Episode 2-29: Hammer Bros

I was talking with somebody else about it, I think at the pre-release, because they were asking me, like, oh, can you play with other languages? And it's like, not anymore, you used to at one point. Like, oh, why'd they change that? And it's like, well, you know, I guess it makes sense if you have like new players that are coming in and don't know what the cards do. It's fine to have a mandated rule that everybody plays with the same language if you're in a certain area or something like that. But I don't know, I feel kind of weird about it because, you know, it's like so much cheaper to buy Japanese cards and play with them. But it's like, and if you show up at a regional, theoretically, you could play against somebody with cards from any language, provided that they're from that country. So I wonder if they ever circle back to a point where they do just allow whatever language, as long as you're not, as long as your deck is all the same language. Okay, yeah. Like, maybe that's a solution. I don't know, I think even now, I don't think you have to have your deck be the same language if you're from a region. Yeah, like, because I've played against Brazilian players that had certain cards that were in English and certain cards that were in Portuguese. Oh, okay. I think the one thing that, like, you wouldn't be, you wouldn't be able to mix Japanese with anything else. I think because they have- Maybe because the back's different. Right, right. I could see that. If you can see the back through the sleeve or something like that, that could be a marked card situation. But yeah, I think as long as the back's the same, they're not gonna be too picky about it. No, and like, for those who don't know, the specific incident that catalyzed getting that removed was 2008 Darkpalm Dusknoir, and there were players at, gosh, I'm gonna butcher this, I think it was Worlds that year, that had Dusknoir, you know, fake reference cards, essentially, in their deck box that they would leave the deck box open and, you know, fully visibly advertise, display the Dusknoir, so you have to think that you have to play around it all game, and they just aren't playing the card in their deck. Yeah. And from that point, they said no. And that's why we now also have the updated rule where you can't even have extra cards in your deck box anymore. Right. Well, that's not as enforced, I think, but it should be. Yeah, it could be. Yeah. I know I get in trouble with that, or would potentially get in trouble with that, like if when, you know, you go to a league challenge or something, and they hand out your prize pack for the day, or for the event, and like round two, you open it up, and okay, cards in the box, because I don't wanna just throw them into my bag. But I would think, like that feels a little bit different. Right? Like, you know. It's like, it's not sleeved. Like, yeah, I guess now it's kind of solved. Like, it's not the 60 cards that are on your deck list or sleeved up, and I don't know. Like, the thing I guess you'd be worried about with that is like somebody hot swapping something out, you know, between games or something like that, but. Yeah, like if you have an A-spec in your deck box, you know, there might be a problem. Yeah, yeah, maybe. For sure. It's been a pretty slow news week, and you know, we've got a couple of tournaments coming up this weekend. I still don't know necessarily how much is gonna change. I don't know how much you've watched of the Los Angeles regionals. I know we're gonna recap things with our prediction, and maybe take a look at a few deck lists. And I think that, in my opinion, there's a chance that this format is heading in a direction that I am definitely not a fan of, and is very reminiscent of one of the other worst formats of all time. Buy it. Yeah, we saw an increased and crazy amount of Dragapult, and the conversion rate for the deck was very, very much higher than any other deck in the format. So we're gonna break down some of the metagame. If you do the variant pairings for the decks, Dragapult comes out monumentally ahead with a meta share of... That's day two, give me one second. Overall, yeah, day one was 31, it's 32%. And no deck is even above 7% after that. And the crazy thing is, it didn't drop down after day two. It shot up to 47%, which just feels pretty oppressive. And the meta, the conversion rate, if we group it, look at that real quick, Dragapult was leaps and bounds ahead of any other deck with 26%. There is a couple other random decks, but the next closest meta major deck is Raging Bolt with 20.87%, so 5% points down, essentially. So a very, very good conversion rate. And it's very rarely that you see the top deck that usually has a target on its back convert at the highest level. Usually somebody was prepared for that. And maybe, I don't know, Aaron, I feel kind of mixed about it. We could see this format progress to being kind of like the Regidrago format, where we just had Regidrago and a bunch of other decks trying to just counter Regidrago, or trying to figure out how to just counter the big bad. And we could see that, but I also think it might be a little bit premature to head into that direction. So I think what I'm trying to say is, I do expect Dragapult to still be like a highest played and convert really well and do really well in this format and be over 30%, but I don't know if I expect it to, like, it doesn't feel like quite their broken Lugia format or Regidrago format level of dominance yet. Maybe I'm wrong. It did look dominant. I mean, the statistics don't lie. It was dominant, but- If we look at this, we have things grouped here, and you wanna look at just what did Dragapult do poorly into, right? With a relatively decent sample size. And so, and the decks that it is performing poorly into look like Sloking, Marnie's Grimmsnarl, Ogre Pawn Box, and then the big thing is that it does still have a sub 50% Raging Bolt matchup. But the problem is most of these decks are terrible into anything that isn't Dragapult, which when Dragapult is approaching 50% of the room, I think that that's a risk you take, right? You pull the trigger on it and you just let it fly, but you're still losing 40% of the time. Like 60-40 is not bad when you are the best deck in the room and you beat all the random stuff here and your win rate just continues to climb as you go down and further and further and further into the page. And some of these other like highly played decks like Festival League, Dragapult's got almost a 70% win rate into, and you're looking at, people thought this was a really good play coming into this weekend. Or Ogre Pomeganium, 60% win rate. Megastarmy is really popular, 60% win rate. And like, there's gotta be a point where, or it has gotten to the point, and we'll see this when you look at the winner of the event, where the Dragapult deck's biggest concern is how does it beat the other Dragapult decks, rather than how does it, it doesn't have to worry about the other things in the room because it naturally out-competes them. And in a way, it's almost, in my opinion, worse than, I don't think it's quite Lugia levels, but I do think that it's worse than Regidrago. It's kind of the in-between point of those two things, where the Regidrago deck still had to worry about Raging Bolt and had to actually tech for it if it wanted to be able to beat it. I think that you were just able to naturally win that game sometimes as Dragapult. You don't have to go out of your way and add extra cards into your deck to compensate for it. And Lugia's just kind of its own beast, like nothing, I don't know if anything will truly ever compare to that. Yeah, that format. The tools. That deck was very impressive. And the tools that were available to it, where it eventually did kind of the same thing, though, where it was more so about how does the Lugia deck beat the other Lugia deck, rather than really worrying about what other people are doing. Yep, and then, you know, we saw, the only deck that really kind of countered it was like the Mew with the Path of the Peak or something like that. Sure, sure, sure, sure. Before we look at like standings and deck lists, though, let's go ahead and go through our predictions from last time, maybe? Yeah, sure. Okay, so we had five predictions. The first one was what Dragapult variant will place highest. Both of us picked Pult Dusknoir. That had a really good showing at this tournament and had two in the top four, but it was not the highest placing Dragapult list. That was Andrew Hedrick. It's not showing the Dedan Spars, but he ran the Dedan Spars package in his deck as well. He ran on 1-1. That's why they're classifying it as not. So I guess it's closer to a straight pull. Yes. With some techs, obviously, and we'll get into all that in a minute. So that was the highest placing one, so we tied on that, obviously. The next one was how high will a Frostlass deck play, and we were both not bullish, but we were not quite as gung-ho as we, we were more gung-ho than we probably should have been. We both said top 32, and the highest placing one was Eduardo Hernandez with Frostlass Starmie and 52nd. So it was a top 64 for the deck. Overall, Frostlass decks did not do well, including Grimmsnarl had a very, very bad show, with the highest one being top 128. So we had what will be the highest placing one prize deck. Aaron, you said Alakazam, which had a 24th finish, and then I had their correct pick with Festival Lead and 12th. So that was the highest placing single prize deck. What was the biggest, what big basics deck will do best? Weirdly enough, neither one of us picked Raging Bolt, which had a kind of breakout tournament, second Dragon Bolt. Aaron, you picked Tarabox, which I'll give it to you for that, with somebody in 12th place. Go back up. 12th place with Festival Lead. Sorry, where was it at? 11th. 11th place. Did this play Noctowl? No, it didn't play Noctowl. No, I'm not gonna take credit for this. Okay, fair enough. I don't know where Noctowl's deck is. You have to go pretty far down, I feel like. Probably. Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if it just didn't get played. But here we go, Tarabox. 224, that's not it. No, and then my pick was Meganium Ogre Pawn. I'd say Brandon Salazar with a Hydrapple, the low deck you wanna get. Okay, you're right, you're right. They ran a Meganium and then the Ogre Pawn, but it has a Hydrapple instead of the Arboliva. He got 36th, so. Okay. So here's the results and then the last prediction. Pick a player to do well. I picked Ian Robb, who had a pretty good showing at 34th. He was on two winning ends for top cut and tied and lost those in succession. So that felt kind of bad watching from home. And then Aaron picked somebody a little bit closer to the top in Andrew Hedrick. So congrats, Aaron, for that one. I think it's kind of a push. I'll give it to you just because you picked, I think if you pick the winner, you automatically win predictions like that. That's kind of, that just feels like how that should go, if I'm honest. But yeah. I was wrong about his deck, though. Well, you didn't think he was playing, he played? I knew he was playing Dragapult, but I had specifically said that he was gonna play Poltnor to kind of go along with the prediction of which variant would be the most played. But he went further into the dark side instead and played four crushing hammers in his Dragapult deck because we've decided the deck, this, people have said, this is the most consistent deck, the deck with the most agency, the most kind of disruptive, essential, like, well, most disruptive deck in general, but can get out of disruption more easily thanks to the recon directive from Dracloak. So what do we do with that? We push the other decks down more. We don't have good hand disruption, so we're going to include the only reliable, and reliable's not a very strong term here, but reliable board disruption that we have available in the form of crushing hammer. And, you know, it's really effective in mirror, like I mentioned before, that the thing at this point in the format, when you have Dragapult being nearly 50% of the room on day two, you need to figure out how to win that mirror most consistently. And from watching his games in Cut where he played Pult Mirror over and over and over again, you know, being able to knock energies off of Dragapult or deny energies from Monkey Dory is a game-winning move at the end of the day. Yeah, he's, and we have Andrew Hedrick entering his Jason Klozinski era running for Hammer decks. This was kind of like a throwback to formats in the past where we've seen like Slurpuff Seismitoad and Darkrai Hammers, and what else? Just other degenerate decks that just don't really care if your opponent sets up, they're just like, all right, you know, I'm just gonna disrupt your board and do my thing, and eventually I'll overwhelm you and take over the game. Just kind of deny you the ability to do what you want to do on your side of the board. You know, you have the item lock abilities still, but I think this is just kind of like peak, I don't know, Dragapult at this point where you're really just trying to execute your strategy more effectively and then really just deny, like there's no real energy acceleration decks in this format other than like some stuff that's really not meta. So everything is more or less going through. I mean, we have like Crispin a lot, but that's your supporter for turns. So if you're using Crispin, you're not using draw supporters or a boss or something like that. And then you do have like the Ogre Pawn decks. So that'd be kind of the exception to the rule, but those, you know, other than the Raging Bolt, which we'll talk about in a little bit, those are still very vulnerable to Crushing Hammer. The Meganium Ogre Pawn deck's probably not that vulnerable to Crushing Hammer, but the Raging Bolt can be. You can get rid of, you know, the fighting energy or something like that, or a psychic energy on a Lily's Clefairy and target something else. And then it's just the combination of Crushing Hammer with Hand Disruption and the Unfair Stamp, followed by just like the ability to boss something up. Like you can Unfair Stamp, Crushing Hammer, boss, and just trap something active, set up your board for that six-prize turn or four-prize turn, and just kind of do a board wipe once you've established your Dragon Bolt. It's like the ultimate come from behind. I think this was kind of, unfortunately, the come from behind mechanic that we've been missing from this format. You know, I've been bemoaning the fact that there is no come from behind decks. This definitely feels like more of a come from behind strategy than anything else at the moment, and it gives you more autonomy, but it really shuts your opponent down from doing anything, unfortunately. It's autonomy, but at the cost of your opponent having fun, for sure, so. Right, but I mean, you know, at the end of the day, when you're playing in a tournament, it does your opponent, whether or not your opponent has fun is not necessarily your concern. It's like, how do you win more games, right? And if your goal is to win the most games, you know, you stop. You want your opponent to not be able to play the game the max percentage of the time. And like you said, without, you know, we don't have Gardevoir anymore. You don't really see people playing other, like nobody's playing Inferno, Fandango, Emboar from Black and White or anything like that. Like we don't have massive hand or discard-based energy accelerators. Nobody's playing Dynamo or Electric. So Crushing Hammer sticks a lot more. And when you are able to use that in conjunction with a boss, like you can almost just lock your opponent out of attacking for a turn in a lot of cases, depending on what deck you're up against, or you get to do something where you knock out one attacker and you disrupt the backup attacker. But you mentioned some similarities to other decks. The one that I wanted to call out as this being the most similar to is actually this Dragapult list. Here we go. Dragapult VMAX list from, I believe this is Michael Catron's list from one of the Players' Cups. So people never actually get to play this format in person, but it's literally Dragapult VMAX with Crushing Hammer. And for anybody who doesn't remember, this can serve almost as a time capsule segment. I'm not gonna say that I'm super well-versed on this deck. I did not play it this time, but Dragapult VMAX at a max phantom, two psychic energy, 130 damage, and you put five damage counters on your opponent's bench in any way you like. So basically, very, very much so nerfed phantom dive. And also, I just wanna make the comparison really quick. Yes, this is technically only a stage one, but it gives up three prizes, has a weakness, has the same amount of HP as Dragapult EX, and does less damage. Yeah. Yeah, it's a very different era. And this was like a two-shotting era as opposed to the one-shotting era we're kinda seeing now. Not that Dragapult necessarily one-shots, but it definitely has a stronger attack. I think that's not hard to deny. Or that's, yeah, hard to deny, is that it has a stronger attack. Yeah, looking at this list, you see a lot of the same kind of characteristics. You see like the Cynthia's similar to Lily's. We don't have a research-based supporter, but you would probably play that if you had it in this format. And then you have the boss's orders. Only one in this list, but you also have countercatcher, or sorry, great catcher in this format. So you had other ways to bring stuff up. You have some other stuff like the Eldegoss, which is similar to the Meowth. I think it pulls it from the discard pile, right? Right, yep. But some other like support Pokemon. This is a Jirachi Stellar Wish heavy format where you ran that and it put yourself to sleep, but it lets you get any trainer from the top five, I think. Five cards, yep. And it puts itself to sleep, but then you can easily retreat out of that with Escape Board. So that was nice. It has some weird stuff that I'm not 100% on. Like you said, I don't think either one of us play this format all that much. You know, you have Distortion Door and the Dimension Breach Giratinas, which allow you to, Distortion Door allows you to get energy into play. No, that's not right. It puts damage in play, sorry. So you can kind of use that in combination with Scoop Ups and Quick Ball, and you can kind of recycle it and get it back into play a couple of times and get some damage pings that way, along with the Galarian Zigzagoon. So you can just add to Dragapult's attack that does spread damage. You can go, I'm gonna ping with Distortion Door, ping with Zigzagoon and do the Phantom. What is the Phantom? I don't know. It's the Phantom. Max Phantom. Yep. So one third of the active, 50 to the bench. So then you can go one knockout the active and knock out the bench. So that's 70 HP. And then just other than that, it's a lot of disruption. We have the Crushing Hammers like you touched on, but we also have Power Plant, which is similar to Path to the Peak. It shuts off all Pokemon GX and EX abilities, which doesn't really hurt you. Once you're setting up, you're using the Dene, which is similar to like Squawk Ability early game. But once you've done that, you don't really need any ability support. You do have the Eldegoss, but like that's not all that important. And a lot of times your opponent will counter that and then kind of try to do their thing. Other than that, yeah, it's just a lot of, you have the Reset Stamp for hand disruption. Very similar to Unfair Stamp now. Yep, yep. And then you have the hitting Psychic Energy, I think also does some, helps with retreat costs. Now this one is another, just put damage into play. Oh, okay, okay. So if it hits into you, sorry, there's an older Psychic Energy that does that. Right. Yeah, so if your opponent hits into you, they put, do damage counters on there. Just kind of like a generic, like good card in this format. And then just helps kind of get, make the math a little bit more effective for Dragon Ball. So it was a pretty successful deck, I think, right? I don't know what the Zamazenta V, I guess you just kind of wall behind it. Yeah, maybe this was, that's my, the weakness of, I don't know what was in this format. Like maybe this is how you were able to beat Eternatus, if Eternatus was legal when this was legal. But I don't know what other attackers Eternatus plays. Yeah, they didn't really run a lot. They run their Crovats and that's about it. But this deck did fairly well. It got fourth place in the Limitless Online Series qualifier back when we had that. This was kind of all we had at the time. Losing to ADP, Zacian, or is that? Yeah, that's what that is. Yeah. No, no, no ADP. No, this is just, this is just straight Zacian. Combo Zacian. So just trying to, I guess, I don't remember this format at all. I guess this is before ADP? Yeah, it must be. No, it can't be, because ADP would have been before the Vs came out. You're right. How did nobody, see, this is where we're all just kind of. Maybe this is before ADP was discovered? I mean, that's. Well, no, because here's one down here. Maybe they were just countered so hard, it's oblivion. Maybe. I don't know. But yeah. But I just wanted to call out, I thought that it was very interesting that we are in a world where Dragapult with Crushing Hammers is once again, a deck that is doing very well in tournaments. And I think this one actually has the legs to stick around potentially. It's something where the Crushing Hammer, I don't know exactly where the inflection point is, because I believe it is more than one heads, but hitting some number of heads in a mirror match specifically, tilts it so far in your favor that it's just kind of unreasonable for your opponent to expect to win. Yeah, I saw that on the stream. I watched a little bit of it. And in a game where he was able to get rid of one or two energies, he ended up winning. You know, especially in the mirrors, it's really just a nice inclusion. And I mean, he hit a lot of Dragapult this tournament. If we look at what he hit into the tournament, not as much early game or early tournament, but like after round six, it's pretty much every other round is a Dragapult. If not, yeah. So, and some really big players are on Dragapult this weekend. If not like all the big players, pretty much everybody that's not already like cooking up something play Dragapult, which scares me a little bit. It says that like, if you're a good player and you want to win the tournament, you have to play Dragapult. That feels kind of weird. We did see a couple other players try to move away from that. The most common strategy was to play Raging Bolt. And we saw Jose Marzon in top eight, and he was on stream a couple of times. I saw some of his games. His list is, I would say, pretty similar to what Ian Rob's been playing with the four. Ian, I think, played only three Mega Kangaskhan, but this is like the four Mega Kangaskhan, four Meowth. Just every game you're trying to draw into and set up your board for multiple attacks, multiple, you know, you pivot out of the Mega Kangaskhan and start swinging with attacks, but you have the Mega Kangaskhan to fall back upon. Lots of different options to accelerate energy with the Crispins, but also the Glass Trumpets, the Ogre Pawns, and the Energy Switches. This is running four, excuse me, four Energy Switch. So lots of different options to attack with and the nice Chen Pow to discard the stadium to kind of get some ability to bump and discard all the damage to Pokemon, which was really, really important against Dragapult in this format. Sure, sure. This just hurts to look at, in my opinion. Like, four Meowth, four Kangaskhan is not something that I feel like a deck should ever have written on its deck list, but if that's what you need to make this function, then I guess more power to you. Like, there's, again, it's probably a math thing where something like the fourth Meowth. Right, like fourth Meowth is probably better than second Cyrano, I guess, in most cases, and you wanna open Kangaskhan pretty much every game, like you said, like you have to play more than one Latias so you don't prize it. Some of the other stuff is less essential, like the Ogre Pond, the Iron Leaves, things like that, but just, it also goes to show, like with this archetype in particular, because you don't have Sada as a supplement to your Crispin to replenish energy in play, yes, you do have the Glass Trumpet, but that's harder to find, so you have those extra Meowths to find your Crispins as you have fewer and fewer of them in the deck, because if you ever hit a scenario where you have to discard all your energy in play, you have to Crispin if you wanna attack with a Raging Bolt the following turn. Well, almost always have to, sometimes you can do the whole Glass Trumpet energy switch thing, but that's a two-card combo versus I played an Ultra Ball for a Meowth, now I can Crispin, and I'm good to go. Yep. So that was one way to counter Dragonpolt, and that was somewhat successful, I'd say. The other way that was exciting to me was seeing Hail Overnult playing a very cool Mega Lowpony Dedan Sparse deck. This deck, I think, had a chance to take the tournament down. I saw from his tweet that he had some really bad luck in his Top Cup match that he lost. He just said Variance was kind of the killer, but I think this was really well-positioned, and if I was trying to counter Dragonpult, this is probably where I would head. This is just running the Mega Lowpony with a bunch of different ways to heal it and swap it out out of the active. With the Dedan Sparse and even running a Abra to get the teleportation or teleporter ability, just as a backup in case you're under the Team Rocket's Watchtower, you have that ability to do it still and swap back out and attack again. I mean, this showcases just how strong Mega Lowpony's first attack is. For those that need a reminder, it's, I think, 60 base damage and then another 170 more damage if it moved from the bench to the active, so you're just able to do 220 turn after turn, or sorry, 230 turn after turn, and it has a nice shred attack as well to just kind of be able to get through anything that it can't get through normally, so just a lot of really powerful low to the ground. Like, if we were worried about it crushing Hammer, you know, you could play this deck and not really be all that concerned, I'd say. It's just not a lot. You don't need a lot, and then that paired with the supporter, Wally's Compassion, that it ran four of, right? Or, yeah, so quite a, really, you don't need a lot, and then you're able to supplement your draw with a Dedanuspar, so you can run this tech supporter, Wally's Compassion, that says heal all damage from one of your Mega EX Pokemon. If you do so, you return all energy attached to that Pokemon back to your hand, so that combos really well with your A-Spec here enriching energy. Whenever you attach it from your hand to your Pokemon, you draw four cards, so you're able to bounce that back to your hand. Obviously, you can use that with Dedanuspar, but you can get the added benefit of using it with the Mega Lopunny and Wally's, and then just Hilda really helps establish anything that you might need. You only run special energy, so you're only really, Hilda, basically, once you've set up your bench and are just going, you can just keep using Hilda to get the Dedanuspar or get a Mega Lopunny and get the energy you need to attack. So this was cool. It was on stream a couple times. I think maybe just the one, but I was really kind of not blown away. The weird thing was this, is just it didn't really have to do much to win games on this format. It just kind of sat there and allowed your opponent to hit into you, and you're like, okay, 220, and you just don't need to do a lot to win games with this. It's just kind of a low maintenance, good attacking. I don't really care what you're doing, although, because there's not a lot of stuff, like the Raging Bolt can one-shot you, and that obviously has, that's a bad matchup. But outside of that, there's not a whole lot. Maybe the Meganium Ogre Bond deck or something like that, but that's not played high enough. In a format where it's almost 50% Dragapult, this is a really solid play. Sure, and I wonder if there aren't ways, like could you just play two Dedanuspar CXs to counter your Raging Bolt matchup, right? As long as they have four Pokemon in play, you're trading two for two, and you just go from there, and you go Dedanuspar's attack, Dedanuspar's attack, Lopunny cleans up anything smaller than a Raging Bolt, and you call it a day. I forgot about the Mega, sorry, not Mega, the Dedanuspar CX. Yeah, it always got like four tail segments. But the Dedanuspar CX, for those that don't know, it's 60 times the amount of EX Pokemon in play on your opponent's side. Considering that, you know, the Raging Bolt deck has usually a full bench full of EXs and is attacking with EXs. X, you're doing like 360 damage regularly, but at least 208, 240. Pretty easily if they have, you know, four Pokemon in play or yeah, four Pokemon to play, and they're going to have four Pokemon to play. So yeah, especially if they want to have the five energy they need to knock out a mega low penny. There were I'm intrigued how Hale arrived at just playing straight low penny to Dunsparce, because that was kind of the breakout thing that had hit the online scene the week prior. Coming out of Prague was and I have to see if I can find another one here. I think this other version of low penny to Dunsparce that also plays the it plays a thinner low penny line, but then also plays the mega Frostlass as a backup attacker, because you have more of kind of an uncapped damage potential and the ability to one shot Dragapult EX. And at the time, initially, I guess all of these players were afraid now that Tool Scrapper and Jamming Tower were going to be present in larger numbers. So they shifted away. The initial aspect in this deck was the hero's cape. So making your mega EX Pokemon massive over 400 HP behemoths that you could then turn around and heal with Wally's turn after turn after turn instead of opting for the enriching energy to have a different combo with Wally and still try to maintain as much healing as possible. But so like I was saying, the thing I'm intrigued by Holtz decision is what made him determine that Frostlass is not worth playing. Right. Like what? And at what point is it better to just play the low penny line? Because from my perspective, Frostlass seems pretty good. And it seems like it also has the ability to run away with games. The one consideration, I guess, would be if you're only playing the one attacker and you can play a thicker line of it, it maybe gets set up a little bit more consistently. Yeah. And you lose the access to the special energy that you have. I mean, you still run mist, but you don't have the spike energy. And I guess the main thing is maybe the consistency aspect of it. You know, I mean, it's still pretty consistent. I'm not going to say like it's not. But yeah, I don't know. I don't know what I haven't really played with these decks and don't really have an opinion about like which one would be better. But I mean, maybe they're both good and maybe just hail had a better tournament run. And that's all it is. It's hard to say. Yeah, I mean, that's the thing that scares me about the straight low penny is that you run into a random Lucario deck and I just don't see how you ever win that matchup. Yeah. Whereas with this, you at least have the option to put a frost loss in play and hope that they don't have access to two fighting Gatorades. I can never remember what that card is called. I mean, there you go. That's the yeah, like it. And it's weird because there are a couple of other stage ones that could theoretically function in a similar archetype. Like you could play star me because you do have access to the second attack via ignition energy while also doing the snipe attack for a single water mega camera up is another one energy attacker. It's not very good, but it is a one energy attacker and I think could actually pretty easily knock out to mask over upon for cheap. But all of this kind of still pales in comparison when you look at the fact that of the top 32, like over I think it was like 22 of them are dragapult and that's not going away anytime soon. No. So that's the new meta. And the worst part is like now we have hammers in it. So if you're, you know, not too excited to play against dragapult, it might be a little bit long. Thankfully, we had a new set. The prereleases for a new set just came out. So hopefully that'll help shake things up just a little bit. Sure. And we'll have to like look at our early tournament results online as we get into that. I'm going to get ready for any I see not too far away. Less than a month now. Right. So yeah, that was that that was kind of the crazy thing. Like I looked at it and I was like, Oh, wow, that's coming up way faster than I thought. We do still have a couple more tournaments in this format, though, including two this weekend. And so we'll talk a little bit more about potential evolutions or maybe the new cycle of dragapult that we may see. But before we do that, I do have a Blaine's quiz show prepared for John this week. And so let me go ahead and throw this up on the screen. Dun, dun, dun, dun. Blaine's quiz show. You know, and so the way. Nope, no idea. I have not, unfortunately, have not had the time to go back and look. I actually might have time to look before I edit this and put it together. So maybe this will somehow magically make their way into the episode. I know. Again, before we get into how to play for anybody who hasn't listened before, thank you to anyone who is listening for bearing with us. I have not really had the time to go through and do the amount of video editing that I was doing previously. So everything has either been released recently in audio only format or with kind of more of a very rough video editing style done to it. So appreciate anybody who stays, stays tuned through all of this. I hope at some point to get back to putting our full like polished videos together and rereleasing them. But for now, we are on Blaine's quiz show this week. And if you have not tuned in before how to play, John will have three multiple choice questions asked of him. And for each correct answer he provides, he will be awarded at one point. He has one hint available to him that he can utilize on any of the three questions. However, if he chooses not to use that hint and answers all three questions correctly, he will earn himself a fourth bonus point for the week. And not really any better way to tackle this format than to do a Blaine's quiz show on it, right? We're just going to talk about the Temporal Forces to Perfect Order format. John, are you ready for your first question? I mean, considering I've played like all of 10 games in this format, probably not, but let's get it. Let's give it my best shot. OK, cool. I would like to know what is the limitless point delta between Dragapult EX decks? So in fairness, this is all Dragapult EX decks grouped together and the next closest archetype post Los Angeles regionals. And your options are 1200, 1300, 1400 and 1500. No, none of those are typos. They are crazy. So for those that aren't initiated and what a limitless point delta is, you know, for the for the viewers that don't know and so the the I would like to know what the gap in limitless point values between Dragapult and the next closest archetype. I full transparency. I'm not entirely aware of how Robin has assigned the points. I know that there is a certain number of points you earn depending on what your placement is. Like first is so much. Second is so much. Let me see if I can find a good answer for you on that really quick. I mean, it's got to be 1500. There's like nothing close to Dragapult at this point. It's like so leaps and bounds ahead and like the next closest meta share percentage. Are you factoring all versions of Dragapult in those two? Yes. Like I said, this is all Dragapult archetypes. Yeah, it's got to be 1500. OK, that will be your answer. Let me see if I can't find an answer for what a limitless point is. Robin, you're killing me. They didn't unlock that part when you did the premium version. I guess not, man. I guess not. The website is much, much snappier, much more responsive. But I cannot tell you exactly how many points you get for a first place. Let me see. Yeah, that's unfortunate. But so John's going to lock in 1500. The correct answer is actually 1300. And these are rounded to the nearest hundred. But the the exact total is that Dragapult is currently at 1500. Six points total. And Crustle is at 200 points. In second place. That's crazy. So massive, massive disparity between those two archetypes. And then things only drop out further from there, obviously. So no correct answer. Let's move on to question two. Which of the following is not in a three way tie for the lowest share of limitless points? The thing I do know is three of these archetypes have achieved status of making day two and achieving a minimum of top 256, which is how they acquired the lowest possible number of limitless points and are now in a three way tie. One of these three is not like the others and is not part of that three way tie. Your options are Baby Blood Moon, Mega Venusaur, Mega Froslass. And this is not that Mega Lopunny to Dunsworth. This is a straight Mega Froslass archetype or Steven's Metagross. No, this is tough. My gut reaction is Mega Froslass. I think it's just a better card than all the other ones listed here. But I'm going to use my hand on this one. Try to narrow it down a little bit. OK, the answer to this question is not a Mega Pokemon. OK, great. So I save myself a little bit of heartache. So we're down to Baby Blood Moon and Steven's Metagross. I like Steven's Metagross, but I know it did not do very well in L.A. I think only like one of them made day two. Actually, no, yeah, it was pretty bad. Had a really bad one percentage. So I'm going to pick Baby Blood Moon and hope for that. OK, your head was in the right place. Initially, Steven's Metagross did not do very well, and that is why it is not part of the three way tie. It is worse than all three of these other archetypes. I fumbled the bag. Oh, my God. I miss. I like the whole God. So maybe like you circle it, you get your test back. You just realize you just put the wrong answer because your head was not wrapped around it correctly. Mega Venusaur, Mega Froslass and Baby Blood Moon are all tied with three limitless points currently in this format. And Steven's Metagross has a big old goose egg with zero. OK, well, I mean, that's fair. OK, got it. Got it. You know, it's like when you make the misplay and you're just hanging your head, you got to pull your head out and hope to get one more point. So let's see if I can get one point. Yeah, let's let's see if you can't walk away with one. The last question, which perfect order EX Pokemon gained its first day to finish at Los Angeles regionals? Your choices are Mega Clefable, Mega Zygarde, Mega Skarmory or Evoltaal. So these are all newly released cards in the perfect order expansion. Well, I don't think it's Mega Skarmory, considering we just said Mega what was it? Steven's Metagross didn't do particularly well. Zygarde, I feel like must have been. I think there was a couple that did well in Prague, like had a limitless entry in Prague. So I don't think it's that. And so it's between Mega Clefable and Evoltaal. What Evoltaal is this? Is this EX? It is. It is. It is an Evoltaal EX. The one that if it's like at six damage counters, it's knocked out or something like that. I believe that is correct. Off the top of my head, I do not know what the card does. I want to say Mega Clefable because it's just a cuter card. But I don't think it's good. That's the problem. I will just go with Evoltaal, and I'll probably be sad when it's Mega Clefable. OK, it is actually neither of those cards. So as of now, as of now, only one of these cards has made day two. OK. And it was, in fact, Mega Skarmory making day two in that Steven's Metagross deck in Los Angeles. Great. Well, I'm glad that I totally botched that entirely. So if you're ever watching this and trying to think, how can you lose Blaine's Quiz Show as effectively as possible? Here you go. Good job. This is one of those situations where I really think that you just kind of talked your way out of the right answer a couple of times. Yeah, definitely. The Dragapult one's kind of a crapshoot because you just know like that that deck is way better than everything else. You just kind of have to guess. It's a guessing game. Yeah, right. That's like asking like asking the billionaire how many more dollars he has than the next closest guy under him. Like, does it really matter? Not right. Right. Right. Yeah, I I'm going to be honest with you, Aaron. Not my brightest and shining. Not my best moment. A little ashamed of that one. So we'll hope to do better next time. Sorry to all my adoring fans. I'll write you an apology. If you leave a comment below, you know, I'll write you an apology. Blue Sky DMs. How's that? So if you have. But yeah, it's it's OK. We'll get them next week or next two weeks from now. Yeah, yeah. Two weeks from now. The so that just leaves talking about we've got two tournaments coming up this weekend in. I know one of South America, we have Utrecht for a European event and Campinas down in Brazil for our Latin American event. There's probably a Utrecht stream, I would assume. But the interesting thing to see here is how will this meta continue to evolve, if at all? So one of the developments coming out of Prague was Festival Elite had this kind of breakout performance and everybody thought that it was this amazing deck. And there were several notable players that decided to bring it to Los Angeles. And almost all of them went 0-3 or 1-3 drop. And the deck did absolutely horribly outside of having one high finish. It, I believe, like you said, it was 12th place just outside of Ace. The deck was absolutely terrible and had an abysmal win rate into Dragapult as it cemented itself even further as this is the best deck. Why would you ever play your silly apples in this tournament? And so I think we're going to see a shift away from that, and that opens the door back up where people started the format, saying you have decks like Zorak or Cynthia's Garchomp that can potentially compete with Dragapult, but they have difficulty and get collateraled by all of these random grass decks like your Ogre Pond based decks, not necessarily even considering Raging Bolt, but definitely includes Raging Bolt. And then particularly with the rise of Festival Elite, those Grass Week archetypes were just absolutely non-viable. A one prize grass deck is going to beat those things almost every single time unless it full bricks. Yeah, definitely have kind of like a little bit of a rock, paper, scissors developing. I still think it's really just Dragapult at the top, even with if we have the rise of Enzora Arc and Cynthia's come back into the format. I don't think that they beat Dragapult consistently enough to really push it out of the way. But it does give those two decks a lot more of an opening. I mean, yeah, I do think we'll see like kind of the Beginium and the Festival Elite decks take a backseat for the next few tournaments, I'd say. Yeah. The Raging Bolt deck will probably be kind of like we saw like the Megastarmy deck pop up and have a little bit more play. That was like the second most played deck going into LA at the start of the tournament. I don't expect that to continue. I think that will die back down. So that'll also allow Cynthia's Garchomp and Enzora Arc to have a little bit better because those kind of struggled against those early aggressive setup and start swinging decks that pick apart your board. if you have a little bit more time like against a dragon ball to set up your board establish everything and Execute your game plan and Zork. We've seen that be a very successful proven competitive deck in the past and I expect that it will do better now and I have to see it like I Don't know how well did it do it? I don't I don't know looking back Garchomp a Garchomp in the Zorak Zorak to terrible. I had like a I think 38% win rate or something like that Um, let me see what the highest placing one was though I guess the main question is like how did they do into dragon ball? so highest placing Zorak was a hundred seventeenth place by Garrett Birkin and into dragapult variants, it was favored against dragapult Blaziken and Sub 50% So really straight pulled forty five point nine six percent and pulled nor forty two point one six percent Yeah, so not pretty not shoot. It's not super. Well, not super. Well, no and then I sent these Garchomp Let's look at that. Sure. We had I got it pulled up. So we have Had a overall fifty one point nine three one percentage against dragapult with the variant grouping pulled up And then day two that changed to 53 So I think that's probably your better bet if you're trying to pick a deck between those two That makes sense. I think that's proven with what I've seen from tournament play locally it does struggle into the ogre pawn Meganium and Festival leads heavily obviously, so if those decks do go down and play which we were saying that we do expect that to happen yeah, we'll see the Rise, I think I think Cynthia's Garchomp will get a lot more play And if people start pivoting towards the Mengele pony I could see where Cynthia's Garchomp just destroys that Essentially so that that's nice that you have that kind of ability to collateral that Yeah, we'll see one deck that we really didn't talk about that kind of had a little bit of a showing was Rockets Mewtwo Which I want I don't want to say it has like a fantastic Dragapult matchup, but at least can like do something which is saying something Looking back at the LA tournament There's only the one main top cut with Patrick Ratte. I said that right got ninth and It when it sets up it it can be dragapult pretty successfully. It had a 51 point one six one percentage And had a really good matchup into a lot of other random stuff like the Alakazam obviously is an auto win It really struggles in a raging bolt Which makes sense and then See Yeah, just kind of from there. It's kind of up and down with just doesn't it's it's very polarizing Like what are your good matchups? What are your bad matchups? Right, and it's gonna struggle into a lot of these mega based decks Especially there's ones of this new breed with the four Wall-e's because you can't break over that damage threshold And because none of them are running max belt is there a spec anymore? So you're doing 280 and hoping that that's good enough and they're saying no, it's not by the way Here's some more damage and they just slowly pick apart your board and then you do also get to kind of collateral those grass weak decks like those or arc in the guard chomp because spite ops Is a very serviceable attacker against those matchups And if this is it's such a weird deck to me because it has always seemed like its biggest enemy is itself, right? Did this package when it was revealed everyone thought it was gonna be so good and it seems like it should be so strong Like Rockets transceiver is a flat-out good card proton seems like it should be a good card like we've had things like Bridget and Collector and even elms lecture that all saw play in their day and we're in a format without nest ball So this is kind of the time where if I have a supporter that can find me three basics This is peak power level for it. And yet this deck still just seems to kind of fumble the bag almost every weekend I know some of my locals have been on it and I can see it like when it sets up and does really well like it just works and When it doesn't it doesn't and I think that's a lot of the decks in this format I think that's why dragon pull is at the top right now as it has that built-in Consistency engine and you supplement that with the Dunsparce in a lot of cases It just has a lot going for it has more on board draw than anything else It recovers from this hand disruption more than anything else. But yeah Rockets doesn't have any of that stuff have Media I mean other than The I mean they're powerful supporters in a vacuum But taken with the fact that your most players are trying to play lilies for turn and that's just a strong even the Rockets decks Pivoted and various playing like four lilies now, too Which I think's the right move. I don't think you know like looking at it Ariana sounds really good and then you play it and you're really like drawing like three or four cards as opposed to you know a new hand when you're trying to set up some Stage ones and get your energy and find your combo pieces for everything It's it's just not great like drawing is always weaker than shuffle draw at least in Pokemon For the most part unless you're like discarding your hand and draw And all the other supporters protons good petrols Okay, and then we saw What's the other one Archer Archer just get cut from Patrick's list and his he didn't run it He ran zero copies of it saying well if I want hand disruption, I don't I just rather I want to focus on consistency I don't really care about hand interruption all that much I do think he ran The Unfair stamp in his build if I'm not mistaken, maybe I'm not Patrick has secret box. Okay, so definitely just focused on consistency like we talked about and secret box is nice You do get you know, the team Rockets What is it called factory to get to draw two extra cards every time you play the Rockets card? So just a very good base power stadium that only really you get to use so that's kind of nice And Secret box gets you kind of everything all your pieces early game. So that's really nice But I don't know I think it's a I like the deck but there's just like the games where you like we saw Patrick play on stream and there was one game like he played a Three game set the first game. He just reached a point where he was just draw passing Because his deck just kind of floundered and didn't really do anything and in the game two and three Set up and executed his game plan and one, you know So it's just tough to say like with any confidence that this will be like the best deck moving forward I don't think it's ever gonna be stronger than dragapult But it does at least give you like an option and like if you can set up and execute your game plan You should feel pretty confident going into against dragapult Sure, two different decks to give you So maybe different dragapult options if you're if you're not if you're saying, oh, I don't really want to play dragapult. I get it Um, those are two decks I've looked at going into the next few tournaments yeah, and then there's the whole conversation of if you take the you know, Zoom and you zoom in on dragapult as an archetype and you get to see it separated out into all of those distinct archetypes We've got the four variants that have seen a lot of play you have the straight pole now Which is more likely to include hammers. I would say the the dance bars dragapult that was popularized in Prague Dragapult Blaziken and dragapult Dusknoir and all four of them have had a decent amount of success Two of them have won tournaments though on arguably at this point the least successful one is dragapult Blaziken But with hammer pult being potentially the de facto way to play it does the energy acceleration from Blaziken become more important potentially and kind of outweigh the Lowered consistency or the lack of the explosiveness because you don't have Dusknoir included in your deck instead You say I don't care about your hammers anymore I want to continue to play the game and then you also have the backup of Blaziken against some of the other matchups where It can be a bit more impactful as well And you also get some other tools that you have access to like Clefairy you are able to set up your monkey Dory more consistently you could maybe tech your list out a little bit more for mirror and you could play something like a Promo Petra run or evil tall to do some retreat lock things I think the Petra run has the potential to be a little bit more impactful if you can pull something up like I don't know I'm me out there a Fez that your opponent has on their bench and then retreat lock it poison it and let it slowly get Whittled away while you're also setting other things up and it really lets you combo off That's kind of the that's the big strength of my mind of dragapult in this format is that it's the only deck Well festival lead technically can as well it depending on if your opponent plays into it for you But it's the deck that can take a three plus prize turn and other decks just really can't do that Yeah, I mean just the ability to place damage counters instead of easily getting countered by shaman Just there's not a lot like, you know you have you have the battle cage and you have Frasca but like both of those are either really hardest keep in play or really hard to set up in the first place not the best answers to a dragapult and so It's just dominant like we keep seeing it kind of just be able to control games and that's the beauty of it Like you don't have to like you can take you don't have to play into your opponent's strategy of hand disruption with unfair stamp that's the only really effective way to damage that and Unfortunately with the new red card coming out and you only getting you set of that card whenever you go below three price Your opponent goes below three price cards. It's not changing anytime soon like dragapult is just gonna say, okay well, I'll just keep the damage out on your board and You know just keep it to the point where I take four price cards at the end of the last turn of the game Um, so it's just kind of a counter play on top of that then so it's like, okay Well, if you're not gonna take price cards, I'm gonna start healing and I'm gonna run the Wally's compassion and a mega deck It's something like that. So it's just kind of like Always and this is what's fun about Pokemon, right? Like you're always trying to figure out. Okay Well, if they're trying to do this, I'm gonna do this and then the players that originally like, okay Well, if they're countering it with this, I'm gonna do this So it's just you know, like it dragapult plays it can I don't think was the play for LA, but yeah, you're right Forward if every straight pull this starts running hammers, you got to have an answer for that So that's your answer and that's a pretty good answer So it'll be interesting to see I think what happens with all that and yeah, I don't know if I'd play it The consistency aspect of it running to stage twos. I'm an attacking stage two at that Really kind of scares me I Think yeah, I still think that the done sparse package is just really really powerful in this format without a lot of Onboard draw and only really lilies is a good draw supporter We don't really have any other draw supporters in this format and nobody's playing other draw supporters so that tells me like yeah, it's pretty much lilies or Nothing. So that's not right. You just say lilies or you say runaway draw Yeah, and if you draw lilies and if you're not playing to Dunsparce at this point You really need a good reason not to like there are so many benefits for that card in this format especially when you have if your deck has the ability to utilize monkey Dory like if you look at the draggable list of risky ruins or the megastar me that plays risky ruins or a deck that wants to play into dragapult and Therefore knows that they will likely at some point have a risky ruins in play the to Dunsparce giving you a means of repeatable damage counters on your board that you can then shove over to your opponent's side is Like a benefit on top of the fact that if that stadium isn't in play Dunsparce is relatively difficult to knock out in one turn so then you can pretty reliably get to your to Dunsparce and it just gives you that extra reach that you wouldn't otherwise have access to because not every deck can afford to play mega Kangaskhan and A lot of times you don't necessarily want to put Fez on your bench I mean If you take that all the way to its extreme you see the list like what Matej played in Prague with no Fez No me out you to get no two prizers in play and you just say to Dunsparce is powerful enough It lets me utilize these like, you know You go max consistency to play for pad for Poffin for ultra ball and you've always got a bunch of whatever the heck the Dunsparce is sitting on your bench and you don't ever have to worry about it because just Three cards that hits you into another to Dunsparce to draw three more and then you recon directive and you've got a Poffin now So you get the two Dunsparce back out and it just repeats turn after turn after turn and it makes your deck really low Maintenance at the end of the day. Yeah, hopefully you bought your journey together Dunsparce is a month ago at this point Because they're gonna be keep going up. I don't see that that card going anywhere anytime soon Well, the crazy thing is that that apparently is only an American thing I saw I saw a comment on somebody's freaking out about the price of that card on TCG player Saying that on I think card market is the European equivalent Where it's only like a quarter of a euro still. Yeah, so okay so at this point do I just buy a bunch of them from somebody in Great Britain and have them ship them over and Right, right, I honestly actually don't even know if I have a place out of those Dunsparce I assume I do but I really and I really hope I do because I don't want to spend 20 bucks on them That's where we're at it's yeah, the Dunsparce inflation wave is happening Yeah, I gotta go through my book and see if I can find any and sell them for Three or four bucks a pop. Yep, but any other decks you want to talk about? No, I think that that just about wraps it up I don't necessarily feel like we really need to do predictions for this weekend I I am still pretty dang low on this format And I don't have a ton of hope that chaos rising is really gonna shake things up very much I I would like to say that I think be drill or Greninja are gonna do something to shake up the format and I hope They will I don't expect them to but I hope that they will But I guess the thing that I would want to know from anybody listening is Let us know the answer to this in the comments is which variant of dragapult? Do you expect to win this weekend? or do you think that we're gonna see a massive wave of raging bolt that is just going to overwhelm all of the dragapult players and the people attempting to play the rocket stack and the Garchomp that and The ends are arc and attempts to counter dragapult like is this the raging bolt weekend? Or are we gonna see another dragapult dominated field? So let us know what you think in the comments of the episode and we'll come back and revisit that on next week's episode