on their bench and that's basically three free prize cards for you yeah no this deck is brutal i know that like it is really consistent like hits 210 two second turn pretty much every game like yeah unless something really bad happens but i don't know it's it's cool um and i'm kind of bummed you can't play it man i know that you've been putting a lot of time and effort into it um are you gonna be able to come out uh on like sunday or something and hang out unclear like yeah that's fair life and this is part of being an adult and like having family and all that it's great but it's also just like gets in the way of having fun sometimes but hey just sometimes most of the time it's fun in its own ways too sure yeah but it was pretty cool like to see that um reesa reid played this his buddy chris played it as well chris unfortunately had a much worse string of luck went oh three drop but he said um i don't know what the total details of that were i think that he like it bricked full bricked at least one game every round like i think one of them was literally like open a basic and six energies and just lose the game um but just not not the best is showing overall but there were literally three young mega decks in this event and i don't know it's just a cool thing to see like a cool it's a cool card it's a card that has always seemed like it should be able to do something and has always kind of just felt like it was short now you're in like this perfect storm scenario where because all these dark decks have risen up specifically and it's still 210 is still a really good number to hit you're just kind of in like the perfect spot to kind of do your thing and 280 is an awkward number for a lot of decks to hit too so where most things are either having a two shot yeah or just like you're making things awkward for a lot of people and then last thing was just like the battle cage pulling double duty with all the frost last x being in the format so you like you're blocking monkey dory on your bench you're blocking the frost last pings then the picnic basket obviously is also really good into those matchups as well yeah i mean you just look at the meta percentage here for the tournament and yeah you're hitting into like it looks like 30 almost 40 of the like top um when you go sit down and like that's a mega absol box you get over 40 so like all that yeah and then dragon ball you said seems like a pretty good matchup um so that's a pretty cool like feeling when you're sitting down you're like you're flipping over your cards you're like yes i got this like that's exactly and that's just and this is the day two field like if you look at you know overall day one like there's what 26 20 or 30 like almost all of these like sarah ledge is a little awkward like we floated the idea of playing reggie gigas as a sarah ledge counter at one point just because you could yeah you can shunt the energies back to the reggie gigas to turn in advance to where you only need to attach one and start koing sarah ledges and they have to decide okay am i going for the two prizer or do i care this one prizer and try to like briar myself back into the game later and it gets a little like weird but yeah just i don't know fun deck interesting deck and i think that the results of this tournament were also really interesting too so i was dead set i thought the toad scroll was a really big card for this weekend especially coming off of the fact that goldengo had just won curatiba the weekend prior so i really expected goldengo to maintain a higher level meta presence and instead we saw i think it slipped down a bit more from where it was even at that event and we saw more respect being given to it in the form of more toad scrolls being added into random decks and people just kind of being out for goldengo's head even despite you know obviously it had won that event but outside of the winner with that legacy energy go build being up there the next closest one was what like top 64 or something yeah way down like yeah overall i mean or i was listening to uncommon energy and they were saying yeah overall it might have won but goldengo had a terrible showing um for that event um and i think yeah it's kind of a weird spot like a lot of decks got so much with pokey pad and golden go not so much like it's not a bad card in that deck but it just doesn't pull the same weight as it does with dragon ball dust snore or with a grim snarl deck um where charizard noctowl like pokey pad does so much more for for the consistency of those decks the power level of those decks the you know turn to turn ability to play them and golden goes kind of just the same one trick pony it's been you know it looks like it got a couple new tricks or like different players are playing it with with the legacy energy with um mega low pony now i guess that's just everybody's played against it and knows how to play against it and is teched for it and ready for it every at this tournament at this point um and so i don't think that uh you know i was hot on the deck early on in this format and last format and i've cooled off a lot um not because i think it's a bad deck or not a strong deck it's just every player i sit across from knows how to beat me like you're kind of dealing with that and there's a lot of decks in this format right now that you can play that your opponent has no idea how to play against because this format's been going on so long some of the newer decks like players i guess i mean maybe not every player but it feels like a lot of players just are already their mind is on post-rotation or on um well i've been playing you know dragon ball death snore for the last six months i'll keep playing it and not really testing against new decks or like testing against new strategies for the old saint the same old decks so you see some decks coming up like crustle like um when we see the grim snarl deck now kind of getting some new tricks and then yeah big winners this weekend you know overall like the frost are huge like random outliers frost last decks were eating really well this weekend like frost last monkey dory and both both well over 50 percent win rate and really the only other things that kind of match that like absol box despite really honestly i would have thought going into this weekend that absol was very very poorly positioned and i think if it showed up and showed up and part of this goes into like player quality right but still i would have expected some of those players to migrate away from the deck and instead they kind of all doubled down and maybe this goes back to what you were saying about like well i've been playing this throughout this last format maybe i'll just continue to play it here to close things out well and it's almost like the counter to the counter like if frost last decks are getting really popular what beats them really well is mega absol and like there's not like i remember i talked with um christopher chamansky who lost in top four about like you know we were i was leaving the venue the same time he was leaving the venue walking back to the hotel and i'm like hey man great run like stinks to see it end that way that was a travesty it was so sad it was such a bummer but i mean if you've been around him you know that he kind of expects it but not that he ever like is excited about it or anything like that but like i don't know he was like yeah it stinks but also like i was just gonna lose in the finals like if i had to play against playing against mega absol box i'm like that's fair frost last monkey door for all its merits um has no way to beat that deck unless they dead draw like entirely right or they just don't know what mega frost last does and yeah and don't play around that at all i guess that's one way to go about it but yeah for the most part if they are able to limit their hand size you have no way to counteract it um sure but uh yeah so we saw that deck pop up again uh kind of come back to the forefront um and so the frost last decks i think were one big story uh and zoroark decks were another um those were super popular and did super well i'm kind of a carryover from um chiba i think those they did well there as well yep um and yeah it's uh i don't know i think crustle still did pretty solid for itself all things considered yeah i mean if we if we go back and look at the standings i think there were a couple of them in top 32. just one but there were there were a few others up here if we go down a little bit further to where they do with it yeah and i know like ethan heggie was playing it i'm not sure where he ended up there he is 76 so it's like it's it's there and it's around and it's a deck again you know i think we saw what 60 of them ended up making day two like that's that's a lot that's more people than normally play crustle in a tournament yeah for sure it's a it's a surprising one to see uh at least for me that it's been so popular um i don't think like maybe i'm wrong but i don't know what the skill ceiling is with that deck like it feels like kind of like a quad walls deck or something like that from the back in the past when once you set up your once you set up your safeguard attacker like as long as you draw okay you're like you're gonna win those matchups that you can win and then you're gonna lose those matchups like guardi or you know frost off monkey dory feels pretty bad i imagine i mean they have some tricks to deal with like the spike energy and stuff but overall just yeah it's not it's not a i don't know those don't seem like great match but no that's a cool i mean it's cool that like we have those kind of decks in this format i think that's always a sign of a healthy format when you have counter decks when you have kind of annoying decks is it a counter deck though like so i'm gonna come from the perspective i hate crustle and i hate wall decks in general because i feel like you're not sitting down to play pokemon you're sitting down to list check your opponent and that doesn't feel like playing pokemon to me where if it's it's something that is it an effective tournament strategy absolutely but like if you were going to go sit down and play at your local league and play against 12 different people in a non-tournament setting and you were just looking to you know have a good time and play against a variety of decks like nobody's going to want to play against you if you're going to flip over a dwebble against them it's nobody no one's going to want to casually play against crustle like right so that sounds miserable is that actually truly playing the pokemon tcg and maybe it comes across i'm sure very terribly for me to be like crustle stupid nobody should play it when obviously it is it has its it has merits and it is an effective card and effective strategy but i don't know it just rubs me the wrong way the same way like iron thorns or you look back at goodness like the cornerstone melodic deck from either last season or two seasons ago and they're just like again list checking your opponent seeing are you playing the thing and obviously these cards exist for a reason and they are printed as counter cards to try to you know i guess floodgate certain specific strategies and stop them from being like well if you're going to be this super greedy zorark list as an example and you're not going to respect my cornerstone um here we go and obviously like sacrum now plays into that it's a little bit different um but still not super great and i don't know crustle is just kind of the extreme example especially i think i would have less of a problem with it if dwebble didn't have ascension yeah yeah i think that's a fair way to say like because yeah tm evo would be enough for it like you really don't need ascension on that card but like yeah it just it makes it more annoying like i think there was it reminds me of pyro i think that's probably the best comparison where you can you do anything no okay cool like they're just gonna crush like that was just the worst deck to play against like i don't know and again again i like as a tournament strategy 100% obviously obviously it works but i think i remember pram famously saying like this was the worst deck he ever played at a tournament when he like got second at nationals that year you're not sitting down to try to win the game you're sitting down hoping your opponent loses yeah that's a good way to put it um so you know feel bad if you play crustle i guess is what aaron saying yeah that's that's the takeaway yeah uh you know we're not saying you're a bad person but we might want you to evaluate your life choices i brought you to that moment where you find your personal play in a deck no no we're just joking um but yeah i think i'm kind of sad that this format won't ever get the i think you're right where you're saying like hopefully people go back and revisit this format in the future because it's a really fun format for me um and you know it's a lot of my friends are already moving to post rotation like i've really enjoyed playtesting for orlando regionals and i would love to like yeah keep doing that in the future um as far as other weird decks that did well i don't think there's anything too weird you know we see one golden go with josh frank we see um one marnie's grim snarl in addition to the two frost last monkey dory decks kind of talking about the frost last decks how did you think about uh we didn't talk much before going into this tournament and i was kind of curious what your thoughts were about grim snarl going into houston and going into this format i know you were kind of hot on it but like cooled off a little bit from understanding um i think it's still good i'm honestly torn on whether it's better than straight frost last and my initial hang-up with frost last monkey dory was that i didn't think you could beat gardevoir consistently enough but i've played it a little bit more and it's definitely more winnable than i initially gave it credit for and is actually you know significantly easier than i initially gave it credit for i thought that it was this kind of knock down drag out and not having the big one hit ko option for the guard of war was just going to be kind of like the nail in the coffin for you and you were done for. But you know, bravery charm, but do puts in a lot of work bravery trauma monkey Dory puts in a lot of work, and you're able to just kind of whittle down the opponent item lock them the entire game. And just kind of go from there. It's almost like you're playing jelly guardi with more access to spread damage when you're playing against these like turbo guard of war lists. But obviously, I'm still a girl's normal fanboy. I think that spike in the stadium is still one of the most broken stadium cards ever printed. And being able to have like this pair, not parasitic, but this kind of self contained stadium that only benefits you is just a huge advantage for the deck. Pokey pad is a huge addition. Like if we look at actually haven't looked at Kevin's list here yet, you see three Pokey pad. So but this has kind of been the thing where I that I've been on to is I cut an Evo initially I was I think at two Pokey pad and two Evo. And instead I cut an Evo for another Pokey pad. And if we look at there were other players, other notable players like Caleb Rogerson and Andrew Hedrick also played grip star all this weekend, but they took things kind of a step further, and they didn't play Arvin. And so in place of Arvin, they played 11. They played four copies of research, and they played 11 or might have even been 12 draw supporters on top of their, their but I'd actually think they may also not have played bosses orders, which I think that's a mistake. That's crazy. I'm a big proponent of honestly, I'm a big proponent of three boss in this deck still. But you know, frost loss is just a really powerful card right now. Monkey Dory is obviously still we're probably one of the most broken cards in the game ever. And it's just so abusable. It's really easy to kind of splash things around. And I don't know, grim star all I think it's just a really good card. I think that foregoing item lock in favor of being able to be more aggressive, I'm a fan of personally, but I also think that they're slightly different decks have slightly different matchup spread. So it's depends on what you're trying to target. Yeah, I agree with that. Yeah, I've been playing in my testing for Orlando, I've been playing for us last monkey Dory a lot. And it was cool to see it. I was kind of like mixed feelings about it, because I'm like, Oh, that's my deck, I want I want to keep it quiet. I don't want people knowing about it. But like, you know, that's kind of the reality of it. If it's a good deck, it's going to kind of come up to the surface. Yeah. And I think people are going to figure that stuff out to and say, so I'm pretty sure cut at every single event in this format so far. And yet when you look at it, not like it's going up still drastically. It's still a 2% deck, a 2% deck with a 56% win rate, and people still, which is crazy expecting it or aren't ready for it. I think it's both those things. Like I will say, like most of the players I've played against have no clue how to play against it at this point, which is kind of surprising, but also not surprising. Like it's not a deck like kind of going back to the crustal. It's not a deck that you're going to bring to locals and just play against most of the time. And if you do, you play one game against it and it's like, OK, that's enough. I'm not ever playing that again. I'm putting that back in the box and it'll get some dust and that's it. But it's so powerful. I mean, it reminds me a lot of Gothitella Selgore or Toad Bats where you just have item lock with damage control the whole time where you're really able to just dictate terms like and you can, you get to a point where you can see like, oh, I've already won this game and it's like four terms away, but you're there's nothing your opponent can do. So it's that's kind of cool. Like it reminds me like where you're just you're establishing a checkmate. Like it doesn't matter if you have I don't know, it it just feels kind of unfair. But also like it's it's a cool strategy thing, I guess. Like this is not and I'm not saying it's like the best deck ever or anything like that. Like there's definitely are weaknesses and there's matchups that are just miserable, like kind of terror box feels weird at times like Evie's if they get their leafy on out and use the healing attack that feels miserable. Just like I haven't played that matchup does does Mega Froslass not put in a lot of work there? Well, okay. So I need to build a list with Mega Froslass because I've been a little contrarian and been running Blood Moon or Saluna instead of Mega Froslass. Okay, okay. I'm sure it does. And yeah, I'm sure that that's probably a better counter for that specific matchup. So that's, that's probably on me. I probably have just been like pilled to play Blood Moon because I really like it as a late game attacker. Okay, you can just I don't know Blood Moon, and then just kind of win from there. But no, I think yeah, you get the matchups for the flurry of Noctowl, I guess most lists just be with with the Mega Froslass or something like that. Yeah, I've like that's been one of the selling points for me with Froslass, Monkey Dory based decks, whether it's straight Froslass, Monkey Dory, or with Grimmsnarl is that your Noctowl matchups are typically pretty good. Sure. Interestingly, like Raging Bolt Ogre Pines are being a little bit of a different story. And I think that's largely because a lot of these Froslass decks aren't running Shaymin. And so baby Raging Bolt is something that's really difficult to deal with. And it's able to just pick off Froslass turn after turn after turn. And under that pressure, Shaymin is a really good card right now, super good card. Please run Shaymin. It's so good. Like Mega Absol and Grimmsnarl are both also bad matchups for Froslass Monkey Dory. Yeah, that's where it like Grimmsnarl itself is difficult to can be difficult to deal with because they have the ability to set up through your item lock. And if they run enough bosses orders, they can keep your Froslass off the table and eventually overwhelm or just keep your monkeys off the table and eventually overwhelm your monkeys while you kind of build damage for them. And from the Grimmsnarl perspective, like if you're playing the matchup, never put a Snow Rite in play. Just put a bunch of put a couple of Impidimps down and try to get four monkeys with dark energies and just rock it from there. Well, the only downside to that is if they bring up a Monkey Dory and then just stall it in the active. So be careful of that. My counter to that has also been that I've been a proponent of playing Luminous in the deck, despite the fact that I'm not playing Tinglu or Moltres specifically for that reason. So when they try to pseudo Wudo you, you can mind bend to the pseudo Wudo and just keep going. But it's not a super easy matchup. It's definitely not super easy. And I think that the Froslass Monkey Dory deck has the ability to kind of run away with the game potentially because it's built to kind of keep you down and keep you item locked and runs multiple item locking cards. Whereas most Grimmsnarl decks only play one Bidu and you don't. Now we did see some bravery charms this weekend, but my other statement was going to be that you don't have a way to buff your Bidu out of their range of being able to just kind of move damage over with Adrenoburn and KO it. But now I guess I've been proven wrong. That is kind of the new hotness is running a bravery charm in your Grimmsnarl deck for either your Monkey Dories and or your Bidu. Maybe even an Impidimp in the odd scenario, but you just, I don't know. It's interesting. I think that both of them are obviously strong decks. They both have performed well consistently in this format, and I don't really see that changing anytime soon, especially while you still have Dragapult as the most played deck in the room. I wonder if there'll be any good in the next format. Like that'll be interesting to see. I mean, you lose some aspects of it, but I don't know. Losing Devo is really, really big. Losing Devo is tough against your stage two decks for sure. Like that, yeah, that's a good point. I wish we had a Pokemon that did a TM Devo or something like that. That'd be pretty cool. But yeah, you're right. That is, that is a huge, like the TMs are really nice. Especially that one. We'll have to see. Kind of any other decks you want to talk about before I do Blaine's quiz show? Just to run down like the rest of these results here, and we'll close out Houston, Yoshiyuki Yamaguchi finally won a Western major with that Mega Absol box over Miguel Angel Marin Herrera with Dragapult Dusknoir, who defeated Alex Shamansky in top four by flipping heads on a, with a confused Dragapult using Phantom Dive two turns in a row. And I guess it was only fitting that then in their finals game, Yoshiyuki flipped two heads with a Kangaskhan to KO something, you know, maybe Turnabout's Fair Play or like Karma or whatever you want to call it. Yeah, yeah. It was, uh, I haven't watched the finals yet, but I've, I've seen like, there was some, it was an interesting finals. The die roll had, it became a semi-viral Twitter clip to when people were playing, other card games were commenting on it and talking about how they thought that it was not a legitimate way to roll a die. Okay. And there was, there was like some controversy involved and I'm, I'm interested to see if it blows up further, but continuing on, we did see Henry Chow making another appearance in top cut of a tournament with Gardevoir, of course, nobody could have expected anything else. And Henry was on stream a couple of times throughout the weekend and just showing that Gardevoir still has a place because some of the, like, it's just that powerful, despite the fact that, you know, a quarter of the room is dark type decks, which all got buffed. Well, besides Mega Absol box, most of them got buffed in this most recent expansion and Absol was just strong to begin with. Gardevoir can still contend with them and still, you know, earning himself a high placement. And then we did see, like you said, uh, Kevin Lynn with a Grimmsnarl Frostlass, a Frostless Monkey Dory from Joseph Burek, who I think also got cut in another tournament in this format. I may or may not, I may be misremembering that, uh, Florida local Sammy Goldsheen made cut with Dragonbolt Dusknoir and had a really unfortunate ending to his tournament run where I think he, um, used Recon Directive in one game and accidentally looked at an extra card twice in the same, in the same game. And then I think I'm fairly certain that he like self-reported both times too and ended up just conceiving the game and going out on his terms, like got it eventually got a double price penalty, got a warning the first on double price penalty the second time and put his opponent at one price card and he like blew up his own Dusknoir to like go out on his own. It's funny. And then we have the kind of the army of Zorarchs, Liam Halliburton being the only one kind of fitting Liam being the de facto Zorarch player being the highest placing Zorarch at eighth place. And then we have three more Zorarchs in asymmetric cut along with Josh Frink with Deckle Dingo and Justin Newdorf, our world championship runner up with Dragonbolt Dusknoir, of course. So it's kind of an interest, like a smattering of decks, but really nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing that I would totally, totally see as unexpected going into this format. And I think that the increased presence of Zorarch really is just, you know, deserved with, you know, Zekrom is a huge factor for that deck and adds a lot of power to it as well. Yeah. I mean, it was interesting seeing Liam's list. I don't know if you saw that yet. He doesn't run the Darmanitan, which has been kind of a popular pick instead of opting for the Toad Scroll, but it's just a thin one, one. Interestingly, a lot of LGM this tournament, you see it here in this list, then also showed up in one of the Frostlast lists and showed up, I think, I think that's in the main two that I saw, but just a kind of a cool, definitely, it's a weird card that shows up. He's running the 0-6 also for Golden Goat and for other matchups, I imagine, where you're just trying to limit their opponent's ability to like just sit on a hand. And then running the Nighttime Mine, which is a cool new card we got, and then Ascended Heroes set. But yeah, just, I think this is a cool list. I don't know. I haven't really, I haven't played many games with it yet. I'm kind of wanting to. Interesting that he runs Petraunt, or he doesn't run Petraunt anymore. He said this doesn't run Petraunt, it's using the Defiance Band. And then Air Balloon in place of that Petraunt as well. Correct. But yeah, I'm a little surprised. I guess because I've seen so many Zorak lists that I've run into on ladder that are playing Petraunt with Binding Mochi. I'm wondering what the rationale is overall, because there's a lot of benefits for running it, right? Like you get to get the bonus damage potentially. You get to potentially put a couple of damage counters in play to utilize Adrena Brain to move them over. You have the ability to reset a Zorak after you copy Zekrom's big attack. So I'm just the biggest thing is you don't have the bench space and maybe like that's a liability. Yeah, for sure. It's 190, like really easy to knock out. I'm opting for the Tatsugiri instead to try to dig for some of the draw supporters. It's like extra draw supporters with a Lillie's Engine instead of Cyrano. Yeah, no Arvin. One Arvin, sorry. Almost no Arvin. It's a very limited amount of search in that regard. Yeah, I mean, I haven't tested much with it, but Liam's definitely the innovator. He's like the very, like Henry Chow of Zorak for the last few formats. This is definitely his pet deck. And he's like kind of got his own group of disciples, if you will, as Henry does for Gardevoir. Right. And rightfully so. Like he's really shown time and time again that he is the best player with this deck and very good at the last like the last few tournaments. Yep. Yeah, I think that that will just about do it for Houston. So we can talk about how we expect things to maybe shift a little bit, maybe shape up going into what I think we have Sevilla this weekend as well as Orlando then the weekend after that. But before we do, we are long overdue for an addition of Blaine's Quiz Show. So why don't we jump over there? All right. All right, Aaron. It's been a little bit, so let's go ahead and review the rules for Blaine's Quiz Show. How to play. Players will be given three questions. If a player is stumped, they're 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 awarded. I'm going back to the well once again for Rocket. I just can't get away from it. It's just so cool. The IP, the look, the R. I drove by a Tesla today that just had a rocket logo. I usually don't like Tesla's if I'm honest, but this one looks super clean as a black Tesla. But just like the rocket as a decal on the back bumper and like that. That's pretty sick. Rockets got some staying power, man. I don't know. Like out of all the villains, I think. Is it your favorite villain class or is there a different one that you like more? That's a good question. Hold on. Give me a second. No, I think. Galactic Plasma. I'm thinking like Galactic Plasma. Who was it for? Gen 5. Gen 5. Gen 5. Yeah. Then. Oh, Flare. No, Flare sucks. Flare is, yeah. Flare's pretty bad. Flare's pretty bad. Team Skull's pretty bad. Team Star's pretty bad. It almost is kind of Rocket by default because most of the rest of them are terrible. Yeah. I mean, Plasma has its own interesting things going for it with N and with Getshu. all that kind of stuff and then like yeah the Galactic kind of cool too. It's Cyrus and all that and really cool engines and all that stuff But yeah, I think rocket just by the sheer staying power and also in the anime Has a lot of relevance which brings us to our first question. What Pokemon does team rocket trade away? Hey Sorry what Pokemon does team rocket trade away their victory bell for in the episode Here's looking at you like head to the Magikarp salesman Is it so what Pokemon do they get from the Magikarp salesman when they trade away their victory bell? This was kind of weird and weird. Sorry about that it was it a Weeping bell a Magikarp a Wobbuffet or an Elekid okay, so I know it's not Wobbuffet because I think that I asked you a question about this briefly and They got the Wobbuffet by trading the Lickitung. Yeah, I don't know why you would trade a victory before a weeping bell It's I'm really concerned that the Magikarp is like a red herring because it's the Magikarp salesman But I also don't know if they ever had an Elekid. Gosh. Here's looking at you Elekid They would not have gotten the Elekid the Elekid would have belonged to some other character that was interacting with ash so Jesse and James seemed like they could be duped into Accidentally trading for a weep I'm gonna go with weeping bell And I'm gonna look like an idiot when it was Magikarp and it was in their question the whole time, but we'll see well Don't feel too bad Aaron. You're not an idiot. It was we yes This episode is hilarious because they trade away their victory bell They're all like we need to trade away a Pokemon to get any Pokemon We don't know Pokemon we're gonna get and then trade away the weeping the victory bell to get a weeping bell and then That weeping bell then evolves later and it's the same kind of thing where it attacks James every time that comes out of the pokey ball so They can't get rid of their problems interesting in true Team Rocket fashion, you know All right next question Which Pokemon was James from Team Rockets first Pokemon? Um Was it crowd with wheezing Magikarp or meow? So it's not me out also wouldn't be wheezing because he had a coughing before he had a wheezing Also gonna assume it wasn't Magikarp because he gets it I know he gets a Magikarp in like the first season when they're gonna go on the boat in Whatever city I think it's vermilion city They're going on the boat and he gets the Magikarp and he like kicks it across the boat and then it evolves into a Gyarados And tries to kill him So I think that just leaves Growlithe as the answer Yeah, I guess I could have done a better job for this question. But yep growth is the correct answer and sussed out I made a mistake. I should have put coughing. I forgot that the pre evolution So that's on me. Maybe we've been a little bit more challenging. But yep, it is growly the growlithe It is the first nicknamed Pokemon that Appears in the TV show, I think all right. Sorry. That's Nick. That's not true It's the first nickname Pokemon that Team Rocket has Interesting trivia question Yeah It was like some other fact like that. All right, so you're two for two on the rocket category Let's see if you can close out very strong. What is the most expensive card from a Team Rocket set? valued at $2,600 for last sold is it Rockets Mewtwo EX Trekko gold star Charizard or Team Rockets Mewtwo EX SIR can I ask are these is that a graded price or a raw price? These are for raw Okay for near men Okay. Okay. Okay, okay because I was gonna said like graded I feel like that would be too low to be either the Rockets Mewtwo EX or the Charizard or the Trekko honestly But a raw price Rockets Mewtwo EX is from Team Rocket returns And that's where the Trekko came from as well then dark Charizards from way back in OG Team Rocket So I'm like is the first edition dark Charizard because I think it's a Charizard and I feel problem I don't want to use the hand I'm just gonna try to go for four points because I think if I ask for the hand you're gonna like narrow it down to Rockets Mewtwo EX and dark Charizard and that's kind of where I'm at. Anyway, so that wouldn't it doesn't even seem like it would Really be helpful Charizard and Mewtwo are both really popular. Holy cow. That's that's a tough one Let's just go a Charizard it's an older card older and therefore more more unlikely to be pulled Um, this was the red herring question. It was actually Trekko. There's no way Holy cow All the gold stars are insane now dude. So yeah, this card is now valued at 2,600 Wow, do you have do you have prices for the other ones? Um, they're all like under a thousand I can say that That honestly surprises me for the dark Charizard. I could see like a first edition dark Charizard Let me double check before I put my foot in my mouth But yeah, I think that's true Wow, no, it looks like you're wow that cards really cheap that's crazy Yeah, they're not too well comparative comparatively, but I 700 for the Team Rockets Mewtwo I are from Destin rivals is 521 market and Charizard is under $500 There you go. And then Trekko star is market price most recently is $2,250 that's absurd. Yep. It's not even This is this is fake money like this is not oh, yeah. Yeah If you look at the sales history, it's still like insane. Yeah, none of the sales are under $2,000 so yeah from the last well, I'll take my two points though Yeah, I think I think if I remember correctly that puts me being one point behind you I that sounds about right. So I barely stayed off our Eventual time. I'm sure you'll catch up at some point but not this week and thanks for playing you know, I'm glad that my Knowledge of TCG player can at least thwart you from having a perfect run I think you were I was four points ahead, right? So that was just two points from this I'm not sure I'd have to I'll double check it. Yeah, it's been a little bit well, Aaron will flash it whenever he does double check in here and Yep, there it is and we'll move on to the next topic. Yeah, so real quick There was an announcement earlier today like as of recording this where I know we talked about Pokemon champions back on Pokemon Day and they Actually announced in a release date for it of I believe April 8th And yeah, I don't know just wanted to bring that up because I thought that it actually it looks interesting I think that that's specifically a switch release date though So, I don't know when it's supposed to be coming to mobile, but just the fact that there's finally a solid release date So they also announced then that the I think Indianapolis regional championship will be the first in-person event that utilizes Champions as the game of choice. So I'm wondering if there isn't gonna be like a huge spike in VGC registration and or attendance because of that No, it'll be interesting to see if it has like the same kind of Pokemon go effect that hit the TCG or something like That where you have a new IP that's more easily accessible. I imagine once it hits mobile That'll probably be the case on that's gonna be the big boom Yeah on switch I think if you're it'll still like help but I think yeah once it hits mobile and it's like now I don't have to own A console to play and battle and the Pokemon TC the video game like that's huge We're just being able to have it more accessible to the general population and then it'll be interesting to see kind of I mean I'm sure there's a lot of doomsaying but also just a lot of excited Speculation as to like what competitive VGC will look like in this with this client with this game I don't know. Have you watched the trailer for it? I think that they had released released a trailer today I think they did they released a new trailer. It's like eight minutes long I think no, I did not get a chance to watch it I know it kind of goes over like there's a battle pass or So you'd like you have the ability to spend money, but you can play for free But I don't have enough details to say anything about it Yeah, but I mean we'll leave it to more experienced and more knowledgeable people to talk about but yeah, it was very interesting other stuff I think we have when does a registration for XP come out. Is that next month? Yeah, I think that it's like April 4th or April 5th. So that's coming up pretty soon. Yeah So that'll be exciting I'll be interesting to see if they release more information as to what exactly the events are and who's gonna be there as far as Like if they're gonna have artists, I imagine they will because they usually do a world's anyway But this makes more sense for this kind of a venue and like more Personalities and VIPs and all that kind of stuff. I don't know I'm excited to see that kind of develop and take on a life of its own separate from the world championships It'll be kind of cool to have the world's be just about competition for the most part, but I don't know It's also like to me just kind of it reinforces that there's still a really big divide between the competitive Players and like the general collecting population of Pokemon, you know like I've Gotten into collecting a lot more in the last year and a half by helping out of the card shop and like I've seen one Of the guys that's really big into the collecting scene right now beard dad is like local to Richmond So like he's now traveling to shows all over the US pretty much every weekend him and another guy Coop TCG that are like I guess pillars of that community, but it's like so interesting It's like I'm saying these names to you and it doesn't people are yeah Which is crazy because like they're like superstars if you will of the collecting side of stuff Sure, not quite not quite the level of some of the other people in it, but like getting close. Yeah Well, like I know the dude, I don't know his name I know the guy who's got like the tagline like should I open it or should I keep it? See? Yeah. Yeah Okay, okay like I've seen a couple of his videos and obviously like everybody knows Leonhardt Yeah, but Leonhardt's old hat at this point. It's like I'm sure I'm sure yeah Like he's moved on and he's doing other things Like he just did a thing recently where didn't he put out a video where he opened like one pack of every single set ever Yeah, I think so, but yeah, it's fascinating. I wish I had the money to burn to do that man Yeah I mean, that's the cool thing like some of these I don't know they really do like it's a different community But it is still a really nice community and still generally speaking Like there's still a lot of people that care about each other and support each other through that But it is interesting to see like the collecting side of stuff gets so big way more than even the TCG Competitively, you know, that's one of those things where I think it's always been that way But now there's more kind of spotlight on it, right? I think art card shows card shows be this whole chair. No, definitely not every weekend now It seems like there's like four card shows in Richmond and we're like where you are in Orlando. I'm sure it's even bigger Yeah, I may just not Like I've seen Well, cuz I thought about going to a couple of them because I've heard from players that they're really good places to pick up Or like make deals like if you want to buy is like full arts of the new supporter cards Don't they come out from a set like you can pick them up fairly easily And you can generally get a deal where you're paying slightly under market value for them or you can trade like I don't know Illustration rares of cards that you don't care about and though the vendor will give you what like 70 80 percent 75 First card shows. It's 70 for trades then Yeah depends on the card that you're trading like some higher value cards, they'll get better value for but yeah It's it's it's interesting that there's not a huge crossover But it is cool to see like I know some players that I've played with back in the day That have gone into vending like Dylan Bryan. I think I started vending I have one of the shows and I saw him. I'm not it was Dylan Bryan and What's the guy's name? Maybe Dylan Lefebvre? No, who is it? I'm gonna have to find it. I'm gonna just I Got his number, but I'm trying to remember his name. I'm gonna give me two seconds I'm gonna try to find it and if we can't find it in two seconds, I'm just gonna move on with life I know you mentioned Dylan Lefebvre a few like a month or so ago, but I don't know who else you would be talking about Like I know Ray Cipolletti like as part of a card show that opened up fairly recently And just again like other older players that are kind of in the game that May not necessarily be related to collecting this can kind of circle back to players Like I know I mentioned Sam will get earlier and he's a name who was what like I think he was a senior still back when like back in my day like early And I think I actually saw I coincidentally was looking at something on labs earlier for Houston And I thought I saw current Hills name. Whoa, and the thing that's your act. That's who it is Okay, the thing that struck me was like there's that's got to be the same current Hill, right? Like there's no way that there's another current Hill that coincidentally shows up at a Pokemon tournament But I'm just surprised that nobody that I knew has said anything about him potentially being there Some of the North Carolina people and see if they know but yeah, it's interesting when cultures collide We've been doing it long enough that I think Anything that like it's it's always fun when people take an interest in what you care about even if it's tangentially related In this case, but yeah, I love it. I mean, it's been fun to have my wife get into it the last couple months Yeah, I start having a collection of her own ask about cards and stuff like that It's been a lot of fun. So it's just cool when Pokemon creates more community and creates more friends and stuff Well, and especially when you think like you said when you can get the people that you love involved with it, too And being able to share an interest with somebody especially when it's your wife child Husband dog like whoever you know your cousin's best friend Whatever somebody that is close to you or meaningful to you being able to share something That's a big part of your life is a really big deal That's where it's like when any boxes that I've gotten, you know I haven't bothered doing what is probably the smart financial decision and keeping them sealed to sell later I've like brought home and been like, okay, it's like we're gonna divide this up where at the time like What a box has 36 packs So like my I would get 12 my wife would get 12 my son would get 12 and we would like quote-unquote pack battle with our portion of the box and just seeing like it's a fun way to open a box and Still letting everybody be like, oh and like and it makes terrible quote-unquote terrible hits like regular art EX is more meaningful because it's still worth a point and Therefore it's better than opening the stupid holly archelude on for the fourth time or whatever but you know being able to do things like that and being able to get people in a position where you can make more memories of somebody and that's kind of a Pokemon suppose like that's their whole brand right yeah that's what they want it to be all about is the community aspect and being able to interact with friends neighbors loved ones and introduce new people into being part of that category for you as well yeah so not really the best transition no but you want to yeah we'll wrap up kind of with our ideas of where Pokemon is going in a different direction in the competitive game to the last two weeks of this format unfortunately more fortunately for those that are really tired of it we only have two weeks of the ascended heroes scarlet ours scarlet and violet through ascended heroes format remaining and yeah we're just gonna talk real quick about where we think that that format will be heading in the next two weeks we don't have we do have Orlando which will be a probably one of the largest not the largest regionals of the year yeah I mean generally it's always the one that's like the largest ever every time they have it so I don't see any reason to think that it would be any different this time but I'm looking forward to it and I have been testing a lot in this format yeah I'm ready to talk about it but I think frost last decks are on the rise I don't think that's a really hot take or anything like that at this point like you brought up frost last monkey door has made top cut at every event one of these events if you're not testing against it and you're planning on playing in Orlando definitely play some games against it it will be there like I don't know like at least learn like relatively like a decent game plan against it a lot of times you don't want to over bench stuff you don't want to put down too many things that have abilities or something that can get trapped or stuff like that you want to mostly work through one attacker if it's dragapult like just one dragapult for the most part you don't want to put down a bunch of drag cloaks because then they could just stack a bunch of damage on them and devolve them or win that way for knock towel decks you know you can't really put a bunch of knock towels and play unfortunately sure and then yeah just I don't know but yeah like learn just the lines and how to beat stuff with frost last decks with other stuff I think a lot of it is mostly the same stuff we've seen Zoroark's got some new tricks especially so test some games against that pull out the mega absol box deck I don't think it really gained a whole lot but it's a little bit of a different build than the toad scroll list it's gone back to the cornerstone so it might be good to just kind of revisit that if you haven't played against it in a minute kind of see what you can do with whatever deck you're choosing but I don't know I think that's most of my thoughts what are you thinking there and I know that you've been testing a lot in this format is there anything that's sticking out to you while you're testing or anything that's man I really am curious to see what happens with this deck or something like that I think if the current trend continues to be the case that you may actually be able to get away with disrespecting gold and go by the time Orlando rolls around I know Sevilla's results will maybe not be fully influenced by Houston because it is only a week apart from each other and also because it is a European event versus being a fully global event and because it's a special championship rather than being a regional it may not draw the same crowd of players as some caliber of players so it also is difficult to kind of draw from those results and have them feed into people's opinions about Orlando and whether or not they'll actually like how impactful is that data really but I do think like gold Angle has been on kind of a steady decline to the point where I thought going into Houston you needed to still respect the deck and coming out of Houston I think I'm now ready to disrespect it and that means if you were playing toad scroll before you could probably afford to take it out unless like unless you beat literally every deck except gold Angle and you just want to hard tech for that matchup then sure go ahead and keep your toes scrolling like Liam's Zoroark list as an example he felt really confident seemingly into all of his other matchups but needed a way to be called Angle and therefore played TM Eva with one one toad scroll and said this is how I'm gonna win this matchup otherwise like the young mega deck that I mentioned earlier like I felt that we needed to include up to four slots because it was a two one toad scroll line and a night stretcher that got added to the deck to try to mitigate that matchup and being able to free up four deck slots in your deck can be a really really big deal when you can kind of refocus that towards other matchups I think another tech card that is increasing in usage and popularity and strength is picnic basket and that is specifically because all these frost less decks are way up and play dragapult is obviously still the most popular deck in the room and you know picnic basket just is really good against all three of those as well as also being niche useful against Gardevoir being able to kind of remove damage from their board to either neuter their screentail or their drift loon while trapping energies on it so really can be a really big deal you can also really just mess with the math if they want to do like a lot of Gardevoir players like to do this play where they'll put 190 on a pheasant dipity or like 160 on a pheasant dipity with a screentail and then try to pick you off with just a drenner brain the next turn and then still take a ko on something else by attacking and playing picnic basket can mitigate that for you if you may if you aren't a deck that can play your own monkey Dory if you're a deck that can play monkey Dory then you probably don't need picnic basket and it probably is actually antithetical to your game plan and you would want to avoid including it yeah sure yeah also think dragapult specifically is in a position where I'm a fan of this goes back to what I was testing previously with rare candy I think is really really important for the deck right now I think that there are a lot of exploitable game states for dragapult where your lone drag cloak can just be targeted or your energy can be targeted and it puts you in a position where you just can literally never attack with a dragapult unless you're lucky enough and obviously the addition of pokey pad makes it more feasible that you'll have multiple drag cloaks in play but it's still possible for the deck to kind of be exploited overall especially by some of these decks that maybe can item lock you and prevent you from playing that pokey pad so I don't know I think that rare candy to obviously doesn't help against item lock but I think that you're in a position now where you don't necessarily need to have six gust cards in your dragapult deck so slimming down on those to give yourself more of an explosive turn can just be a really big thing whether it's getting a dust or into play or a dragapult into play either of them are extremely powerful they're both really powerful stage twos with really powerful abilities and attacks respectively so other thing I think crustle had its time in the Sun for Houston and I think it needs to go back in your binder for Orlando personally because I think I am a true crustle hater because I think that you're gonna see Goldengo's gonna go down dragapult's gonna stay right where it is and it actually can reasonably beat crustle the frostlast decks I think will both increase in play which can also beat crustle and Gardevoir I think will actually pop back up for this last event and you will see kind of a resurgence of it and it obviously can be crustle and it's always kind of in the Achilles heel of that deck so I say crustles crustles a big no picnic baskets a big yes Goldengo's a big no and because Goldengo's a big no toad scroll can also potentially be put away yeah those are kind of my hot takes I think last one would be a nighttime mine if you really like your option you have multiple pathways to hate on dragapult and if you want to hate on dragapult while also hating on Sarah ledge then nighttime mine is your stadium of choice if you want to hate on dragapult while also hating on frostlast then you go with battlecage and it's difficult for both of those to get huge huge effects for you because they are reactive stadiums and your opponent has the ability to bump them and then just go on their merry way and not worry about it but the option exists especially if you can hand disrupt your opponent at the same time sir let's run a counter stadium I've seen some that run battlecage I've seen someone that run what is the other one I think I've seen no not town store oh my gosh maybe not maybe it isn't standard I just know that I run into it maybe it's one or two guys that I've run into over and over on ladder and they both run battlecage yeah I'm not in the upper echelon of the ladder at this point but yeah I think those are all really good points there and I think I don't disagree with any of that for the most part yeah I think all that really makes sense it is kind of a weird coincidence to see golden go slide down so much I don't think it's like a weaker deck per se I think it's got really teched hard against and didn't really gain as much as some of the other decks but I think it's still a really good pick you know like that's kind of my backup pick for frost last is starting to get really hard countered I think golden go still has a lot of legs and it's like if people stop respecting it you know you can disrespect it but we could see a world where you know because people disrespected it it opens the door back up sure you know yeah the mega apps all deck the the Zoroark deck the grim snarl unfortunately I know I'll have pretty terrible golden go matchups if they don't respect the deck like they they just straight lose and I think if you're not gonna respect it you know great if you don't hit it but if you do hit it what's your answer then kind of thing so yeah we'll see it'll be interesting to see kind of what happens the next two weeks severe like you said maybe not as interesting as Orlando but um it'll be interesting to see the send off for the standard format before we hit rotation and have to hit a hard reset on all of our expectations and understandings of the metagame I'm about you I'm kind of I don't really like relish rotation but I'm kind of bummed about this one like I really don't want to leave this format especially I've invested some time into it and there's a lot of good decks I'm sure on the horizon and I'll probably find something that I want to play but I'm definitely like less motivated than I have been in years past like the the Reggie Drago format felt really stale by the end the broken Lugia felt really stale by the end right yeah this one's a little different this one feels good for sure like because it's gotten especially because it's widened ever so slightly more with the introduction of this set I think that that's why it feels even though Pete everybody's obviously sick of Goldango, Jugardivore, and Dragapult at this point because Zoroark's more viable now because Grimmsnarl got a little bit better because Froslass Monkey Dory is available because you can play like there was um an Ethan's Ho-Oh Ethan's Macargo deck that made day two and I think actually may have made top 64 in Houston so people are finding ways for these niche strategies that people just aren't prepared for and part of that again could be because people are kind of checked out like you said but they exist and they're more than likely not going to be viable as you move into the next format I think the thing that scares me initially about rotation is just seeing the results for Japan where it looks like literally you play Dragapult or you play a deck that counters Dragapult and you just get used to it. And every aspect is unfair stamp and yeah that just seems miserable like the fact that I'm gonna unfair stamp you okay I drew my one of my three cards I drew one unfair stamp and now I have you back and it's just like that sounds fair it sounds pretty miserable we'll see yeah but I'm sure like the good thing about Pokemon is even if you don't like the format right away like the there's a lot of formats that just like right after rotation is pretty tough just because the card pool is so much smaller and the strategies aren't really proven the deck lists aren't proven aren't figured out like we look back at like apricorn maker being a supporter that people played after we lost a lot of like Bridget and stuff but yeah well it'll be it'll it'll grow it'll develop it won't stay like that forever yeah but it's gonna be slow this time yeah I mean that's always fun too right you have a slower setup start thanks well I just mean it's slower in terms of building the format and we didn't we didn't get to talk about this but like we've so now we have confirmation with both perfect order and bash what's the Greninja said called a chaos something and just spinner well that was the Japanese now I don't remember what the English name is yeah okay it's chaos something like chaos but they neither both of those sets are under a hundred cards yeah where historically we would have gotten both of them as one set and I think part of that like the like tinfoil hat theory that I have right now is that winds and waves got delayed by some amount of time because of that they're now spreading out some of these set releases for the Western audience so like okay we're gonna get perfect order and then we're gonna get Greninja set and then now they're gonna scramble and like shoehorn in like a Pocopia set or something just to kill time fill time for the winds and waves stuff to come in because otherwise I don't see why they would have suddenly put the brakes on and not given us another like 200 card set that was all the Zygarde and Greninja stuff at the same time right yeah I don't know maybe that has something to do with like a simultaneous release they're trying to ramp up for that maybe for the 30th anniversary set so that's been taking up a lot of the printing or something like that it's hard to speculate without more information and it's such a large global thing to like try to figure out but yeah it'll be interesting to see what exactly comes up out of all that stuff from Japan I don't there's a lot of new stuff we haven't really talked about with ninja spin or you know whatever you wanna call it but we will save that for another day I think it's getting a little longer but still good talking with you and I really appreciate catching up after such a long absence I'm glad you know your family's doing well as far as everything you know with your newborn and I am excited to kind of get into testing a little bit unfortunately the latter well fortunately for some before unfortunately for me the latter changes to the new format on Thursday this week so I have one more day of testing and that'll be that we have the trainer yes what is it called trainer trainer trials yep so I'll have that I guess to try to have and I'm gonna just probably be testing locally with some friends I got like a couple people that I know locally that are going to Orlando so I'm gonna try to meet up with them a couple times in the next couple days and then I'll be playing in a cup Saturday that's best two out of three so we'll see if that helps me or not if the competition levels like that that cup we'll see it'll be I'll report back next week and let you know how that goes perfect looking forward to it and looking forward to hearing what you guys have been up to in this format and any thoughts you may have as it draws to a close let us know down in the comments of this episode either here on Spotify or on YouTube wherever whatever listening platform you're on and from John and myself thank you for bearing with us again through the ups and downs of once again new parenthood for myself and how that has affected our release schedule we are trying to be as frequent as possible in releasing episodes but appreciate your patience and your understanding and we will see you guys next time we are able to release an episode of the battle frontier have a good week slash another week