Episode 2-5 A Mega Flop?

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, my co-host, Jon Orgel. And this week, we're going to review the results from the Full Grip events that happened over this weekend, for both standard and GLC formats, including the new Mega Evolution cards. But we'll try to hit on some of those GLC results first, I know Jon had some GLC action going on over the weekend. And we'll segue from that into our Blaine's Quiz Show, before we return to hit up the Full Grip Games standard event, and close things out by also looking at the results of the Yokohama Champions League tournament, now that we have more of those decklists available in an easier to digest format. So that being said, let's just jump right into things, Jon. How was your week? It was pretty good. I didn't do a whole lot of Pokemon over the weekend, we just kind of hung out, Sydney and I. You know, I was on, we went to, I went to Pittsburgh Regionals last weekend, so, or the weekend before this one, so it was just nice to like catch up, hang out, and we kind of did like an Oktoberfest locally, and didn't do a whole lot else, just played some board games and went grocery shopping, and yeah, went to the Bill's, watched the Bill's win on Sunday. We go to like a Bill's Backer Bar, so sometimes I'll go there for that, so that's fun. But yeah, Bill's are 4-0, so gotta rock the hat, they're wearing their all-white uniform for the Patriots this week, so I'm excited about that. But yeah, I got to do some GLC on Monday for League, we had our GLC night, we tried to do that the last Monday of the month when we can, and yeah, I was like, alright, let's see, you know, we'll get the new cards available, like, people can just proxy them, it won't be a sanctioned event, it'll just be a fun tournament. We only had, you know, myself and three others that wanted to do it, so we just did like a quick round-robin, everybody plays everybody tournament, and I played Fighting, and then Ian, a friend of the podcast, played Fighting, and then the two others participating played Water Decks. And Ian and I both went 2-0 and played each other in the last round, so it was a very close series. I was playing like the new build with kind of what won the full group tournament. Fighting really got totally revamped with this set, more so than any other type. Having draw with Solrock and Lunatone, using Lunatone's ability to draw three cards, you know, every turn, basically, if you just get the basic energy, and you could run it with Training Court to get back a basic energy from your discard pile. So it's really just a really easy combo to just help, because Fighting had no draw before, you were living off your top deck, which in Pokemon is really not a way to live. You can't do that. So it was really nice to, yeah, have some supplemental draw. And then it also got the Marshadow, which I don't know if you saw that card, but for two Fighting, it just has the one attack, and it just does 60 damage, but has the insane effect of an attack where it says, if you knock out your opponent's Pokemon with the damage from this attack during your opponent's next turn, this Pokemon cannot be affected by attacks, or cannot be damaged by attacks, or affected by any effects of an attack. So it's basically invulnerable. So if you get early pressure with Marshadow, and you can pick up some of the bench stuff, like 60 damage doesn't sound like much, but then you run strong energy and Muscle Band, so you can boost it to 100. You can pretty much knock out most of the basics that would be evolving into Stage 2, so you can go turn 2, knock out a Bench Sitter that will be a support Pokemon, or something like that. They can't Prize Race you, so you can take two Prize Cards before they take anything. So I was able to use Marshadow effectively throughout the tournament, and then it didn't really come up too much against Ian. Ian got a faster start, he used Okidogi, which is from Twilight Masquerade. He's pretty cool, we like Okidogi. Okidogi's good, but he used them early, and I think he was telling me as the match was getting closer to the end that he had prized, he runs two Stage 1s, he runs a Sand Slash and a Dawn Fan, he prized both basics for those. So he wasn't able to get the early spread damage that those two offer, and was just kind of forced to use his Attackers, like his big Attackers early, and then once I dealt with Okidogi, he really didn't have a really good response right away. He had one turn where he used Lucario's Revenge Attack, I don't know the name of the attack, but it's basically like a Revenge, it's 30 and then plus 120 if one of your fighting Pokemon was knocked out during your last turn. He put the Focus Sash on it, so I hit it for knockout, but it went down to 10, and then I was able to clean that up with a Hawlucha later on, so a Guzma-Hawlucha play, and that kind of shut the door there. I went down to one prize, he had two were left, and was just kind of conceded from there. So that was pretty cool. We opened up some, we finally got in some product for our league, and I got like booster boxes of the new set, and so some of them have, I think all the booster boxes now have the box topper, right? I thought so too, but I learned from one of my local stores that apparently some stores at least are also still receiving regular booster boxes, so I'm not sure. For what it's worth, the ones that we got did have box toppers, and so since they're just selling it loose packs, they're like, here's a box topper, you can give it out of the league. I'm like, cool, and I'm like, alright, before we started the tournament, whoever wins this wins the Bulbasaur, and so I got the Bulbasaur, and I'm like, should I be the good league leader and give it the second place, and I'm like, nah. One of the staff members was like, how did Gym Leader Challenge go, and I was like, well the Gym Leader won, so it's all is right in the world, so that was funny. Last I checked, that's like a $30 card too. Oh is it? Yeah. I mean, I can't imagine it stays, maybe it does stay that high, who knows, man, Pokemon's crazy right now. It's all over the place. We were talking a little bit before the podcast, and just like, yeah, the market is in a weird spot, especially for Sealed, man, like if City and Flames, Pokemon Center, ETBs, like, I was just looking at that the other day, it was like, oh, this is, you know, Pokemon Center stuff is crazy too, but like, that was like, a couple months ago, that was like a, you know, $150 box, now it's like, multiple hundreds of dollars, and we could go on and on about that. My gripe's not even with that, like, my gripe is just with the release of the set, and how, I mean, it sounds like this was an issue across multiple games, I saw a lot of complaints this weekend of people not being able to get their codes for their, the video game, to like, get the shiny Karidon and Maridon, because I guess every GameStop was just giving them to people who showed up to get TCG product. Okay. And, um, yeah, I wouldn't, I, gosh, all the VGC people are unhappy because they don't have their codes, a lot of TCG people are unhappy because scalpers are still trying to get product. I mean, I went in because right now, GameStop has a promotion where you're supposed to spend, I think, 10 or 15 bucks on Pokemon product, and you'll get a GameStop stamped Evoltal from Mega Evolution, so I went in to try to get one of those, they just gave it to me because they were totally sold out of cards, so that was pretty neat, but then I was talking to a couple of other shops, and this is where my gripe on, like, sealed product comes in, I've heard of this idea before where if somebody's got sealed product for a given set, they'll charge market price, unless you're like a local player and you show up to their events and they kind of reward you for being a local and charge you essentially MSRP at that point, but then there are some stores that are just, no matter what, I'm going to charge everybody and their mom market price for this product that, initially that decision was being justified by the fact that there were stories that distributors were charging stores more for their product, and now there's supposedly this other evidence that says, no, they're not, these guys are just being really greedy and you're all just getting caught in the crossfire on it, and leaves a really salty taste in my mouth, and I don't know, I don't know how to feel about it. Yeah, it's tough for stores, I'm sure, like, no store wants to just have a bare shelf and have to turn away people, so, like, the card store I've been helping out at, you know, I think they're kind of where I think of, like, they will sell their stuff pretty close to MSRP, maybe a little bit more when they get it from the distributor, they'll keep it as close to MSRP as they can reasonably, you know, like, because yeah, I think distributors realize, like, that the first wave of a product is always sold as, like, this is the distributor, you know, this first wave is like normal, and then after the first wave, distributors can market up as they see fit closer to market, and then that's kind of where it just gets more hectic, so it's like, if I get a restock on, what is it, Prismatic Evolutions, of course you're going to take that, and, but the restock is closer to market price, so there's less of a margin, so you have to charge market price in order to get that back, and then, you know, the ones, the store I'm helping out at, and I'm sure this is more common now, unfortunately, it's like the debate of do I have a bare shelf and just sell stuff from the distributor as it comes in, so I have, like, literally for Mega Evolution, they had their stuff from the distributor, they were sold out of that stuff by lunchtime that Friday, so it's like, do I just sit there and only sell that, and then discourage scalpers to not sell me stuff, because, you know, the store was like, well, I can either do that, or I can pay people, like, a percentage of the market price, so they'll say, you know, they'll buy it at 80%, which is pretty high, and then sell it at market price, which guarantees that they have product always available, but means that it's always at market price, people are like, oh, that's crazy, but it's like, you know, Sealed is just like that right now, and I mean, it's good if you come across Sealed, honestly, in the wild, or like, me as a judge, and you get Sealed product for working events, I can then either sit on it, or like, if I have to, like, pay a bill or something like that, just sell Sealed, but it makes it like crazy for judges to like, I've talked to some judges that have now, like, a quarter of a million dollars worth of Sealed product, because that's how crazy the market is, it's the point where, you know, you worry about your house burning down, and the value of the house, like double that value of the house, essentially, is in Sealed product, like, that's crazy, right? Like that, that's, we're not in a reality that feels grounded, and based on anything concrete, it's all kind of funny money, like, just no, absolutely. And that goes well beyond the bounds of Pokemon. But that's not the topic of discussion for this podcast. We won't get into economics in general. But yeah, my concern is still just like the stores, like I said, where they, they get it from the distributor, like, I understand that the situation that you're talking about, where they buy it from a third party. And because they bought it at a marked up rate, you have to sell it at a marked up rate if you're gonna make any sort of profit on it. And that's whatever that is what it is. I think my bigger concern is when somebody gets it from their distributor for the base distributor price, and they still immediately mark it up. I'm just like, why are we doing this, guys? Well, it's like, because they know they can. Yeah, but it is discouraging. It tells you that that place that place is not focused on, you know, having it available for players. Or right, you know, they legitimately just care about their profit margins. And I guess, theoretically, in the long run, that store is not going to survive. But maybe. Well, I mean, let's see what it is. There's there's stories of we have a lot of different options in Richmond. And there's like one store that has continuously marked up closer to market all of all their products. Okay, including like, the stuff of like the, the building battle kits are not the building battle kits, but like the league battle decks, like they were overpricing those. They were overpriced, like basic energy bricks and stuff. And it's just like, the players realize they're not stupid. They're like, we see what you're doing. And we're not going to support this. And so like, they, they went from having like the best league enrichment. And now nobody shows up. So it's like, I mean, that's the thing you have, you have the power as a player to say, okay, well, we're not going to come to your league events, we're not going to support this store anymore, if you're going to like not take care of players, and not focus on that. So I mean, that's, that's the end of the day, that's kind of the power you guys have, whenever you're shopping anywhere. But you definitely have that ability to refuse that. And unfortunately, a lot of people buying Pokemon, you know, don't play the game or don't care too much about the long term ramifications of price fixing or whatever. But yeah, I hear you, man, it is frustrating. I mean, thankfully, I will say that the influx of collectors has made single prices like bottom out basically, like, oh, yeah, to get to get everything you need playable from this set, easily less than like 50 bucks. Like you could probably if you if you have a store that you can buy singles from. and you can put an order together. I would be surprised. Like maybe some of the X's verge on like three, four bucks, but like realistically, like right around a dollar. And you don't need to buy most of them. Like you definitely do not need to buy mega camera up or mega Obama snow. No, which pains me to say, because I think I think mega camera up to cool card mega Obama says not a very cool card. I just like the Pokemon. Yeah, yeah. But like Lily's determination, like, OK, that could be like, you know, that could be like Hilda, where it's like on release. It's a four dollar card. It's like 40 cents. Like it's dirt. There's so many. Yeah. So that's the nice part of this, especially being a mainline set instead of like the collector sets that are, you know, like black bull, white flare, where just the product availability is less. And you have two sets to try to dig through and find your singles. This one's a little easier. And then the next set coming out, it's going to be an even smaller set list. So it'll probably be even easier to get your singles. So that's good for players. So there's that at least so. But anyways, I've rambled enough. How is your week, Aaron? How do you have any fun over the weekend? We I think I mentioned on last week's episode, my son had a friend from school come over and stayed with us Saturday night into Sunday. So that meant that I did not get to go to the league challenge that I potentially was going to go to. But that's fine. Apparently, they had a really low turnout anyway. I guess there were also a ton of cups happening last weekend that I just was totally oblivious to. But they all kind of cannibalized each other. I don't know if any of them had more than like a dozen players present because they were all within probably an hour and a half of each other or within an hour and a half of Orlando. And so people just scattered to the wind and went to these five or six different stores for all their different events. And interestingly, I think Tara Box won like four or five of those events. So continuing its extended success from the first week of regionals that we saw for the season and maybe a little bit of foreshadowing for what we're going to talk about later. But so we did that on Saturday, like the kids got to go do some indoor go carting and a couple of other fun activities of some an entertainment place over here. And then Sunday, we had a fundraiser for baseball. But, you know, back on the Pokemon topic of things, I like I said, I managed to go into GameStop and get that evil tall promo. That was neat. And then Pokemon Pocket actually has released a new special set for themselves at like a mark of their one year anniversary. And if it's something where you kind of fell off a Pokemon pocket, but you want the you have the itch to maybe open a pack every once in a while. This is the set for you, because every single pack comes with an X or better in it. And I've got some interesting things that are playing with the idea reverse hollows for the first time. So the set looks massive because as you're opening cards and filling out your set list, I think that the base set list is like 360 something cards, but that includes the regular and reverse hollow copy of every single common and uncommon. And then I think it's literally every single X that has been in the game up to this point is also available to open in this set. Like I know I did a ten poll earlier today and I got like a Wigglytuff from Genetic Apex and, you know, a handful of other things. So filling out cards that I hadn't gotten and then also got a couple of cool like full art things like I got the full art ho-oh and some of the artwork is just pretty neat. So still checking into that as things go and definitely get my daily dopamine through that. Yeah. Did you open anything from that today? Yeah, I saw that I was on Pokemon.com earlier and I saw, oh, they put out a new set on Pocket. So, yeah, I opened the app up and opened up my two daily packs. And I think I had enough hourglasses or whatever for another pack. And I got like my champ. So I guess I got a couple like exes that I hadn't already had. So I was able to like finish up a couple of things. Sure. So that was cool, you know? But yeah, it's a good set if you haven't played Pocket in six months or something like that. You know, if you're or ever. Yeah. If you're trying to get into the game. Sure. Like, yeah, it can be overwhelming, I think, to see that set list. I mean, like, oh, there's no way. Like if you're a completionist, good luck. Oh, yeah, especially they because this is the first pack also that I think is going to disappear. Yeah. Yeah. You think there's a timer that says you have until the end of October, essentially. So there's good luck with that. Yeah. So like this is before you can trade for people's wallets. Yeah. Yeah, I could see that. But I think it's a good set if you're trying to get into it. Like you said. I would be interested to see like if there's an influx of players because of that or like a reinterest in the game, but, you know, I don't know. I haven't really kept up with the competitive side of pocketed all that much. Like I haven't really looked into it too much since four worlds. Right. So me, I don't know. And unfortunately, from what I have heard or, you know, I haven't heard much about people like driving these tournaments either. So I'm wondering if that like grassroots scene has kind of died off a bit or maybe it's just something people aren't talking about. And maybe it's still just thriving quietly. Yeah. I may have to check into that after we're done with the show today. But I know I did also get to check out some of the I'm not a GLC player by any means. So I did not check out full grips GLC event on Sunday, but I did. Tune in and catch a lot of the coverage that they had for the standard event on Saturday. And we'll talk about the results from that later. But first, I know John mentioned his fighting deck that he won his GLC event with, so we were going to kick things off with the results of the GLC event at Fulbright Games and being our resident GLC expert, John, I'm going to yield the floor to you to talk about. Fair enough. Yeah, I only really watched top four in the finals. It was cool to see Jesse Parker having a deep run into it. He finished in the I think he was in the finals. And he played a psychic deck. You have the results somewhere in there. Um, I thought I did. Here we go. Yeah. So top. Eight. Going into time, let's cut this screenshot to cut off for some reason, but going into top eight, I see fighting psychic grass, another psychic colorless, another psychic, another psychic. So one, two, three, four, seven. And I'm missing who the last player was, unfortunately. But it looks like unsurprisingly, psychic still doing very well. But I think that's like water deck to something like that. OK, I don't really know. But like, yeah, I would love to see the grass list. I haven't looked at that. I wanted to see if the stadium like helps them out a lot. I don't know. You know, Meganium doesn't actually make a huge impact because you already had that ability in a couple of different places. There was already a Venusaur that had it from like a jungle totem had it. So they don't stack. So you can't run both. Meganium and Venusaur to get the like double up your basic energies like it only works once. So but the fighting, like I said, got the biggest buff psychic. I don't think it really got a huge buff from my understanding. It's just the most powerful type. It has like the largest pool. Jesse Parker ran a Garbodor build with like the ability prevention Garbodor. OK, I look like he was doing pretty well in the top four. Yeah, I like ran a Frillish to have item lock. Stuff like that, nothing I think totally groundbreaking from my perspective, but just a consistent build. And then, yeah, I don't know. I didn't really watch a whole lot of the tournament. I would like to maybe go back maybe at some point and watch it. GLC is a lot of fun because like you have the ability to kind of you just have more turns so you can do like a spread strategy more effectively or try to play into like what you're if your opponent's dead drawing, like play into that or kind of go from there. But yeah, I did manage to find Jesse's list, actually. So here, let me throw that up on the screen really quick. Yeah, that's that's good. OK, yeah. So yeah, this is pretty. Please walk me through this, because I actually don't know. Yeah, no, if I know what all of these cards do. So you obviously have like I usually look at the Pokemon first. You know, you have the Garbodor line with trash collection. Yeah, you have a couple of different like support things. You have the not the not the Zatu to have energy acceleration. Malamar as again, energy acceleration. Iron boulder, if you match hand size, it does a really decent amount of damage. That's what the one below. Below Malamar on the right is that I think that's curious about these these three yellow border. There's a Nile ego was the far left that has if your opponent is at two price cards, you can just copy one of your opponent's attacks from their from their board. Just copy that. Can you zoom in at all? I can't really tell. Yeah, I know this next cards like I can tell you what Pokemon they are. I just don't know what they do. Let me let me open the image on a new tab. I might be able to zoom a little bit better because this is Jesse's tweet and it keeps it keeps zooming back out on me. I see. Oh, me too. So that has I believe that's like an attacking me, too. If you're at three, if your opponent has three or less, three price cards or less, it does like an additional 90. So like it does 180 for three energy. It occurs to me that if you're at three, if your opponent has three or less, three price cards or less, it does 180 for three energy. Necrozma has like a special laser. I think if you have it's like a second colorless. And if you have a special energy attached to it, it does like an extra. It does it does a good amount of damage, like nothing over 200 damage, but all of these are like really strong. And then on the rest is kind of either support. So you have a Clefa. The Frillish is the item like we talked about. Q has copycat for two second colorless. And then Wobbuffet has Bide Barricade, which shuts off all abilities from all non psychic Pokemon and play Wobbuffet's inactive. So this is kind of like standard. The only thing is a little like most psychic lists moved away from Garbodor. And then the Nihilego is a new inclusion that I hadn't really seen before. But like everything else kind of is predictable for psyching. You run Parallel City, Dimension Valley. Dimension Valley is a broken stadium. Yeah. And then Shopping Center is an interesting one. I haven't seen that in psychic lists, but it makes sense. If you're running five tools, you want to have like the added mobility, like find your tool for Garbodor. I also like the combo with the Shopping Center. Like you have the tool on the Garbodor. You can bounce it off to re-enable your abilities. Oh, true. I forget. I was thinking, what is it? The newer one, the Mall, where you can search out tools. Oh, Town Store? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I'm wrong. Shopping Center, yeah. That's, thank you. You're right. This is a little different. Yeah, it says once during your turn, you can return a tool attached to any Pokemon to your hand. And that, yeah, like you said, pairs super well with Garbodor. So yeah, you have access to your energy acceleration. And then, yeah, you can go back into item lock at the end of your turn, which is pretty cool. The rest, all that's there is draw. And then, yeah, you run Lusamine, Raihan, teammates, Tulip, Guzma, Lysandre. Nothing like crazy, like stuff that I wouldn't expect. Like no real, like Lieutenant Surge or something like that, you know. And then just kind of all of the most broken items in the game too, basically. Yeah, you get all the cool psychic support. So Mysterious Treasure, Fog Crystal. And then, yeah, just a bunch of ball support. And yeah, like just consistency stuff. You run Field Blower to, you know, shut off Garbodor if you need to. You can use it on your own, but Shopping Center is the ideal way to go. Yeah, I mean, this is, to me, this is just like your low, your like low to the ground, high power level, energy acceleration, but then with a Garbodor twist with the Shopping Center. And then being able to shut off your opponent's abilities is like super nice in GLC. Like there's a lot of Pokemon that just have annoying abilities like Okidoki. And there's like a Wailord that has reduced damage effect and, you know, Rain Dance and all that kind of stuff if you want to look at that. Abilities are like really kind of key in GLC. And yeah, if you're able to shut them down, but then have access to your own abilities, pretty nice. Especially since a lot of decks are like the draw engine is more so Pokemon based, right? Since you can't play multiple copies of a supporter. But somehow Jesse's Psychic type deck was not able to take the whole event down. And instead that was won by, oh dear, my zoom is all messed up. Hold on. It was won by Chris Hill with his Fighting deck. Yeah. Yeah, and this was a cool deck to watch. Because like I said before, Fighting really didn't have anything going for it before this format. It was always inconsistent. It had good attackers and it had like cool things you could do. But for the most part, it was just like, you know, your opponent would hand disrupt you and you'd have no way to draw back out of it or close the game out. But this is a, like a really low to the ground, like I said, kind of in the, there's only one evolution Pokemon, the Lucaria. And pretty much everything attacks for a low amount of energy, like two or less, except for the Blood Moon. But that Blood Moon has an ability that lets you accelerate to Fighting to it whenever you put it from your hand to your bench. So all of these are like really powerful attackers. Tinglu gets in there. It has a really cool attack where if you have a Stadium of Play, you can use this attack and then it does 30 damage to all your opponent's bench. pokemon and then discard the stadium so like a spread attack which seems good but like okay why do i need a spread attack well you can like put some bench damage out there kind of take out some 60 hp bench sitters or you know you can use the and then that sets up the blood moon or saloon really well which hits there's 100 plus 30 more for each damage counter on your opponent's active pokemon so it goes from you know doing 100 damage to i think i had a whale lord i used blood moon against i hit my lord for like 70 or something like that to start out with and then yeah i followed up with a good amount after that um so that that's that's pretty strong but yeah there's just a lot of cool stuff you can do this deck just gets such a consistency boost with all the different things you can add to it with the fighting gong uh i think is what it is um fighting gong it's a new card for mega evolution searching deck for a basic fighting pokemon or a fighting energy really big yep and just yeah i mean you run some cool stuff that you don't really always see in other decks like the magma's great ball um which is such a goofy card but it's like ball search that lets you get a basic fighting energy and so you run ball guy in your deck so you can go get three ball cards one of those is a guaranteed basic energy essentially um because you don't run any magma pokemon in this build so um but yeah there's just a lot of good fighting support um now there has been but it's just like there wasn't a draw engine and now there is um so now you're able to like set up your board better and be just like just have your board set up for end game essentially because that was always the problem is you would just kind of stall out midway or like miss a thing here or there now you're able to like find the energy you need or find out missing piece and so yeah this is kind of the if you're if you're playing glc this is a good list to look at and kind of know what how to deal with um and you'll probably see this a lot more moving forward um so that's that's about it there wasn't a whole lot of other stuff i saw that was like groundbreaking or revolutionary but fighting coming out and doing really well was kind of the talk of the tournament for this one i guess my question would be as someone who has played glc before do you think is the the bigger impact is the lunatone itself right because there are other soul rocks you can play yeah like are are the soul rock and marshadow big enough inclusions of their own right to push fighting over the edge or is it really mostly on the back of the lunatone just being there um i think fighting i think it's both honestly like and truthfully it might be that like a lot of the decks didn't have for this tournament specifically a lot of the decks didn't have answers for marshadow um and you know it's that's the nice thing i was talking about with glc with you a little bit before we started is now and now people know okay now i need to have an answer for marshadow so now i can tech in a pokemon ranger or i can play an escape rope life sander combo to reset the pokemon to the bench and then put it back in the active stuff like that where you know you can you can tech for specific cards you know ranger is not really played at all um right now but like it could be like there are other cards that it's relevant against um so it could be like you know you see hex maniac in this that's a one of supporter you know so somebody might say okay well i really need to have an answer for marshadow so i can run the ranger or run a shred attacker if that exists for the color you're trying to run so i think um it is a combination of the two to answer your question but i also i don't you know and i think now that this is the cat's out of the bag the the format will readjust and people will like have an answer from our shadow it's only 60 hp or it has actually has 90 hp sorry um so but that's not an insane amount um and you can kind of deal with it if you get ahead of it or or something like that right and and if you deal with it one time the second one like assuming the first one's the one that's kind of souped up right with the tool cards and the strong energy maybe they had to blow their fighting power pro or i think that's what this card is called just premium power premium power probably it's only that but so if they use all these resources ahead of time if it comes out a second time like it gets night stretchered let's say it won't be as impactful yeah it's um i don't think you really need to have like one more shadow in the game is enough like because then you can pivot to other attackers um primarily like okidoki and blood moon or saloona are really good late game like if you have damage already on the field you can clean up with blood moon or saloona and that's a really easy one to get into play with like you're you have the professor's letter and there's the energy retrieval to get back basic energy okidoki you know you can set up with a raihan um to get everything you need and then that thing is a tank dude it has like 230 effective hp and heads for 170 for 2 energy um and it's not that hard like when you run they only run the four special but that's enough like you don't really need like you only need yeah you only need one or one or two of them throughout the game um so um yeah just it's i mean it's consistent like i think fighting now is more consistent than it's been in a long time um and that this deck that props to chris here for you know putting a competent list together and running it well um and not trying to do too much like i think we looked at jesse's list and looked at this list this list is a little bit more teched out than jesse's was i'd say with the hex maniac and with um like the silent lab and escape rope and some other things in there to kind of deal with some of the more challenging things that you're running you run into with all basic attackers and stuff like that um sometimes i can come back and buy chip but uh yeah it's it's a it's a cool list and it's cool to see something like this kind of come out and show up and do well yeah and like you said if some people are looking for a baseline list to um maybe get started in glc i would definitely go over and check out full grips twitter page they had a bunch of people either they're retweeting the results posts that people are posting or they directly posted people's lists as long as the presumably they had permission of the players that were running the list and you'd be able to find all those resources there i'm sure as well that andrew mahone has some updated skeletons more than likely on the official glc website yeah but i would go also to the discord channel for tricky gym oh there's a whole community dedicated to glc over there um and each color each type has their own gym so they all you know post and talk about the specifics of that time oh cool yeah so it's like a you know good community over there if you're already on discord um i think you can probably find it through andrew's like link tree on his twitter or whatever on uh tricky jim's twitter but yeah glc is fun um it's it's not like a huge i think it's they didn't have a huge turnout i think it was like less than 100 for that tournament but it's still like you know pretty solid they're putting the money where their mouth is and supporting it so that's cool to see and then presumably they will have another event when phantasmic flames comes out in three months yeah for sure we'll be back to it's it's neat though to see the immediate impact like you know the release weekend of a given set and then if you maybe are like involved in that scene how that continues to progress over time as the set matures assuming that people's you know are responding to what they see at that initial event but i think that's enough glc talk for the episode if we didn't alienate all the non-glc folks already we can go ahead and take a quick break from talking about pokemon cards all the time and hit up blaine's quiz show this week where i will be asking john some questions if you are unfamiliar with blaine's quiz show maybe it's your first episode viewing the show or listening to the show blaine's quiz show is a weekly quiz segment where john and i take turns asking each other a series of multiple choice questions and each correct answer for those questions is worth one point there is one hint globally available each week that can be utilized on any of the given questions but if the person answering is able to answer all three questions without utilizing that hint he will earn an additional bonus point and i know going into this week john is still large has quite a large lead over me uh currently in this season he's up five to two and is just looking to extend that lead this week and i thought john there was no better topic for this week than mega evolution given that that was the set that was released most recently this friday and is going to be a large topic of discussion again as new megas continue to be revealed throughout the life cycle of the legends z a video game releasing in a couple of weeks so with that being said are you ready to answer some questions about mega evolution oh yeah let's go perfect i was able to scour the internet for this first question john given that you have such a as such an affinity i guess i could say to the end for the anime at this point i want to know if you know the answer to what was the first mega pokemon to appear in the anime and your choices are mega charizard x mega charizard y mega gyrados and mega blaziken this is tough my gut reaction um i mean charizard always like feels like a good answer like maybe they teased it in a previous episode or like early on in the season i'm trying to think of like the black and white series i'm trying to think like i don't know if i've seen the beginning i was definitely watching i watched part of it the other day when i was over at the card shop they'll put pokemon on and so we were watching this the one thing that sticks out though is um there's a character in the black and white anime that has a mega blaziken that like has like a i think he's a masked hero or something like that um and that he keeps popping up and so maybe that's like the first mega from that because he comes on pretty early in that show um and they have other megas like mega lucario shows up a lot but i'm going to go with mega blaziken that's my guess um is uh like thinking that that guy came on pretty early okay so mega blaziken locked in john you are correct mega blaziken did first appear now i will say it's the x and y portion of the show because x and y are the games where mega evolution was introduced but yeah oh you still managed to get there you still managed to get there my bad let's go ahead and go straight i'm z a pilled like i'm only thinking about legend z that's where my brain goes to sorry shifting gears back to the tcg as of the release of phantasmal flames which of these mega pokemon will not have received a standalone card and your choices are mega sableye mega low pony mega abomasnow and mega tyranitar oh okay so i know low pony and tyranitar have their own um i'm guessing save because like you've made their standalone card because mega sableye had the tag team with ttar but it didn't have its own mega card um so i'm going to definitely lock in mega sableye okay and you are in fact correct yes mega sableye indeed did have a tag team with mega tyranitar or with regular tyranitar and now at this point has not received a mega uh mega low pony will of course be releasing in phantasmal flames somehow people already have english copies of those cards because of some error packs and like the three pack mega evolution blisters okay wow some of them randomly like there was this error one where you got like one english mega evolution and english phantasmal flames and then like a french or spanish mega evolution pack really good and then uh mega tyranitar was in ancient origins and mega abomasnow just released in mega evolution yep and so to close things out last question will be which of these pokemon does not have an ability ending in the suffix eight a-t-e upon mega evolving that increases its damage output in the video game okay and your choices are mega gardevoir mega pincer mega latias and mega salamence oh man all right uh i'll use a hint on this one i'm confident that i won't be able to get this without a hint okay both mega pincer and mega salamence have the areolate ability which increases the damage of their flying type moves okay yeah that's helpful because i wouldn't have thought pincer had a really uh and i guess in that thought ladios so it's a dragon flying and then guardia is i'm trying to think like what car what what because i knew about areolate that yeah increases normal type or not flying this was like a normal there's a normal moves one two i'm trying to like i don't play vg enough to to know all this super well i'm really just trying to pull from like watching wolf glick videos that's that is the extent of my vg knowledge uh uh i'm gonna go with mega latias i think gardevoir has probably has some like fairy buff or something like that or or psychic buff um that has eight in it yeah i'll just go latias okay and you're three for three this week john let's go so mega gardevoir does in fact have the pixelate ability which increases the turns all of its normal type moves into fairy type moves and increases their damage output by some percentage i don't know what it is uh mega latias and mega latias have levitate which does not increase their damage output it just makes them immune to ground type moves okay so very good three for three puts you at a now Six-point lead going into next week. And again, I need to figure out how to come up with some tougher questions for you Some softballs as it were yeah, the card one was I don't know like I think that This mega say well, I sticks out in my mind because it's such a unique looking dude with a giant gem and stuff like that Yeah, seeing him attack team and like oh, yeah, we haven't seen that and outside of that tag-team card Yeah Cool. I think I was hoping that you would forget that it had a tag-team and you would remember that like Lopunny did have a Tag-team or maybe you would somehow forget that mega Obama snow was in mega evolution. Yeah Not this time I will look less impressive as the season goes on. Trust me like if you keep saying that well But it's two weeks ends. We'll see our three weeks in Yeah, but yeah, I'll have something for you next time and we'll we'll do another round of Blaine's quiz show It's a lot of fun, man. Thanks for doing questions. Of course So we'll go back now and head into the latter half of the episode jumping Shifting gears back into the standard format and so full grip games Like they hosted their V or VGC Wow like they hosted their GLC event this weekend also hosted a standard event Where they allowed the new mega evolution cards Ahead of their official, you know tournament legality they did some other interesting things though, and I'm not sure if this actually also applied to the GLC day, but they did a best of three Swiss With 60 minutes and a 5-minute overtime clock as opposed to the 50 minutes best of three with a 10-minute overtime clock and I'm not sure one how well advertised that was go ahead of time So maybe did that affect anybody's deck choices and to did that affect any like how much did it affect match outcomes? You know, I know That the full grip account did make a post saying that because they ran with those time rules Their tie rate throughout the entire event was only 6% which is Ridiculously low compared to what you would see at a regional but I also don't know like how many more people You know had gentleman's agreements and stuck to them because it was quote-unquote lower stakes than a regional Maybe yeah, or is it really maybe this is just the way to go with the time rules moving forward yeah, it's a Too small a sample size to really have anything sure conclusive I'd say but it is something to think about You know, we're really into the early days of we only had the one major in the US with the time rules We've had just two two weekends of it It doesn't look like the tie rate was changing all that much from that early evidence from what we've seen in regionals But yeah, I will say players are providing feedback and all of its positive So, I mean, this is just kind of a new way to if they keep doing this It'll be fun to see like how this if the tie rate stays low and if player satisfaction stays high then yeah, maybe People bring this to Pokemon or Pokemon sees this as like, oh, yeah, this is a nice like kind of testing ground like in the NFL sometimes they'll have like the XFL like a lower division or something like that try out some new rules and then the NFL will implement those that are more Successful, so it kind of has that feel to it Or you look at you know, like the pitch clock and the MLB Yeah, they started in our minor leagues first and then brought it to the major league, right? So, I mean if they if they can change the time rules in baseball I'm sure that we could see time rules also change in the Pokemon trading card game as they have in the past I think that they'll continue to try to refine things and evolve them further as things progress But I thought it was really interesting like that the 6% versus what we've seen It's the other major so far like 6 versus, you know, double-digit numbers is a pretty stark contrast and Unfortunately, I don't have a metagame breakdown to go along with this all I've got here are the top 8 decks Which have some interesting things to look at? Notably not a ton of actual mega evolutions featured here throughout this event Even going back through and scrubbing the full grip stream for the weekend I think that there were a couple of lists that did feature mega Pokemon that were featured on those stream games But even then I don't know if a mega evolution ever actually hit the stream table Which is kind of disheartening but at the end of the day it is kind of the base set for the set or for this concept this gimmick or Mechanics probably the better word to use right? They Always tend to make Most of the ones in that initial batch a little bit weaker you say that but like carnivore Okay and then Gardevoir and my ride on stand out But what other Pokemon from like the scarlet guard of war GX when that came out that was the first time I think we had Gardevoir is the exception to the rule. I mean, there's a garden for in this set, too I mean, you know, it's being it's being overshadowed by its non mega cousin at the moment Yeah, I mean when we had breaks those showed up a little bit But yeah, I weren't overwhelming exes me too when those came out that was like next destinies was huge, dude Sure I think you look I think it the important thing my perspective might be That you look at the power level and like look at the introduction of it Like yeah tag teams and exes when the like capital exes came out. Those were introduced into like a lower power level Format and The power level those cards was undeniable and you would say, okay Well, these are like, you know three prizes like giant Pokemon, but none of their attacks really seem or none of the abilities on those cards really seem like Overwhelmingly like oh, yeah, this power levels too big to ignore. We have to include it. We have to make a deck around it There's not a lot of synergy with anything else Maybe like the Gardevoir Doesn't really slot into the Gardevoir Gex builds that we've had before mega Gardevoir doesn't really fit into that super well. Sure You know, I think a lot of that will change after rotation But yeah It is I think the important thing is looking at like how does the introduction of a new mechanic fit into everything and at this point? It's easy. It's it's it's somewhat convincing to say It's not really rocking the boat a whole lot It's not shaking things up as much as maybe the designers thought it might or or maybe there they wanted a more gradual inclusion It's interesting maybe to think about where they want the game to go and how they want it to shape out the next few months But yeah, those results are pretty interesting in some ways we have a Good amount of new build of gold and go that came up And I it makes sense Golden goes moved away from the energy search Pro and is now running Precious Charlie and the way that it can get away with that is it now runs? the soul rock lunatone engine And so we see four of those making it into the top eight. I'm surprised they didn't do like an asymmetrical top cut here Sure Like if they're championing the time rules and all that stuff I would have liked to see that because you still had a bunch of ties here that contributed to like a large Yeah, they only cut to a top eight but then there were let's see They went all the way down to 12. So there was four players that missed out on That would have been included on a sim That would have been included on a sim Is that a Tom limitation though? Like in Tom, are you able to run an asymmetrical cut you run it as a regional I think Okay Have not messed around with the program. Yeah That's it. You can run a custom event and you can kind of figure it out from there I haven't run a lot of I mean, I've never run a regional on my Tom So, I'm sure that yeah, you have to finagle it a little bit more but Realistically air and you can run it Like once you get to this point Tom has done its job. You can make a bracket and just kind of run it. That's fair However, I want to run it like you just okay ASIM is in effect So, you know the top four get an automatic buy and then the rest of the eight play the first round of a sim And then you go top eight top four top, you know finals like you would normally Yeah, I guess it'd be interesting to see what the rationale was to not do that Yeah, I don't know like that that would suck for me if I was The player in ninth or tenth or even you know, whatever like you try all that and then just come up short I don't know what pricing looks like or anything like that, but hopefully they got some pricing for you know, bubbling out of top eight You would hope five going x1. Yeah, that's that's rough But yeah like you said we had a half of our top eight here was that Goldengo lunatone Sol rock engine and Then the rest of these were singleton decks that we had a guard of our at seventh place Remy Lorenz, which I believe is in I see champion in the juniors division formally and Now has aged up to seniors we had a monkey Dory frost last make it into cut a Dragapult Charizard and going X1 and first seed into cut was an Eevee box deck of all things from Emma Hagen who? Left Norway and has not gone back home yet After I know that Emma was playing in Pittsburgh and apparently sticking around to also play in Milwaukee Coming up here in a couple weeks so but One other name that stood out to me is one of those Goldengo players was Devin Raymond Thon a Ramada Thon I believe Devin has actually made cut at every single full grip cash event since they started running them again That's pretty cool as a as a seniors division player So, you know be on the lookout if you're in that seniors division and you happen to you know run into him Yeah, it seems to be a shark for sure. I do love that. They allow seniors to compete. Yeah like these high-level tournaments I'm not saying that I want Pokemon to have more of a uniform age of it like I don't want that But it is cool when you have like third party tournaments allow seniors to compete at these levels because it shows it showcases that That skill gap that might have been in place when those age divisions were set up initially or you know That players like to say that they oh, yeah masters You know, it's so much harder than seniors. Well, I think we've seen time and time again. That's not necessarily true And yeah seniors know how to play man, they really do so it's cool to see yeah Yeah, the upper echelon of the senior division definitely can hold its own in the masters division We've seen that time and time again, you know as we have a lot of these age ups here Just just a new Dorf just got second place at world's We've seen you know, Benny Billinger did very well last season. I Fully expect Gabriel Fernandez to do incredibly well this season And there've been a few others as well, yeah, I've just right Reagan Retz love Yeah, and I'm sure there are countless others that we could just kind of sit here and list names on and on but going back Into this. I actually don't know how the game shook out for top four I do know that at the end of everything the finals ended up being Emma with their Eevee box deck up against Remy and their Gardevoir deck and Emma actually managed to take things totally down with this Evolutions list that did not run a single new card from the mega evolution set and If that doesn't kind of go into what you were saying about the power level of this set I don't really know what does yeah and I honestly also think that this might just be the same 60 that Emma has played to two majors already this season or Very very close to it and it's just what looks to me to be a pretty par for the course Eevee deck at this point like We've seen the popularization of this Pidgeot line Sylveon is nowhere to be seen the Eevees got slimmed down because you only have three Evolutions in the deck at this point. We're making room for the Pidgeot line along with that well Wow along with that well spring mask ogre pawn and You know cuts here and there to fit this extra package of cards and to shore up some of these other matchups to increase the Consistency of the deck and it really paid off at the end of the day. I know Remy had A little bit of an unfortunate situation I think that he managed to double attach at some point during game one of the finals where it Largely, I think would have been inconsequential But ended up costing him the game because it was during a series of turns where he was using Oceanic gloom with frillish and Emma was just passing. Yeah, and Just at some point though. They noticed it and determined that it had a large enough impact on the game that Gave him a double prize penalty that allowed Emma to take everything down and then game two Emma actually went first opened the boosted evolution Eevee and immediately evolved it into a flarion going first and Also just raw opened with wrote him to go find hoot hoots and knocked owls and Remy just kind of drew past until he lost So, yeah when you have this deck firing on all cylinders, it's really good. Yeah, it's a fun deck And it's cool to see like yeah I mean this might be the same was that Emma's played at other events, but you know some cool inclusions with The Jacques and the Cyrano, I don't think I've seen this Before if I have I don't remember And then yeah, I run in the briar tech Kieran and black belt so getting some extra reach to be able to knock out those stage twos and then you can bring down their HP just a little bit with the gravity mountain to like put like we've seen with dragapult or in this case guard of or EX you can get the ko on those with Flurry on with their Carnelian carnelian, thank you With gravity mountain or with black belt straining, so that's pretty cool Just to Crispin to it's not it's a little less than I've seen some eevee builds play It definitely more more in on that like turn-based Burning charge than anything else Yeah, yeah, definitely That's pretty cool. I Don't know. I'm definitely want to like maybe build this list and try it out I know it's if he's kind of long in the tooth at this point, but it's still like fun to play it's a fun deck to like if you're really like trying to be better at sequencing and routing and learning how to like tech for like like play different matchups like this deck definitely Rewards you for good play more than most decks I'd say And there's a lot of cool stuff in here. Like you have the energy switch glass trumpet combo you have The Pidgeot which is super helpful in a lot of different ways Three ultra ball I think is a little bit more than I've seen in some no, maybe that's not true. I think no It's pretty soon. Yeah, that's that's pretty standard. Sorry. The to poffin is a little bit more I've only seen one in a lot. So that's Yeah, just to get your owls out and I like that honestly like that was kind of the thing that I always felt like I I just really want to see poffin early or just reestablish my owls if they get knocked out Or I'm like get discarded after your stadium gets bumped. Just that's such a nice thing to have but yeah, congrats, and I don't know I'm always happy to see like not Cardivore or at this point dragapult One one of these so it's cool to see something else for sure Sure, and we could kind of continue that trend So we didn't talk about this tournament last week because we didn't have all of the results yet But there was a Champions League event for the mega evolution format over in Yokohama a few weeks ago now, I think it was actually the same weekend as Monterey, so if we just look at the the metagame, this is only the makeup of the top 32 for this tournament and Overwhelmingly the most popular deck in top 32 is again gold engo and I'm fairly certain these are almost all lunatone Sol rock builds with the exception of Pedro Torres was actually over there from Spain and managed to make thought top 32 with The similar list of what Daniel Magda and some other players have played at worlds with the secret box rev of room Like heavy lightning heavy La Vinci a type of list And then following that up we see kind of the contingent of stage two decks making up the next most popular date or top 32 decks with dragapult Farney's grim snarl guard of war and Charizard Making up the quote-unquote top four with guard of war and Charizard being tied with three copies of each and then we get into just The other remaining decks either ones or twos here with terror box raging bolt Ethan's typhlosion Sarah ledge and flurry on box but at the end of the day, it was another knock towel deck that took everything down in the form of No, but oh hungos Tara box deck and so we can go ahead pull this up real quick See once again very little change from what you would expect from a You know destined rival or sorry a black bolt white flair list and instead just looking at one new card from the mega evolution format in that Lily's determination and Otherwise largely the same from what we've seen in the past Yeah, maybe just switching out like a professor's research for a little determination and then like the rest of it looks pretty bog standard What do you expect? Yeah, it looks pretty good Yeah, I wouldn't I don't think we need to spend too much time on it. If you played terror box It looks just like this and then yeah one card swapped out Sure. Yeah going into the second place list. So we do see this guy or this player Second place did run a mega Dian see here, which we haven't seen. It's not it's not out in the u.s. Yes Right. We'll get that in phantasmal flames. They so this is kind of a weird format for them It's mega evolution plus the mega Dian see and mega Gengar decks were legal at the time of this tournament because they were released similar to what like the What was it Stevens metagross and Marnie's grim snarl decks at one point got released ahead of the main set at that time so, you know This is mega evolution with a small asterisk. I guess is probably the right way to describe this for me But definitely some upgrades here in the guard of our deck though, like obviously we have the new Ralts and new curly a present This Dian see does seem to be a pretty cool tool whenever we get it Unfortunately, we don't have access to it right now. And then the big thing here though is Even though we're still rocking the two copies of bravery charm and secret boxes the a spec There's no Arvin's in here to search any of those things out Yeah, that's uh, it seems to be a trend for a lot of these stage two decks for Lily three research for Iona So just a focus on hard draw power And if we look back in time, this makes sense Like I remember early in black and white we had a lot of decks running Skyla And then as the format progressed those decks started cutting Skyla and just said, oh, I'll just draw into it with my draw supporters So as you get more powerful draw supporters People realize card draw is just better than like getting one or two cards, you know And I don't always not it depends on the deck. Obviously I say that to say like that's a broad general statement take it with a grain of salt, but Looking back at the history of the game. Like once we get like more powerful draw supporters people just say, okay Well, you know, we'll just draw into it and then kind of play accordingly and build their lists accordingly For sure and Gardevoir as a deck is something that like Arvin has never felt particularly good in this deck true Yeah, I mean, yes TM evo has had its place and has been relatively impactful But in the list like this one that doesn't play that TM evo like you're Arvin for bravery charm most of the time is not something that you necessarily want to do and it's more so that the Utility of Arvin was that it could find your secret box guaranteed. And now if you're in a relatively Unstable early game position. Maybe you've lost a prize or given up two prizes even to something like a torrential pump I think Lily for eight 99% of the time is gonna be better than Arvin for secret box and Just giving you way more options to work with like the power level of this card is Ridiculous is what I've learned over the past week since it dropped on TCG live for sure We also see the inclusion of the new psychic stadium mystery garden Yeah, this is a quick refresher for those that may not have looked at it yet It's basically discard a psychic and a drop your hand size matches the number of psychic book when you haven't play That's yeah broad generalization. So I mean it's somewhat strong like it's great to recover Yeah, it's great to recover from like an I don't know or something like that But it's not like overly impressive I'd say so I haven't really tested with it or anything like that to be honest But yeah, I I think one is fine. It makes sense. You know, like art is on You're not getting a lot of value out of super late game Not as much you can still like find your attackers back easy with Stuff, but you're running the night stretchers. So you don't necessarily need to use our design You can just night stretcher it and put it back on your bench that way So, yeah, it's nice to have a little bit extra supplemental draw to recover from like a hand disruption They're just a low hand size in general. So that's kind of cool It also gives you the like extension or the ability to extend some of your like combo turns I know kind of jumping back to that full group event they did have a round where there was a card of our deck that actually featured I believe two copies of mystery garden and That the player in that round was able to do something like Lily up to eight Play some ultra balls earthen vessels or maybe a reverse order but a way to thin the hand down enough to then have a bench full of psychic Pokemon and mystery garden to draw like four or five more cards and Then after that use something like a mew or which we don't see featured in this list And just trying to kind of go Further and to kind of extend also gives you a means to discard another psychic energy Which can be an issue for the deck sometimes especially earlier on in the game. So more out to that are definitely helpful You know It's not as conditional as something like moonlit hill where you have to have damage on your board that you don't necessarily want to remove So definitely mean and I think also the the upgrades in the Ralts in the curly are probably more Impactful than people will give them credit for as well Yeah, for sure there's definitely like Extra value there for those guys Interesting to see for monkey and only three dark. I think is that standard now like I don't Think no dark would be no I think no from If I have learned anything from watching Henry Chao play Gardevoir, it's that generally Then this is a broad sweeping generalization. That is probably inaccurate on my part But generally your number of darks in Gardevoir matches your number of monkeys or is your number of monkeys like plus one and Typically, you would run more darks before you run more monkeys. Yeah Yeah, that makes sense and seven psychics a little I mean it's about the bare minimum you could get away with comfortably But I don't think it's anything for sure alarming Nope next up in our top four We had a Marnie's grim snarl and this deck was actually I believe this player was undefeated going into top four so I had made it all the way through the grueling what 15 round Japanese event going into top four and Once again, very few cards present from the mega evolution set now granny grim snarl didn't pick up a lot of tools here I think interestingly for me We see the maractus included over the evil tall We do notably see the inclusion of Psyduck with that damp ability Which while not being in the mega evolution set did release at the same time as available as a promo in those three pack blister packs so if you are looking for a Psyduck because you hate dust noir be sure to pick one of those up for yourself and Then of course we see Lily's determination eating up a lot of slots that used to be allocated to professors research in the deck Marnie's grim snarl is a deck that really doesn't like to discard its cards So being able to Lily for eight as you try to establish your board and really make yourself resilient build up your monkey army Build up your frost loss on your bench get that damage Accumulated on yours and your opponent's board and start working things out so you could take a lot of multi price turns back to back to back Lily's is really kind of just what the doctor ordered to help this deck function more efficiently Yeah, and we see the inclusion of the blood moon or saloon, uh, which Is risky, but I think is ultimately the right move if we're trying to have a good late-game closer Like if your opponent does have that response for the grim snarl, then you still have a backup plan with that Sure, what are your thoughts on having miraculous over the evil tall? I mean, have you tried we tried I'm assuming you've tried Marnie's grim snarl at some point since the new sets come out Mm-hmm. I have and I'm personally an evil tall fan. Okay, I think I talked to a couple of people about it And the logic that I've been presented with for why you would still use miraculous as opposed to evil tall is that? Miraculous against something like gold Dango specifically They have to go out of their way or they have to have monkey on their board to be able to go out of their way To knock it out without triggering the ability and when they trigger the ability they put their gold and go up to 60 damage minimum. So they've got only 200 remaining HP, which just makes it that much more manageable for you to K.o. it with shadow bullet or blood moon if you are playing blood moon or saloon, uh, I Don't personally Ascribe to that being the correct line of play. I Don't think that a lack of damage is a bad thing That being the correct line of play I Don't think that a lack of damage of my opponents active gold and go is the reason that you lose games against gold and go And so i'm definitely more of a fan at present of the extra pivot that you get access to especially if we're including even more cards that Potentially eat up our air balloon like psyduck or like blood moon or saloon, uh Um, I don't want to necessarily have to try to save it to move Maractus is just too thick to be a reliable corner option in my mind Yeah, I think i'm Again, i'm definitely no expert on this deck So I haven't really have a flushed out opinion or anything like that but to me the logic that you describe makes more sense than yeah, like I don't think you're winning the gold to go matchup by hitting it to gold it goes with a grim snarl like I mean unless it's really got to that point late game or something like that But like your divo line, it's probably the way you want to go with that matchup if you can It depends. There's a couple of different avenues Like i've got a whole I don't know if I showed you that picture. I had I had a few people message me after worlds. I did I wrote out a whole flow chart for that matchup going second And a lot of it is idyllic at the end of the day But it's kind of the game plan that I think is much more achievable now that we have access to lilies as opposed to research yeah, and Even so even if you were going to take a corner line I do think that evil tall would end up being more impactful overall and more often than maractus would And you also don't just immediately lose the game because you started evil tall Yeah, I think that there are far more lose cases for opening with maractus than there would be with evil tall. Yeah See nobody in this list. Um, no No way to pivot outside of air balloon too, which kind of is a little weary to me that's that's pretty standard. Yeah It's kind of scary. That's just kind of a risk you take with the deck, unfortunately, but most things either retreat for one Or you want them active anyway, because they're a grim snarl piece, right? The only scary thing are again the maractus or maybe the blood moon and Blood moon's kind of been in and out of the deck for me, but it's Unnecessary evil at this point you run you typically, you know You run enough basics that you shouldn't start with blood moon very often and the games you do you just accept except that you're gonna have to put your air balloon on it. Yeah. Yeah, it's a beefy guy. So yeah, it can be a little obnoxious to have to move around. But it is so powerful, like the, yeah, just the Glow-A-Wake Game Closer ability, you can't really ignore it at this point. But yeah, it's cool to see. For sure. Running through Snow Runt and then, yeah, nothing else, I guess, too, too big. Took a little break there. Try to fix some technical difficulties. We're just gonna run through a few more lists here. So just to take one more look at Sanics, we're gonna look at our other top four deck, being Dragobolt Dusknoir. Then we'll look at some of the other unique entries into the top eight, being the Lunatone Goldengo deck, and some updates to Raging Bolt. And close out our top eight here. So the first thing here would be Dragobolt Dusknoir. Again, not a ton of new tools outside of that Lily's Determination. The interesting thing, or the most interesting card that kind of stands out to me in this list in particular, is the Aerie. And I don't know what they're really aiming for with this. Like, is this just a Goldengo tech? Like, you're hoping to snipe a couple of superiors out of your opponent's hand? Yeah, I can imagine it's a lot more powerful in best of one, where you are playing, like, kind of with a surprise factor in your advantage. So like, yeah, if you're able to rip, like, I guess if you're playing against a Goldengo and you're able to, like, rip, I don't know, a supporter. Like, I think you can get a supporter with Aerie, right? No, it's two items, two items. Yeah, I guess, like, the vessels. It's gotta just be superior or bust, right? Yeah, superiors probably. That would make sense in this matchup, in those matchups. Or, like, recovery for Gardevoir or something like that. Sure. Like, Knight Stretchers or Rare Candies or whatever. Yeah, I mean, it's not a huge, we've seen, it's been a while, to be fair. We've seen Aerie in Garra, Dragapult before, but yeah, this is definitely like a, I think it's a best of one inclusion, where you're, like, hoping to kind of hit the jackpot and really slow your opponent down. You know, you can Budew and prevent them from playing items and then Aerie the next turn. So there's some synergy with that, if you want to look at it from that perspective. But yeah. Yeah, early game, like, cause you're not playing your superiors early. And if you have, like, an eight to nine card hand size with Lunatone Solrock, you know, yeah, you're gonna be sitting on a couple of the superiors. So it might be really hard for you to close the game out if you rip two of them with an Aerie. So, I don't know. Be fun to test around, though. Yeah. Otherwise, we do see four copies of Lilies and not quite the full Tord-Reklev candy list, but two copies of Rare Candy making their way into the deck to maybe give some of that explosive potential. I have to imagine, like, with Lilies in the list in particular, you know, you drop a Lilies, you use a recon directive, that's 10 cards. So being able to find something like Candy Dustmore has to definitely be more likely to happen. And just, I think that this deck being able to put its foot on the gas when you have access to such a big thing, a big draw tool, you know, sitting on six prizes for as long as you need to, to really just come out swinging and essentially win the game within your two or three attacking turns. Like, Candy definitely seems like the way to go in this format in my mind. Yeah, you do. I don't think you need four, though. Four seems like too many. No, I did test Sorin's deck out a little bit, and yeah, four felt overkill. Especially now that you have Lilies, you do see it a lot more often. You're not discarding it as much with Research, so you're able to keep it in your deck for the pop-off turn or for the, you know, all right, now I'm gonna go have a quicker response to something. If it got knocked out, I can go Hilda, and then I have the Rick Candy from the previous turn where I got Lilies with it, and then go, go, go. But yeah, I don't know. Nothing really sticks out other than, like, the Eerie. Just the one Jamming Tower, I guess. But that's pretty standard, I guess. Right. Yeah, nothing. It's just Dragapult Duststorm, man. Yeah, it's been around for a while. We don't really need to harp on it too much. Cool, let's look at a deck that features the most mega evolution cards that we have seen so far. True. So, these Goldengo decks, you know, lists somewhat similar to these, were definitely popular over at the Full Grip Tournament, like John mentioned previously. Precious Trolley coming in as the ace pick of choice over that E-Search Pro, because you need to run more fighting energy when you're running this Lunatone Solrock engine to supplement your draw. And additionally, the Solrock actually serves as a pretty dang good early game attacker for this deck, when you still have multiple copies of Air Balloon to help move your Genesect or your Gimmickles out of the way to get Solrock into the active. And it's Cosmic Beam attack that does 70 damage, ignores resistance, ignores weakness. It's basically a fan rodent, but instead of needing a stadium in play, you need to have a Lunatone on your bench. And it's not too hard for the deck to do when you're running your Precious Trolley, your Nest Ball. You've got four copies of Arvin to go find that trolley. And 70 on one, this lets Goldengo have that kind of one-prize attacker that it didn't necessarily have access to. Or in some of those secret box-based lists, we were seeing them play one copy of Fan Rodent, just to try to open the game with taking a KO and having a one-prize threat on the board. Solrock accomplishes that while also giving you access to the Lunar Cycle from your Lunatone to supplement your draw and help you establish your board more effectively. Yeah, and you don't have to find the stadium. So I think it's easier to get into play and use that attack more than Fan Rodent was. Yeah, and just the consistency book that Lunatone adds, it doesn't seem like it's all that good, but being able to draw three in addition to all the other coin bonus you can do, and it combos really well early game. It's super easy to go Trolley turn two or turn one, and then turn two, Cypher, load up. So you can get away with running the one Genesect. You don't even have to put Genesect in play with the Trolley. You can just go Cypher the next turn and put two Goldengos on top and then go from there. This is kind of a throwback to earlier Goldengo lists, running three vessels, and then you have Fighting Gong, which is a nice flexible card. Let's you get basic Fighting, but also basic Fighting Pokemon. And so, yeah, we get to play some of the new fun cards. But at the end of the day, it's still Goldengo. Yeah, you have Solar Rock Lunatone. They're helpful and help you achieve what you're trying to do. I think this is a better version of, you don't live and die as much on your A-spec as you did in the previous versions of Goldengo. Having Energy Surge Pro hurt so bad in the early Goldengos, or if your opponent played Item Lock, you were really struggling to find the energy and get going. This is at least, you have a draw power. You have an attacker. Solar Rock can attack without needing energy to discard. So you can get away with just attaching to one Fighting, attaching an Air Balloon, and going. That's pretty cool. I'm interested to see how this does against Jealousant. Like, that was kind of the counter to Goldengo last tournament. So it'll be interesting to see, like, does this have a good Jealousant matchup in comparison? I don't think it does. I think Jealousant's still pretty tough. Yeah. Yeah, there's really not a lot that improved that matchup. So maybe not, but like, it's still power level-wise, like, very, very high. So we'll see a lot of this one. Oh, absolutely. I think that my question, and being somebody that didn't play Goldengo very much in the last format, is, is this truly better? Or is this just kind of the new toy syndrome of this format and people trying to include these cards? Because they do seem like relatively strong cards and just guessing, is Goldengo a better partner than, you know, Mega Lucario, as an example? But it just, is Trolley plus Fighting Gong really better than Energy Search Pro? And the answer is, like, maybe. If the format lends itself to leaning on this one prize board for longer, if possible, that's great. Like you said, Trolley's an A-spec that you don't necessarily need to save. You can just kind of find it and burn it immediately, whereas the Energy Search Pro, you typically wanted to try to conserve it until the turn where you really needed to take that big knockout, or could get enough of a mass of energies into your hand and discard piles so that you could superior for that big knockout when the time came. Now you, with, you know, four Gong, four Superior, and three Vessel, is that enough search and recovery to really serve the same purpose as what the Energy Search Pro was doing previously? I think the other thing that scares me is just, I don't know, I feel like there's gonna be more non-games with this version of the deck because you're only running three search cards. Yeah, yeah. And so, like you mentioned, not necessarily living and dying by your A-spec, but I think this version of the deck seems like it could struggle very heavily in terms of just not finding basics, potentially. Yeah, I mean, you still have the fighting Gong to find. Oh, you do have fighting Gong, you're right. The basic fighting guys, so you kind of get a little bit of help with that. But yeah, there's definitely gonna be games where it hurts when you're priced Trolley, but I don't know, that's just kind of how Pokemon is with A-specs, right? Sure. Yeah, I think I like this build a little bit better than the Energy Search Pro builds just because of the flexibility that Solrock adds as an attacker, and then the consistency that Lunatone adds is just the ability, like the draw power. You go from being really relying on flip the script every turn, like those, the games where you prize Fez and they knock out one of your golden goes and you only have one in play, like having only one coin bonus feels really rough. Okay. So like having an extra ability to just kind of works, because there'll be so many games where I'd coin bonus and then get a cipher off a coin bonus and like not be able to do anything about that, like go from there. So that felt pretty rough. So it's nice to have like kind of a supplemental coin bonus, if you will. But as a one prizer is really nice, like you can play a one prize board early if you want in certain matchups. Okay. But yeah, I think it's a cool deck. Yeah, I think it's a little bit better than where we were at with Golden Go before, but is it better? Like, does this make Golden Go a tier higher or make it a better deck in the meta game? That's where I'm still kind of trying to figure that out. Like, I don't know if this is still better than like what we've seen from other decks that, you know, like it still has its weaknesses. It still has like vulnerabilities, like all of your attackers, like Crustle's still really hard to deal with. It's really vulnerable to like the Toad Scroll that prevents stuff from being returned to your hand. It's a little bit better now that you have like an attacker that you can actually use without having to do all that, but it's not perfect. Not much. 70 damage is not great. It's good early, not great later. One thing I didn't think of before, and now that you've jogged my memory about Fighting Gong, the thing that I do like about this setup is you actually could, if you wanted to play a copy of Cornerstone and reasonably actually utilize the card as well for Mirror or other matchups where that might be something that could be beneficial. So that's pretty neat to see as well. But I'm sure that we'll see results from this deck, whether it's in this form, or maybe we'll see some holdouts for either the secret box versions of the past, because like I mentioned previously, Pedro Torres did make top 32 with that deck at this very event, or we could still see some holdovers with the Energy Surge Pro as well. But just to look at the final top eight deck, it's everyone's favorite deck. Raging Bolt has made it into things, and unfortunately, no mega evolution cards whatsoever. No, it's pretty standard. You know, if you've built Raging Bolt from a format or two ago, this will look pretty similar to you. Literally the same deck. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, there's nothing here that I really feel like is new. Yeah. Sorry, nothing new to report. So the Superior Energy Retrieval is a little interesting, I guess. That's a lot of energy back. And that and the E-Switch, but you know, at that, like some kind of tech slots, opt to play Karidon instead of Slitherwing. Personally, I think that's a mistake, but it is what it is. Maybe it's, maybe that's specifically because they had access to Mega Gengar in their format, and this card can one-hit KO it. I don't know. But the, I guess, takeaway for the Raging Bolt enjoys is that your deck can still do decently well in the format if you really don't want to let go of it. Yeah. And that kind of seems to be the takeaway from the format as a whole, that nothing from mega evolution itself was truly impactful. So I guess my question for you would be, did, you know, outside of the decks that we talked about, have you, you mentioned at the top of the episode, you maybe haven't played a ton of the standard format since the set dropped. I don't know if you've had time to play any of it. Are there any other decks that you have either played that you found interesting, maybe played against that you found interesting, or have thought about since last week that you might want to explore further? Yeah. Unfortunately, I haven't really had a whole lot of time to play on PTCG Live. And, I mean, I was thinking about Mega Venusaur. I haven't really seen any lists that, like, surprised me. There was one that, like, I think did okay. It did an online tournament on Limitless, play Limitless or something like that. But I looked at the list and I'm like, how does this even function? Like, it was using, like, the Teal Mask as an attacker, and you could Energy Trans over Energy to it. And I'm like, that just doesn't seem very good right now. Like, having your attacker be, like, having all of your energy on one attacker, and, like, they would run the Max Rod to be able to recover the energy to get it back and attack. again. But there's just, there's more like raging bolts, just a more efficient way to do that, if you're trying to do that, in my mind. But I mean, it's still early days, that's the upside of it, if you will. So we could all be speculating that this format, like mega illusions change nothing in this format, everything's the same. And then we go to regionals in two weeks. And we're like, Oh, just kidding. You know, now mega Absol's the best deck in format or something like that. Yeah. I mean, everyone like mega mawile shows up and does really well, or, you know, that's the fun thing with Pokemon is like, we figure with we feel like we have a good feel on stuff. And then, you know, we see Conkeldurr make a deep run, or we see like, Raychan pull out toad scroll, or somebody like figure something else out that nobody else has really seen before, and sticks to their guns and does really well. And that's the fun thing, you know, like, I think that's why I keep coming back to it, keep checking in on and keep keep playing after all these years. But yeah, to answer your question, not not really. I haven't really seen anything that's like stood out to me too much. How about you? Have you have you tried anything new with a new set? I've, I spent a little bit last week trying to make mega Latias work. And initially, I had it named in TCG live as new cloth. Because kind of the basis for what I set up was like, similarly, like precious trolley base, like you had, it wasn't quite one to one, but like mega Kangaskhan serves a similar function to a Rangaroo. Latias is kind of your one hit KO the thing button. Because with a binding mochi, you're hitting up to 350 with poison included. And so the problem is you just need even with area zero, I the deck doesn't have enough bench plots. And I tried either using glass trumpet as an energy engine. But then the problem I was running into is not having enough colorless Pokemon on the bench to actually make trumpet useful, or using ho as an engine. And then the problem is, it's just another bench slot that your deck needs to really be successful, because you're looking at you need, you need your mega Latias, you need Latios, you need regular Latias to give your things free retreat, or, I guess, theoretically, you could have like a pet run with an air balloon that would function similarly. A lot of times you either need mu or Fez on there, you need brute bonnet down some games as because mega Latias has that hit and run attack, you can run into the promo Petra on or cornerstone or clefty. And so you maybe have your hit and run Pokemon down on your bench as well. And eventually, it's just like, okay, I only have eight bench slots, even when I have my stadium in play. And it also was just not consistent enough in getting enough energy in play to utilize the big one hit KO attack. And I was just losing out games that felt like they should have been far more winnable by the deck just kind of being clunky, you know, maybe it just needs a little bit more work. But it also could just be terrible. So let's see, maybe maybe somebody else will find a busted way to play it. I think that it has potential though, like 300 is just a lot of damage. Sure. Like having a card that says I want to hit KO your thing is really good. And we'll have to see I do think that a lot of these cards, mega Absol and mega Latias in particular, are interesting tech options for ho-oh box. Not that that deck really gets a ton of a boost from them. But having a more reliable, beefier dark type basic is really good into Gardevoir, which the deck struggled with previously. And also the secondary effect of mega Absol second attack is really, really good. And so if that card is ever in a strong position in a format, it's going to be really devastating for people. Like cherry picking what you're discarding from somebody's hand is super strong. Yeah, it's very good. But yeah, like those are things that I've thought about and or worked on. The other big thing is just been playing Grimmsnarl games because none of the other decks really interest me all that much. That's fair. Yeah, it's always fun to go back to like your pet deck and like see how the new tools affect that as well as you know, playing the new decks and the new shiny toys. But um, you know, we wish you well for those listening as you try to break the format or get ready for regionals. We didn't really get to talk too much about regionals prep for this one. We're running a little bit later than I think we can get into that for this one. But that might be a topic down the road. We talked about our process for testing and all that kind of stuff. That'd be fun to talk about. Absolutely. And so stay tuned for topics like that and more on future episodes of the Battle Frontier.