Episode 2-4: The Unexpected Path to the Expected Outcome

Hello, and welcome back to the Battle Frontier podcast, where we aim to help you level up in your journey as a competitive Pokemon TCG player. I'm Aaron Curry. Here with me as always is my co-host, Jon Orgel. And we've had our first US Regional this past weekend. So we're going to be looking at the results of that this episode, along with getting a recap from Jon on how his experience went as a judge, and maybe his perspective on how some of the new rules or updates to the system year-to-year impacted that event, now that he's had the chance to experience it in person. And so I think that we should just go ahead and jump into things. Jon, how was your time at Pittsburgh last weekend? Hey, Aaron. Thanks. Yeah, yeah, Pittsburgh was actually, it felt pretty good for the first event of the year. We had a kind of rough start, I'd say. There was a huge crush at the security line that delayed the tournament close to 45 minutes from the actual, like from the scheduled start time, it was scheduled to start at 830. And we didn't start round one until 915. So that was rough. And then we had a little bit of slowdowns in the first couple rounds. But once we got rolling, man, we made up a lot of time. And we got out of there by like 8, 830 on Saturday. So I mean, that's not anything fantastic. But Christopher Schumanski put it in perspective that we finished, I think, like an hour earlier than how they finished Frankfurt or something like that. And it was like, yeah, so. And then, yeah, it was just a good experience for me. I was an assistant head judge for this event. So I had a team of eight judges under me, are working with me. And four of them were first time regionals judges. So and then a couple like I had, the rest were more experienced, one worked three, and then the other three were very seasoned, like experienced regionals judges. So there was a decent amount of like help from the more experienced judges that could rely on them to help kind of mentor. But the first few rounds were kind of rough, especially for the newer judges. You know, if you've never done a regionals before, especially as a judge, there's a lot to learn, like the whole penalty system that they implement with Arcanine. If you're not familiar, like no one uses that at their local league. So you have to like learn that on the fly. You have to learn kind of how to utilize the chain of command with if you have anything above a warning, you have to run it by the assistant head judge. And if it's a game loss, it has to be run by the head judge. So all this stuff, like if you've never judged a regionals, it just takes a lot to learn. And then just, you know, with a lot of these judges, it was their first time going to a larger event. They've read the rulebook, but they don't always have like the best knowledge of it. I had a couple situations come up where, you know, there would be like a nuanced, like, oh, they didn't put their prize cards out and they've done one to two deck searches. And like, that's in the penalty guidelines, but they didn't know exactly where it was. And they didn't know what the penalty was. They just thought it was like a game loss that we weren't able to fix the game state because of that. And there would just be a game loss. And it's like, no, let's just, you know, I'm going to tell you the answer now, but we can look it up later. And I showed them, like, I put it in the group discord channel. Like if it's one to two deck searches, it's just a double prize card penalty and stuff like that, where we just had to do some like re-education, but it was good. I think overall, like the first few rounds, like I said, were a little more challenging. And then I was able to give them feedback and they worked on the feedback. And by the end of the event, I mean, it helped that we weren't necessarily in the thick of like the top tables, to be honest, we were at the middle to bottom for the second half of the event. And so that's, you know, a little less stressful than tables one through 400. We were at 400 through 800. So it's, you know, it is what it is. But they performed admirably considering that, you know, a lot of them were, it was their first time. And then the best part, I had a great time on Sunday, which doesn't always happen. I was an assistant head judge for the League Cup that occurred. And the people I worked with for that, I was very happy to be working with the other assistant head judges and the head judge for it. And that's where I think the whole, we might talk about it real quick, but the plus one and then 10 minute clock, paired with online match reporting that they've been doing at the cups. The round turnover time was insane. Like, it was so fast. Like, there was times where time would get called. And we would have the new round, like pairings posted before those 10 minutes were up before the round, like I had a round where if like my, I looked down and Christopher, or I think it was Karin was announcing it, another Arcanine employee, but she was saying, you know, pairings for the next round are up. And I looked down, I watch, and it hasn't even been 10 minutes since the end of the previous round. And I'm just like, Oh, dang, we're flying. Like, this is, this is epic. And we had like, the event capped, like we were, it was a full event. It was 128 masters. And I think half of that 64, 64 juniors and seniors. So we had over 200 players playing in this thing. My math doesn't work there. 180, whatever. So, I mean, that, that tells me like, that's, that's the future. As far as like event turnover and all that stuff. Like if we move on to pairing online only and match reporting online, and that's where we can go with this game. So that was very exciting and encouraging. I don't know, I didn't look at the tie rate. I was just real quick before we move off of that. Do you think from what you had seen in the main event on Saturday, was that experience similar throughout the day there? Or like, I guess my question is, do you think, because when people are participating in like the proper full format of the regional, they're more likely to be, you know, more cutthroat. You're more likely to have a judge call occur over the course of a game as somebody's, maybe the pressure gets to somebody to make a mistake or, you know, a judge has to step in and get involved one reason or another. You've also got the random deck checks that get involved. Do you think that any sort of delays that happen in the tournament are more so as a result of added time because of judge calls that cause it to go over that 10 minute timer? Or were most of the rounds still finishing within that allotted time? I think earlier on, like in rounds, I think in round two, I can speak personally, there was a penalty that my unfortunately was part of with my group that like ran over 20 minutes into overtime. And I was that was rough. Yeah. And there's just, there's no good excuse for that one. So to all those that, you know, grumbled and complained around to, I'm sorry. You know, it is what it is. But it's tough. Like it's the first one of the season. There's a lot of stuff, a lot of new judges, a lot of tough situations to work through. It doesn't justify that that happening. But yeah, I think earlier on, that was probably the case that the tempo and the pace of the tournament was being dictated by those longer calls. Um, but I think as it progressed, and as like, the newer judges became more experienced, and like deck check, figured stuff out faster. I didn't really hear any problems as much at least. Truth be told, like, I don't know, maybe I'm not as preoccupied with it as a assistant head judges as I would be if I was a player. Because you're more affected, I think, by downtime as a player than as a judge. Like, as a judge, I always have another, pretty much always have another table I can judge. And I only really think about it when it's been like really dragging, you know, when I've been sitting there for 20-25 minutes. So I don't feel like I felt that like most of my time, once my last table was cleared on my section, it would be like five to 10 minutes. Until the next round started, which I think is pretty fair. I was having a hard time, like, really, because a lot of times as judges, you'll, whenever you're cleared your section, you would all sit down at one table and kind of have a little debrief after each round, or talk about, like a ruling that you dealt with, or just a point of emphasis that you want to hit going into the next round. And I would literally like be able to talk like about one talking point. And we'd go straight into the next round. Okay, like, we'd get done talking. And then players would be like, Hey, that's my seat. I need to sit there. Because the next round was already up. So I don't know, I don't think it ever got to the... It's hard to say. I mean, I think I might not be the best person to speak to that. But I felt like as the tournament went on, and I think that's probably shown in the statistics, as the tournament went on, the round turnover time was much improved from where it started. And I would say it felt a little faster than it has at previous other regionals I've worked. So, okay, all that is a long winded answer to say, yes, maybe. So from the staff perspective, you think? Yeah. So it's weird, because you do have the mix still, like you still do play when you have the opportunity to. What is your perspective of the new time rules in particular, that they are a good thing or a bad thing as far as... I don't know, I guess it depends on what perspective you want to look at it. But I guess we'll take the lens of either tournament integrity, or actually, is it accomplishing the goal of expediting the tournament? Like both of those things. Yeah, I will say like, as a player, it takes a lot of getting used to. I don't know if I would say that I'm a huge fan of them as a player. I always want to play more Pokemon. And the plus one, 10 minutes kind of cuts into that, unfortunately. And there's no really easy way to say that. You know, you're playing essentially one full turn less of Pokemon if it goes to time. So that's not fun. And it was impactful. Like there were, I don't know if the tirade was any higher. I didn't look at that. We'll take a look at that in a minute. I pulled it up if you want to just tackle it here. This week, it was actually surprisingly low. It was only 15% for the weekend, which if you compare that to last week, that's about equal to what it was in Frankfurt. And then Monterey is really the standout being at 19%, which is definitely higher than average, but still has the excuse. It kind of fits in line with what they had down there for Monterey for last season, where you still have a lot more of the Mexican player base that maybe potentially is not used to playing in a best of three format. Sure. And it kind of eats into it that way. Or, you know, maybe they had other logistical issues. And then it becomes a matter of like, how is that? Like the turnover time and the extended time between rounds? How much is that being impacted by different judge calls and bubble? Like we talked about before. And then our ties resulting as well from these player errors. So it's kind of like this confounding factor situation. It's hard to tell. Is it because of the rules? Or is it because of the player base? Or is it kind of like a mixture of the two things? It's probably a little bit of a little bit of B, right? Yeah. I mean, it's definitely an adjustment. Like, no, no matter what, as a player, you have to like, kind of change up how you're playing. Sure. And focus more on time and getting your matches in if you can. Or I mean, if you want to approach it from the less. I hesitate to bring this up, but like, yeah, winning game one and then not having game two finish is a viable win strat. It's also a very real possibilities with a number of decks in the current format. Right? Yeah. I mean, and there's a lot of slow decks that seek to methodically pick your opponent's board apart or do a lot of different actions. That's kind of the reality of it. It might change with megas, you know, if we end up like in a faster meta. Sure. It might hopefully isn't as relevant. But right now, yeah, it can be. I would be interesting to see if that statistic change, if there's a way to look at that, you know, to see how many games completed one zero versus how many were. Two, two or two, one. Okay. Or yeah, like that or like. Yeah, I think that's what I'm saying. But I don't know. I mean, that's probably some like data that TPCI is tracking, assuming that everyone's filling out their match slips appropriately. I know that I've definitely been guilty of not doing it correctly in the past and just going out with like a blank game record, but a win on a match slip or not indicating winner loss on any game and then like, you know, signing that I lost the match too. So regardless, like I can definitely go a little bit, go both ways on that front as well. I think. Like you said, it's an adjustment. I think that I'm going to have my first opportunity to potentially experience the time rules. I'll be at not in a best of three format this upcoming weekend at a local league. challenge, but I am hesitant to go into, I think the big thing, especially in best of three that people are going to have to get used to is scooping and being comfortable with identifying the position where it is appropriate to do so. And that it can be difficult, especially with some of these decks like Dragapult, like Gardevoir, like Grimmsnarl, like those three in particular stand out as decks that can come back from losing board states. But maybe it just doesn't work out and you Iono your opponent into the boss and you just wasted 10 minutes that you didn't need to. And so it's it's it gets really tough. Like you have to weigh those options. And that all just comes down from repetition. So again, just making sure that you get the practice and that you need with the deck to make sure that you can identify these positions appropriately as they arise. Yeah, I think that helps a lot is having that depth, deck knowledge and matchup knowledge going into the tournaments. If you're a player that doesn't play much, it can be really hard to identify those scenarios for sure. But I think we've talked enough about well, one other thing I want to say I was able to stream judge in top eight on Sunday, so I was cool. Yeah, I don't always look for opportunities for that. But I was thankful that I was provided one. So that was good. I got to work with CJ Rodriguez, who I never, I don't think I've ever stream judged with her if I had. I don't remember, but she was fantastic. And like somebody I would love to stream judge with again, at some point, she, I love taking notes. And she's like even more in depth about note taking than I was. And I'm like, this is awesome. Like, just being able to rewind a game state based off of what you write down or, like, you know, that kind of stuff. So that was cool. So that was great. Yeah, it was a great weekend, I got really decent feedback from the judges that I worked with, from those that were under my position, if you want to go that way of saying it, and those that were over my position. So I'm looking forward to, I'll be going to Milwaukee in a couple weeks. So and I'll be back at it again. So, you know, it'll be interesting, at least I won't have like another six month period between being in that a Shea role. Like I was in San Antonio last year when that was in, I think, January. So this was like the first time in eight months that I had that. So there was a like, a lag or a relearning process. So hopefully, the next time I do an AHA role, it won't be as stressful for that. So that's good. How about you? And I you didn't you weren't at Pittsburgh, but did you do anything Pokemon related or do anything fun? I mean, we did some fun stuff. So my son's birthday was last weekend. And it was kind of just like an all him weekend, all birthday, like what I wanted to do. So we went out. And like he went and wanted to for sure, determined that one of the activities we went to the melting pot on Friday night, because he just loves the idea of fondue, which I mean, what kid doesn't like dipping? How do you? Had he gone there before? Yeah, he's been there before. Like, we've probably gone the past. I don't know, like three years, we've gone like once a year for insert some occasion throughout the year. Sure. Because the price tag is definitely pretty steep for what you get. But it's like the experience of it. All right. And kids love dipping food in cheese and or chocolate. So it was a good time. And then Saturday, I took him he had a pitching lesson that morning that was already pre scheduled. So we had to go ahead and go do that. And then from there, we went and did an escape room with him, myself, my wife, he wanted to bring a friend. But unfortunately, the friend that he specifically wanted to invite is like, this is my best friend. He's the one that has to come do this with me. He was out of town last weekend. So he's actually coming over and staying with us this coming weekend instead. So as maybe we'll do something there. But instead, we went did an escape room, we got out with, I don't know, 1012 minutes to spare. It was a pretty, pretty neat theme of if you're ever in the like, East Orlando area near UCF. I think the establishment is called the escape game or something like that. And the whole theme was you're at granny's house, and you have to like redecorate things from fall to winter as things are preparing for Christmas. And they can go through a series of puzzles where you're out on like the front lawn to then get access to actually going into the house. And then you have to do a series of tasks inside the house to ultimately like solve everything and be able to get out. Which sounds fun. It was pretty, pretty neat. You know, horror, right, right. It's violent. It's definitely more family friendly. Yeah, they've got one I want to go back and do at some point where it's lit. They said the entire room is pitch black. And you have to do most of the tasks, at least initially, entirely by feel. And I think that that sounds like a very interesting experience. Maybe if there's a Florida regionals this year, or something like that, we'll have to do an escape room for the podcast or something. That'd be sick. That would be sick. I absolutely love doing them. Like we I know a couple years ago at any I see when my wife is somewhere that we went out and did one in downtown New Orleans as well. So definitely a fun activity. And then on Sunday, when like went bowling with the family, like literally just did like activity after activity after activity. And it was like just in a packed weekend. So in the in through all of that also fitting in being able to watch as much of port or not Portland Wow, as much of Pittsburgh as I was able to. And it was it seemed like a pretty good stream. I unfortunately, I felt like we had too many guard of our verse Dragapult matchups on stream for my taste. Because that matchup is not very interesting from a viewer perspective. But I do understand that those are the two primary archetypes that a lot of top players like to bring and the top players are the ones that typically get featured unless an off the wall deck is doing extremely well, like mid late into the day. And then that'll get popped up there instead. But is what it is. There were still some interesting things that popped up from that tournament. And we will talk about those in just a little bit. Unfortunately, I also have to announce that I have officially missed wave one of LA IC registration because I totally forgot that it was happening this evening. Fingers crossed that tomorrow morning goes a little bit better. And I'll have an update next week for whether or not I was successful, even though this will not be posted until after that has already happened. Right? You got to set an alarm or something or like, well, I mean, I'll be up already. Like I'll be about ready for but yeah, but you gotta like, for sure. Yeah, put a reminder. For sure. I was like, Oh, wait, did that happen? And then I went back and looked at it. So unfortunately, it's sold out. I don't know how many slots are gonna have tomorrow for date for wave two, but we'll have to see. Might be like close to 50. I don't know. 50%. Yeah. And to follow in that I haven't heard anything about LA I see from a judging perspective yet. So no rejection letter. But yeah, definitely no acceptance letter for judging. So you know, um, I'll let you guys know if I hear anything, but for now, nope. But that's okay. Yeah. And I think that that more or less catches the two of us up on what we were up to this past weekend. So before we get into these Pittsburgh results, let's go ahead and jump over to Blaine's quiz show. Alright, so welcome to Blaine's quiz show. This is the weekly quiz segment of this show. We all love it. I think it's become kind of a thing I look forward to every week. And where I try to stump Aaron with some multiple choice questions. There's some rules, you're going to be given three multiple choice questions. If you are truly stumped, you will have one hint you can use for any time or you can use it. Why did I need to change this the the language like this was you will fix your typos at some point. Yeah, I mean, they're part of the show. It adds to the charm and I yeah, for sure. And if you but if you use all answer all three questions without the hint, you will be awarded a bonus point. All right, this week's category. And it's not just a cool letter. It is a beloved character in the Pokemon franchise. And also the main theme of the deck that won at Pittsburgh. So I figured what better week to do and themed round of trivia. You ready, Aaron? I sure am. All right. The first question, fill in the blank of ends full name. Natural blank, Gropius. Is it regalus, Concordia, amicus, or harmonia? So not hint related, but I want to know are these all actual Latin terms. I did use Google Translate to translate English words into Latin. Okay, just to just to like fill out the category. I will say that. So I did not take Latin. Do you want any point? No, I'm not going to use the hint yet. I'm hoping that something harder will come up. Because I think I've got it narrowed down to like, two of them. And those are either regalus or harmonia. And the idea in leaning to those is regalus is like gets us wanted to set and up is like this king of the world or whatever. I think if I remember black and white correctly, that's what was happening. And then harmonia is like and wants to be friends with all the Pokemon and that's why he doesn't actually ever catch any of his Pokemon. He just befriends them in the wild and they love him so much. They listen to him. And again, that's best of my memory. I think that that is how that actually happened. And the second one sounds then the question is like did gets his name him? Or is that what he named himself? And I have no idea how that works. So I don't know which one to go with. So I'm just going to coin flip on. I'm gonna go with harmonia. Okay, well, I like your lines of reasoning, and is considered the king of team plasma. So that was good. Concordia was his. I don't think they call him sister, but like his companion in his home. Land or whatever. And then the correct answer, though, was actually harmonia. You were correct. Nice. And yes, it was entirely a ploy by gets us to, I guess the plot was that he chose harmonia because yeah, it would seem like and was freeing all the Pokemon of the world as part of plasmas plan or something. Wait, are any gets us actually related? I think gets us is ends like foster parent or like, not adoptive parent. I think that's the logic of that. Okay. Let me know if I'm wrong in the comments. I had somebody tell me that I did my trivia the last time. I don't think it was 100% correct, but it was like, correct enough that it was still a correct answer. But I don't know. It's just anyway. I'm not gonna go back and fix it because whatever you answered was still wrong. Fine. Fine. The answer. The right answer was still there, I think. But anyway, next question. I'm getting off topic. Sure. What Pokemon does and risk his life to save from Team Plasma and the black and white anime? Is it watch hog, Haxorus, Braviary or sawsbuck? I'm going to use my hand here because I have no idea. Okay. Um, let's see. It I think they're all of all Pokemon. So that's not a good. It is either. Watch hog or Braviary. Okay. So I know Team Plasma uses what like there was a team plasma watch hog card. I don't think there was a team plasma Braviary like these are all gen five Pokemon to begin with. Right? They're both stage ones, which one would end say like Braviary sounds like something that either wouldn't need saving. Like watch hog seems much more helpless comparatively. Maybe I'm wrong. And maybe watch hog is like superpowers that I'm just not aware of as a non anime person. I'm gonna go I'm gonna say that the team plasma people were like using the watch hog to attack the Braviary and we're gonna go Braviary here. Okay. Well, you narrowed it down successfully and you chose correctly. It was Braviary. Good job. Were they attacking it with watch hogs? No, they were using Surviper. I think I forget what they were doing. But it wasn't a watch hog watch hog actually appeared later in another episode right after this. He was used as part of a firefighting group like the Pokemon rescue squad. These anime questions are killing me man. I mean, I sit in the card shop and I start bulk and I watch the anime. So I I'm not gonna apologize. They're pretty fun for me. All right. I I'm gonna give you one last question. You're two and Oh, doing really well this week. Let's see if you can keep it up. Which set did not have an end theme supporter? Was it cosmic eclipse? Fates collide? Dark Explorers or legendary treasures? I wish I still had my hand. Like I know for sure Dark Explorers has a reprint of N in it. Sure. I'll give you that one. I don't like I because I didn't play tag team era. I don't know if cosmic eclipse has one. Like or I didn't play any sun and moon I guess is what I should say. And some like I don't know when like ends Russia, Raymond Zekrom came out. So I don't know what set that card is from. It sounds like it would be from cosmic eclipse. Because otherwise is a different sun and moon based set would be on here because it would fill that spot. Fates collide... like what other end supporters are there? Because there's end's plan, which is obviously the most recent one, there's end... I don't know what the Reshiram Zekrom supporter is called. But that would then mean that there's another one. If there is one in Legendary Treasures, it's just again a reprint of N, which sounds like it might be correct because that was a reprint set in a lot of ways. Kind of like a base set too, but for the Black and White era. So I think that that has me leaning towards Fates Collide. And I'm probably wrong, but I'm just gonna go ahead and lock it in before I talk myself out of it. Okay, well I'll run down the answers real quick. You guessed Scarf Explorers right away, and I figured you would. Cosmic Eclipse did have a different kind of end supporter. It had End's Resolve, and then yeah, like it just kind of wasn't a very played supporter or anything like that. The Full Art looks cool, but not a very good card. But I kind of gave you Legendary Treasures as a MacGuffin, as a Red Herring. End was not in Legendary Treasures, weirdly enough. But it was in Fates Collide. It was reprinted in Fates Collide. So End, the supporter End, was reprinted in Fates Collide. That's how it was played for so long. Oh, because it was legal again. That's right. Okay, that makes sense. Oh well. Yep, so two and one. I mean, you know, almost a really good week. But I stumped you there on that last one, and I think that was my goal. So I'm happy to do that. You threw the anime question in to force me to use the hint early. So I couldn't save it for this. Right, exactly. That is what it is. It's definitely... I'll take two correct answers over the zero that I pulled in last time. Yeah, for sure. But yep, that leads us with... I think you started first, right? So you're at two, and I am at three after... No, you have... Sorry, that... Oh, go for it. Yeah, go for this. Yeah, you opened up with a resounding three-pointer in the first episode of this season. And then I went 0 for three. And then last week you got two points. So you were sitting at five. Okay. So now we're at two to five. And you're just going to widen that gap, I guess. Because apparently I am not good at coming up with questions. You're not that bad. Yep, that's where we're at for now. And we'll see if that changes next week on N's... Or not N's quiz show, Blaine's quiz show. That'd be fun to do too. All right. Cool. Very nice. Well, with that, we can go ahead and jump back over to look at some Pittsburgh things. I guess before we look at this data though, we need to recap some predictions, right? Yeah, we do. All right. So as bad as my predictions were the last time we did predictions, I feel like we might have a different outcome this week, Aaron. So we had three predictions this week. The first one was what will be the highest placement for Goldengo? Aaron, you said top 16. I said top eight. And Destin Hatcher got sixth place with Goldengo. So I definitely got that one. Yep. What's the highest placement for Conkleder? Aaron, you said top 32. And I was a little less optimistic and said top 64. And that's where Bennett McKinney finished in 42nd. So I got that one. Bennett was so close though. Just like just lost out on that winning for top 32. Or actually top cut, right? Yeah. Because his loss was to Cal Conner. Right. That shows you how dramatic these things are. These tournaments are so brutal. And they added more rounds too. That's what kills me. That was supposed to help with that. We're having 400 player day too. It's just such a massive tournament. Well, that's a whole different topic of conversation. I think that that's a little ludicrous at this point. But yeah. Yeah. I mean, I was helping out with prize out at the end of Saturday. And it was like, oh, yeah. Top 512 or whatever gets prizing. And we get over there. And the guy's like, yeah, I really don't need you guys help. I mean, there's only like 25 people that are going to get prizing that aren't playing in phase two. Right. And I'm just like, OK. So that's where we're at now. Where I remember when day two first started, it was x21 or something like that. Or the top 32 players of the tournament, right? And we regularly had that be the determining factor was the top 32 as opposed to, or I think it was top 64. One of those two. But it was definitely not the 400 player thresholds we're seeing now. No. So that's. No. And anyways, we're getting old men talking about old times territory. The last prediction was pick a player to win the tournament, in quotes. You picked Hunter B. You picked Hunter Butler, who did not make day two. I think he lost his winning end. He finished at 566th. And I had the insane foresight to see Brad Kersey out. I mean, he did well in Mexico. So it wasn't like the most off the wall pick. But he finished in fifth place. So I definitely think did a little bit better this time around. I won all three, if you want to say winning. So good job, John. Made up for the last time we did predictions. Yeah. I don't think we can keep score for both Blaine's quiz show and predictions. I think that's just a little too much. But yeah, it was good to see that I'm not completely washed up as a commentator on the meta development and all that stuff. But we saw a lot of cool stuff coming out of this tournament. Absolutely. And so we can go ahead and pull up and talk about the specifics of this event as a whole. And the first thing we'll look at is just the metagame. This is going to differ pretty significantly from the official stream graphic that we had. Because they decided to, for whatever reason, group Gardevoir and Jellicent Gardevoir as the same deck. And there are definitely obvious similarities between them because they are Gardevoir Monkey Dory archetypes. But the Jellicent deck typically plays a little differently. Just having those trainer or item lock options and then the potential tool lock option as well just opens up some avenues that you don't otherwise have. Whereas the straight Gardevoir is just really like the Screamtail Monkey Dory show, right? And it's just kind of a weird decision that you group these two. And we were talking about this a little bit before the show. But you aren't grouping the Goldengo decks together and you're not grouping the Dragapult decks together. Like, what makes this? Are these just in the eyes of whoever was doing it backstage? Are these similar enough that they feel that they need to keep these together but the other ones are distinct enough from each other that they need to remain separate? Yeah, it's hard to say. I mean, the Gardevoir Jellicent deck's a little bit newer. Sure. So maybe not an established archetype if you want to think about it from that perspective before this tournament. Like, we saw it at Worlds a little bit. But it definitely kind of saw its moment here in this tournament. We had a huge turnout of top players playing Gardevoir. That was the new quote-unquote Henry Chow-like list for this one was the Gardevoir Jellicent. And it's not hard to see why. If you watch any of the stream games, the ones where it went up against Goldengo or in the mirror even or against a Dragapult, it just kind of, once you got that Jellicent established, it was so hard for Goldengo to do anything. When you can't play Superior Energy Retrieval and chain those or you can't recover your things back with Dragapult and use Rare Candy to push a fast advantage against the Gardevoir decks. I mean, Monkey Dory still runs a heavy amount of Monkey Dory. We'll go into the list in a minute. We'll finish up here first. Sorry. Yeah, you're fine. So the way the stream graphic reported things, because it combined those, had Gardevoir as the most popular deck in the room. When we break things down and break it out by specific archetypes, we still have Dragapult Desmar on top. Straight Goldengo as the second most popular. Straight Garde is third. Raging Bolt fourth. Goldengo, Joltik, and then Joltik Box rounding out the quote-unquote best of the best decks with several other popular archetypes trailing closely behind with Charizard, Tarabox, Gardevoir, Jellicent, Grimmsaur, Froslass, and then Flareon Box kind of being the best of the rest grouping, as it were. And when we look at how those things kind of converted over into Day 2, it stays more or less the same. We get the fall-off of regular Joltik Box and the kind of rise of the Gardevoir, Jellicent as it propels its way into Day 2. As always, we're going to look at these conversion percentages as kind of the indicator for how well these decks performed this weekend. And we see things from like the Dragapult Dustmore decks continue to convert on average, you know, about the average amount which is in that 17-18% range is relatively good for a popular archetype. Straight Goldengo looks like it's really on the decline here though, and maybe that does have something to do with the popularity of the Gardevoir, Jellicent. But when you kind of come down the list here, the decline of the Goldengo deck means that Grimmsaur will actually perform significantly better this week up from where last week I think it only had like an 8% conversion rate. This week it's boasted all the way back up to 20% which I think is pretty significant as a finding. But the big story where we had the Tarabox converting at like 40% last week, or 42%. Gardevoir, Jellicent seems to take the crown for most popular deck that still converted very well with a 31.52% conversion rate which, again, that's really dang good. Like for a deck that's got this many copies in the room. Yeah, and I think it kind of like... Not to say like which comes first, the chicken or the egg. Like if you look at who played that list and who played that deck, I think that really makes a big impact on the conversion rate. Like Tarabox was still converted pretty well with 26%. Oh yeah. So maybe that's not going anywhere either. That's the same thing for Joltik Goldengo, also at 26%. So again, pointing to, like is the question, are the better Goldengo players playing Goldengo Joltik or is it the better Goldengo deck? And it's really tough, difficult to say. And I'm sure you could drill down into this data if you are curious and want to attempt to do that yourself. All of this is fully available at labs.limitlesstcg.com. It's where we always come for all of these statistics. And you can feel free to look at all of that data yourself at your leisure. But I think we could go and jump over and look at the final standings for this event. And the question was after last weekend, could Guard of War be stopped? You know, we saw the full Henry Chow 60 in full swing took down both major events last weekend and looked like it was poised to potentially run it back again when we had four of them in the top eight of the event. Except there was one lonely dark deck standing at the top where Liam Halliburton managed to take the entire event down with his Enz Zorark EX deck like John alluded to earlier. And Liam actually went fully undefeated throughout this tournament. I believe I did two of these rounds. Oh, yeah. Yeah, this is a new record, right? For most match points ever achieved in a tournament, I believe. Yeah, it's gotta be. I can't imagine. I saw somebody tweet that at some point. The previous record, I think, was 49. And it was set all the way back in 2015 or 2016. And there just weren't a raw, large enough number of rounds to outdo it up to this point. Yeah, and we'll see if that holds up going into the ICs, which might have a couple more rounds. For sure. But for now, yeah, Liam set the new benchmark for a perfect quote unquote tournament. If you want to look at level of difficulty and all that stuff. And I mean, he had to go through a lot of top level players. And he picked the counter deck for this week. His list, I didn't see this coming. I mean, we talked about it a little bit, saying you need a deck that one can beat. Basically, you just need a deck that can counter all the different things in the meta. This one at least counters the two main ones in Gardevoir and in Goldengo with the Toad Scrool. And it does an OK job against Dragapult. There are times where Dragapult can kind of run you over, especially if they run Dusknoir. It can be a little dicey. But if they can't keep their board state going, and if they're forced to hit into an Enz Zoroark, we saw in the top eight match between Liam and Simon that there just wasn't anything Simon can do at points. Like, he could heal off the damage and just swing into whatever was in the active from Simon's side and just put that threat in the active and say, all right, deal with it. And if you can't deal with it, I'm just going to boss KO your monkey, your dragon, your Duskull, or whatever, and just kind of control the game from there. So this is a really cool list if you want to talk about it. Yeah, just, I mean, Enz Zoroark, when it was first revealed, people thought that it was going to be this bonkers card, like trade, dating back to Zoroark GX, trade or refinement or any other number of cards that had this ability on it, is just a strong ability. Discard a card, draw two, has always been a good thing, and the limiting factor for this card was theoretically what attackers it had access to with Nightjoker. And then we ran into this list initially that ran Darmanitan alongside the Enz Reshiram because people felt that Enz Reshiram was not enough of an attacker to really push this card over the line. But we've circled back around to where instead of trying to brute force your way into a prize race, the Zoroark decks have done something very similar to what the Zoroark GX decks did back in the day, and have evolved into a more kind of methodical, controlled pace of play game style. And so we've got the inclusion of the Toad Scroll for those Goldengo decks, also preventing Nightstretchers on things like Screamtails, Monkeydories, Gardevoirs, Duskdrawer pieces against Dragapult, etc. And then just controlling the damage spread with Monkeydory, and chipping away at things with Virtuous Flame, or like you mentioned, if you ever get swung into by a Phantom Dive from a Dragapult, you can Powerful Rage it right back for 400 and take a one-hit KO. And you get to kind of set up some of the extra damage you need to knock out things like Fezendipity via the Toxic Subjugation ability from Petraunt EX, pushing a Zoroark into the active and poisoning it in tandem with a Binding Mochi attached to it to really push it over the line. And then Liam had the foresight to cut the End's Castles from the list, like what we saw popularized by Gabriel Fernandez or Marcos Fuentes at Worlds, and instead included two copies of Rocket's Watchtower to deal with the rise in popularity of Tarabox. And I know for a fact I saw a post from one of Liam's opponents, it was Emma Hagen, had posted that they weren't aware that Liam played two copies of Watchtower, and he slapped one down, turned one in one of the games, Emma countered it, said okay cool, I got that out of the way, I won't have to deal with it the rest of the game, let me establish a Flareon, attack into you, put energies on my EVEX, have a Hoot Hoot ready to evolve into a Noctowl next turn, and Liam plays Histern out and puts the second Watchtower down, and it just totally shuts the Noctowl deck out of the game. So being able to make some of your worst matchups, which I have to imagine all of the Noctowl decks without Watchtower in your list, are things you're going to struggle against, right? Like a lot of them play Grass Attackers, which are relatively strong against Zoroark in the form of Ogre Pawn basically being featured in all of them, or Leafeon in the case of a straight EV box deck, or even just Flareon itself is really difficult for Zoroark to deal with. And being able to say no, your deck doesn't work anymore just by putting a Stadium card on the table is definitely a statement that you can make with this deck. It's a really cool list, and it's cool to see, you know, we saw Journey Together when it first came out, felt like a flop of a set, right? Because everything was still all Gardevoir, all Dragapult, and the only thing that seemed like it worked out of that set was the Lily's Clefairy. So it's really cool to see that these Zoroark decks between Worlds and this event have risen to the occasion and been able to develop themselves in such a way that it's actually a viable strategy to play. And the only thing we're waiting on now I guess is, is somebody ever actually going to be successful with something like Hop? And the answer is probably no. Like they can't all be winners, but it would be really cool to see a full circle moment where all of these trainers' Pokemon really got a chance to shine in the spotlight. Yeah, I mean that was kind of the goal when they printed all this stuff. And this, yeah, like Rocket stuff kind of flopped hard. We've seen a little bit from Ethans with Typhlosion and then the Ho-Oh box, but I mean nothing's really dethroned anything that was from the trainer sets, like the last two trainer sets. But this is making a name for itself in its own right. It still feels like a counter deck, like it's not something you would just pull up in a vacuum and say this is the strongest deck. Like it's not. Like you're not, none of these attackers are like, and like using and being forced to use Enzorestrum as your only attacker, attacking option. I mean, the first attack, the powerful rage is super strong, but it's dependent upon your opponent hitting into you. Sure. And that's just never that good. And then the second attack's not that good either. But you know, you get a lot of cheeky ways to augment your damage with your Petra runs and Pining Mochi, your just different things like that. And it's, it ends up like with Monkey Dory, you can add and spread damage. It ends up mattering like you, you have so much control. And honestly, you have so much consistency in this deck that you're able to execute your game plan. Like, I was fortunate enough to judge this on stream. And it felt like, you know, all Liam needed was like, he had pop off like pretty solid turns every time like if he got one buddy Poffin and an artisan in play, his setup on his bench was fine. And then all I needed from there was one Cyrano. And he was like controlling doing whatever he wanted to do, always having energy switch or you know, the little key pieces that he needed having. It's interesting to run secret box without Arvin. I think that's a first I've seen where you don't really have access to it instead of drawing into it. Maybe we had some of the guard he builds focus on secret box without Arvin, but I can't remember the moment. But yeah, this is like he was just sitting there with like a 10 card hand. And his opponent knew and he knew that he could just like even if his opponent I honored him, he would just be able to draw back into whatever he needed and when most games and so that it just feels impressive to have to sit across the table from that. So very cool deck. It's kind of tricked out, I guess I would say. But nothing that really affords you other than maybe some of the the build decisions of not running, you know, not running any Arvin or research. And I think that research you don't need it once you're setting up and doing trade, right? You don't want to research, you know, you want to play Iona. The Hilda is an interesting decision. Running two of those, I guess is just a backup way to get your end Zorak out. If you don't hit into Cyrano. Yeah, I think it also allowed Liam to make cuts like I think a lot of Zorak lists have played more than six energy in them. And so Hilda gives you the avenue to effectively function as like, you know, an earthen vessel of sorts while also accomplishing the idea of getting your Zorak out. Whereas I know Liam was a proponent of a list in the past that played four copies of Cyrano. And now we have the freedom to cut one of those for a card that has a similar utility but also accomplishes a secondary purpose at the same time and helps you get energy on your board, which is something that this deck potentially could otherwise struggle with. But I like what you said earlier about how the build decisions that feel that they are kind of more uniquely suited for the specific metagame of this event. And I think that that's something we saw a similar reaction at Worlds with the builds that were successful being the ones that included the Cornerstone Ogre Pawn. And in some cases, also the Wellspring Mask Ogre Pawn, just having the options that are suited to counter whatever deck is popular at the event. And so it's something that similar to what, you know, actual control decks like Pidgeot control variants that we've seen pop up. You have to have the foresight or the meta knowledge to make successful deck building choices for this deck to really be a successful archetype. You're not just going to be able to brute force your way through an event because of the raw power of Zorak, and it's a bit more nuanced than some other archetypes are. Yeah. Yeah. Like I said, it's a counter deck. So you're never really, you're never really imposing your will with this. You're more reacting to what your opponent's doing. And like, you're setting up your board to kind of checkmate them, to like, put them in a position where they're just not able to do anything. And the moment they try to do something, you're like, okay, cool. You know, knockout, knockout, whatever. And Gardevoir being the most popular deck in the room definitely helps. Yeah, it does. And not just the most popular deck. I mean, it's not the most popular. Statistically speaking, it's pretty popular, but it's not like an oppressive number of Gardevoirs like we saw with Regidrago earlier last year. It's more the top players making their way to the top cut. Like you look at here, the majority of top cut, well, not majority, but like four of the top eight decks were Gardevoir variants. And so you you're saying, okay, I can get through the first few rounds with all my like tricks and all my my toad scrolls and what have you. And I know that if I get to the top cut, and I see Gardevoir, I'm chilling like I have that down. And I mean, that down. And I mean, we saw that just kind of executed perfectly. Like he did enough to get in a position. I mean, not just did enough. He went undefeated. So I mean, he wasn't he wasn't like he was really struggling against a lot of decks in this tournament. But he knew that he'd be well positioned to take it down from when he made it into the top cut. Yeah. So that was pretty cool to see. Just to run down top cut, since we skipped it before we jump straight into Liam's list, we did have a bond Ahmed making another appearance after winning Monterey last weekend, this time, playing the jealous and variant of Gardevoir. And we'll look at that here in just a second. There was an unfortunate, I don't want to use the word controversy, because it was really just kind of a misfortune more than anything. Bond had kind of a pop off moment in his top four game against Cal Connor, and inadvertently sent one of his monkey Dory's across the field to Cal side. And while Cal was cleaning up his board, he collected a bonds monkey Dory. And maybe you can explain this to me. I'm not actually quite aware of how the judging team came to determine that a bond had a 59 card deck, or even thought to count his deck before he did anything. Like he wasn't the one who recognized that his monkey Dory was missing. That was something from the judging side of things. But they did determine that he had a 59 card deck and unfortunately was given a game loss as a result of that because he had an illegal deck when he sat down at the table. And a bond kind of recognized, okay, I'm already down a game in a matchup that is potentially unfavorable. Let me go ahead and just scoop it. I mean, a bond and Liam are really good friends anyway. So he said, I've already got my regionals win for the year. I'm happy with second place. You've got this one buddy. And they just kind of shook hands and moved on. But do you have any insight on that? I wish I did. I finished the top eight match and I had some like evaluations I had to do for the judges that worked under me. Sure. And so I don't have any scoops here, unfortunately. And if I did, I don't know how much I'd be able to say as far as I mean, I can speculate, but I really don't want to get into too much. I just know that when you're stream judging or when you have these matches on stream, there's a lot of eyes. And I mean, a good spotter or a good stream judge working the event, not necessarily the person at the table, but there's more people behind the scenes that are trying to catch stuff that are trying to use the resources that they have. And there are people in production that are helping and making stuff known that said, Hey, maybe this is a weird thing you guys should look at. It's all teamwork, right? It's all people trying to get to the end result of the best player who played the best winning the tournament and not having not gameplay determined match outcomes. Unfortunately, that did happen. But still finals two weekends in a row. I don't think about that. And it's kind of the, you know, we had Henry Chow come up as the newcomer, maybe a bonds making that name for himself early on, making the case that says, Hey, this is my year. You know, Henry, you had a great year last year. It's my turn. Yeah. Now I'm going to take over and it's a little early to crown them, but yeah, go ahead. I'll say a bond had a pretty strong season at the close of last season as well with several pretty powerful finishes, but just to run down the remaining members of Topka here, we had Rahul Reddy again, Jellicent Gardevoir, I believe same 60 here. Cal Connor was playing straight Gardevoir. Like we previously mentioned, lost a bond in that top four game. Like you previously mentioned, Brad Curcio on Jellicent Gardevoir, uh, fifth place at Destin Hatcher with straight Goldengo, Lance Bradshaw and Simon Fang rounding out top eight with Dragapult Destinoir, and then Alex Shemansky and Solomon Schurge with Tarabox rounding out our asymmetrical cut. But just to jump into that Jellicent Gardevoir list, this was kind of the new deck of the weekend, the new Henry Chao sauce. And again, there's nothing totally groundbreaking here. It is really just a Gardevoir deck. You still have standard 3-2-2 Gardevoir. Uh, we're at three Monkey Dory, the kind of standard accoutrement of Screamtail, Clefairy, Mew, Fezendipity, and then the inclusion of the 2-1 Jellicent line in a TM devolution in place of things like extra copies of Bravery Charm, um, the extra Earthen Vessel that Henry and co. had last weekend, the extra Psychic Energy has now disappeared and have been replaced by these kind of more tech options that seek to aid different matchups in different ways like you talked about. It makes the Goldengo matchup more favorable. Um, I don't know if it directly makes Dragapult more favorable, but it definitely doesn't hurt the matchup by any means. Yeah, I remember overhearing, um, Simon talk to one of his friends, and his friend said, oh that was a favorable matchup for you. So maybe they were saying, uh, well we should have beat the, uh, oh I'm sorry, Simon, I'm talking about a different deck. You're talking about the Zoroark? Yeah, the Zoroark deck. Um, yeah, I don't, I don't think it really hurts the, uh, I mean, it hurts the setup for the Drag, uh, the Dusk Snore Dragapult deck, but, yeah, I don't know. I don't think it, it's hard for me to say and sit here and say, yeah, it makes it this much better or this much worse by this bigger percentage or less. I think your game plan is pretty similar, um, abusing Monkey Dory to, like, just kind of run through their setup. up. Right. You just hope that you were screamed scream tail the dragon, like the stuff with energy, you know, seems pretty good. And you just hope that you're naturally favored enough into it that the hit to consistency that you're taking is not that noticeable. Like we have one, we're only rocking the one copy of TM evo. And with fewer energy, you're potentially less likely to find the outs to that. Early on, you have fewer raw energy. So it's harder to make sure that you have the ability to get those in the discard pile early on. And it just seems like this could stumble a bit more than what they ran the weekend prior. But I guess that trade off was deemed worthwhile. Because, you know, I in Gardevoir mirror, in particular, I think that's where the jealous and plus devolution really shines. Like you can just fully lock your opponent out of a Gardevoir for a turn and cause a ton of headaches because none of them are playing boss right now. Yeah, that's what I was about to say. Yeah. Just not being able to move that jealous and out of the active just kind of death now. For sure. But cool list. I think this is something that we saw popularized at some point in Japan. And, you know, it's no surprise that once some like an upper tier level of player picked it up in the West that it saw some level of success. Next deck we had to talk about was Lance Bradshaw's. Just a quick look at Lance Bradshaw's Dragonball Dusknoir. Lance opted not to pick up the torch strategy with the four rear candy. Instead, this looks kind of very similar to Justin Newdorf's world's list, probably only a couple of cards off. Notably did include the copy of shaman respected the terror box respected the potential rogue Greninja decks, none of which made day two, unfortunately, because that deck is really fun to play. But just kind of a stock standard par for the course of Dragonball Dusknoir. Not surprising to see a list that like this succeed just requires kind of the proper sequencing and know how and I'm sure that Lance was able to capitalize on that throughout the day with by being well practiced on his deck. Yep, nothing too much more to say for this one. Yeah, I think we've all we've all gotten kind of sick of that this deck by now, right? Yeah, I think we've said about as much as we need to say about Dragonball Dusknoir at this point. And yeah, this is a little bit more of an interesting list. I think this is Alex and Alex Mansky. I was about to say Crickler. It's not that. Another longtime player though. And Alex Mansky pulling out his he's been playing terror box for a while, but he pivoted away from like the Pikachu still runs a Pikachu. But the I'd say less like, yeah, a little less grass energy and then he played a thin Eevee line with a one Eevee one flurry on and one leafy on in the deck as opposed to maybe more ogre pawn or some of the other attackers we've seen. I'm trying to even think well, I would or if you or like you could you if you want to talk about the maze build exactly. Exactly. And I think this is a cool list. Is it like running a lot of 11111 energy? Yeah, you're down to a thin energy line to be honest, and you're running so many different types. You're running seven different types of energy in this deck. In addition to the crystal, obviously, but yeah, you're giving yourself so many options. It's very cool to see. I like it a lot. I like terror box a lot. It's it's fun to play. It's when it's firing well and doing well, you just have so many ways to close out the game. But yeah, I think this is cool. I'm running the gravity mountain as opposed to maybe a tool jammer or another way to counter your own stadiums. I think you definitely need a way to counter your own stadiums now like you don't want to leave damaged Pokemon on the bench like a fan wrote them or something like that that can get picked off. You need a way to clear your own bench Pokemon at times. And that's good for that running the iron bundle to help with early pressure from the water. The wellspring mask ogre pawn. Yeah, this is great. Like you don't have the tour. Oh, you're not running the penny which we saw earlier, which makes a lot of sense with your stage ones here, your stage one exes. I'm seeing also running air balloon. In addition to the terror is switching out. So as opposed to the switch, which I kind of I don't know how I feel about that. I talked a little bit about it with you before where that might impact your ability to get an attack off if you have to like debate putting the crystal on versus the air balloon. But, you know, I thought about it a little bit and it makes a little bit more sense because both the flurry on and a leafy on their first attack takes two energy and both of those are the prime I mean, you can use the other two attacks, obviously, you have the energy and there really are still good attacks, but you can swing with flurry on pretty easily with just and yeah, then move it out of the air, move it out of the active with air balloon. And that was like, obviously, I think one of the things when I played the box from time to time, having that flurry on stuck in the active and like having to burn a switch like it felt bad later on where if you wanted to attack with flurry on again, with like carnelian or something like that, and then move it back out of the active. It felt really challenging to do that. So having that air balloons kind of nice. I mean, golden ghosts are running tool scrapper, but you know, they got to find it and more prioritize it even and that's not always a high priority thing to do. But yeah, I like this build a lot. I think if I were to, you know, rebuild my terror box deck, I might consider this one I've been like, I've been playing the measles a little bit the one he did well with last weekend or two weeks ago now. But yeah, I don't know. How do you How do you feel? What what version of terror box? I know, you've been kind of thinking about this deck a little bit too. What version of terror box are you leaning towards if you were to play it? I think I'm a fan. Like if I'm going to play EVS, I would go all in on the EVS. And with the terror box, I think, honestly, in both decks, I really like Pidgeot. And it's obviously you can't fit the Pidgeot and this like 111 EV evolution line. So personally, it feels like the archetype right now, just to prevent that stumbling block, right, that you often fall into where you go up to four prizes, and then you go I own it into an unplayable hand. And you're praying that you top deck a knock towel at some point. To prevent that getting the Pidgeot in play really kind of like saves your bacon in that sense. No, for sure. And I think that the it's that consistency versus power debate that you can often have with these decks. And I think currently, I would favor the consistency over the power or the option select that the EVS provide. Although they are definitely good attackers in this format. And I think that some of the combos you get with this list in particular, like with the gravity mountain, being able to go like boss a guard of our Carnelian it for a ko is really nice. Or being able to go gravity mountain into topaz bolt to ko Charizard and dragapult. It's pretty cool. And just honestly, this list being able to fully checkmate gold and go by just going burning charge and move energies to Pikachu. You basically lose the game sign the slip is Yeah, I mean, you run that boosted evolution Eevee. So you can get that even turn one attack off all you need is really like a terror or and a Crispin or like you can pretty much guaranteed get it off turn two with terror or Crispin and like the boosted evolution Eevee. Yep. It's really not that hard to get things going. So yeah, I like this list. I think I'm with you. I like playing the page out a little bit more to having that insurance policy where when you get end or I'm back on and I own it late game, you have a way to find what what you need without having to use an owl. The owls are such a powerful engine, but there's such a fickle thing, you know, you it's not so much getting the stage one or like, sorry, it's not so much getting a terror Pokemon and play that's the issue. It's usually just getting that stage one. It can be really hard to find there's no like level ball or like, I guess ultra like, you have to use ultra ball to find it to fulfill that condition. And that can be kind of tough to like build your combo with that. Whereas Pidgeot like being able to search for one thing, you really don't need a large hand size to close the games out. No, and often that like, the card, the combos of cards that these decks need are typically three cards in a lot of scenarios. And so you do need jewel seeker plus one card, and you're either praying that you've top decked it or you restart into it or you Fez into it. And just having Pidgeot to guarantee that you get all three cards in one go, really just kind of saves the day. I think the other thing to think about with knocked out in particular is like, people make the comparison to the shady dealings and telly online all the time. Except we don't have specifically like that line had Irida to go find this Pokemon. And also scoop up net for a large part of their existence. Like if we had if we had scoop up net with knock towel, I think we'd be seeing a lot more Tara decks. Although realistically, like you look at a list like this, I don't know how you fit scoop up net into it. But if you just fit, like maybe you cut the toro in the air balloon and just play a couple scoop up nets there and that's good to go. That might be good enough. Yeah, oh, for sure. You'd have to you could probably honestly cut a knock towel at that point and just play the scoop up net in place of the fourth knock towel. Yeah, yeah, probably. That's an interesting Yeah, you don't need for a knock towel. If you like you ran when it was shady dealings and tell you and you ran like for sobble two or three. What are they called? Drizzle Drizzle and then like two. We ran like thicker lines of the stage two but only because like the stage two also could attack and like damage as well. Yeah, but yeah, I don't know. We're getting off topic. But that yeah, it's an interesting, interesting comparison. Before we move off of Pittsburgh. Did you have any other decks that maybe like the top 32 that stood out to you that you wanted? Unfortunately, I didn't really see any of that really threw me for a loop. I'll hit the other tab just to see what people were playing. Ross coffin played like Maridon list, but he didn't do particularly well with it. He made day two but didn't have a super deep run. Okay. And yeah, I don't know. I didn't see anything that stood out to me. It was all like pretty meta expected. I mean, that's I guess to be understand understood at this point, right? Like we've had quite a long time in this format. Sure. And players are probably gearing up for the new format coming around just just around the corner. And we have another regional in three weeks from with with that new set. Yeah. So I'm sure players are already focusing on that more than trying to like come up with new ideas for this format. That's fair. And I guess like we could shut the door on this format, then this was, like we said, the last event for the I guess the last event, technically for the scarlet and violet era, as we enter the mega evolution era, right? Sure. And so that set officially releases on Friday this week. And there is an unofficial event happening like full grip games is doing their kind of what has become tradition, their five or 6k event, I think where they do like a standard event on Saturday, and then a GLC based event on Sunday. So if you're in that Akron, Ohio area, go give them a visit. If you know, could be some money for you if you have the like the broken mega evolution deck that you want to bust out. So I think, just to kind of close out the show, what is an archetype that you are excited to try out with those new cards, since we will have access to them on TCG live this week as well. Well, I, I wish the cards were better, Aaron, like, there's nothing in there that like, makes me say, Oh, this will be a tier one deck coming straight out of the box. You know, the lilies, the termination, I believe, right? Sure. What it is. Yeah. That's going to be a huge, make a huge impact on the game, I think, making stage two decks more consistent and less reliant upon research, which is nice. And just allowing setup decks to set up more consistently. I think we'll see that a lot more like maybe Charizard and Dragapult will get kind of a revamp or rebuff to work off of. We'll see. I do want to try out like a mega Venusaur deck. I've always loved like energy trans, moving energy around strategies. I don't think grass is particularly strong right now. Like we don't have a lot of grass support in the format, as far as I remember. Well, they did, they did get a pretty broken stadium. Oh, true, true. So the stadium is really nice. And that adds a lot of like, and we get a couple of cool, like stage twos to go with it. Besides Venusaur, we get the Meganium with like the Verdant Wind ability, I believe, where it doubles all the grass energy. I don't know. I think I'd be more interested in like focusing on a tank build where you're just keeping the mega Venusaur alive as long as possible. With different things like missed energy or like to prevent devolution, or just healing and like the attacks, not anything spectacular, but it's just such a beefy Pokemon, right? And then you can kind of run like maybe fun, different things to go with it. It'd be fun to see. I don't know. What about you? Are you excited to try anything new on your side? New? I don't know. I am definitely excited to go back and revisit my friend Grimmsnarl. You know, we had the my friend Malamar propaganda that popped up a couple weeks ago. I definitely feel that way about Grimmsnarl going into the set. I think, like you said, Lillie's Determination is going to be a huge card for that deck in particular. Just more draw supporter options lend themselves very heavily in that deck's favor. I also think the Evil Tolls is a massive upgrade in my opinion, although a bunch like we had the Yokohama Champions League for the Mega Evolution format that happened last weekend. And maybe we'll look at the results of that in combination with the Full Grip event next week because we still don't have all of the decklists from that event. that it was won by Tarabox, but there was a Grimmsnarl that was like undefeated going into top four. And I think that list and a couple of other ones that I saw from the weekend were still choosing to run Maractus as opposed to Evoltaal. And I'm not fully sure of the reasoning, but maybe I'm just a hater and I'm so like anti-Maractus that I'm clouding my judgment and I really need to give the card another chance. But I think that that archetype definitely benefits from Lily's Determination. There's also a chance that just straight Froslass Monkey Dory gets like a big boost from Lily's Determination because that deck, even more so than Grimmsnarl, likes to play from a six prize board state for as long as it possibly can and just wants to spread damage. Like Evoltaal lock things, or Maractus lock things, or maybe even both of them, like you can literally play both cards and just have your corner lock available for longer and use the one that fits the situation better. That seems pretty interesting, just because I'm definitely a spread player at heart and would love to play spread decks more than anything. I wish that, like you said, I wish the Mega Manectric was better. I wish that the... Mega Mawile is kind of cool. Yeah, I might try to pick that up and play like Archialadon with Mega Mawile or even like Metang with Mega Mawile, like could potentially be cool. But I don't have high hopes for either of those cards. I do think, like when we did our set review, I do think we were a bit low on Venusaur and I might just have been totally wrong about Venusaur and Meganium. Like I didn't even think about the fact you still have Ogre Pond to work with these cards and you can just set up an Ogre Pond with like four energy. I forgot about Ogre Pond, I'm not even gonna lie. Like you've got four or five energy, but now suddenly it's eight or ten energy plus the energy on your opponent's Pokemon and you can basically broken time space all these things into play and it would function, I guess theoretically, similarly to how Raychan's Toad Scroll deck worked, where you have such a density of grass Pokemon and grass energy that you can actually effectively play Bug Catching set to and manage to reasonably hit two cards off of it every time. And so that in combination with Lillie's, you just get this like, at some point, okay, I drew eight cards. Here's my full Venusaur line, full Meganium line. Here's an Ogre Pond. Four energies onto the board, move them all up to my Ogre Pond, your thing is knocked out. And you're not necessarily attacking with the Venusaur, but it's enabling you to do this kind of degenerate blow up your active with my Ogre Pond strategy. Is that better than something like Raging Bolt? Probably not because it's a lot more combo pieces, but it definitely seems fun at the very least. Yeah. And I mean, you still have Hydrapple if you want to go down that road, kind of lending into that, you can get the Toad Scroll out really easily. So there's a lot of cool things. I mean, I guess I kind of was dismissive of grass support. I totally forgot about the Teal Mask Ogre Pond, which, you know, that's kind of silly. That's on me. That card's broken and such a good card already, like from playing it with Regidrago, now you have a way to move the energy around even easier. You don't have to run Energy Switch. You can just run this Venusaur line. I think there's like a world where like the box version of the deck comes out or yeah, I don't know. It could be pretty cool to see that come into play. So we'll see. And yeah, we'll be talking about it for sure. And make sure you tune in to hear our kind of opinions and predictions of what will be good and all that in the next few weeks to come. Aaron, you have anything else you want to close out with? No, I just thank you everybody for tuning in so far this season. Hopefully your competitive season is going well. If there are specific topics or news that you would want covered that Jon and I maybe haven't covered so far, let us know down in the comments of the episode and we'll see what we can fit in when our schedule allows. So again, thank you from Jon and I for listening. You can find links to all of our socials in the description of the episode and we will see you guys next week on another episode of the Battle Frontier.