Episode 2-3: Henry Chao's Leaked Sauce

Hello, and welcome back to the Battle Frontier podcast, where we aim to help you level up in your journey as a competitive Pokemon TCG player. I'm Aaron Curry, back as always with my cohost, Jon Orgel. And this week, we're going to hit up a time capsule for the first time in a while before we get into the results of our predictions from last week's regionals that occurred in Frankfurt and Monterey. Then we will hit the results of that Frankfurt regional, take a quick break for my favorite segment of the show, hopefully yours as well, Blaine's Quiz Show. And then we'll jump back into things with the Monterey regional and close out with kind of how we expect the meta to evolve, maybe some recommendations heading into Pittsburgh this upcoming weekend. But with all that being said, before we jump into things, one quick announcement, if you are going to Pittsburgh, I know that Mega Evolution pre-releases did occur last weekend. If you got any of those fancy new Full Art Trainer cards, like your Buddy Buddy Poffins, Rare Candies, or Night Stretchers, they are unfortunately not legal going into the weekend because the set has not officially released. So I know you've had some situations in the past, things like Hidden Fates, Paldean Fates, I know like the, you know, the SIR Gardevoir, SIR Charizard in particular were cards that people sought after to include in their decks and were able to at the time, because even though the set was not tournament legal, it had been street legal, that is not the case for Mega Evolution. It does not officially release until next week. And then you will be able to play those cards in tournaments scot-free. So just make sure you keep them out of your deck. Don't get yourself penalized. Do not have any issues because your opponent is well within their right to call a judge on you. And as unfortunate as it might sound, you will be penalized if you do include the cards. So with that out of the way, John, how you doing, man? How was your week? Um, pretty good. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, I had a bad situation unfold at my league on Friday, I got a call from my store owner saying that his distributor dropped the ball and that we did not get any of our pre-release kits to run our pre-release on Monday. He righted them wrong or something like that. It's all his fault. But I had to cancel my pre-release for yesterday. Oh, that's rough. Um, yeah, it really stinks just because it's not like anything we did cause this or whatever. But so yeah, it's just, it just kind of erodes some of the trust you build as a league leader. And so I have to write like a support ticket to Pokemon and try to make sure we run pre-releases in the future and that this isn't a ding against us. But that's, uh, you know, it's, it's a bummer, but like we still, the cool thing was like, even though it was a little bit bummed out, I still had league and still had like, you know, it wasn't a huge turnout. It was like just five people. Um, but like my regulars, you know, Ian was there, um, um, uh, good news for Ian. Uh, he got engaged, uh, recently. Yeah. I heard. Congrats to him and Lindsay. Yeah. So congrats from the battle frontier to, uh, Ian, but you know, it was good seeing him catching up and just playing Pokemon and you know, that was, that was fun. Like it puts things in perspective that even if, um, stuff doesn't always go as planned, you have friends there to help ease the pain a little bit. So that was good. And then the rest of the weekend I had a game night Sunday, Bill's one, so pretty dominant victory. Uh, the rest of the weekend we went to a, took Sydney to a Pokemon card show for the first time. Uh, so my wife does not collect, um, she supports me with Pokemon, um, and knows that I'm passionate about it, but I was like, well, there's a card show, not the kind of in town in Richmond. And then let's, let's see if we want to go to, I'll, I'll go to that. And I texted her kind of just saying out of curiosity, like as a courtesy, like, Hey, do you want to go to this with me? And she surprised me by saying yes. Um, but it was, it was a decent show, but it was just like, like there was a decent number of tables. Everybody had a little table area kind of set up and there was probably about, I don't know, they advertise like a hundred plus tables. It definitely wasn't that, um, it was more like closer to 50 or 60 and a lot of the tables were like selling like 3d printed stuff or, um, you know, some dude just selling kind of bulk cards or something like that. It was kind of like a flea market than a card show. It was a card show. There was definitely some vendors that knew what they were doing and had a decent selection, but it felt like, you know, afterwards Sydney and I were doing like a debrief in the car. She's like, you knew a lot, like I was surprised, like you seem to really know what you're talking about. And some of those people there definitely didn't. So I was just like, well, that's good. And also I agree. Um, so, you know, that's kind of the interesting thing is like, we don't really talk about it on this podcast because neither one of us really collects like that. Um, but yeah, some of those it's, it's interesting to see like with the, the boom of Pokemon, how many card shows there are like every weekend, every week now there's a card show. And so it's almost like, uh, is this worth my time? Is this worth the effort? Um, I was able to get a couple of cards here and there, um, but like just, it was frustrating at times. Like I had a, um, illustration rare, um, what is it called? Um, Umbreon VMAX from not the like one from evolving skies, but I think it's from a different set that has like the trainers on it. Um, so it's like worth a decent amount, uh, it was like $75 card or something like that. Um, which, you know, near mint and I took it to one guy and he just looks at it. It's like, Oh, it's got this corner mark. And I look at the card and it's like where the card was punched out. Um, and that's not in my mind, like a huge deal, but I guess, yeah, I won't grade a 10, but it's still in good shape otherwise. So it was just like, well, he was just like really trying to find stuff to not buy cards for me or like try to undersell stuff. And I just don't love that world, man. So, um, I don't know, but it was fun. It was still good to like walk around and just see what people have. I mean, I'm still looking for stuff for, uh, I've been building like Hargold, so silver through sun and moon decks. So I've picked up some playables for that, um, and was able to get some stuff crossed off my list for that. I got three BS seekers and I don't really want to go into all this stuff I picked up at a random card show. Cause that's really not what people came here for, but, um, yeah, it was fun. It was good seeing Sydney's reaction to it. That was kind of fun to just seeing her have any appreciation for like the hobby and stuff. But, um, yeah. How was your weekend, man? No, go ahead. Before we get to that. So she still doesn't want to collect after going to the card show? She I think is warming up to it. She like was looking at some cards. Fortunately, she was like, Oh, I really liked the rainbow rarest. And I'm like, Oh, geez. Like I don't know. Your wife has terrible taste, John. I know, man. She doesn't listen to the podcast, so we're fine. But, um, other questions, she saw like the whale Lord full art from, uh, or the side of what's that? Is it? No, the well, or that's like the whale just standing straight up from, I think Dustin rivals or something like that. That's, um, journey journey together. Sure. Yeah. That one. She's like, Oh, that's a cool card. Maybe I can get into like, well, Lord, I'm like, well, it's pretty. Okay. We can, we got some good artwork. He's got some great artwork. Yeah. You got like the whale Lord shooting, like the most expensive ones that I think the, is it a E X or the G X that has like, he's like shooting up a Pokemon and it is a spout of water or something like that. Yeah. Is it? Oh, is it? Yeah. Well, Lord magic. Yeah. It is. Is it magic art? That sounds right. Wow. That sounds right to me. I don't know. I don't want to think it's pretty expensive. I believe it. All the tag teams are crazy. Oh yeah. Um, but yeah, it was fun. I mean, I think she's like, I, I got her to like, I got her a little mini binder and her favorite favorite Pokemon is Flamingo. So I put Flamingos in there. Um, but that's as close as I got to her collecting so far. So we'll see how it goes. Um, yeah, it's exciting though. It's fun to have something to do with your partner. Yeah, absolutely. So that's fun. Um, but yeah, speaking of doing stuff with your partner, uh, what did you do with your, uh, significant other and all that, I guess, or what's going on in your household? Well, it did involve my second, it, it did involve my significant other and our child. We, um, my, my son had a baseball tournament this past weekend, um, and they did pretty good. They won last Saturday in their seeding games and then they won their bracket on Sunday. So they walked away with a trophy for the team and all the kids got a medal and they had a good time. So it was a good experience all around for everybody. Definitely some learning moments, um, from a coaching perspective, hopefully for the kids from a player perspective. And we're still just like back at practices again, hoping to iron everything out. And it's, it's funny, like I had a whole moment this weekend where like I was watching my son as he was up to bat and I had this like realization like, Oh, he legitimately really, really loves doing this. And like, as a parent or as a person, like I love that for him. And it brought me the sense of joy and like completion, I guess, about the whole idea that I hadn't really, I hadn't clicked with it yet. And yes, I knew that he was interested and that's why I was trying to support him doing it. But it was like, Oh no, this is his thing. So that was a really cool thing to get to experience. And so I'm definitely happy to still be involved doing all that. But unfortunately, um, because of delays, both on Saturday and Sunday, due to weather, I did not get to go to a pre-release at either of my local card shops. There was one Saturday night and one Sunday night, didn't get to go, did not get to go to either of those. And that's, I don't know, kind of sucks. I saw some pictures of people were posting in local store discords. People pulled some pretty cool cards, would have been fun to be there. I talked about this last week. It's a fun atmosphere to be a part of. And I wish that I could have gone and gotten into it, but I'll be able to pick up everything as far as singles go, because the set overall is pretty bad. So hopefully they'll stay pretty cheap on top of that. Because I think that like we talked about last week, a lot of these cards are not going to be super impactful right when they come out, it'll more so be down the line. And I know the one thing I was looking at, I really do want to get a play set of each of the Full Art Trainers, like the Knight Stretchers and Buddy Poffins and whatnot. Right now they're pretty inflated. And so I'm hoping that they'll come down, because I saw that Gold Buddy Poffins have gotten down to like 12, 15 bucks ish. And right now the just regular Full Art Buddy Poffins are like 25 up to 70. So it's super volatile. Like there's no way to really tell what it will be at, but I'm hoping it'll drop down to being like a $10, $12 card and it'll be much easier to justify the purchase. Because they just look really good, man. Yeah, I agree. Yeah, I saw my friend had the Knight Stretcher and like the gradient patterns on the background and like the texturing is really nice. Like I hate, I mean, I don't hate, but like I don't really like the Gold Full Art Supporters and Trainers that they've had for the longest time. Yeah. I guess it's not, it's not supporters, just Trainers and stadiums. Some of the stadiums look fine, but like the Trainers just look weird and ugly. But these look so nice. Like they're really clean. So I agree. So hopefully we'll be able to pick those up at some point. I did get to watch a little bit of the stream for Frankfurt. And we'll get into that in just a moment. Unfortunately, no coverage for Monterey. So it was just kind of following that along on social media and then checking things out on Limitless after the event was over. But before we get into some of those results, John has prepared a time capsule for us, everybody. And we briefly mentioned this deck previously. And it's one of the decks that kind of spurred, I believe this is part of the first wave of bans ever. You know, I mean, technically you could say the first ban wave was the Emergency Rotation they did once HeartGoldSellSilver released. But this was the first true banning of a very specific card. Yep. And that card was Shiftry. So this is a Shiftry deck. A Shiftry deck. And this deck is interesting because the fear of this deck alone caused a ban. So the real culprit in this was Forest of Giants plants. Shiftry existed for a really long time before Forest of Giants plants was printed. So Forest of Giants plants was printed in, I think this is, what's that? I'm going to look stupid. I know it's some Sun and Moon stuff. That's all I got. Yeah. It's not Sun and Moon. It's X and Y. Is that Ancient Origins? Ancient Origins. Yeah, it's X and Y, I believe, right? Oh, you're right, it is. That's like Curious Fists, all that kind of stuff. It's like the end of X and Y. Yep. So they had the Megas, the Primal Groudon, Primal Kyogre, I think. Ancient Origins. This was printed in Ancient Origins as well. But so Shiftry existed. It was printed in Next Destinies. And Next Destinies was like one of the oldest sets in the standard format when Forest of Giants plants was printed. So Shiftry has the ability Giant Fan. Whenever you play this Pokemon from your hand to evolve one of your Pokemon, you may flip a coin. If heads choose one of your opponent's Pokemon, your opponent shuffles that Pokemon and all cards attached to it in his or her deck. So I mean, this card is not a good card normally, truthfully. It's a powerful ability. I'm not going to say otherwise. But it's not consistent. It's not easy to get into play, all that kind of stuff. But what broke this card essentially was the inclusion of Forest of Giant Plants into our format, which is a stadium card. And it says each player's Grass Pokemon can evolve during his or her turn or during her It's his or her first turn, sorry, or the turn that she or he plays those Pokemon. And because Shiftry is, even though it's a dark Pokemon, the two previous evolutions are both grass, it can evolve up into Shiftry immediately turn one. You can go straight from Seedots and Nuzleaf to Shiftry. And so that allowed you to essentially, in theory, before your opponent even gets to draw a card for their game, for their turn, for their first turn, you can use Giant Fan to put back one or two of their only Pokemon in play, and they don't even get to play the game. So whether that happened or would have happened is still a topic of debate today, because before the set was legal, before Ancient Origins became legal for play, Pokemon put a ban out and the ban was on Shiftry. So this was banned. So this wasn't the first card to be banned, I don't think. We had Lysandre's Trump card before this, right? Oh, you're right. Yeah. So, it's interesting because the two bans that are pretty big happened pretty close to one another with Lysandre's Trump card and Shiftry, and Lysandre's Trump card did see play, but Shiftry was never allowed, I mean, it was in format, but it was never allowed to be in the same format as Forest of Giant Plants. So this deck I have here is from a Sixth Prize article by Dylan LaFleur, I think that's how you pronounce his last name, but who was, you know, a multiple regional champion, I believe. Really good player in this era. I don't think he plays anymore. But this whole deck was built to get into Giant Fan as often and as fast as possible. And so you basically would start any of these Pokemon, it didn't really matter where Shiftry was, it's not like you were attacking with him ever. This deck doesn't run any energy. So you don't really have to worry about, you know, where your Pokemon are in relation to each other. And so you could start with any of these Pokemon, but you wanted to start with a Seedot if you could, and then just burn through your deck. The article I read for this said that by the end of turn one, you usually had a 15 to 10 cards left in your deck. So you're able to get through, you know, a huge chunk of your deck, and then through Shaman, which lets you draw more cards, Farewell Letter from Unknown lets you draw more cards, and then you would play Research, and then you could super scoop up your Shamans, or your Shiftry. So you would mostly focus on super scooping your Shamans, but you could do the Shiftry, but the Shaman, once it's scooped up, you can bench it and use the ability set up to draw up to six cards. And then you can burn through your hand with a lot of these different items, but I won't get into all of it. But that was the main premise. He said in the article that it was pretty successful that he got an average of about six giant fans off 6.4 or something like that, giant fans off per game, which is a good number. There was also a rate in which this deck just bricked 20%. So I think if you could always choose to go first, in every one of your games, you would play this deck and it would be really well do really well. But because you're playing best of three, it's really volatile. If you lose the coin flip, you're pretty much going to lose this set. If your opponent sees you're playing Shiftry, they can just fill their bench up and it's very hard even. It's not impossible, but you can get six giant fans off, but you still have to flip heads. It doesn't matter if you get six off, you still have to get a heads on six of those at some point. So it's hard to clear your opponent's bench out. So it really wasn't, I would say, a viable strategy. I think the reason why Pokemon decided to ban this card wasn't because the strategy was overly powerful or really good. It was because they did not like the idea of somebody winning a game where the other player had no agency, where they had no ability to even draw a card for turn and play the game. And I think that's a fair reason to ban a card at the end of the day. This ability wasn't built to coincide with Forest of Giant Plants. It's just kind of a weird coincidence that happened, I think. I don't think that there's many instances where the game designers don't see unintended consequences, but this might have been one of them, right? So, yeah, that's the deck. Like I said, it was banned before it saw play, so we'll never really know if it was competitive or competitively viable. I remember, I think I was sitting at a regionals right before the set released and playtesting against a friend who had built the deck, and I was playing the deck, I was playing whatever deck I had. I forget what deck I was playing, like maybe a Toad deck, and he was playing Shiftry, and it was annoying, but it wasn't like, even then, I would say, oh, I didn't feel like I was afraid of it. It was just more of like an annoying deck to play against than anything else. So I don't know. Do you have any opinions about Shiftry or anything that you remember from that? Like you said, the idea behind banning this is mostly for a player experience and a tournament experience. You know, at the time, tournaments were smaller. You probably only had seven, maybe eight rounds of Swiss, and you'd go through and just, like you said, not even having to win multiple games and not even really playing a game to quote-unquote win it. It just leaves a bad taste in everybody's mouth. Like, strategies like this are reasons why, you know, we had the first emergency rotation, which you could effectively look at a precursor to the idea of banning cards in general when HeartGold SoulSilver released, and they really needed Stormfront Sableye to be out of the format. Otherwise, you could basically guarantee that you would win the game turn one every single time. And so they didn't like that then, they don't like ideas like this now. Yes, it may not be the most consistent thing in the world, but if you're going first and you only need two heads and you get six plus five to seven shots at it, you're probably going to end up winning that game in a majority of cases. So I think it's a, you know, it was definitely well worth the ban. And the reason, like the idea of this is also why the designers of cards saw fit with Lush Forest to print it as a stadium that only affects grass Pokemon evolving into other grass Pokemon. So something like this, and it's really going to be kind of restrictive on the card design of grass Pokemon for as long as that card is legal. Yeah, and it also has the text, like you can't do a turn one. Yes. Very important. So I think that's just as important. But yeah, that's the time capsule for today. I'm glad to have this segment back. Cool to talk about a fun deck that, you know, might not really be featured anywhere else. Sure. People that are new to the game or have probably never even heard of Shiftry. So cool to talk about. But yeah, that's that. Great. So we can go ahead and jump straight into results from last weekend's regionals. But before we get into the results, John, I believe we did some predictions about these two events. So why don't we go ahead and recap those really quick? Yeah. All right. I get my predictions out. All right. So we had three predictions. The first one was a region outside the reporting region will win both tournaments. I should have put one tournament, but then I said, no, I'll say both. So I said both. There was a chance with Cato doing a deep run in Frankfurt, almost able to help me out. But, you know, we had Garty, well, I'll get ahead of myself. We had a European player win in Frankfurt. We did have an American win in Monterey. The U.S. showed up for Monterey. We'll get into all the results in just a minute. So let me finish the prediction. So Aaron wins that one. The next one was the winning list will have Badoo. I got very, very close once again with Tord Reklev having a deep run with Dragapult. But he lost and Aaron again predicted this correct with a false. Neither one of the lists that won regionals this weekend had Badoo in it. So Aaron 2-0. And then the last one, Garty will win one of the tourneys. Well, this prediction aged very well for Aaron. Again, Aaron predicted true and I predicted false. So Aaron had a resounding 3-0 and I had a very whimper sounding 0-3. Yeah, that's all we're going to talk about with predictions. I think I warned you last week that we could agree on things at some point and that was acceptable. But you know, you did embarrass me 0-3 at Blaine's Quiz Show last week. So I think that I'll take that victory. I would rather do well at Blaine's Quiz Show than predictions if I'm being honest. There you go. I guess my credibility as a podcast host hinges more on trivia than on actually understanding the metagame. So be it. But anyway. So let's go ahead and look at some of the information we had from Frankfurt. So this was a 2400 player tournament, which I think I saw a tweet from Chris Brown that said this was like the fourth largest European event ever, which is pretty impressive. I'm pretty sure that that puts it up there as one of, if not the biggest European regional ever, because undoubtedly some of the top five events have to be EUIC. But we see a pretty decent shift from the World's Metagame coming into this event. And we'll see that echoed a bit in the Monterey meta percentages where Goldengo is not the top deck. We have a little bit of cannibalization here. So if we do some variant grouping, you'll see Goldengo jump up. That is because a lot of players shifted over to that Goldengo Joltik list that we saw win the Seniors Division at Worlds. So making its way down here is the sixth most popular deck. But we have Dragapult Dusknoir as the most popular deck in the room. Raging Bolt is number two. Straight Dangoless is number three. Gardevoir at fourth. Charizard, Pidgeot at fifth. And then Goldengo Joltik box at sixth. If we do the variant grouping, the next most popular deck would have been Tarabox. And if we kind of jump forward into day two, things shift a little bit. We see the top three, or top four rather, stay the same. We still have Dragapult, Dusknoir, Raging Bolt, Ogre Pawn. Straight Goldengo, and Gardevoir is the top four. But Tarabox jumps all the way up into being fifth place. And Joltik Goldengo maintains its place at sixth. So basically, just Charizard, Pidgeot, swapping places with Tarabox. And the big news there is just kind of the story of the tournament, I should say, in my mind. Maybe even the story of the weekend, outside of Gardevoir winning these events, is Tarabox being an extremely powerful play this opening weekend of Regionals. And John and I were talking about before the cast, how strong this conversion percentage in Frankfurt of 41.49% for Tarabox is when you compare it to other decks. So typically, if you look at a highly played deck, you know, a deck that's got 70 plus players in the room, a conversion percentage of like 15, maybe 17 or higher, is considered extremely strong as a conversion percentage. Or is what you would expect. Because you have to imagine that a decent number of upper level players are playing that archetype. So when we see something pop up that's 41.5%, and it's not one of these kind of freak instances of something like Charizard, Dragapult, which is somehow different from Dragapult, Charizard. And only two of them were played, and both of them made Day 2. So it got a 100% conversion. Or these other lesser played archetypes that get to both percentages, like 60 and 50. Tarabox makes its way in here with these other single digit decks as almost a 100 player sample size, still converting 41.5% of people into Day 2. That's kind of crazy to me. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that like top players are really gravitated towards the deck. We're going to take a look at, you know, the results in a minute. But you see so many like, quote unquote, big names gravitating towards the deck. I mean, yeah, I think that makes a huge difference, realistically. But you know, there's a reason why they chose that deck. If you want to go kind of counter that argument. I think there's a lot of things going for Tarabox at the moment. Yep. Has a really good Golden Goat matchup with the use of Pikachus. And then you have, you know, pretty good Raging Bolt Ogre-Pawn matchup with Clefairy. And you're able to keep up tempo and respond really well to stuff like that. You can use Briar to even your prize exchange really effectively in different scenarios. And then, yeah, it's just a really powerful, you know, consistent deck for the most part. There's some times where you brick, but it's pretty rare where you aren't able to get that Fan Rotom turn one and then turn two, just kind of do whatever you want. So yeah, it was cool to see. Cool to see some of the names that played it and how well they did. And some of the lists. The cool thing is, it is a deck that really lends itself to innovation. So like, there was a lot of different ways people were playing it, different tech inclusions, all that kind of stuff. We didn't see just the same cookie cutter list for everybody. So that was kind of cool. Yeah, absolutely. So we can go ahead and jump over and look at some of these lists. And we will first, of course, congratulate Rune. I will not attempt to pronounce his last name. I do not know how to say it. Playing Gardevoir. I do not want to look at this list quite yet because, spoilers, the same exact 60 won Monterey. And the innovator of that deck won that tournament. So we'll jump over and talk about that when we get to those Monterey results. But congratulations again to Rune. Tapor managed to come in second place with Dragapult Dusknoir, with Kato Arai, with Straight Dragapult. Fabian Pujol with Dragapult Blaziken. Dominic Fink with Joltik Box. Drew Stevenson with Straight Goldengo. Mace Brenninkmeyer with Tarabox. Alexander Soleil with Tarabox. Maciej, I believe is how you pronounce his first name, Chojnacki with Tarabox. Konstantin Kalama playing Gardevoir. And Richard Herman with Greninja, rounding out our asymmetrical cut. And so we're going to look at a couple of these lists here. Another couple notable results before we do that are Mike Ellis, the European caster, coming in just short of top cut at 12th place, playing Grimmsnarl Froslass. So obviously I'm going to have a soft spot for that. But the kind of cool thing about this was apparently this was Mike's first ever regional event. So he's been casting for Pokémon for a few years now and had somehow never found the time or opportunity to play in a European regional. And to play his first one ever and come all the way and make top 16, it's a pretty decent accomplishment. So big shout outs to him. And then the other kind of highlight off the wall deck, outside of this Greninja deck, is Benjamin Georgios with Conkeldurr. And so we saw Conkeldurr featured on stream, I believe, only one time throughout the weekend. But the big notable thing was that at the end of day one, there were two different Conkeldurr decks that were 7-1 in the first eight rounds of Swiss, which is something that a lot of people probably just wouldn't have had on their radar going into this weekend. But I know, John, you and I were talking about this before the cast. Conkeldurr actually has a lot of stuff going for it. So why don't you lay out what some of those things are? – Yeah. I remember I actually played against one playing Golden Go funnily enough. And that deck, that matchup feels abysmal for Golden Go. Normally you have some agency with Golden Go, but in that matchup specifically, Conkeldurr, once they set up, you know, and they're able to chain attackers, you can't do anything. Like turn two Rare Candy into Conkeldurr. And then they just used Gutsy Swing, I think, or something like that. I don't know. – Yep. – Oh, good. I got it right. Yeah, you're doing 250. And if that wasn't enough, they're always Petra Running to use the secondary attack, attack the secondary effect of that. So you would just poison it with Root Bonnet. And then you poison the Golden Go. And then, so yeah, then you hit for 250. And then it dies from poison. Your Golden Go dies from poison going into your turn. So you can't even use Feathered Nippity. So, you know, it's just pretty miserable. And 180 is enough to where it can be really difficult if you don't find everything you need to get there. This is pretty typical. I mean, you run the Pidgeot, which is nice. I don't think I've seen that before. But yeah, Hilda helps a lot in this deck. That was a nice innovation that this deck got a lot of help with. So now you're able to, you know, get your stage twos out more effectively. You can use Hilda to search for an interesting A-Spec here in, I don't know the name of this. – Enriching Energy? – Enriching Energy. So it's just a special energy. It's an A-Spec. But it says, as long as this card is attached... Oh, it's when you attach this from your hand to your Pokémon, you draw four cards. So it gives Hilda almost a draw effect, if you want to phrase it that way. Because you don't need Hilda... You don't need to attach an energy to use your attacks. You can attach an Enriching Energy to a Dedan Sparse and then just shuffle the Dedan Sparse back in and kind of cycle it that way. So you have a really infinite draw or extra draw with that, with getting your stuff set up. So, I mean, it's a cool deck. It's a fun League deck. I'm going to have to probably build this. I think I built it already for League. But I'll have to update my list to reflect some of the additions it got with Black Bolt, White Flare. You also have Sacred Ash. And I think that's really about it from an innovation standpoint. We've seen... And that was, yeah, I mean, just really, you know... The reason why, like, getting back to talking about results from this tournament, the reason why this deck did so well... It has a really, really, really good matchup into Golden Goat. A really good matchup into Raging Bolt. An okay matchup into Dragapult. I wouldn't say it's favorable. But you can kind of cheese them in some ways. You can find a way to, you know, not necessarily hit big numbers. But you have the Binding Mochi. You have the Gravity Mountain. So, the Gravity Mountain, playing that, you play two of them. And it reduces the HP of stage twos by 30. So, you reduce your Conkeldurr. But you really don't care about that. The nice thing is you can go take your Dragapult down to 300 hit points. Attach the Binding Mochi. Swing with Gutsy Swing. You're doing, I think, 290. And then you do the additional 10 from Poison. So, there you go. Great. So, it isn't necessarily the most consistent strategy. I mean, you run the Color Assist Tenacity to potentially be able to find your stadiums a lot more effectively. This is like a solidly built decklist, I'd say. Probably the most flushed out version of this deck I've seen. Everything makes sense and has a good point. Like, has a good purpose and solves a problem, essentially. There's not a lot of fluff. So, that's kind of nice. I've seen some decks of this, it'll play the Poison package with a Petra Run and all that kind of stuff. And this says, no, I'm going to just execute my strategy. And that's definitely enough. And sure enough, the results speak for themselves. Getting a top 16 with a very innovative deck. Yeah, I think the other thing I hadn't actually paid attention to, prior to the release of Black Bolt and White Flare, the only legal timber actually had 80 HP. So, you couldn't Buddy Poffin for it. Oh, true. So, this pickup was something that ended up being a lot bigger than I would have anticipated. And definitely not something that I at all paid attention to when Black Bolt and White Flare were coming out. So, definitely really cool to see. The other neat thing that doesn't necessarily come up super often, but can, is the ability to use Hilda or Kholras's Tenacity to go find a jet energy. And you can essentially jet a Dedan Sparse to the active to get, you know, a lot of times people are going to try to gust up your Brute Bonnet and let it sit there to try to stall for time or maybe just what have you. Whether it's Brute Bonnet, Dedan Sparse, a Benched Girder that you haven't evolved into Conkeldurr yet. Unless you just jet up Dedan Sparse, same thing with the Enriching Energy combo, shuffle it back into your deck. Also draw those three additional cards and just kind of keep things flowing that way. But I think that this deck gained a fair bit from the most recent set. And it's always cool to see an A-spec that is rather unusual to see a lot of play. Or that you don't usually see, see success is what I should say. Yep. Ah, spoilers, no. So, if we go back and look at some of the other lists though, we do have Tord Rekklev's Draggable Dusknoir. And this is a pretty interesting one, given that it kind of deviates from the norm in a lot of ways. So first, Tord's got the standard, you know, 4-4-3 Dragapult, 3-2-1 Dusknoir, nothing we haven't seen here before, 2-Badu. Fez, Latias, Bloodmoon, Ursulina, Hawlucha, 4-Research, 4-Iono. And you're like, okay, Aaron, you haven't really said anything innovative yet. Oh, let me know. Let me also tell you, he has 2-Hilda. I bet you haven't heard that one before. But the real kind of interesting aspect of this is Tord has trimmed down some of the Gusts count, so he's got one fewer boss. He's really eaten into the Energy though, where a lot of times you would see 4 copies of Luminous, coupled with typically still 3 basic Energy, sometimes even going all the way down to 2. And then Neo Upper as the A-Spec. That's not at all unusual. But we have a total of 6 Energy here. There is no Monkey Dory in this list, which has become essentially a staple in all Dragapult variants going into worlds. Tord saw fit to remove that, and is instead playing 4 copies of Rare Candy, saying, I want my Stage 2s in play. I'm not going to let you TM Devo me out of my Stage 1s and prevent me from getting them into play. And I want to be able to go Duskull into Dust Noir potentially multiple times in a given turn, if I have the ability to do so. And so you still have the raw filtering ability from Recon Director to help you find these candies, along with copies of Research and Iona to just naturally draw into them as well. And then you can still fall back on your Badoog Ichipollen game plan if you really need to slow the game down. But I think that Rare Candy being in the deck is a card that I've always been a little confused as to why people weren't playing at least one or two of them. But understandably, it is difficult to fit into the deck when you want to fit all these other things in. So I think Tord kind of taking the Charizard route, I guess, in terms of deck building with only playing 6 Energy cards is kind of an interesting call. But when you have Hilda to potentially go find those Energies, you don't necessarily need to go about having higher quantities of them to be able to find them naturally. So pretty cool. Yeah. Yeah, I think this tournament, the question was forced of Dragapult, how do I deal with Goldengo? And a lot of decks sought to answer that question a lot of different ways. And Tord sought to answer it with Rare Candy. He said, okay, Dragapult's pretty slow. I can attack consistently turn 3 most games. Definitely turn 4. But if I run Rare Candy, I can definitely make my turn 3 attack more powerful. I can get a Dusknoir in play. I can get a Dragapult in play. Maybe get the Dragapult to play turn 2. And I think that makes a huge difference when you're going up against Goldengo. Normally, Goldengo, if they're able to take two price cards before you attack, which they can do by just knocking out two Badu, then it can be really difficult as a Dragapult player to chain attacks to say, okay, I can get the one attack off. If they take two price cards, they can just go knock out Dragapult, knock out Dragapult. You're really restricted on to how many Dusknoir you can use KO throughout your game to kind of even the math, make it more favorable for you. This allows you with this build to kind of put the ball back in your court and say, all right, I'm going to be the more offensive attacking deck in that matchup and better utilize all the tools that I have. You lose some of the maneuvering that you had. And I think if you watch the finals of this, Tord struggled to find energy in a couple of the games. So maybe cutting some of those energies ended up biting him in the butt later on. But, you know, it's just kind of like you have to figure out where you're willing to make sacrifices in order to win a tournament. So this was one answer to that question of how do I deal with Goldengo. Goldengo, interestingly enough, did not really, I think we had, did we have one in the top cut? Yeah. So Goldengo, like we said, it had a huge meta representation. I don't think that this is, you had to beat a couple of Goldengo to get to top cut, essentially. Like you would have to play at least two, probably in a tournament run. I don't know how many Tord played. We can look at that. But hold that back up again real quick. Yeah, sorry. You're fine. Tord played against. So yeah, so yeah, he played one, two. Three. Three. So three. But the last one was. One of these was an ID. For your winning end. You've got, right. I'm almost certain this was an ID. Not the most. Yeah, yeah. Drew, definitely. So, but you had to beat it early on. And I think it helps in the mirror too. If you want to go look at that, being able to blow up your opponent's board before they're able to set up. And set up before your opponent sets up. It can be really impactful. So we saw Tord with this version. And then there's two other variants of Dragapult. If we're going to talk about real quick. The next one is Kato Arai. So Kato answered the problem of Goldengo with Cornerstone. Running a Cornerstone Ogre Pawn. And then I also had Maractus for other mirrors. And for other situations. Yeah. So still no jamming tower in here. Which was another answer that we've seen from Dragapult decks. Historically trying to shut off the air balloon. Gust up the Genesect. Stall for a turn. While you spread some damage to Goldengo's on the bench. And set up that free. Essentially two price KO. Force the Turo out of your opponent. Instead saying, no. I'm just going to set this thing up. I have the energy to power it up. To attack with it. And you're not going to be able to one hit KO it. So you know balls in your court buddy. Especially when you can set up the Monkey Dories. To kind of back it up on your bench as well. Other than that. Nothing super crazy in here. I think the penny is potentially interesting as well. So if that Cornerstone takes a hit. You could penny it up. And then basically make it the wall that you need it to be. Throughout the rest of the game. And then this last one. I think is probably the most innovative Dragapult deck. That we saw this weekend. And Fabian has been a fan of playing interesting decks. For the last few events that he's been playing. And I know back at NAIC. He was one of the big proponents of Cynthia's Garchomp deck. That again at that time nobody had on their radar. And this time he paired up Dragapult with Blaziken EX. And so this answers the question of keeping energy on your Dragapult. Like we've seen Charizard before. And we've seen Neo Upper as the inclusion of. How do I accelerate these energies into play for my Dragapult? How do I get this thing powered up as quickly or reasonably as possible? And Fabian's answered that question with Blaziken. With the Seething Spirit ability. The Blaziken allows you to accelerate a basic energy. From your Disco Pile to one of your Pokemon. And then it has the Smolder Salt attack for 200 damage. For a fire and colorless. And during your next turn this Pokemon can't attack. Interestingly enough. Clean KO on Goldengo. Fire type 200 damage. Work math checks out. Also provides the ability to accelerate energies into play. Like these basic darks to get Monkey Dory powered up. You could potentially actually attack. With the single copy of Baby Petrunt that he has included. As opposed to Maractus. So there are several advantages to this. One. Because you can reasonably power it up. As long as you can get a Blaziken into play. Petrunt does the same thing as Maractus. except it can lock something and actually chip it down much more quickly if that is your end goal. The nice other kind of tangential benefit is that Petraunt only has a single retreat cost as opposed to Maractus' 2, which is often a pretty big liability for running the card and forces a lot of Dragapult lists like Kato's to run Latias EX in there as well. But then because of the Blaziken, we also get to include some other cards that can potentially be beneficial in various matchups. We get the Chi-Yu to help with that Goldenko matchup. We get to include other kind of tech cards. So instead of a Bidu, we're playing an LGM to use the slight shift attack and move energies around. I can see this being impactful particularly in Dragapult Mirror. So if your opponent is only able to attach a single energy per turn, you just slight shift it off onto a Monkey Dory or a Bidu or something and you're never worried about it. I think another card and a reason that Fabian was extremely successful this weekend was the inclusion of Shaymin. And I'm going to talk about this later when we talk about Pittsburgh, but because of the rise of Tarabox, the continued prevalence of Gardevoir with Screamtail, sniping things, just Fezzendipity being in decks, or Baby Bolt in the Raging Bull decks, I think that Shaymin is a card that people have quietly been excluding from their deck in the same way that we saw Manaphy being excluded from a lot of decks at the tail end of its life cycle, and people pounced on it. So we saw at the time there were aggressive Radiant Greninja attacking decks like the Powerglass Roaring Moonless that popped up at the end of, or just prior to rotating to Scarlet Violet on, you know, the end of the V-Star era. Now we've seen Water Ogre Pawn make up this big resurgence this weekend in particular, and Shaymin being present here to protect these little guys on the bench, prevent that from happening, really big for Fabian. Again, because you have Blaziken for energy acceleration, you don't have to play that Neo-Upper. You can play Secret Box. Hands down, I will shout this until this card rotates, this is the best A-Spec they have printed in the Scarlet Violet era. And it might honestly just be the best A-Spec ever printed, hands down. Like it's realistically better than Computer Surge at this point, and that was widely considered to be the most splashable, potentially best A-Spec prior to this. It's hard to argue it at this point, like, I don't mean, I would have never thought to put Secret Box in a Dragapult list. I would have probably thought of playing Unfair Stamp or something like that before this, but honestly, like, when you run a multiple stage 2 deck, it just makes sense. Like you're not, you're just saying, okay, if I can execute my strategy, if I can get all my attackers and all my support Pokemon and all that into play, I can win this game. And Secret Box allows me to win more games. And you're able to then, you know, use your one of stadiums, one of tools, like the TM Evo. If you get like, if you go Arvin for Secret Box turn one, you can go Artisan, TM Evo, Buddy Poffin, and a supporter for next turn. And that's honestly such a broken combo, right? Like you get the Poffin, the Artisan, so you get three bench Pokemon guaranteed. If you have an energy in hand, you can just get your setup. You can go, okay, Dracloak, Combusken, and then turn two, just pop off, you know, go start Phantom Diving. So this is a really, really cool deck. I mean, props to Fabian for pulling the trigger on this. Like I don't, I don't know, man, like it's so off the wall that I'm sure that you, I don't know how you feel. If you're, if you're testing this, maybe, and you put enough games with it to feel really comfortable between worlds and now, and you're saying, okay, I feel like I can have the edge with this. But this just seems almost like, so it's, it's, it's been cooking for a long time. Like having the LGM, having the Petra run, like those aren't really intuitive things to put into a deck that I think like would fit into a Dragapult deck. But you're seeing like, how do I have, I think it's just trying to figure out what are my answers for different matchups? What am I okay giving up? What am I like trying to do? I'm trying to beat Goldnego, and I'm trying to beat Dragapult. And I think that's kind of what this deck is built to do. 100%. And I think you like, you just hit the nail on the head. So that's like the LGM as a, as a card is bet that its best matchup is Dragapult. Because typically your traditional Dragapult list don't have energy acceleration. So you just need a way to slow them down. And realistically, LGM essentially locks them out of the game. So because you're not playing the Dusknoir line, you need some other way to get an edge in those Dragapult mirror-esque matchups. I do still think that this deck is going to struggle pretty heavily into Gardevoir. Maybe the Petra does something that I don't fully understand in that matchup in particular. But it doesn't seem super great. No. And maybe just Aggro Blaziken might also potentially just work as a strategy into Gardevoir. Because they have a difficult time knocking it out. But I'd be wary of picking that up if you're looking to target Gardevoir in particular. Charizard's probably a better partner in that case. Yeah. Looking at like, I mean, if you watch the top four match Fabian played against Rune. And Gardevoir kind of had its way with Fabian there. Exactly. Exactly. But that is what it is. I think that that's what a lot of people kind of accept when they choose to play Dragapult. They say, I know I'm probably going to lose to Gardevoir even though I can beat it. And it's just kind of a roll of the dice at that point. We're not going to spend a ton of time on Dominic or Drew's list. Dominic's list is Joltik box. There's not really a ton of innovation there. Drew's list is relatively interesting, but it's basically a card-for-card copy of what Daniel Magda and his testing group played at Worlds. So it's the Revivroom Heavy Lightning Energy, Heavy Laventia, Secret box-based list. Next thing we're going to look at, since we've been talking about Tarabox so much, we're going to look at May's, Brenninkmeyer's Tarabox list. And like you mentioned, John, this deck's relatively adaptable. We get to see some interesting things. So this deck has changed a lot from when it first came on the scene. And we've seen this a lot in many of these Noctowl or Fan Rodent-based decks. Like it started to pop up in EV box lists. You've got a 101 Pidgeot included here, along with a Rare Candy to get that set up and keep your board more stable, because that's typically what does these Noctowl decks in, right? Is you take an early lead, and then your opponent Ionos you to two, and you're just stuck for the rest of the game because you can't really do anything. So getting the Pidgeot online, it's relatively robust, not the easiest thing to take out of play, and can give your opponent a hard time when you're able to find those single-card answers that you need turn after turn after turn. And instead of playing two, three Energy Switch and two Teal Mask Ogre Pawns, we've slimmed that down to one Teal Mask Ogre Pawn, and just making this the Water Ogre Pawn show. Except in the matchups where you need them, you have the Pikachu EX to knock out things like Goldango and be a Thorn in their side, and you have the Clefairy to knock out things like Dragapult. I think that your edge against Gardevoir is just going to be hoping that they don't play Shaymin, and you Water Ogre Pawn them back to back to back, and close out the game that way. And with the Pidgeot in play, that's much more likely to happen, right? I do think that the Jamming Tower is relatively interesting as a continued inclusion, and the lack of a means of moving the Noctowl outside of the Turo. We saw Rescue Board included for a time in this deck, so I would think that a Rescue Board or an Air Balloon might make its way to this list. Or even a Switch. Yeah. Right. But I guess, you know, out of all the tests in that maze, and I believe from looking at other Tarabox lists from this weekend, a lot of players have achieved the same conclusion that Toolcards is not worth it anymore. If I can just find a way to get the Turo when I need it, that's good enough to get out of Maractus. There's not a ton of Maractus in the format. I'm finding enough consistency in being able to just attach to my Noctowl to move it, and just the rest of it's just a typical Tarabox deck, right? The deck had kind of fallen off, but this Resurgence, with the lack of Shaymin in the format in particular, isn't the most surprising thing in the world. No. It's cool seeing Iron Bundle. I think that's a newer inclusion in some of the Tarabox lists. Maybe it fell out of flavor and came back in. It's nice to see a research. Some of the builds, I don't think were in research, but it's good to have some push. Yeah, I really like this list. I think I do like this a lot more than just your standard Tarabox. Having the Pidgeot makes this deck so much better. Like you said, I think getting Iron in a late game was the death knell for this deck so many times, and is still. You look at even the matchups, like the matchup that Mies played against Tord. He wasn't able to get Pidgeot established in anything, and just kind of struggled to get anything set up. When you do set this up, this deck just feels like it's able to solve the puzzle better than any other deck. Even more than the Eevee box deck, because you're able to be a little bit more lower to the ground, and abuse that Wall Spring Mask Ogre Pawn so much more effectively. It's a very cool deck, and I'm excited to see if we get more of it going into Milwaukee, or Pittsburgh, sorry. Yeah, I wouldn't be too surprised, but we'll talk about that in just a little bit. Last deck here from TopCut that we're going to look at is probably the most interesting one, because it's a relatively new thing. It kind of harkens back to, I cannot remember what the Washington-based player from last year that was playing the Gurninja, Charizard, Pidgeot, Grand Tree deck. At some point, something relatively similar to this made its rounds last year. I know he was a Tabletop Village player, but I cannot remember, I don't even remember what his name is. So we saw a Gurninja EX-based deck. Was it Yoshi? It wasn't Yoshi. No, it's not Yoshi, Tate. Or not Tate. Yeah, no. Yeah, Yoshi. But it's not him. You're right. It's not him. Okay. So we do have Gurninja EX with Dusknoir and Pidgeot, so Gurninja's still doing its Mirage Barrage thing. This is kind of like Water Ogre Pawn with extra steps almost, but the kind of big combo for this deck is you start a Froakie and a Pidgey, and you Cholrus for... So you attach a Water to Froakie while it's active, or whatever it is on your board. You have Pidgey down. You Cholrus for Grand Tree and Ignition Energy. Grand Tree into Pidgeot. You quick search for whatever piece you're missing to get a Gurninja EX into play, whether it's a Rare Candy or the Gurninja itself. Get a Gurninja out, attach Ignition Energy, and then use that as the discard cost for Mirage Barrage to take out the evolving basics off your opponent's bench. And from Richard had posted responses involving this deck saying he was choosing to go first in literally every single matchup because he doesn't want to give his opponents the ability to evolve their Pokemon before he can Mirage Barrage them. And this one in particular is, you know, like the Water Ogre Pawn, taking heavy advantage of the fact that Shaymin is just not present in a lot of these decks. So this is one that I would not necessarily expect to see a ton of moving forward. But this is a really cool card, and I'm glad that it got to see some level of success again before it rotated. Yeah. I mean, it's a powerful card. It's a powerful attack. And the interaction that's really interesting is the fact that, you know, you can use Mirage Barrage and it shuffles the energy back in, right? Like it shuffles... No, it's a discard. It's discard 2 energy. Okay. So not as good as I was thinking, unfortunately. But you're able to, since it's a stage 2, take advantage of Ignition energy and then yeah, it's able to fulfill the energy cost and you don't have to worry about... This is discard 2 energy, you said? Yep. Yep. Okay. So you're able to fulfill the energy cost and then discard those cards that would be discarded either way. So yeah, it's very effective, clean attacker. You love to see that. But yeah, I don't really have anything else to say. Just a cool deck. Yeah. And honestly, this kind of almost looks like a shell for what you could expect a multi-stage 2 deck to look like in the sense that Grand Tree plus Pidgeot allows you to set up some other combo like this. And I wouldn't be the most surprised to see something similar pop up in the future. And I think really the drivers of this being successful are Kholres letting you find Grand Tree more consistently and Hilda being released to let you find Ignition energy more consistently. And so just having these cool utility supporters that are available is just neat. It's definitely interesting to see. But that's going to round out Frankfurt for us. As the local Grimmsnarl guy, I will say Mike's list is definitely different from something that I would have played to this event, choosing to play zero copies of Boss's Orders and two copies of TM Devo. I love the second Devo right now. No Boss is still really scary to me. But again, shout out to Mike for his strong performance this week. I'm curious. I mean, you looked at Grimmsnarl's conversion rate, I'm sure. How are you feeling about the state of the deck coming out of these tournaments? I think that, and I'm going to sound super biased saying this, I think that a large contributing factor to the relatively poor performance of Grimmsnarl this event, and maybe even at Worlds, and it's probably less so at Worlds, but more so here, is you don't necessarily have the highest caliber of player choosing to play it right now. I think that it's a deck that a lot of upper level players have put by the wayside, and they have deemed this deck is not good enough. And because of that, it's just going to continue to struggle until someone decides to pick it up. Because it is not necessarily the most straightforward thing to do, or straightforward deck to play. And there are a lot of alternative routes that you can find on the fly in the middle of a game, whether that's benching an extra Monkey Dory, or when do I want to put the second Frostlass into play in a matchup that you don't necessarily need it? Or when do I want to put Frostlass into play against Gardevoir in particular? Because you don't always want to them play, but there are some niche cases where you do want to them play. And other just kind of list-based inclusions, like do you want to play Maractus, still not a fan of it. but, but, you know, do what you will with that. Do you want to play the Blood Moon Ursula Luna, which Mike chose to play? And I actually think that at this exact moment is probably the correct call, even though it scares the heck out of me to start with that card in the deck. And so there's just some different things that kind of vary here or there that can have some pretty large impacts on its win percentage across the day, because I do think that the Goldengo matchup is still better than what the average person seems to think that it is. And I think that having good matchups into Dragapult and Gardevoir is a really big selling point for the deck. Yeah, that's definitely nice. Now, granted, I have not tested against Tarabox. That matchup may be like 30, 70, and maybe it's a reason alone to not play Grimmsnarl, but I'd have to sit down and play it to really kind of flush out an opinion on that. Right. So before we get to the results of the other tournament from this weekend, we're going to go and take a quick pit stop over with Blaine's Quiz Show. And so for anybody that may not have listened before, Blaine's Quiz Show is a weekly segment that John and I do most weeks, you know, 90% of the time. And it will be a series of three multiple choice questions. This week is my turn to ask John, who is currently leading three points to zero. And each correct answer will award John with one point. He has one hint available each week that he can use at any time on any question. But if he is able to answer all three questions without utilizing said hint, he will earn an additional bonus point for a potential of four points for the week. So, John, your topic this week is going to be 2024 to 2025 season tournament winnings. How are you feeling about that? Not fantastic. I don't say I look at the results and such, but I don't remember who won what from week to week. I've got a pretty bad memory, if I'm honest with that kind of stuff. Like, I think Xander's done like regionals winners from 2018 or 2017. And I'm just like, bro, I don't know. So it's tough. We'll see. So we'll see. This is fairly recent. This is like, I guess, yeah, last year, last season. So if there's any chance that I remember, we've probably talked about it on the podcast. Well, I think that you may be taking my topic the wrong way. So let's get into the first question. I want to know how many tournaments did Henry Chao earn money at last season on his way to winning a total of forty five thousand dollars? Oh, my gosh. And your choices are five, six, seven and eight. I mean, he did really, really well at regionals, obviously. I'm trying to remember, he did a podcast interview on Uncommon Energy. I think he did like cashed at five regionals and then cashed at Worlds, cashed at NAIC. I think that's it, because he played Golden Goat at EUIC, and I don't know if he played at NAIC. I'm going to go with seven, you know, just the guest seat strat. And we'll just lock it in for this one, just because I think this is probably one of the few ones that I have at least a chance of answer correctly. OK, so you say seven and it is, in fact, seven. But I think that your account might be slightly off. Yeah, it probably is. The worlds, the worlds that you're counting was not part of last season. Oh, OK. He did, in fact, earn cash at LAIC playing Gardevoir. EUIC, he chose to play Golden Goat for some godforsaken reason. It did not earn money. NAIC earned money as well. And then five regionals, like you said correctly, last season for a total of seven events. So didn't earn money at Worlds, earn money at LAIC, but I had it right otherwise. OK. Yep. Cool, cool, cool. So next question would be, how many different decks did Brent Tonneson earn prize money with last season? And your choices are two, three, four and five. Oh, dang. All right. I can picture Gardevoir, obviously the Brixty. And then you have Regidrago. Just like, was there anything else? That's the question, right? Did he play Dragapult later on? I think he played Dragapult at one or two tournaments. And I think he made some money with that. I'm going to guess three. I think two's like the bait answer. I think three is the correct answer. If it's two, I'll be pretty sad, but I'm going to guess three. Lock it in. OK. Before I reveal this result, I'm going to ask you a sub question. How many different decks do you think Brent played in total throughout the season? Uh, three. That answer is incorrect. However, you were correct. He did earn cash with three decks, and they are the three that you named. It was Dragapult, Gardevoir and Regidrago. He also chose to unfortunately take some adventures with Archaladon that did not serve him very well. That's right. OK, but you're doing well so far. Two for two have not used your hint yet. So let's see if you can close things out to the nearest 1000. How much prize money did Gabriel Fernandez earn last season? And your choices are 55,000, 60,000, 65,000 or $70,000. If I knew the amount of money that you get for winning each regionals and each ICs, I could probably like suss this out a lot easier. And then I think Worlds you got. God, how much did you get for second place? If I had that chart in front of me, I could easily figure this out, but I don't know. So I think I'm going to use a hint on this one. I don't think I can get there because I don't know the the cash values. I know you get like 10,000 for each regionals. If you won five. And then is that right? But it's it's seniors, so it's like totally different. It's like half the value. Yeah, I'm going to have to use a hand. There's no way I can get there. OK, the answer to this question has four zeros in it. OK, so 60 or 70. Oh, I'm going to just go 70. I mean, I'm thinking he did everything but win Worlds, you know, and I think that even if the values are half, that's still just a lot of money. So let's go 70. OK. 70,000 locked in. Unfortunately, the answer is $60,000. The exact total is $61,750 for Gabriel Fernandez. And you're correct that for the most part, seniors cash earnings are. It's not quite half. And actually, in the case of regionals, it's even worse. They get 2,500 for first place, which is still a lot of money for a 14 year old to earn on a given weekend. But. So Gabriel won four regionals last year for a total of $10,000. Got a top eight, which earned him $750 additional dollars. Then the three IC wins, which is an absurd thing to say, was $7,000 each for a $21,000. So we're up to $31,750. And then Worlds is the only event throughout the year where every single age division earns the same amount of money. And second place earns you $30,000, bringing Gabriel's total up to that aforementioned $61,750. That's a lot of real, man. That's a lot like the conversion rate. Yeah. Like you think about that, too. That boy's probably buying a house. He said he said, yeah, definitely. $60,000 goes a lot farther in Brazil than it does in the U.S. I'm sure. But yeah, that's still relatively strong week. You held out using that hint for the very last question and you were able to assess your way through the first two. So two for three for a total of five points for yourself. And I just physically cannot catch you on our next show. Well, that's pretty nice. Yeah, I'm pleasantly surprised with how well I did. I'm glad I could logic out some of those. But yeah, great, great, great set of questions. I'm excited to see how it goes from there. But yeah, we had one other regional to talk about, like you talked about before our segment. And this is in Monterrey, Mexico. And I think is this the biggest regional we've seen in Mexico so far? I mean, I was like that. I'd have to fact check it, but it wouldn't surprise me. It was sixteen hundred twenty players total. Maybe Mexico would not be bigger, but maybe. Yeah, huge number for Mexico. This is like getting into North American or U.S. and Canada regionals even bigger than some of the Canadian ones in Vancouver and Milwaukee. But yeah, huge show out for a regional and awesome to see. I mean, we had a huge contingent of U.S. players come down there, you know, to be expected, but no tournament in the U.S. on the same weekend. And these Metashare's look pretty similar, I'd say. Not exactly the same, but yeah, not as much terror box, notably, I'd say. Looks like that's a little bit lower. But yeah, I think, you know, you have the same three decks at the top with maybe a little bit more draggable dust snore than in EU. EU, I think, had no, I had draggable dust snore number one and then. Yeah, no, the top six are identical and the top six are identical. The percentages are also actually eerily similar to what we saw over in Frankfurt. Wow. And then kind of below that is where things shift a lot. And like the terror box in particular, being notably lower than it was in Frankfurt is a big deal. But Grimmsnarl, again, being deck number seven and then a few other things. There's a, you know, relative to, you know, I know it's only two point five percent, but I feel like that's a lot of typhlosion. And maybe people came into this event with that deck, just expecting to only play against Koldango. And we're unfortunately surprised for that to not be the case. Yeah, I think maybe they saw the world's Metashare percentage and were like, all right, all I got to do is beat Koldango. Yep. And yeah, definitely not the case. I mean, big shift away from Koldango. It's still prevalent. It's still, you know, combined total of right around what? Fifteen, eighteen. Oh, OK. A little bit more than I was saying. Yeah. So 10 percent regular and then another close to eight percent of, I guess, 11 percent regular, seven percent. Yeah. Yeah. More or less. But yeah, it's a. I don't know. I'd say kind of what we would have expected after looking at the EU one. For sure. I don't know if I expected as much Dragapult. I expected a lot, but maybe I don't know what I was expecting, right? If I if it's like, well, if Koldango is falling off, what deck takes its place? And Dragapult is probably the easy answer there. And then, yeah, just Raging Bolt. I mean, it's kind of a deck that refuses to die, right? Like we've talked about that deck since it's come out, and it's the deck that if you're a first time regional player or a less experienced player and you're like, what deck do I play for regional? That's the one you're handing them. Maybe Koldango too, but Raging Bolt definitely. And even in saying that it has some agency, it has some power and we're mid range and you get the baby go baby Raging Bolt involved. There's a lot of things you can do that. I almost say it's less linear than Koldango for sure. So you have a lot. I think that you have the the owls in particular, like, yes, technically, like Cypher Maniac kind of lets you do a very similar thing to what the owls allow you to do. But the fact that you play a toolbox of. Well, relative toolbox compared to the Koldango where you're attacking with just Koldango the entire time, you know, you have situations with the deck where you can attack with Baby Bolt or Big Bolt or even Ogre Pond in some instances. And the deck isn't just slam face the entire time, like it once was. Right. That's fair. So, yeah, I don't really think we need to spend too much more time on Metashare. No, we just just wanted to look at day two real quick and show. So we did see a big jump in for TeraBox relative to day one. And so we can actually probably look at this better on the conversion percentage page where you'll see again, TeraBox had an even better conversion here. Granted, again, significantly smaller sample size compared to what it was in Europe. You know, probably about a third of the players that had in Europe, but still similar conversion rates. So that was obviously a very good play for this weekend in both tournaments, given that they had relatively similar top end makeups. But yeah, like you said, we can go ahead and look over at results and we had a nice clean top eight with Aban Ahmed, Henry Chow, Michael Davidson and Brian Kim all playing Gardevoir, Conor Malnick and Caleb Rodgerson playing TeraBox. Arath Gomez representing Mexico with Dragapult Charizard and Frank Luciano playing Charizard Pidgeot. So notably, I said I didn't want to talk about this list previously. Being the Gardevoir list that Rune went with over in Frankfurt. It was, in fact, Henry Chow's list. Henry apparently posted this list on Metafy earlier in the week leading up to the event. And it must have been a pretty dang good list because Aban, Henry and Michael Davidson were all playing the same 60 and all made top four. And that might be the best tournament run for a single list ever. Very impressive results for this deck. Dude, I don't know why I keep kidding myself thinking that Garde is not the play for a tournament, that it's not a good deck or it's dying or it's not and it's a vulnerable position or anything like that. Like it, it's almost like, you know, the whole like Jeff Goldblum, life will find a way, well, Garde will find a way. Like that's kind of the feeling you get when you see it on the results page at the end of the weekend. It finds a way, man. Like it doesn't matter if it's not the best tournament run. It doesn't matter if it's not the best pick for a tournament. It's just raw like Monkey Dories and Screamtails and you have so many options you have so much ability to outplay your opponent You can have your board completely wiped as we've seen in a bunch of different tournaments. We had you know Toward wipe out his opponent's board multiple times and then go on to lose games just because Gardy can just I oh no and then rebuild their board and then just pick you apart Yep, and no other deck can really do that to that degree No, and I think that Gardevoir's ability to accelerate energy to all of these different psychic types is Really the kind of the versatility that the deck needs to win But interestingly this you know It's been a little bit since we've seen a three row as far as how many like card count list. It's actually a really pared-down Simplistic list on the whole like we're not seeing the driftloon included You're not seeing things like extra monkey Dory's and extra darks and turbo energizes and whatnot This is just I'm gonna set up. I'm gonna be consistent I'm gonna have my bravery charms to keep my basics safe And I'm just gonna swing face with whatever I need to it looks like, you know Your primary attacker for the most part is gonna be I'm gonna Screamtail and pick things off while I monkey Dory things around and I guess dragapult a bravery charm to Clefairy or a bravery charm to Mew is still really difficult for them to deal with and Including I think that the card that actually it's gonna be this might sound like a weird take The card count that stands out the most to me is the inclusion of the eighth psychic. I Think you know most commonly we've seen seven psychic three dark and I think that the eighth psychic just finding that energy more consistently to be able to discard it more frequently is Something that's pretty solid and a lot of this kind of harkens back to Henry's oh My gosh not Philadelphia Baltimore list from last year Where he took this Gardevoir deck try to pare it down and just make it aggressive get Gardevoir out turn two and Just go and that's really what this deck looks like it aims to do as well So similarly instead of playing shaman You also have extra copies of bravery charm to try to protect some of your basics on your bench from things like water ogre pond potentially You know notably Ralts still would get one hit KO'd because 120 is a nice magic number from that water ogre pond But you can protect other things as well as well as making sure that you can actually attack with up to three charmed up scream tails throughout a game could potentially be a pretty big deal and I don't know. It just looks like a nice consistent pretty Straightforward list and this is something I expect people to copy going into next weekend. Oh for sure Yeah, I mean it's interesting how the meta plays out, you know, dragapult moved away from playing tool jammer Saying okay. Well tool jammer is not really effective anymore. All the gold and go lists are running to Stadium So I'm gonna just try to focus on beating gold to go in a different way Sure, and that opened up a lot of range for Gardevoir and especially bravery charm and it said okay bravery charms back baby, like we're gonna Play three now and it's gonna be so good and it's so annoying To have to deal with a bravery charmed Clefairy as a dragapult player The fact that you can't one-shot the Clefairy after they one-shot your dragapult and then you're forced to like say, okay Well, if I go hit into it with another dragapult, they just knock me out again, and there's nothing I can do And you don't have any tool removal. You don't have any way to counteract that that tool. It's just it sticks and it hurts And like you said, yeah, it's just the evolution of the deck is interesting. It's almost like it's gone full circle We started back, you know going back to Baltimore last year. I mean, it's cool to see like how Henry can just tool this deck. He has such a deep understanding of this deck Something we don't really see all that often where a player has just kind of made Knows how his bread is buttered knows how to get the most out of this archetype and knows how to transform it or Shift it from different types to different types, you know moving away from devolution moving like as we have a Format where everything's being one shoddy or more aggressive. He's building Guard of order be more aggressive Yeah, exactly. We don't need we don't yeah, I don't know. I It's so crazy to me that one player has had this much impact continuously And in such a short amount of time but I Mean if you didn't believe that Henry Chow was probably the most impactful player in the last year I think he's starting off the season right where he left off last year and We see this, you know come coming and coming from this weekend for sure I think that the most exciting thing will be to see what Henry does post rotation this year Yeah When this card when this card is finally gone when Gardevoir is no longer legal to play in the standard format What will Henry Chow play and I think that that'll be a pretty interesting question to bring back up when that time comes For sure, but I mean there's a lot of time between now and then like he can literally Get his world's invite like four or five times, you know before before then So yeah, we could definitely could see it happen again this coming weekend potentially Yeah so again Shoutouts to a bonnet as well was a very strong player in the latter half of last season has been a longtime testing partner with Henry Chow and Believe this is his first regional win So really? Yeah, very cool. You know where he's from. I don't really bond lives in the Washington area He's another one village guys. I know he also plays with Liam Halliburton as part of their testing group as well. Yeah, shout out to Caleb. There's a North Carolina player just so yeah Yeah, very cool guy very nice player I've judged him a couple times so it's cool to see him do well So we've got next up another terror box list to look at so, you know It I think that this is actually the same 60 that Caleb Rodgers in and I believe also roll ready We're playing so in contrast to Mesa's list, which featured that Pidgeot often to include cards to try to shore up other matchups like Charizard which can actually be relatively difficult for this deck if it's able to get off The ground and kind of took a what I've like slimmed down the energy ever so slightly like we've seen this grass count But believe started at five in the deck when it first hit the scene in Japan and now paired all the way down to three Again, like we mentioned with Mesa's list only one teal mask ogre pond in here But featuring iron leaves as opposed to that second teal mask ogre pond so you still have a way to potentially one shot a Charizard because you could Crispin a grass and another energy into play teal dance that other grass into play attach the third energy and then Wrapper veneer to get your iron leaves in the active to prism edge the Charizard if need be but otherwise once again this is just the Water ogre poncho, I'm gonna torrential pump KO all these evolving Pokemon and not let them play the game Instead of the jamming tower We do see the third copy of the area zero under depths keeping that bench as wide as possible as frequently as possible And I believe Mase had this as well But we do see Briar returning as a feature in these decks to kind of cheat those prizes where we need to to close out games You know otherwise Like kind of very similar to what we've seen Since we just talked about Mesa's list not gonna spend a ton of time talking about this one some I guess notable things We do see the air balloon. I guess maybe because we don't have the Pidgeot to find the turtle as consistently So this one really like there's a lot of Maractus hate in this list or just you know counter catcher hate we've got the turtle we've got the iron leaves got the air balloon and I Think that is pretty notable relatively interesting to see But yeah, I think interesting to see you're running air balloon over switch I'd say But it makes sense like you everyone just is a better thing early game. You find it. Absolutely It stays in play No hand disruption. It was an interesting thing compared to Mesa's list. No, I know so that was one thing I noticed But yeah, other than that, you know, we can move on Yeah, and then so last deck I wanted to talk about for the top cut of this event was Frank Luciano's Charizard and Just pulling it up Nothing crazy here Just wanted to demonstrate that Charizard is continuing to see success with a list similar to ones that we would have seen from like oiven From top cut at world. So we still have full drag or Charizard Pidgeot dusk. Noir. She you still present We have Clefa opting to play Tatsugiri as opposed to the potential Pichu that we had seen rising up in prominence But max belt still the included a spec and the rest of this is relatively vanilla Charizard lists at its core. I think Jacques kind of stands out to me. That's not a card that you necessarily see all the time But also doesn't fully surprise me You know fits a similar build of what you would have seen when it was seeing play in a deck like Dragapult back early post rotation journey together format So just keeping things consistent trying to set everything up on time I think that I guess the one notable trend in these Charizard decks is we've Continued to include TM Evo and to Charmeleon and doing to fit that in we've slimmed down rare candy from four to three And I don't expect that to change really anytime soon but At the end of the day, it's just kind of been the tarot box and guard of war show this weekend more or less Yeah, so it'll be interesting and we can get into it right now Just what do you think coming out of these two regionals? We've looked at the metas We looked at like tarot box having kind of a weekend if we didn't win it and it got pretty close at a couple times This past weekend. So what decks are you looking at coming out and saying? All right, if I'm going to Pittsburgh what's on my radar? What are people playing? And then what am I? wanting to play to either counter that or Try to win the tournament if you want to say not necessarily counter that but like what do you think will be in a good position moving forward So I think we'll see a big uptick in tarot box. I Actually wouldn't be surprised to see it be like a top four deck going into this weekend and to kind of counter that I think Raging bolt kind of just fine into the deck It's not good. It's not bad It's kind of 50-50 back and forth because bolt can and one-hit KO the Pikachu's as long as it's playing slitherwing And then water ogre prance not really super effective into the deck So it becomes just kind of a terapagos and Clefairy versus raging bolt Show at the end of the day With really the briar kind of being the linchpin to push terror box over the line in a lot of instances So maybe it is actually worse than what I first said as I've kind of reasoned my way through it But I would definitely expect that there to be an uptick in terror box And with that being said, I think that that means that if you are choosing to play an evolving deck Regardless of what it is, you know, whether it's guard of war drag up hold grim snarl. I Think you've got a play shame in this weekend. I Think that there's just really if you want to be successful I do not think there's an excuse not to include shaman in your deck It's a one card slot in turns this terror box matchup from something that can really just get off the rails out of control Super quickly and just be something that you can't handle to something that your opponents basically doing nothing while you set up And you're totally fine You know They're taking one prize at a time as opposed to two is a really big deal and something that really hinders the progress of that deck in particular for sure Yeah, I think that's a good point. We don't really ask that question. But yeah playing shaman this weekend really I think it's If there ever was a good weekend to play it, it would be this weekend, right? Well, it goes hand in hand. How how likely should I or how much is shaman a good play for this weekend? It's a spectrum. So this is probably closer to the end of this I mean, yeah, you know I think Frankfurt was like all the way over to the right if you played it you had a huge advantage now It's gonna come down a little bit because it's more known, you know, yes and no so and so I had brought shaman up in particular because I do expect the percentage of Tara box to go up this weekend. I Think that it's gonna be you know, it was Eighth place on the metagraphic in Frankfurt and Relatively low on the totem pole as far as popularity was concerned in Monterey and had such a breakout performance in the way that It did I think that it's gonna be a top four deck in terms of popularity Mmm for might be generous because I do think the top four would still be draggable Gardevoir gold and go raging bolt But I would not at all be surprised to see Tara box be number five to going into this weekend Hmm That being said, I think that in response to that if people are smart, they'll put their gold and go decks away I think that gold and go Had a lot of hype coming out of worlds. There were a lot of interesting lists that people played It was the most popular deck of world So if all these players think that it's really good it's obviously got to be a really good deck right but you need to keep in mind metas evolve things change and What was good at a previous tournament doesn't necessarily mean that it's gonna be the best at going into this other event as well and So I think Tara box goes up gold and go goes down Which potentially then raises the question should Tara box go up if gold and goes going down when that's one of kind of your marquee prized matchups going into the weekend and the answer still maybe like you still have water ogre pawn if people aren't playing shaman you're Good into the dragon pulse. You're good into the guard of wars potentially But I do also think that we're gonna see Drag up all continue to be the most popular deck in the room, you know People aren't gonna put it away They like the amount of agency that they feel it gives them you have the ability to see a lot of cards with recon directive Dragapult is really good at playing an extended best of one which can be a lot of what happens in these plus one turn 50 minute time periods like you have more than enough time to finish one solid game of Swiss but finishing three Even two in a lot of cases with a dragapult deck sitting on either side of the board is gonna be pretty difficult So I think if you've got your game plan down and you feel that you can handle that one single game Dragapult might be just be the way to go for you Cool yeah, I think that makes sense It's really just interesting though like now that you said, okay dragapult might be the pick for the weekend But we looked at it Garty has a good dragapult matchup. Absolutely argue. Otherwise If I'm playing guard if I'm playing dragapult, am I afraid of Garty like it just won the last two weekends I don't think that decks going anywhere you know, realistically. So, is there anything I can do to maybe counter Guardi or, you know, do I, if you can't beat him, join him? Should I play Guardi instead? Like, I mean, I think to maybe answer my own question, I don't think you can pick up Guardi last minute and expect to do well. I mean, you look at the players that have been winning with Guardi, they know the lines in and out. I mean, if you've put enough effort in, I think stuff becomes a lot clearer. You can get there, but definitely not a deck to switch to last minute. Definitely not like a, you know, Golden Go or Jolting Box kind of level of pathing. It's a little bit advanced. And you have to like, really make some gutsy calls and decisions during games to kind of claw your way back a lot of times. Sure. I don't know. I think it's, how do you beat Guardi? Like, if you're Dragapult, do you just take the loss? Or is there something you can do? No, I mean, we've seen like Dusknoir is a solid answer as far as you force the Gardevoir player to take prizes using Dusknoir and Duskclops so that they can't necessarily countercatcher for the limited number of countercatcher that they play. If you opt to play Shaymin, you can actually protect your benched Dracloaks from Screamtail. It gets a little messy when you try to include all of these things together. The Shaymin, I would expect to see more prominently featured in like a straight Polt list. Or if somebody opts to pick up something like Fabian's Dragapult Blaziken deck, then it could fit in there. Or it could show you the kind of framework for why it could also potentially work in Dragapult Dusknoir. But, you know, Justin Neudorf played against multiple Gardevoir throughout his Worlds run. Tord played against multiple Gardevoir throughout his Frankfurt run. You know, these players brought Dragapult right to the edge of winning these events. And yes, ultimately lost to Gardevoir in both cases. But that matchup feels in a lot of ways like a lot of Dragapult Dusknoir's matchups. They come down to kind of the coin flip. Like, how well are you able to set up under my Badoo lock? And if the answer is well, then the Gardevoir deck is going to run away with it. There's nothing you can do about it. But yeah, I think that, you know, if you go back and watch Worlds in particular, like Riley was pretty fortunate with how he drew against Justin. And otherwise, I think Justin put on a pretty good show of how to play that matchup from the Dragapult side. And was almost in a position to close out the first game. The second game was a little bit different. But the first game was pretty close and was just demonstrates the fact that even though it might seem very unfavorable on paper, just in terms of Clefairy plus Bravery Charm, and oh no, like what do I do in this situation? Your opponent still has to get there, right? Like if you're doing the Badoo loops and your opponent isn't drawing into Research plus Raw Energy cards, they're not going to be able to Psychic Embrace. If they're not drawing into Energy plus TM Evo, naturally, they're not going to be able to get the Curlias online. And you could potentially get yourself, especially if you have one of these faster decks like what Tord played, with their Rare Candies getting into like kind of into the mix, you could get a really big, aggressive Dragapult plus Dusknoir combination set up to where you just KO everything and your opponent is fully boardwiped. And I think Dragapult is something that is able to play into Gardevoir from ahead a lot better than other decks can. But you know, Tarabox might also be able to kind of fit that same bill, and that's why we've seen it see success. So I wouldn't be surprised to see Gardevoir do well, but I do think that it may have to adapt ever so slightly and again wouldn't be fully surprised to see Henry show up with a deck that just has, you know, a shame in inclusion alone kind of flips the Tarabox matchup for Gardevoir in particular. Yeah, I'd agree with that. Yeah. Is there any rogue decks you should be on the look for? We talked about Tarabox. Do you think Conkledore is worth any of your time or effort coming into this tournament? I haven't played zero games with that deck. I cannot in good conscience recommend it to anybody. I was impressed with how well it did, but I would... I don't know. It's hard to say that it was a fluke when there were several of them that did well. Like if there was just a kind of a one-off thing like the Greninja deck that made asymmetrical cut in Frankfurt, that might be a different story. But maybe it is still relatively well positioned. But then it kind of goes back to my expectation is that Gul'dan goes on at the decline right now, and if that matchup is on its way out, Conkledore's good matchups are also on their way out. So Gardevoir's going up, you're in a rough spot. Tarabox going up isn't the worst thing in the world, but also potentially you just get run off the board by Water Ogre Pond, and like you don't really have an answer to that, right? And it just becomes a lot more difficult. But if a quote-unquote rogue deck was going to do well, Conkledore's probably my top pick at this point. I'm gonna buy into the hype train. I'm gonna full send it on the rogue deck side of things. As far as other things, I still... I'm gonna hold fast. I think that Grimmsnarl is better than people are giving it credit for. I think that Mike put on a pretty good showing last weekend and was one game away from making top cut. I wouldn't be surprised to see Grimmsnarl make it into cut this weekend as well. It may not win the whole event, but if you play against a bunch of Gardevoir's in a row, who knows? Yeah, it's almost kind of a rock-paper-scissors meta, it feels like, with, you know, declining of people trying to figure out how to beat Goldengoat. And so other decks rise up, and then those decks don't necessarily have a good Gardevoir matchup. So that rises back up, and then Goldengoat has a pretty good Gardevoir matchup, so that can come back. So it's just like, I think it's interesting to see how the hype cycles go. You know, at this point, if you're debating whether you should switch your deck off and play something else, it might be a little late, I had to say. Oh, absolutely. If you're more comfortable with... Yeah, if you've been playing Goldengoat for the last three months, and you're saying, okay, it didn't do really well the last two regionals, actually, I need to switch. That might not really be worth your time. I mean, Goldengoat's still good. Like, there's still a lot of matchups where it can be, you know, it's linear, but it's hard to beat. And I think you can still expect to do fairly well with it. I think we'll still see some, you know, we'll still see a decent chunk in day two, and a couple vying for the win. And it could take the tournament down. And so just last thing for this episode, we've got some predictions going into this weekend in Pittsburgh. And Jon, why don't you go ahead and hit us with the first one we got? Okay, so we've seen Goldengoat have a lot of hype going into regionals, but didn't necessarily perform the best in Frankfurt and in Monterey. So my question is, what is the highest placement for Goldengoat this weekend in Pittsburgh? Okay, and I think that I'll give them... I know you think more highly of this deck than I do. So I think that you're going to probably say top eight or higher. I do think, I mean, it could get there, like it obviously has the chance to, but I'm going to say top 16. And I was actually teetering on going down to top 32, but I'll stick with top 16 on it. I mean, I could see a world where it falls to top 32. And like, yeah, it's very linear. If you have a game plan for it, and you can execute that game plan, you can probably beat it. That being said, I think it still has a lot of raw power going for it. My initial gut reaction is top eight. And I'm going to probably stick with that. And if I get punished, I get punished. But yeah, I mean, we could see an innovation on Goldengoat. I don't think it's entirely as linear. We saw the Joltik innovation coming into Worlds. We could see a riff on that. Somebody finds a new way to attack with different things, like with Blaziken or with something crazy like that. You never know. All right. What's the... Kind of going against Goldengoat, that's a proven meta deck. Aaron had a pet deck that he wanted to talk about. And the next question is, what is the highest placement for Conkeldurr? Kind of new meta... Not new deck. It's been around for a little bit, but got some new tools and did pretty well in Frankfurt with one in top 16, right? So you think it'll be able to improve, or where do you think it'll be? Well, before I sing this deck's potential praises, I want to hear your take on this one. Okay. I don't know. I think it's kind of a fluke. I mean, it's really good into Goldengoat. But like we said, if we don't think a Goldengoat is going to make... I mean, I think it just has a really tough time against Dusknoir, Dragapult, Dusknoir rather, and Gardevoir. And I don't think it'll really... I think I'm going to look at top 64. I don't see it getting up to those heights again. I mean, that's honestly better than what I thought you were going to say. I thought you were going to tell me the deck wouldn't even make Day 2. I legitimately thought you were going to say top 512. I think it's good enough to make Day 2. If you find the right matchups Day 1, and you have a good run... I mean, you can go 7-1. If you hit 6 Dragapults... Or 6... Sorry. If you hit a straight Pult and all the other stuff and can kind of piece it together, I think you can... It's really hard to deal with. But yeah, the moment it hits a Gardevoir, it kind of just folds. Yeah, that's totally fair. I do think that it overperformed this weekend in particular. But I do think that this also gives people the framework to work with that they may not have seen previously. And so I think we will see a few people play this deck. I would be very hesitant to put it at top 16 again, so I think I'm going to go with top 32. Okay. And just be a step above you. I think somebody will go decently. Somebody's going to earn some money with Conkeldurr this weekend, is my take on it. Okay. And then, to close things out, the final prediction for the show is kind of an old standby. Just pick a player to do well this weekend. And so, how to win this prediction would just be who's chosen player places higher during the event. Yeah. Before we do this, I'm going to eliminate Henry Chow. I don't feel like it's a competitive thing to bet that or to guess him anymore. Yeah. I think neither one of us has that luxury of just hitting the easy button. So... Sure. Totally fair. Totally fair. I mean, I wasn't going to pick Henry anyway. I'm going to saddle my horse with a good friend of mine. I'm going to go with Hunter Butler, who I think has been doing a decent amount of preparation for this event. Didn't play in Monterey last weekend, but still has been keeping an eye on things. And I think that he's ready. I think it's been a little bit since he's won a regional. He's had a couple of decent runs in the past couple of years, but he's looking to go a little bit deeper. Maybe get back onto that top eight stage and take everything all the way down. So you picked a fun old head. I'm going to pick a fun old head of my own. One player I saw do well was Bradley Curcio. He had a deep run in Merida, I believe. Okay. And so I'm hype. I'm excited. That's a red name that I haven't seen in a long time, and it's cool to see him back on the scene. I'm going to put him... Assuming he goes to pit, I don't know if he is or not. You know, that's kind of the risky run. I picked Hunter knowing he's playing this weekend. Yeah. Well, I don't know. By all means. Yeah. I guess, can I have a backup then if I don't know? Or no. No, you got it. You got to go all in on this. You got to say it with your chest, John. Brad, please show to pit. If you're not there, I'm going to be kind of sad, but you know, that's how life goes. He's played in a few other events too. I know I saw him at NAIC. He was in Atlanta. He's been around a little bit the last year, so I wouldn't be totally surprised to see him show up. But yeah, I think that more or less closes everything out. Did you have any final thoughts on Pittsburgh before you head up there to judge this weekend? I guess down for you. No, it's up. It's up. It is up. It is up. Yeah, yeah. Kind of west up a little bit. No, I don't think I do. I think I'm excited to see... For me, I have, from a judging perspective, it'll be interesting to see how the organizer takes the lessons that it learns from last season and applies it and see how we go into this tournament with the new time rules and see how that flows with end of round with just kind of getting all that stuff. And there's been talks about how do we handle gentlemen's agreements. So I don't want to go into all the different talks we've had, but just there's a lot of stuff flying around. It's a lot of anticipation on the judging side as much as the player side. We're trying to figure out how to be the best judges we can possibly be. So please provide, I guess, PSA, be courteous to your judges. We'll try to be the same to you. We're all kind of here to play Pokemon and ensure that everybody's having a good time. And that works a lot better whenever everyone's working towards that goal. But I'm excited. I will be getting in pretty late Friday and then just going Saturday, Sunday, and then flying back early Monday. So not a whole lot of time to really do anything, but judge Pokemon. I burned through a lot of my PTO for NAIC Worlds and then Montreal a couple weeks ago. So I'm definitely having to hustle going in and out of tournaments for the last few months of the year. But yeah, it'll be excited to see how it all shakes out, man. How about you? Cool. Anything? Any last thoughts? If you're playing an evolving deck, include Shaymin. If you're not playing an evolving deck, have a plan for playing against Gardevoir. You just know that you will probably have to beat a Gardevoir on your way to win this tournament. Other than that, just stick with... I know we've talked about, hey, maybe this deck isn't the best. Maybe this deck's declining. Stick with what you've been playing. I know we already kind of gave that sentiment earlier in the episode. But if you've put enough time into something and you fully understand how it works against all these different matchups, don't let any of these results from the last week really shake you. Maybe they could influence whether or not you choose to include a couple of tech cards and you could kind of vary your list ever so slightly here and there. But stick with what you know. Just keep a strong mental game and, you know, have fun. at the end of the day. It's kind of the most important thing, the reason you go to the event. Obviously, the cash prizing is cool. Championship points, world's invitations are really cool. But, you know, if you're doing this, it is a hobby at the end of the day. Go out there and have the best time that you can. And I will be watching everything from the sidelines. Yep. And we'll talk about it all next week. And hopefully see you back here on the Battle Frontier.