Episode 22: BEGINNING A NEW JOURNEY

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 this week, we're going to dive into a time capsule that Jon has prepared for us before we look at the results from the Vancouver and Fortaleza regionals that happened this weekend. We'll then hit up our Blaine's Quiz Show segment for the week. And since we don't know when we're going to have time to do it, we're going to go ahead and look through the Journey Together set, which seems as good a time as any since this is pre-release weekend, or the opening weekend for pre-releases, I should say. But before we get into everything, as is tradition, Jon, I need to know how your last week was. It was pretty good. Didn't really do a lot of Pokemon stuff this past weekend. My wife was out of town up until Wednesday, so I did play in a league challenge on Wednesday. I tragically went 3-1 and got 4th out of, like, so... I lost the first round to, like, the person that went undefeated. I was playing Dragapult again, and I lost to Goldengo, so I guess foreshadowing in some ways for, like, the whole regionals perspective later on in the cast. But like I say, the reverse of it for... Yeah. But anyway. Spoilers. Oh, sorry. Yeah, if you weren't aware. But yeah, we'll get to that. But yeah, I lost to Goldengo in the first round. They were playing the Monkeydory, of course, and so that just kind of negated a lot of the strategy. Like, I used Bidoo and Bidoo'd three times, and then they benched Monkeydory and attached Dark and knocked out my Bidoo, and I'm like, oh, okay, yeah, that's not good. So I wasn't able to really recover much from there. But it was a good set. Like, I anoded them down to, like, a one-card hand and, like, damaged their two Goldengos and, like, knocked out their Monkeydory and, like, made it to where if they didn't draw on energy or something like that to knock out Dragapult, it would have been a game. I think they had hit the Dragapult for 150 the turn before, so they didn't really know a whole lot, but they got there, you know? Sure. But it's just, you know, they have so much draw on board, so it's tough. But it was a good set, you know, and then, yeah, I just kind of played other people after that and I don't really remember a whole lot, to be honest with you. But yeah, it went 3-1. Yeah, I had $15 store credit. Oh, wow. Yeah, it was a good... That's kind of crazy for top 4 in a league challenge. Yeah, it was like $5 per win. Oh, wow. Oh, I thought you said $5-0. No, no, no. I was like, holy cow. Not quite. No, Paper Tiger is one of my favorite stores in Richmond. Sure. They're, yeah, just a nice, clean, like, comic book store that does Pokemon twice a week, which is pretty cool. So I've been doing, I've been going there a good bit. But that was Wednesday, and then the rest of the week, Sydney came back in town, so I was just kind of chilling with her, catching up, because we haven't really spent a whole lot of time. I was gone for UIC, and then she was gone visiting her friend in Texas. So we spent last weekend and last week just catching up and, you know, watching shows, been watching Severance. That's a great show. I still haven't gotten into it, but I've heard good things. Yeah. But yeah, man, that's about it. Not a huge Pokemon week. I did watch all of Vancouver yesterday and the day before, and I finished it today. Okay. But yeah, how about you? What's your week been like since we last talked? Usual, usual family baseball, whatnot. Like, we had a rec league baseball game on Saturday, and then two of our other league for Sunday, and then actually just played another game tonight. So I've been doing a lot of that. But in addition to that, on Sunday, I actually played in that Pokemon Pocket tournament that I referenced last week, and I went 7-0 in Swiss and made top cut where I got a buy during the asymmetrical. I think it was a total of, like, top 52. So just the upper half of us got a buy into the top 32 round, where I unfortunately went first twice, bricked twice, and was summarily eliminated for the tournament. A little sour about that, especially to walk away. The prizing that they had for top 32 was advertised as 60-pack hourglasses, which is something. Like, they were codes that they got, I guess, from TPCI. But unfortunately, those codes are limited to one per account. So I got 12-pack hourglasses and four codes that I can give away to other people. Oh. Okay. That's kind of silly. But hey, looks good for me as far as getting pack hourglasses later today. Yeah. But congrats. That's still pretty sick. 7-0 in Swiss is nothing to sneeze at, man. What deck were you playing? Just the Dialga Arceus. Nothing mold-breaking by any means, and it was just a consistent thing that set up pretty much every game except for the two that I lost. I'm pretty sure. I think I 2-0'd, like, every round. Like, it wasn't even remotely close. And the neat thing was that in most games, I was able to play from either going first or going second and actually kind of map out a game plan from both sides, which I feel like a lot of decks in Pokemon Pocket can't do. Most things want to go second and just thrive on going second. And I guess maybe that speaks to the kind of power creep in the form of Arceus. But it's able to definitely operate from going first as well and work itself back into a favorable position. So it was interesting, and got to see... I hadn't played many games in Pokemon Pocket since the Triumphant Light set had dropped, and getting to see that there is definitely a solidified meta that has developed within that set, and that there are definitely good and bad matchups for different decks. But there is... I feel like there's more... not competitive integrity, but the ability to have some amount of skill expression and decision-making is more present, I feel, than when the first set came out. Oh, for sure. It's got to be. I mean, any time a carpool gets bigger, in theory, the skill level will get higher and higher. Well, especially just more trainer options definitely makes a big difference. That's cool, man. What did you lose to, if you don't mind me asking? I was a mirror. Oh, okay. So lots of Arceus and Dialga, I imagine. Oh, for sure. I think that I'm pretty sure at least a quarter, if not more, of top cut was that deck. It didn't actually end up winning the whole thing. The deck that took the whole event down was just Palkia, Palkia. So Palkia EX, and then the new baby Palkia. Like, no Manaphy, just running Misty, Irida, and a bunch of other stuff, and kind of going to town there. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Just getting lucky on flips, I guess? I don't know. I didn't watch the rest of the thing. I didn't see how any of their games went. The other deck that made the finals was Rampardos, Lucario, which apparently has a good- Okay, hard counter to Arceus. Yeah, exactly. That definitely has a good matchup in Arceus. I think it was like 70 or 72% against it on the weekend. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. That was my, that ate up most of my Sunday, honestly. Sounds like it, yeah. It's like, yeah, you know, it's quick games and stuff. Right. Kind of wait around. Yeah. Best two out of three was still, I think it was like 30 minutes or around. Still. Then I had to go do some stuff for work too, unfortunately, that day. So, not a ton of time to do other stuff. And just not a ton. You know, I'm really waiting for a rotation, or at least waiting for Journey Together to hit the online client. Just knowing that I don't have an event coming up to play in the Prismatic Evolutions format has diminished my desire to go play with paper cards right now. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I feel like that's a pretty common sentiment, for sure. For sure. I've been hearing that in my League, like on Monday, our League day yesterday, I don't think we had nobody playing standard. There was people playing Retro, and then everybody else was just playing. Like proxied. Post. Yeah, one of my friends proxied a bunch of decks, so I was just playing against him. I played Hop Station again and then I played the end deck. Which we'll get into. Well, yeah, we'll talk some more about all the cards coming out. And I think a lot of players have shifted focus from, unless you're playing in Stockholm coming up, there's really not a lot of incentive to keep playing standard. People are trying to get a feel for new decks, so I'm sure you've started proxying decks or unsleeving some of your Lugia's and stuff like that. It's on my to-do list. I have not had a chance to do it, but I definitely need to get around to it at some point. It's always therapeutic for me. I don't know. I've been through so many rotations at this point. People always ask, like when I was at League, somebody was asking me, like, how do you feel about rotation? And I'm just like, it's part of life. It's just another Tuesday. It's just another day on the calendar, yep. There's something therapeutic about, like I have a standard legal trainer's binder and then I have a, not a rotation, but like a black and white, yeah, expanded. And so just moving all the binder pages from one binder to the other, you know, that'll take up a couple hours on a Saturday or something. So thankfully it's not too hard, but yeah, definitely. I don't know. I like staying organized a little bit, but you know, you wouldn't know about my office right now, but I've been doing taxes. So it's always a little messy, but sorry, sorry to bring that up when we're trying to focus on fun Pokemon, you know, avoiding adult responsibilities. For real. Anyway. But yeah, speaking of which, let's get back into some more Pokemon. And this week, the first thing we're going to talk about, like I said, is a time capsule. So John, why don't you tell me what we're talking about this week? The deck for this week, I wanted to look at. We talked last week a little bit about the reintroduction of Megas, and I wanted to look this week at a deck that's one of my personal favorites from the first Mega era. It's Mega Mewtwo Y, I believe. Yes. Yeah. I always get them mixed up. Mega Mewtwo Y and Garbodor. So Mega Mewtwo Y, it's 210 hit point EX Pokemon, which just similar to Vs and V stars. It is a Mega, which means it has the Mega evolution rule. It says when one of your Pokemon becomes a Mega evolution Pokemon, your turn ends. There's a way to get around that, which I'll get into in just a minute, but I'm going to finish reading this card. It's a psychic type Mega Pokemon. So it's not a stage one. It's listed as a Mega here, and it evolves from Mewtwo EX, so you have to have that progression. And Mega Mewtwo EX has one attack for two colorless. It does 10 plus 30 more damage times the amount of energy attached to both active Pokemon, and this attack's damage isn't affected by weakness. So relevant because it is weak to psychic. So in the mirror match, you don't have to worry necessarily about the two of these hitting each other for weakness. You're telling me that they learned from the first Mewtwo watch? Yeah. We've, you know, it's like, this is World War II, and after World War I, we banned the use of chemical weapons. So now we're just using brute force, essentially. Oops. Okay. Okay. Let me pull the image back up. Cool. So that Mewtwo was powerful in its own right, and we had a lot of different ways to power it up. There was double colorless energy, so the predecessor to double turbo. This is a special energy that just provides two colorless energy. That's all its text says it does, and so that's all it does. We also run primal, or sorry, mega turbo, and this is just a trainer card that says you can attach a basic energy card from your discard pile to one of your mega evolution Pokemon. So you could power up Mega Mewtwo's psychic infinity, you know, with four energy, you're dealing 130 damage. Yeah. And so that is dealing a decent amount. If your opponent had two energy on there, you're looking at, what is that, 180? 190. Yeah, 190. So it adds up pretty quick. 190 was enough to knock out most basic EXs in this format. And the best part about, well, I'm going to get ahead of myself, but we run Mewtwo Spirit Link, and this was a four of in this deck because you wanted to see it pretty much immediately. Spirit Links were the way that Pokemon kind of retconned the mistake of mega evolution rule, or I guess balancing it. When they first printed mega evolutions, they did not print Spirit Links. They just forced you to end your turn, so with, I think, the introduction of the mechanic, you had to just basically play with a whole turn just inundated by evolving. Later on, they introduced Spirit Links, and this is just an item card with the Pokemon tool text. So before Scarlet and Violet, all tools were items, which is more relevant than you think because there was a Vileplume that had item lock that I'll shout out here because I lost to this deck in top eight of this tournament, which we're looking at here. But Pokemon tools were items at this point, so they were prevented from playing them under item lock. But yeah, this just says your turn doesn't end if this Pokemon, or if the Pokemon this card is attached to becomes Mega Mewtwo. So, that's how you got around the mega rule. A lot of this deck, the Shaman is primarily used the first few turns to draw through your deck, to find your spirit links, to kind of get set up. And then once you do get set up, you have access to the insanely powerful Garboader with Garbo Toxin. It's an ability that says that this Pokemon has a Pokemon tool attached to it. Each Pokemon in each player's hand and each player's discard pile has no abilities. So this is a functional reprint of a Garboader that was from the XY era, or sorry, black and white era, that was really, really powerful then. And this one's just as powerful now, or in this era. But yeah, just to go over this, you got your Mewtwos down turn one, and one way that you were able to kind of build your bench up was through Hoopa. Hoopa is a basic EX that has a really powerful ability. It's called Scoundrel Ring. When you play this Pokemon from hand onto your bench, you may search your deck for up to three Pokemon EX, except for Hoopa, reveal them, put them into your hand, and shuffle your deck afterwards. So just let you turn one, go Mewtwo, Mewtwo, Mega Mewtwo, or Mewtwo, Shaman, Mega Mewtwo, or Mewtwo, Mewtwo, Shaman, one of those things, after you play Hoopa, and then you can focus on using your other ball search for Trubbish and Garboader, kind of get those into play. And this deck would seem like it's pretty linear, and it is a lot of the times you are just using that Psychic Infinity attack. There are some other plays you have access to. Mega Mewtwo, the basic one that you run, the Mewtwo EX, had access to its attacks through a stadium called Shrine of Memories. So Shrine of Memories works similar to Relicanth in our standard format currently. It's just a stadium that says each player's evolved Pokemon can use any attacks from its previous evolutions. So that allowed you to use two of the better attacks. So Shattershot you didn't really use too much. You could use it early game to maybe get a quick knockout on a Pokemon that you're going up against. But Psychic Infinity, you usually just hit for more damage. Right. And I guess unless the Pokemon was weak to Psychic. Exactly. That is one reason why you would do that. So you could, like say, get three energy on a Mega Mewtwo, and then you Shattershot to knock out an opponent's Mewtwo EX, something like that. But the real attack that you wanted to use was Damage Change, which doesn't do any attack damage. It just has the attack effect of switch all damage counters on this Pokemon with those of your opponent's active Pokemon. So the reason I love this deck so much, and I played it at this regional, I played this two Orlando regionals in 2016, and I got top eight with this. The reason I love this deck so much was because of Mega Mewtwo, and because of the access to Damage Change. There wasn't a lot of decks, or pretty much no decks, that could one-shot Mewtwo in one hit. So a lot of times your opponent would do 100 damage, or 110 damage, and you could Damage Change once, and then it hits you again, and then Psychic Infinity for the knockout. But yeah, basically that was the strength of the deck, was against a Mega Manectric or something like that. You could make sure that you're staying alive. A lot of times against a Mega Manectric where they hit you for 110, you could boss up a Bench Shaman, and then just Damage Swap and knock that out. And then you have a clean Mewtwo, and they have nothing they can do for the next turn. So that was pretty cool. Yeah, I don't think there's a whole lot of... So this format was pretty straightforward, I'd say. This deck, especially, just a lot of consistency cards. You run a 4-3 Mewtwo, the two Shaman, and the Hoopa, and then a pretty thin Pokemon line overall, I'd say. You don't run any Ball Search other than the four Ultra Balls. Yeah, I mean, it's worth noting at this time, Nest Ball hasn't been printed yet. Just Flat didn't exist. So you've got one Ultra Ball, or Master Ball and Great Ball, probably. Yeah, and Master Ball was an A-Spec, so you had to... Well, I don't think you could use it in this era. No, I'm sorry. I was thinking of older prints of Master Ball, which have the same text as current Great Ball, so I'm probably off-base with that. Yeah, I guess you probably had Great Ball. I think a lot of decks ran Pokemon Communication, if I remember correctly. They reprinted that. But this one didn't run a lot of Pokemon, and you ran Hoopa to turn one, get all your Pokemon you needed. You ran four Sycamore, which is similar to Professor's Research, three N, which is similar to Iona, two Lysandre, which is the same text as Boss, a Pokemon Center Lady, which was kind of my tech inclusion. I don't know if other lists ran this. I'm trying to remember what... I think Igor ran Pokemon Center. Yeah, Igor Costa also played this deck at this tournament. Let me see his list. Yeah, I don't think he ran Pokemon Center Lady. So that was kind of my tech inclusion with it. Yeah, so Pokemon Center Lady is a supporter that says it heals 60 damage and removes all special conditions from any Pokemon. So it wasn't too impactful, but there were times where, because you weren't getting one shot a lot of the time, you didn't really want to use damage change, but you wanted to make sure you could take two hits so you could use Pokemon Center Lady, heal 60, and then kind of prevent that two shot and turn it into a three shot, which was pretty powerful. This was probably one of the most impactful items in this format was VS Seeker. It is an item card that just says, put a supporter from your discard pile into your hand. So super strong. It was a four of in almost every deck in this format. If you weren't running item lock, you were running four VS Seeker. We talked about Mega Turbo already. Trainer's Mail is just kind of a thinning, an item search, really powerful. It says, look at the top four cards of the deck. You may reveal a trainer card you find there, except for Trainer's Mail, put it to your hand and shuffle the rest back in. So this was just dig. A lot of times you try to find your tools with it, your spirit links, your float stones for Garbodor. You can also find stadiums in this format too. And then the last card in this deck I wouldn't talk about is Parallel City, which seems like a weird inclusion. This was mostly used for disruption to limit your opponent's bench. I think Mega Rayquaza was in this format. It should be. It's the same set as Shaman. So you would play Parallel City in that matchup to limit Rayquaza's bench. And this allowed you to also potentially, the cool thing with this is it has two different sides and based on the direction you put this stadium down, it impacts which side takes effect. So the red side here doesn't really affect our deck, but the blue side is kind of the more powerful, but it just says it limits your bench to three Pokemon. So very powerful against Mega Rayquaza, but you can also use it in your own deck to potentially get rid of Shamans. If you wanted to have access to your abilities, you could get rid of a Garbodor for some reason, but mostly just get rid of Shamans was kind of the name of the game. You could get rid of like a damaged Mewtwo if you had to, that kind of stuff. So that was the deck. I played this to a Top 8 performance, which was the last time I made a Top 8 at a Regionals. So it's been a while, but this was one of my favorites. This was, I think Orlando Regionals was the first modern era event, essentially. So the first era that allowed cash prizing instead of the scholarships or whatever. And yeah, it was definitely like kind of the beginning of a new era, essentially. And this was still probably also the first year that Regionals were no longer standard day one and expanded day two, correct? Correct. Yeah, this was all the same. You had to run the same deck throughout. We don't really see a lot of Mega Mewtwo here. You see it probably all the way down here, or Megaware Quazza, sorry. But yeah, not a whole lot in this era. But I know Volcanion also had to have a big bench. And then a lot of the decks that did well were Vileplume Toolbox. This is what I lost to from Alex Schmansky. Still a name you'll see quite a bit today. The crazy thing is more than half this top cut, well, let's see, one, two, three are still active today, which is still impressive considering this was almost a decade ago. I guess I'm active today, four. And then yeah, Ryan's active in his own way. His brother is a caster, but he also helps out with production. And then Alex was qualifying for Worlds up until last year, I think. So last year might have been his last Worlds invite. And then yeah, of course, Igor is a pretty big name. You got, I think he won Worlds one year, right? So yeah, pretty stacked top eight, I have to say. But anyway, just yeah, I wanted to reminisce about Megas for a minute with the release of Legends Z through A. So I'm excited for that game. But I also just kind of miss, this is like simpler times, just everything is very simple compared to now where we're going to get into kind of our breakdown of Vancouver. But goodness gracious, man, you watch the top cut matches from that, it is a lot different of a mindset. You're not just running like one attacker, you're basically trying to set up multiple KOs in the same turn and all that kind of stuff. Well, you really didn't have the ability to do that as much back then. There wasn't a ton of KOs from abilities until Sun and Moon came out. And you also didn't have the ability to very easily take big one hit KOs on things. You really had to stretch a ton of resources and probably put yourself in a position where whatever you're KOing with, like if you had a Mega Mewtwo with six energies on it, if your opponent just puts another Mega Mewtwo down with a double colorless, they're KOing you back. So it's like kind of the trade off of stretching for something like that, where nowadays things are a bit more streamlined. And we do see a lot more kind of one hit KO big guys just punching into each other. It's just slightly different shades, different flavors of the same game and kind of how things have evolved since then. Yeah, I will say that's probably not the best retro format, if you go back and play it. No, it looks awful. It's all ability or item lock, and that sounds terrible. Yeah, I don't remember ever going back and playing that format. I reminisce about it here. It's fun for a time capsule, but definitely not one you'll see me playing at regionals unless somebody's just like, oh, it's the 10th anniversary of 2016 format. Let's play this tournament, you know, and I mean, the nice thing about it, it looks like a fairly cheap one to get into where a lot of these other formats are becoming increasingly more expensive. If you don't buy the Art Rare Mewtwo EX, you should be alright with that one. I mean, it looked like the most expensive card in that deck was Float Stone. So I think that as long as people can deal with that, they'd be okay. Yeah, we're going to go ahead and shift gears now and go back to the present and look at how things went in our regionals this weekend. And the first thing we're going to jump into is Vancouver, and we're going to look at our day one meta graphic with, as we expected, Dragapult EX being the number one deck. And this is, of course, a combination of the straight Dragapults along with the Dragapult plus Das Noir, Gardevoir maintaining that number two spot. And then, as you expected, John, Goldengo making a huge surge up from being off the front page up to being number three. Big, big jump up for the Cheese Man. Yeah, I think players were kind of waiting in the wings to play Goldengo again. It's a really fun deck. Anytime you can draw cards for free, it feels really unfair, but also very fun. I did predict Archeladon to be a little bit higher than it turned out to be, but I can understand why it's 7.6. It had a top four, but it definitely didn't do quite as well as players might have been expecting at EUIC. And I think sometimes a deck's performance... People can definitely be results-oriented, for sure. Yeah, and some people might have seen how it did at EUIC and kind of pivoted away from that. And I think a lot of the top groups playing Goldengo and having the backing of quote-unquote named players makes it a lot more incentive. There's a lot more incentive to play Goldengo. And we saw that a lot this weekend, too, the continuation from EUIC. A lot of players still playing Goldengo, and it did really, really well, which we'll get into in just a minute. Yep. And just to finish up day one. Just to finish up day one, we do have Lugia here at number four still. Archeladon is on the day one graphic at number five, and number six being Kloff. So if we jump forward, fast forward to day two, Dragapult dropped down just a little bit. I guess the one thing I didn't call out for day one was that Dragapult was almost 20% of the field. You know, 19.3 is a big number. We haven't really seen things like that since the Charizard formats. And, but dropping off just a little bit to be just under 18% with Gardevoir and Goldango kind of eating up some of that percentage along with Lugia and Kloff. But Archelodon taking a big dive off the front page here and being replaced by Lostbox of all things. So still no Meridon and instead we get to see a different Pikachu deck kind of jump into the mix. Yeah, I think it's cool. I'm looking right now. We had a really even split between Dragapult Dusknoir and Dragapult without Dusknoir. There were in day two, 20 Dragapult decks and 19 Dragapult Dusknoir decks. And then three Dragapult Charizard and then one Dragapult Ironthorns to round that out. So very, very even split, which I think you predicted pretty well. And I think that makes a lot of sense. People moving away from Dusknoir a little bit more, but still recognizing the power that it does present. Yeah, I am surprised that Lostbox had such a decent showing in day two, but I guess it has a really good Golden Go matchup. For sure. And yeah, it has tricks for some of the other matchups ahead of that. Yeah, it's good into Goldengo, it's good into Lugia. It's not as good into Gardevoir in the current format and the Dragapult matchup can definitely be iffy as well. But the other big thing is being good into Archelodon. So being good into several of the more popular decks definitely makes it pretty appealing for some. But I think that's enough about our stats here. We can go ahead and look at some of our results. Yeah, there wasn't any Moridon in either day one or day two. And I thought that was interesting. Kind of a fall off from the UFC. Yeah, not on the graphic, for sure. For sure. Yeah, I think if you do just look at the rest of the stats here, Moridon, I mean, it was there. It was still present and it was just off that graphic since we didn't get a pass to the rest. But it was still fairly low representation, all things considered, given how popular the deck had been prior to this and the level of success that it had prior to EUIC. But so seeing this fall off, I mean, I guess the other big notable thing is like we saw Archelodon had fallen off, seeing how much it fell off as far as converting into day two, going from being like a 9% deck to 4.7 is, those are like almost raging bolt numbers. Yeah, yeah. And it's, it feels pretty linear, like the same way that Raging Bolt was. I think this format and last format really just show the strengths of a deck that allows you to express your skill and to play out different scenarios and have different avenues of victory and different strategies. Having a linear strategy can be good. It can, you know, work out just fine, but it definitely, when something doesn't go your way or so often happens at Pokemon, like you prize something and you have to pivot your game plan, being able to abuse a really powerful attacker or have like more draw power or something like alternative win conditions, like a buddy strategy is really, really good. And Archelodon and Raging Bolt don't really seem to have that. No. I mean, if you look at the seven decks that are ahead of Archelodon in popularity here, all of them have options or in the case of Goldengo, just hit for infinite damage. Sure. And even then we do have options now with the inclusion of things like Monkey Dory into the deck and kind of pivoting the deck away from being just as straight. I'm going to do infinite damage every turn. Right. Yeah, Monkey Dory definitely allows for some counterplay. And then, yeah, I think Goldengo has just proven to be more consistent than Raging Bolt. Having that belt and draw in Goldengo's coin bonus ability just allows you to recover from late game Ionos so much more efficiently. And that seems to be really a key trait of almost all these decks. They have some way to recover. Dragapult has Dracloak, Gardevoir has Curlia, Lugia has Gift Energy. Kloff, well, that probably doesn't have as much, but you don't really need much to attack with Kloff. You can almost attack for no energy almost every turn or just a double Turbo. And then, yeah, Lost Box has Klefki. So, yeah, just a lot of those decks above Archelodon have options, so. Makes a big difference. That's the name of the game, yeah. Just seeing how things turned out, we saw there was a 12-person asymmetrical cut for both Vancouver and Fortaleza. And so we saw, at the end of the day, Samet Kukadapu making another asym appearance with Lugia this time. I believe he was the undefeated Snorlax last time he made an appearance at an event. Then we saw Makani Tran pivoting off of Arceus V-Star, finally, and playing Gardevoir EX instead and making it in the cut. Joe Figliano, another Lugia. And then Christian Labella from Canada, almost making it into top eight with Regidrago, of all things. And it's a pretty interesting list. Plays the Latias instead of the switch. Plays a Professor Turo to deal with Bidu, potentially. And just provide the options to take that mid-game Kira and play that otherwise would be impossible. But still showing that Regidrago can get it done sometimes. Yeah, I was very excited to see Christian have a deep run with Regidrago. It's cool to see that. It was kind of an outlier, for sure. Same thing with some of the other decks we'll talk about in just a minute. Speaking of outliers, we had one Pidgeot control in top cut in Abana Med. We had one Archeladon in top cut in Hiroshi Takeda. And then to see probably the most popular deck in day two, we had a Neal and our eventual winner, Andrew playing Dragapult. We had two Golden Ghosts in Lucas and Trevor. And then we had a Maridon in Caleb Rodgerson, which he played a really cool set versus Makani. I will say that I don't always get to watch every regionals and it's weird, the ones that I judge, I don't really get to watch a lot. I don't know, man. After you've judged all day, I didn't really watch any. I will have to go back and watch at some point EUIC, but I did not end up watching hardly any of that tournament. Sure, you just get kind of burnt out on it, I guess. Yeah, you're just tired after working three days straight of a tournament and you're actually working, like you're not just sitting around waiting for something to happen. But yeah, they're full days. And you don't really get a chance to, unless you're judging, table judging, like Top Cut or at the top tables, like, I don't know, you don't really get to see what's going on in the tournament proper. You just kind of have to, like the tournaments are so big to where it's not always convenient or your job to be watching the top tables. And we're not always, as judges, focused on what's going on in top four. Sometimes we're just focused on the cup or the challenge that's going on as a side event or whatever. And then, yeah, it just can be a challenge to find the time when I'm judging to go back and watch tournaments, especially like, you gotta catch up on all the stuff that you put off when you're traveling and all that kind of stuff. But this past weekend, I'd had some time and then today I had a nice day to just sit and watch the Top Cut matches. And I will say, if you are trying to get better at sequencing or at figuring out how to play in the Pokemon training card game, I'd highly recommend you watch the day two coverage, start to finish if you can. But at least of the Top Cut, there's so many games, literally every single game. There was no, like, I hate to say, like EUIC had kind of an anticlimactic ending, but it did. But there were so many games that came down to game three or came down to like small decisions. Makani versus Caleb, Makani had the game and then Caleb had to kind of use a decision tree of either going for a boss's orders or trying to hit an energy off a generator and then another energy for turn and sequenced it correctly and weighed all the odds and did a really good job of thinking through the strategy that he needed to execute this game plan perfectly. And so like we talked about last week that, you know, Maraudon seems like a little luck-based deck but when you're watching a player like Caleb play the deck, you really get to see kind of the depth of strategy that goes into playing that kind of a deck. So that was really cool. Just to round out the rest of the players in the top eight, we had Libui, and I apologize if I'm mispronouncing that, but he played a really interesting Roaring Moon deck if you wanted to talk about that, Aaron. Yeah, I haven't actually had a chance to look at his list but I know that Lee's been playing this. I know we saw before the cast, we looked at his Limitless page and saw that Lee does not venture out from the West Coast very much but has been sticking to Roaring Moon for both this event and Sacramento and just looks like a very consistent Roaring Moon list to me, I mean, we've got the Baby Moon, we've got the Karidon for the Maraudon matchup, you have the Petraunt EX to help with many matchups really at the end of the day, but just kind of giving yourself one, an alternate attacker, two, making sure that your block matchup is locked up and secure and really came into play against a Bond who was actually piloting a pretty interesting Pidgeot list which consisted of some Snorlax in addition to other typical Pidgeot cards. So I'm sure that that came into play with them. We have the four Pokemon Catcher, four Pokestop, three Trekking Shoes, and we see Prime Catcher make a reappearance in Top Cut after being notably absent for the rest of this format. Yeah, we saw a little more Prime Catcher this tournament, but yeah, I think, was this the only deck in Top Cut with Prime Catcher or? Should be. Because Caleb played Secret Box. Correct, Caleb put on Secret Box, Andrew Hedrick had the Crystal, Lucas and Trevor had Energy Search Pro. Christian probably played Prime Catcher and Regidrago. But that was outside of, oh, okay, if you're including Ace Sim, then yes. Okay, fair, fair. Yeah. I believe Hiroshi was also on Scoop Up Cyclone. Oh, cool, I love that. That's pretty cool. But yeah, I said interesting as in it's interesting to see Roaring Moon, not that his list was overly interesting, I apologize. I kind of baited you there, but yeah, definitely focused on aggro, consistently getting that turn two, turn one attack off. He whiffed it a little bit in the top four against Andrew Hedrick, I believe he played. Yeah. Yeah. That's right, yeah. No, Hedrick played Lucas. He played Lucas. And that seems like a pretty bad matchup, honestly. Yeah, especially Lucas ran a basic Golden Go, so he was always able to threaten that if he used Frenzy Gouging, you get that. But the math just, he whiffed some attacks. Game one was close, and the game two was not very close at all. Yeah. If I remember correctly. But yeah, this was, you know, as we round out this format, we're kind of putting a bow on the standard format as we know it, and we're moving away from that into the journey together slash post-rotation format. But it is still very exciting to me as a player slash kind of lover of the game to see, just looking at this like menagerie of decks you have here, like pretty much the most deck that's repeated is Golden Go, I'd say. Yeah. And even that like doesn't make up more than a third of the decks here. And there's just such a wide variety of different decks, different play styles that you can choose, different strategies, if you will. Control, we have Lugia, we have Garde, you know, all these crazy like damage placement and energy acceleration. And yeah, it's really exciting for me. And I'm kind of hardened by it to say the least, you know, players might complain that it's a stale meta, but I don't really think that that's the case. I think maybe they're just tired of playing the same few decks and hitting a pairing against Dragapult with Dusknoir. And that deck does feel unfair when it fires on all cylinders. But hey, man, like, I think this would be a format that, you know, we talked about earlier with 2016, that that's not a format that you'd really want to go back and play. I think this one is one that I'd want to go back and play. Like looking at like the Garde versus Dragapult matchup was so interesting. And just seeing like the interplay at the high level between all these two, like those two decks and all the different decks listed here. It's really cool. There was another stream game from this event. I think it was Anil against Rowan Stabenow was actually really good as well. And I believe that that was a win and in for top cut. So it should be either round 13 or 14 to go back and look at. But there was another event this weekend, did not have official coverage. And therefore we have nothing to go off of other than these results here. But I do know that Fortaleza did also have a 12 person asymmetrical cut consisting of many Dragapult decks and notably multiple Gardevoir decks, all of which managed to get themselves all the way into the top eight of the event. And so we start with Joao with a straight Dragapult, Omar on an ancient box deck. Our lone American in day two in Fortaleza, Austin Charles went over with the Tarapagos poison archetype and fell just outside of top cut. Marco with another Sarah Ledge attempting to make its way into top eight, but falling just short. Then we see Marco Cifuentes, notable player. Just, you know, maybe related to our current world champion playing Lost Box, which I know he's been a long time player of. And then we see some of the other more familiar Latin American players, William Azevedo on Gardevoir, Joel with another Roaring Moon making its way into top eight this week. So, you know, somebody sent a memo to Joel and Lee and kind of let them know from opposite parts of the world that Roaring Moon was the play. And we see Juan with Gardevoir, Giovanni Sasso making another top cut at a regional with Gardevoir this time. Francisco on Dragapult Dusknoir, Pedro Pertuzzi on Gardevoir, and then Vinny Fernandez. And then worth noting as well, his brother also won the senior division at this event with the same straight Dragapult list. That's probably a pretty cool stat. I don't know if that's ever happened at another event to have two family members win the masters and seniors division with the same 60. I can't think of an example of that. Like the closest I'd say maybe the Sable House Brothers did it at one point, but I don't know. That's a while ago for sure. Yeah, and this is the one deck that I think I would wanna pull up and look at. And I don't think that it's very different from the EUIC list that they had, but just again, notably Unfair Stamp as the A-spec of choice with Crispin serving as that energy acceleration option in place of the Crystal. Klefki is a big option for both the Meridon and Tarapagos matchups, and then the Monkey Dory to serve in the mirror. And I know that finally figured out what Defiance Vest is good for in this deck, John. And apparently it's really, really good against Goldango. Just forcing them to have an additional energy card makes it even more difficult and also sometimes makes them even more susceptible to Badoo following that big knockout. That makes sense. I also heard it can be used against Regigigas. Prevents that one shot there. Yep. So a couple options. I really, I do think we do, like you said, have a couple more events coming up in this. We have, I believe, Brisbane and Stockholm that still have this format. And I think this list in particular, if not the 60, like one or two cards off is my pick to win one of those two events. Sure. Solid deck for sure. You know, I think we've seen Monkey Dory. That's been kind of the star of the show, this back half of this format. Make its way into everything now from Goldango to Guard of War, obviously, to now Dragapult. So the longer this format's gone on, we've just seen Monkey Dory kind of just take over as a counter to Dragapult, but also now Dragapult's playing it as a way to supplement its own damage and augment all the damage placement you get from Phantom Dive, which is cool, but it definitely gets a little annoying sometimes, I'd say, playing against it. It can, for sure, for sure. Yeah, I think that's about all I've got for these two regionals. Did you have any final thoughts on it before we move on? No, I'd just say that it's been a fun format, you know, as we kind of close this format out. I don't know, I started a lot of, and we'll get into the new set coming up, but I've started playing a lot of the new set stuff, and now that I've started playing it, it's always hard to go back and play standard, but this'll definitely be one that I would love to go back and play, like three years, four years from now. Yeah, like Regidrago's a fun deck for me, Dragapult's a fun deck, I love Phantom, like Phantom Dive's always fun, and the Recon Directive mechanic is a really cool ability. For sure. So I'm hopeful that stuff will stay cheap and accessible in the near future, and we'll be able to kind of go back and play with all these old formats. And I do think, I will say that I do think that Prismatic Evolutions changed the format in a healthy way, because I was not at all a fan of Surging Sparks. Okay. And maybe that's just because I hate Regidrago, like even the events that I played Regidrago to local level events, it just, I didn't find the deck enjoyable to play with or play against, and the fact that it got pushed out, maybe unfairly, as we saw Christian almost make his way into top cut, just it not being the most dominant deck, most popular deck in the room, I think was a healthy change in the format, though. Yeah. I mean, anytime you're having stage ones and stage twos rise to prominence, like the fact that a stage two attacking stage two is the best deck in format, essentially, is always a healthy indicator for me. We've seen like Qian Pao, Baxcalibur, but those don't really attack with Baxcalibur unless they absolutely have to. So it's cool to see a deck that even manually evolves up from the basic to stage one, and then stage one to stage two, really be the prominent, powerful deck, which I think is pretty cool, so. Yeah, yeah. Next thing we're gonna move on to, though, is our Blaine's Quiz Show for the week, and this week it is my turn to ask John some questions. So as of last week, the current scores are John sitting at 14 and I have 20 points, and we'll have to see if John can close that gap. So same rules as always, John will have three multiple choice questions, each correct answer will award him with one point, and he has one hint available to him throughout the course of all three questions. And the helpfulness of that hint may vary. So we'll have to see. I had a topic for you this week, we're gonna talk about the Journey Together set, and so I wanna talk about owner's Pokemon. Okay. And these will range, I'll tell you right now, these will range all the way back to, there is one wizard's question, all the way up to some more modern stuff. Okay. But first question for you, which of the following Pokemon SP was not owned by Cyrus during the Platinum to Arceus block of sets? And your options are Camerupt, Crobat, Bronzong, and Electrode. So notably Pokemon SP, for those who aren't aware, were all basic Pokemon, SP was kind of the owner mechanic of the time during the Platinum era. And so all of these would have the suffix of G attached to them they were all Team Galactic Pokemon, but one of them was not owned by Cyrus as indicated by the trainer portrait on the card. Okay. So I know two of the four that are Pokemon G. Oh, sorry. All four of these are Pokemon G. Oh, but not all of them are owned by Cyrus? Correct. Well, that's great. That's gonna be a lot harder than I thought. Okay. Jeez, man. Okay. Well, okay. Trying to like picture the card in my head and like picture what trainer is on the card. It's tough. I'm gonna use a hint here. I think just get it out of the way. Okay. Try to narrow it down. I'll get a 50-50 out of the way here for you. The two of the three that are owned by Cyrus are Camerupt and Electrode. Okay. Well, that's good because those were the two that I was leaning towards that weren't Cyrus's. So you're saying two of the three that are Camerupt, Electrode, and one other are owned by Cyrus. Okay. So it's either Crobat or Bronzong that aren't. Oh, I can picture Crobat. Doesn't have Cyrus in that little box. All right. I'm gonna say Bronzong is my answer. Okay. That's my guess. Okay. That's a very good guess because Bronzong, in fact, is owned by Saturn. So we can see this little trainer portrait here. And that indicates that Bronzong, while being a Team Galactic Pokemon, was not, in fact, owned by Cyrus. Yeah, I figured the Camerupt and Electrode were gonna be the tricky ones, and so I kind of threw you a bone and took those out of the mix. Yeah, they were definitely the ones I'm less familiar with. Well, because they're just not good cards. I mean, I couldn't, for the life of you, even now, I looked them up today to make this, and I couldn't tell you what they do. That's right. Bronzong, even though this is the Japanese version of the card, I can tell you that Bronzong lets you move an energy, and it puts two counters on itself. Yeah. And that's why it was really good. So another one. These, unfortunately, this is cheating a little bit, but the next two questions are related to cards that are not yet released, and actually, unfortunately, are not coming out of Journey Together either. But which of the following Misty's Pokemon are featured in Heatwave Arena, which is the upcoming Japanese set, that were not present in either Gym Heroes or Gym Challenge? And your options are Misty's Gyarados, Misty's Starmie, Misty's Psyduck, and Misty's Lapras. So all four of these are cards that are coming out in Heatwave Arena, but one of them was not in one of the gym sets back when Wizards had the game. Okay. Well, I know Starmie's definitely not one of the four. Definitely was in Misty's set in the first Wizards expansion. Beyond that, I'm kind of just guessing here. I can't picture Misty's Lapras from the Wizards era. I could be wrong about that. I can kind of picture a Psyduck in my mind, and I feel okay saying that Gyarados was also included in the Gym Challenge. So I'm gonna say Lapras was not a Misty's Pokemon in the original Wizards expansion. Okay, final answer. Yep. And you would be correct. Misty's Lapras, in fact, was not a Pokemon that she had access to in the gym sets. Yeah, the Psyduck for sure. He's just sitting there on the ground and he looks all confused. It's a stereotypical Psyduck card. Right, and in the anime, she had a Psyduck too. So that one. And I know she had the Magikarp in the anime, so that kind of leads to the Gyarados, I guess. There you go. One more question to go. You are two for two so far. And yourself is happy. Two for two so far, John. Try to see if I can't have a Aaron Curry week and go perfect. For the last one, I want you to do a little bit of math. And I want to know what is the maximum amount of damage that Cynthia's Spiritomb can do with its Raging Curse attack? So for reference, in case you do not recall what Cynthia's Spiritomb does, Raging Curse does 10 damage for every damage counter on your benched Cynthia's Pokemon. Okay, so 10 damage for every damage counter on your benched Cynthia's Pokemon. Yes. And then we got to figure out what's the maximum hit points that all your benched. Yeah. So I'm guessing this is- Your options are 1,400, 1,710, 1,780, or 1,810. Okay. So I think it has to be a number divisible by five, which- Is everything. Well- It's multiples of 10, so yeah. I don't know. 50 would make more sense. Because if you're saying that, oh, no, because I guess you can only have four of one Pokemon in the deck. So you have to figure out what is the most power, like highest HP and then one extra one. I'll throw you a bone to work off of this too. Cynthia's Garchomp EX has a base HP of 330. Oh, okay. So this is a newer card. Okay. Yeah, sorry. These are also Heatwave Arena cards. I probably shouldn't have included this question yet, but it felt really fun and I wanted to do it again. It's a fun question. I just have no clue any of the Cynthia's cards coming out, to be honest with you. I guess I've seen a scan of Garchomp, but I didn't know that that was like the most hit points. So 330, you said? Yes. All right. So that times four, three times four is 12, 144. So 1,400 starting out there. And then we're going to say probably at least 220 from there. So 16 something. So I want to just do price, like kind of guess the middle answer here. Let's go, let's see if there was one more that's 330. No, let's go 16, 10. I think that's the right answer. You mean 17, 10? There is no 16, 10. Sorry, yeah. Sorry. And the attack is 10 times the amount of damage counters on the bench or all Pokemon? On your bench, Cynthia's Pokemon. Okay, and there's no Terra Pokemon. I guess you could do it where you put one Terra Pokemon to play. No, okay, my math is going to be wrong. I totally didn't account for doing anything with areas. Yeah, yeah, sorry. This is a max bench size of five. Yeah, all right. Otherwise, yes, you can make the number higher. But using the assumption that we're not doing anything other than Cynthia's Pokemon, I got to break the game, of course. Let's go 17, 10. That's my final answer. That is a very good guess. And you would be correct if Hero's Cape didn't exist. So we have Garchomp EX here with 330 HP. So you can do 320 damage for each Garchomp. You have the Roserade that has 130 HP. You can do 120 damage for that, but it also has Glorious Cheer, which makes your Cynthia's Pokemon do 30 extra damage just for existing. And you can further boost your damage by 280 by having four Cynthia's Power Weights on your bench Cynthia's Pokemon, which boosts their HP by 70 for each. each one, and then Hero's Cape on the fifth Pokemon to increase its HP by 100. Yeah. All right. So when you add all of that together, you get to 1810. You are absolutely correct. If we had a Terra Pokemon and we could include two more Cynthia's Roserades on our bench and boost that damage even further. So just be aware Spiritomb does a lot. I, uh... I'm going to give you this point because you broke the question. Yeah. If you put the Hero's Cape and the power, I'm like, well, yeah, if we break the game by... I don't know, man. Yeah. No, this is a fair question, but it doesn't really... I would say it's unfair. I will agree it's unfair because these cards are not released. They're not even released in Japan yet. But I was just looking at some of the new owner's Pokemon to see if I could find another question to fit in with what I had this week. And this seemed like an interesting thing to include. Probably would be better served if we had a better idea of what these cards did because they were more soon to be coming out in English. Right. Well, if you're listening to this podcast and you feel like you would have got the answer to this question, correct, please put it in the comments. And that's how I'll know you're a liar. Or if you've done the math. Or if you've done the math. With an area zero Underdepths in play, let us know that as well. Yeah, I'm sure if Jake, your heart's listening, start typing, bud. Yeah, that'd be a lot of fun. But that'll close out Blaine's Quiz Show this week. And like I said, for John breaking my question and none of my answers technically being correct because John was able to beat my question, I'm going to give him three points this week. He totally earned two of them by getting the questions right. And then that last one, I'm just going to throw away because I made a bad question. And so that's three points for John this week. We are now at 17 to 20. And we'll have to see what we can do when John comes back with a quiz for me after our big quiz episode next week. Yeah, next week will be a week off for Blaine's Quiz Show. Between the two of us, we'll have Xander Bennett on as a special guest. So I'm definitely excited for that. Yeah, I need all the help I can get to catch up to you. I don't feel like I'll be advancing my advantage much, but hey, man, it's still fun. That was a really fun segment. I think Owner's Pokemon are really fun. I'm glad that they're bringing that mechanic back. For sure. Definitely. And they're always really popular. Yeah, they should be. So speaking of Owner's Pokemon and the upcoming set, let's get into it. Yeah, last thing we're going to close the show out with is just a look at our Journey Together set. And we're looking at everything here on PokemonProxies.com. So shoutouts to Jack from Omnipoke for putting this site together, taking the time to actually template all of these cards with English text, and should be pretty accurate to what we're getting in our set starting this week with our prereleases. So as always, we're going to start with the trainers and special energy. First card, only special energy of the set is Spike Energy, which simply provides a colorless energy. But if the Pokemon that it is attached to is in the active and is damaged by an attack, we put two damage counters on the attacking Pokemon. I honestly don't see this seeing very much play. No. I mean, it's basically Rocky Helmet, but an energy. And Rocky Helmet sees zero play now. Yeah. Yeah, I don't really see a lot of scenarios where this would come up as like a really important modifier. I mean, it's cool that it stacks. Yeah. There's like a Lycanroc. Yeah. Yes. There's a Lycanroc that can accelerate from your discard pile to Spike Energy in the set. Even that, like with given all opportunities. I could maybe have seen the same play in Lugia, where you could accelerate it. But the fact that Lycanroc itself is not a super great card will probably not lend this card any points in the playable department. Yeah. I mean, the reason why I think this card is not that good, it goes back to like offensive versus defensive cards. This is a card that forces your opponent to, like, this is like asking the question of your opponent. And then if your opponent has the answer, like a Temple of Sinnoh, they can just hit you without any repercussions or, you know, that kind of stuff. Most of the stuff that is really good in Pokemon forces your opponent to make a decision. So like if this card said this, your opponent's, your attacks do 20 more damage, like Powerful Energy did or something like that. Yeah. This would see play. So. Yep. Next thing up, we've got some stadium cards to go along with some of our owner's Pokemon. And the first one up is Postwick. And we kind of talked about this with the Hops deck that we featured in Time Capsule last week, but just simply makes all of Hops Pokemon do 30 more damage to your opponent's active Pokemon. And that's just going to be kind of a running theme with all of Hops cards, so they just boost the damage. Obviously solid card, we'll see play in any deck featuring Hops Pokemon. Next card's Lavincia. It's a stadium, and it just says once during each player's turn, they may put two basic Lightning Energy cards from their discard pile into their hand. So very powerful stadium here. I don't know of any deck that I'm, I mean, I guess Iona's stuff might run this, right? That's what it's intended to go with, like this is Iona's home city in the video game. I could see this maybe seeing play in like Goldengo or maybe Raging Bolt. But Raging Bolt's probably going to be an area zero deck, so it can play Noctowl. But I could definitely see it seeing play in Goldengo. I mean, you just put two Lightning in your deck and you can kind of, that's a free hundred damage without having to use a superior every turn. That's a good point. Yeah, definitely. Because you don't, you have the flexibility of playing whatever energy you really want to play. And yeah, that works out pretty well. And Pokestop doesn't exist anymore. So you need something. Next and last stadium for the set is Enn's Castle, which simply gives all of Enn's Pokemon free retreat. Obviously, really good. I have no doubt this will see play as probably a two of, maybe a three of, depending on how high stadium counts go in average decks. But at least a two of in any Enn's deck moving forward. Getting into the supporters, the first one we want to talk about is Brock's Scouting. This is a supporter that has two different effects. You get to choose one of those. It's first effect is search your deck for two basic Pokemon, reveal them, put them in your hand, then shuffle your deck. And the second effect is search your deck for an evolution Pokemon, reveal it, put it into your hand and then shuffle your deck. So you get to choose whether you want to get two basics or one evolution Pokemon. Just kind of a basic setup supporter. It's nice that it gives you like, like Lugia would have loved to have this, I think, last format. But just one of those that might not see a lot of play, but if there's ever a deck that like needs to have a guaranteed way to search out basic Pokemon turn one or evolution Pokemon, this is definitely an option for that. Yeah. And this is a card that I think we'll get. It's weird to talk about the kind of three rotations from now. But once things like Buddy, Buddy, Poffin have rotated out of the format, assuming that nothing like similar has been reprinted, this card will be a staple for of in basically every deck. And just the nice thing about this compared to something like, I think it's Clavel that lets you search your deck for three basics that are like under 100 or things like in the past that we've had, like Professor Elm's lecture that did the same or very similar things or Bridget. This lets you have the flexibility on turn one, you go get two basics, any term beyond turn one, you can still do that if you need to, or you go get the evolution for those basics and you're off progressing your game plan. And so just having pretty much every supporter that has a choose option is flexible enough that it will see play at some point. Yeah, for sure, I'd say so. Next one up is a Ruffian bringing some much needed tool removal into the format. So supporter form of that option in your deck, but it says discard a Pokemon tool and a special energy from one of your opponent's Pokemon. So kind of filling the role of Lost Vacuum that we've had previously, and but being able to double whammy somebody sometimes, but also having the payoff of being able to do either or as well. Yeah, it's not as strong as Lost Vacuum, obviously, but sure, you know, being a supporter and all that, but it's still good to have some options for tool removal. We lost Lost Vacuum, and we've only really got the tool jammer stadium as kind of yeah, we got jamming tower or megaton blower if you want to spend your ace spec on it. Sure. I don't know about that one, though. No, I don't think that's I'd be all I wonder, has that ever seen play from Limitless? I know we're going to get I'm going to get I'm going to look at yourself bogged down and then but I don't but I believe the answer is no. I believe the answer is no. But Ruffian, if there is some sort of kind of control archetype, I could definitely see this card seeing play in that deck and being able to recycle it with something like pal pad is obviously very strong as well. All right. So quick update on megaton blower. It was played by Pidgeot control by Aiden Koos at regionals in Vancouver this weekend, this past weekend. Wow. Yep. So there you go. Okay. I stand corrected. That's how Aiden wanted to win. The Lugia matchup was discard all their special energy with a megaton blower. There you go. So moving forward, it will not see play. That's what you're telling. Definitely not. Okay. Yeah. Lugia going really just limits what it can do for sure. Next card up we're going to talk about is Lily's Pearl, which is a tool card that says if the Lily's Pokemon that this card is attached to is knocked out by damage from an attack from your opponent's Pokemon, that player takes one fewer price card. So the effect of legacy energy, but on a tool card and on something you can play four of in your deck. So I don't necessarily think that there's going to be a dedicated Lily's deck, but maybe if you are playing something, we'll talk, the big card we'll talk about later is Lily's Clefairy EX, which was already revealed at worlds last year. If you just could slot in a Lily's Pearl, make your Clefairy a one price Pokemon, maybe that's worth it. It could be good. Probably one of the more premier item tool cards in this format, Hop's Choice Band. It's a really, really powerful tool card. Has the effect when the Hop's Pokemon this card is attached to uses an attack. The attack cost is one colorless energy less, and it does 30 more damage to the opponent's active Pokemon before applying weakness and resistance. So I think Hop's deck would not be very good if this card didn't exist. Just being able to lower the energy cost and then also buffing all the attacks by 30 just makes this really, really powerful. It kind of is a spiritual successor to Choice Belt or Choice Band of the past, but much more strong for Hop's Pokemon. For sure. The energy reduction in particular is kind of a crazy effect. I don't think we've seen, other than maybe some of the comeback mechanics, I guess we saw the last time we saw it was the last time we had owner's Pokemon in the TCG with galactic Pokemons you had, what was it, energy gain? So that was the last time we had something similar to that, but that didn't even buff attacks. No, it just reduced the attack by one colorless. This is probably one of the more broken tools we've seen in recent years. And then to go with it, Hop also has a bag that maybe he puts his Choice Band inside of. But really it looks like it's full of Pokemon because it says, search your deck for up to two basic Hop's Pokemon and put them onto your bench, then shuffle your deck. So Hop gets a Buddy Buddy Poffin, except it can grab things that are higher than 70 HP. And Hop's got a lot of Pokemon that are higher than 70 HP, and we'll get into a little bit. But just being able to go get the Zacian EX in particular without a Nest Ball or being able to set up multiple Pokemon in one go is just really strong. Yeah, for sure. The decks I've seen that run Hop's bag don't run a lot of them. They might run one, maybe two. But just being able to Arven for a turn one is really powerful. Next item is an exchange ticket. We'll just shout this out real quick. This is one of the few ways you'll have to interact with your prize cards now that we've lost a Suiyan Heavy Ball. So it's good for control decks. It allows you to just, I'll just read it real quick. So you count your prize cards, then you shuffle them and put them on the bottom of your deck. And then you take that many cards, take that many cards from the top of your deck and put them down as your prize cards. So you get some interactions. It's just a world in which you can play the, what is it, Chansey that when you draw it, you can flip a coin. If heads, you get to draw an extra prize card. So there's some fun interactions that could come up from playing this. But you know, it's good for control. There's a lot of times where control is just like, oh, I just need the one card that's in my prize cards. The rest of my deck I can, you know, you're fine to play an exchange ticket after you get set up. And you're not really worried about losing anything from your deck, but you just need, you know, that one disruption card specifically for this matchup so that I could see this being played in control or a deck that needs access to like it's one of tech cards, perhaps that kind of thing. Yeah. The scary thing is that unless you go out of your way to do something like Cypher Maniacs code breaking, you can't control what's going into your prizes. And then you have to do the scariest thing for me, honestly, is if this card becomes a card that you play in every single deck that people are going to be price checking their deck multiple times during a game. Yeah, that's going to get lame. And that sounds that sounds awful. For sure. But I do. I like the dream scenario of I'm going to Cypher Maniac to chancy to the top of my deck. I'm going to Academy at night, a third one to the top of my deck, and then use exchange ticket to put all three of them in my prizes. Hear me out. So you put them into like three prize cards and you Cypher Maniac and then you put the two. and then play this, and then you take two prizes and you win the game. Cause like, statistically speaking. Yeah, statistically speaking, I guess, yeah. Well, I don't know. Anyways, you win. Just trust me. Your opponent will just concede on the spot, honestly. Probably. Actually, your opponent will probably hit you, to be honest with you. They might. We're not liable for what your opponent does. We're just saying that would be pretty funny. That's all. For real. Last item card that's probably worth talking about in the set is N's PP Up. It is an item from the video game. That is what it is called. But it allows you to attach a basic energy from your discard pile to one of your bench N's Pokemon. So Dark Patch, but any type of energy to any bench Pokemon that has N in its name. Yeah, pretty strong. I mean, energy acceleration in any form we can get has pretty much seen play every time. So definitely expect this to be played in the long N's Pokemon as a four of. For sure, for sure. Especially being an item, really good. Like Super Potion, I said that was the last item worth talking about. Super Potion might see play at some point in something if you really want to tank or wall deck that just needs that little bit of healing to get over the line. But yeah, we saw it's a reprint of Super Potion of the past. And that saw play in, I think, the original Duraludon deck. Or what was it? I'm thinking of Stonejourner. That's what I'm thinking of, yeah. With Stone Gift and you could accelerate energy yourself and then use Super Potion. Yeah, that was an annoying deck. So yeah, I could see it in a deck like that. So you need to, I don't think you need to discard the energy if it doesn't have any energy on it, right? Correct. Okay, so yeah, that's pretty good. There's some worlds where that's, yeah, that would be pretty, like you can Energy Transit off and then heal 60. But 60 is not as much as it used to be. No, and nowadays, if you've got 60 on you, that means you can use two Monkey Dories. True, yeah. Yeah, that's not rotating. So we'll definitely see more Monkey Dory in the next format, for sure. All right, getting into Hop's Pokemon. We'll just go through all these really quick and then we can kind of talk about the deck as a whole. We went over the deck profile, so we don't really need to go into too much detail about it. But there's a couple that we touched on, maybe didn't read before. Probably the most efficient attacker for the most damage at least is Cramorant. For one Energy, it does 120 damage, but only if your opponent has three or four Price Cards remaining. So pretty awkward, but still really powerful and we'll definitely see some play in Hop's deck. Yep, especially like we saw with the Hop's Choice Band and the Post Wick, you're getting up to 180 for no Energy if those are in play. And we'll go up in a little bit. There's another damage modifier to work with. We'll go up in a little bit. We'll see, there's another damage modifier to where Cramorant can be hitting 210 by itself. When we didn't talk about last week too well was Hop's Dubwool with its challenging horn ability that says when you play this Pokemon from your hand to evolve one of your Pokemon during your turn, you may switch in one of your opponent's bench Pokemon to the active spot. So boss's orders or the Midnight Eyes from Lycanroc GX from back in the day, just evolve and you boss something up. Not super crazy powerful, just like not gonna be an auto-include in everything, but definitely has potential to be a tech inclusion in something at some point. Yeah, it could be decent. And then notably Hop's Wooloo can be grabbed by either Hop's Bag or Buddy Buddy Poffin. True. So last Kalilos Pokemon here before we get to Hop's Snorlax was the Dunsparce EX, Sage I 270 HP EX Pokemon evolves from Dunsparce. And the thing that really lends this card credibility is the fact that we have the non-EX to Dunsparce with the runaway draw ability. So you have the potential draw engine Pokemon to go alongside this potential tech attacker. So you're not just stuck with a Dunsparce on your deck that's useless unless you have this evolved on your board. But the thing that makes this worth playing is its adversity tail attack, which for one colorless energy does 60 damage times the number of EX Pokemon your opponent has in play, which for a lot of these decks in this format are gonna be at least three or four. And if you can get into things with, like Pheasantipodes in play and you've got a Dragapult or you've seen something like Raging Bolt with a Raging Bolt and an Ogre Pond and a Pheasantipode and you're hitting for at least 180, oftentimes you're hitting for 240. And there are some rare circumstances where you can get to numbers beyond that and take big one hit chaos on stage two EX Pokemon for one energy. And I can definitely see this seeing play as a tech card. Yeah, I could see that too. Just to note, it's second attack breaking drill, three colorless for 150. It's a shred attack, meaning it goes through all effects on your opponent's Pokemon. So it's a nice inclusion if you're playing a deck that doesn't really have any way to deal with your opponent's Pokemon. So like say you're playing Archelodon with the Dunsparce or something like that, you can in theory power this up with Archelodon. Does Archelodon only go to metal Pokemon? No, it only goes to metal, yeah. Of course it does. I'm sorry about that. But yeah, even then you still can power it up manually over the course of three turns and have an answer for like a Mimikyu or like a Melodic or something like that. Sure. Yep, definitely, definitely. All right, next and final Hops Pokemon is Hops Snorlax. A really, really important one in this deck. Has the ability Big Belly. It just basically allows your Hops Pokemon to do 30 more damage to the opponent's active Pokemon. Similar to the trend of Choice Band and Post Wick. Dynamic Press is relevant. It's the most powerful attack that's colorless at least. On Hops Pokemon, it is three energy but think of it as four or two rather with the Choice Band. And it does 140 but also does 80 damage to itself. So just a good kind of threat to have. You can attach one energy to it since Zacian and all the other Hops Pokemon attack for no energy essentially if you have the tool card attached. So you can just kind of threaten that there later. For real. And then if you have the Choice Band attached and Snorlax affects itself as well and you have a Post Wick in play, you're doing 230 on a basic for two energy. It's pretty relevant, especially on a one prizer. I mean, that's not anything to sneeze at. No, very good. We're gonna, I'll come back to some of our Dragon friends here a second just to close the door on Hop. We talked about the Zacian last week being the spiritual successor to Buzzwole GX but Hops Zacian EX, 230 HP metal Pokemon with Close Cleave for 30 damage and it does 30 damage to one of your opponent's bench Pokemon. So again, for one colorless or zero energy if you have that Hops Choice Band attached and then Brave Slash for metal, metal, metal colorless does 240 and you cannot use Brave Slash next turn. I do not expect Brave Slash to ever be announced unless maybe you put this into an Archialidon deck and kind of get rid of the rest of the Hop package. You just go for, I'm gonna Brave Slash to kind of surpass the limits of what Archialidon can do itself. And if you use an Archialidon ability to accelerate two metals to Zacian and then attach from hand, put a choice belt onto it. Now you're doing 270, which doesn't one-hit KO stage twos but it does kind of get you over the hump of what the 220 would on some of the stage ones like Goldango as an example. Yeah, it could be relevant, but yeah, I don't expect the second attack. But the first one's really good, similar to the Buzzwole of Gyor. But yeah, anytime you can basically spread damage for a really low efficient attack cost is pretty good. Yep, so we'll circle back now to our dragons here. So the other big owner in this set in addition to Hops is, well, I guess there's Iona as well but I think Enz is probably the second most powerful to Hop. So Enz has their premier Pokemon. This is the, there's probably two attackers you're gonna use, this is one of them. This is Enz Reshiram, has 130 hit points, is a dragon type with no weakness obviously for dragons. Has two decent attacks for fire and lightning. It has powerful rage. This attack does 20 damage for each damage counter on this Pokemon. Okay, and then has a second attack, Virtuous Flame which just for fire, fire, lightning and colorless does 170. We'll get into just a little bit why the attack cost isn't super relevant here. But just to, that's just reading the cards and that's what they do. For sure. Only other dragon worth talking about and even this is kind of a bit of a stretch in my book is the Salamence EX, 320 HP dragon type with a wide blast for fire colorless. Colorless does 50 damage to each of your opponent's bench Pokemon which it sounds like a lot. It sounds like it should be pretty good but unfortunately we just saw Vaporeon EX come out in Prismatic Evolutions and talked about how that card isn't very good. Now that they're a little bit different, Vaporeon does 10 more damage but only hits EX Pokemon whereas Salamence can also kind of hit the basics that would evolve into those EX Pokemon. But even then 50 just isn't that much damage and unfortunately we got some dragon hate in this set so Salamence is not as safe as it would have been if it was really sooner than this. But it does also have the dragon impact attack for fire, water, colorless, colorless for 300 and you discard two energy from this Pokemon. Yeah, this would have been a cool card to have in Rictudrago for sure. Oh gosh. This would have been pretty toxic. And that would have been horrible. Yeah, it would have been horrible, truthfully. But it is an interesting card. We're losing Manaphy and so you might be like, oh well, wide blast is great. We can spread 50 to everything and then you kind of realize all the premier Pokemon in standard format including Dragapult are terror types and terror types have the terror trait that just says that if this Pokemon's on the bench it does not take any attack damage on the bench. So basically negates wide blast. So unfortunate but that's just kind of the world we're living in. Right. Yeah, but you never know. This might be something that if we get to a format where terrestrial Pokemon aren't relevant anymore or everything's a setup deck that we're just trying to set up over the course of three or four turns. Yeah, I could see Salamence having some relevance again. I think the other thing holding it back is the fact that that attack costs three energy. Yeah, and it's stage two. Obviously if it only costs two it would actually probably be too good. Sure. And it would probably gatekeep a lot of evolving decks but just the inability to power up two successive Salamence easily and quickly is gonna probably hold the card back a bit. Yeah, I think if you're trying to do a spread deck like Hydreigon's just a better spread attacker. You've got Hydreigon, you've got Dragapult. And Glaceon if you care to do that. Yeah. Next up is a card I know you wanted to talk about, John. Oh, Kling Klang. No, I'm just kidding. I wish. No, Magearna. Yeah, so this was one that I didn't really realize was in this set, but really struck me as one that might not seem all that really good to start out with. But I think this ability is underrated. So Magearna is a basic with 90 hit points and has the ability auto heal. It says, as long as this Pokemon is your active Pokemon whenever you attach a basic energy, or I'm sorry, an energy from your hand to one of your Pokemon, heal 90 damage from that Pokemon. Which sounds okay, but then you remember that, oh yeah, there's other cards like Baxcalibur that's in format. And anytime you can accelerate energy from your hand, you're not capped by your one energy attachment per turn. So there's situations where you could potentially heal 180 or with Baxcalibur even more so. And I think this might not see play in a lot of decks, but we've seen stuff like this kind of pop up here and there. Healing is always underrated in my mind. I'm trying to think, there's been times where we've seen like a fairy deck that had back in the day was able to heal with, oh, what was that card? I forget, but just healed 10 damage over the course of every little bit helps. And this having a one retreat cost at being a basic, there's lots of ways to kind of promote it between attacks and maybe heal or promote it during your turn and retreat it with Beach Court or Escape Board or Latias or something like that. Yep. So definitely one I wanna keep my mind on. Definitely has potential. Yeah, yep. Definitely something that you should pick one of. I don't know if you need like a play set by any means, but definitely has potential to pop up at some point. And then we'll get into the card. John mentioned earlier that the text on the, or the attack costs on the Enz Reshiram wasn't super relevant. And that's because most of the time, if you are using it, you're going to be copying it with Enz Zorark EX. So Enz Zorark is a $280. HP dark Pokemon and they brought back Zoroark with trade So, you know you discard a card from your hand draw two cards. We've seen that for years we had old Zoroark GX with trade then we had refinement and Now we're back to trade again And then to go with that Zoroark also has the night Joker attack for dark dark and you choose one of your benched ends Pokemon and copy its attack To use as this attack so you can use that Rushieram attack to just do 170 you can use the other one to do 20 times the number of damage counters that would be on your end Zoroark to And that's really gonna be the only way that you can take a big one-hit KOs with this deck And that's the thing that Scares me about playing it is the fact that you don't have an easy way to KO something like a Dragapult And being or even just an opposing Zoroark and you really depend on some of the other attacks you have access to we'll get up to later on in this review to Enable you to hit the bench effectively But still trade really good I worst case that this card could just see play as a draw engine for some deck to enable discard base strategies, but More likely than not if it's going to see success. It's going to probably be as a dedicated end deck Yeah, I mean it's exciting for me as a longtime player to see Zoroark be back into the competitive scene And this one looks okay But there's definitely like it is only as good as the ends Pokemon that are printed and we'll get into The there's like two good ones, you know, you see Kling Klang and it's like, okay, and then you look at the attacks and They're terrible and I want Kling Klang to be cool. But you know, he's one of my favorites But uh, yeah, man, no one no one should play Kling Klang like Magnetic Blast for one colorless and then Metal Metal Color one 20 times we go flip three coins and then yeah, no one should be doing that to be honest When I'm sure when Kieran and then Neil saw this card, they cried. Yeah, I mean, yeah It's rough out here for our Kling Klang boys. I Had one other card I wanted to talk about before we moved on from the dark types and that was this Tyranitar which you know regular stage two Tyranitar with a whopping 190 HP on a one prize stage two With the daunting stubbornness ability that says while this Pokemon is in your active spot Your opponent can't play any item cards from their hand So not only do you have to have Bidoo to contend with now you have the worry of a rare candy Tyranitar on your opponent's side of the board and for dark colorless Crackling Stomp does 150 damage and makes your opponent discard the top two cards of their deck So item lock milling your opponent Yeah, that's I didn't I didn't think I read this card first pass through that's actually really really good That's a really low attack cost for a really powerful attack Exp share still exists, right? Yeah. I mean, that's got crispy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah Yeah, you got options. I mean, yeah You could just put this in monkey Dory and then just be really a noose like healing or you know whatnot Could be really really good So, I don't know the downside to it of course is that Tyranitar is weak to grass and therefore if you are powered up a teal mask ogre pawn does one hit ko you and That does look to be a rather strong card heading into our next post rotation We still have the weakness energy, right Is it no No, mr. Membrane. There's there's some way to remove weakness or no. I don't think so. I don't think in the current standard there is Okay, but I Do still think at some point this card has potential to be decent. I mean just you know, if you have a tyranitar Your opponent can't play items. They one-hit ko that one. Okay, I bring up another one and Just with a Crispin you can power this card up like it's not that difficult to power up a to energy attack. Yeah For sure, it's a you pretty If you ever mill something important from your opponent to that can just be back breaking But then right when they can't play any recovery cards, you know Like this this is gonna be a card that really annoys somebody at local events. Yeah. Yeah, it will be Let's see, what else do we have next we talked about this lichen rock earlier Not really we're talking about other than the fact that it references spike energy Mm-hmm But otherwise not a super great card, unfortunately Of something that does have potential though John is our mammoth boy here Yeah, mammoth swine. So my friend Ben made this deck and it seemed okay has 340 hit points on a stage two. So one of our tankier Stage twos that it's come out Does have grass weakness, unfortunately here But it has a decent ability. It says Once during your turn you may search your deck for a Pokemon reveal it Put it into your hand and then shuffle your deck. So you just get to search your deck great setup Pokemon So it's kind of like there has been a couple of different printings like that. Most recently I could think of is The grove aisle that came out that lets you search for grass Pokemon, but this is even better It lets you just get whatever Pokemon you want as an ability once per turn It has it one attack for fighting fighting. It is rumbling March. It does 180 plus 40 more damage for each stage 2 Pokemon on your bench. So Kind of a cool synergistic effect With Pidgeot you can kind of just bounce the two off of each other and then yeah, you can run something like Garganacle to accelerate fighting you could run That's probably the main thing I could think of but I'm sure there's other stage twos that are really powerful That I'm just not remembering at this time. Notably they don't have to be evolved stage two So you can play the Lux Ray from Paldeia evolved true if you're behind on prizes and there was also a cling-clang that came out in either Stellar crown or surging sparsity can't emergency rotation. Yeah that 2012 worlds or 2011 worlds, right? Yeah I don't remember what the condition for that card is But I know that there is a way to cheat it into play as well, right? But realistically you look at the fact that if you have Three stage twos on your bench, which is very difficult to do I think even if you are snowballing things off of Mamoswine coming into play you're doing 300 damage for two energy Yeah, that's nothing to scoff at Yeah There's definitely like a lot of strong stage twos and 340 hit points is quite a lot of hit points to try to knock out Yep, you know the grass weakness It's discouraging And a four retreat cost is rough too. But sure, you know, there's there's ways to potentially play this that can make it fun Yep, and then notably as well the swine up that is being released in the set has a call for family for two basics So definitely a good pairing if for something that wants to swarm Pokemon in play Yeah, call for a family for a 78 point basic is pretty nice. Oh for sure for sure We've got some Lily's Pokemon here, unfortunately, they're not super great There's not really looking to be any sort of dedicated Lily deck but comfy does allow you to get a bunch of Lily's basics in play for one colorless and put them on your bench and But the big I guess next card we could talk about would be the Benet from the set that has the curse speech attack For a psychic energy your opponent shovels three cards from their hand into their deck and on first pass this just sounds On first pass this just sounds Really meh as an attack but you do have the wombo combo scenario where you're Zorosik your opponent down to three cards and then you curse speech and Force them to shuffle those last three cards back into their deck as well and they're left with just whatever they top deck Unfortunately 90% of the time it's gonna be a research and you're gonna try Yeah Again, this might be something that's dependent upon the meta like if we get a format where there's no Onboard draw like if golden goes not popular and everybody's playing hops Zayshen or something like that This would be a really good card and controlling what your opponent can do It could be good in a control deck I could see that like another tool that control gets but You know Definitely something that like you would keep in your binder pull out Maybe if you're building a control deck try that out be fun to play Yeah, and I mean I guess it's also worth noting you could play it as a one-off in a just binette EX deck that you Already have built as well. Sure If that was something you were so inclined to do Probably one of the most most pivotal most impactful Cards from this whole set is Lily's Clefairy EX It's a hundred and ninety hit point psychic Pokemon basic With the ability fairy zone Says this weakness or sorry the weakness of each of your poke opponents dragon Pokemon in play is now psychic apply weaknesses times two and Then has a decent attack and full moon Rondo for one psychic and one colorless It does 20 plus 20 more damage for each benched Pokemon that you and your opponent have in play So really really similar to lightning Rondo You know similar kind of wording convention as well But the ability definitely allows for dragapult counter and that's primarily what I think a lot of players will use this for Yeah, I mean also works on raging bolt as well, which look does look to be a pretty powerful deck going into the Rotation says it doesn't lose very many cards but I think the funniest thing about this is that this is just called full moon Rondo and Just saying that this isn't the same Clefairy is in the same class of Pokemon as Entei, Raikou, and Suicune Yeah, it's just definitely weird it is of note that I Guess Clefairy is a basic. I'm just thinking of Clefa and then Clefable is the stage one. Nevermind. Correct. Okay But yeah Definitely powerful card definitely looks to be a mainstay in the format because from results that we'd seen from Japan Dragapult was again just a very strong deck post rotation and this looks to be a key weapon in fighting back against it Now we get into some of Iona's Pokemon, yes the last trainer I believe from this expansion and this is kind of a package It's really hard to talk about these cards kind of one at a time But I think the first one I'll highlight is Iona's belly bolt because it's kind of the thing that glues everything together And so it has the electro streamer ability that says as often as you like during your turn you may attach a basic lightning from your hand to one of your Iona's Pokemon and Then it has a thunderous bolt attack for lightning lightning lightning colorless Just 230 damage and this Pokemon cannot attack during your next turn So a lot of energy, but really we're using it for that electro streamer ability Which if you remember back when we started talking about cards from the set The Lavencia Stadium that allowed you to put two lightning from your discard pile into your hand to really just fuel energy to your board and that's kind of what this archetype is all about it's just putting a bunch of Energy on your board and to help us get those energy We have Iona's kill a watch roll With flash draw that says you must discard a lightning energy from this Pokemon to use this ability Once during your turn you may draw cards. So you have six in your hand So just kind of burn a bunch of cards out of your hand get a lightning on your kill a watch roll Discard it draw up to six burn a bunch of cards. Use a second kill a watch roll and The real thing that this asks then is what is the payoff for this after I've gone through this whole song-and-dance played a bunch of item cards rained a bunch of lightning energy onto my board everywhere and Interestingly the payoff is a Voltorb With the chain bolt attack for two colorless that does 20 more dam does 20 damage base and does 20 more damage for each lightning energy attached to your Iona's Pokemon so At base just from having to lightning to attack you'll do 60 and then you'll do an additional 20 for each energy on your bench I own those Pokemon as well but the Thing that I have a difficult time with with this kind of grouping of cards is that you just need so many energy in play To knock out anything meaningful Yeah, I mean you look at it like to really get into like where we're at now We're trying to hit 300. I'd say it's like a good number to aim for Consistently, which means you have to have 15 energy in play Which means you probably need to run at least 18 in your deck to consistently get to that number And it's just really hard to pull 18 out of your deck and then get them all in play Not saying it's impossible, but it definitely and like you have ways to get stuff back with the stadium with killer watch Well, you can draw and you can stack killer watch. Alright, like you don't have you're not limited to one of those per turn Or anything like that. So that's pretty good. So you can draw through your deck fairly efficiently, but Yeah, I don't know. It's uh, it's okay Like I don't feel like I'm reading this and I'm like, oh my gears are the gears in my head are turning There's some cool interplay with you know that all the all the different attackers you have here, but Yeah, I don't know. I mean, it's kind of a pre-built deck in a lot of way. Sure when you when you look at it But it's it's a pretty simple premise. I'd say right right. It's it's again very Raging Bolt ask Unfortunately to not to keep kind of putting Raging Bolt as the example of like poster child for Linear but not super enticing deck, but that this I feel falls in that same category But the thing that I feel like this struggles even more than Raging Bolt is that you have to set up multiple stage ones And even to knock out something like a goldango, which is you know under 300 hp just to do 260 You still have to have 13 total energy in play And I really feel like that's asking a lot when if I knock out one of the premier things happening in this one If I knock out one of the premier things happening in this format right now involves water ogre pawn Which you can knock up very easily with this because you are a lightning type deck but if they knock out your Voltorb and they knock out a Kilowatt troll that had some energy stored on it or they knock out your two Voltorbs that both had energy stored on them you're now having to recover the Pokemon to attack with as well as recovering Pokemon or not Pokemon you have recovering energy to repower it up as well as any other energies that were discarded by other Pokemon being knocked out and it just seems very disruptable I guess is the easiest way to put it yeah yeah for sure I mean the cool thing is that there's other cards like Raging Bolt you just mentioned that discard basic energy in play sure there's a world where like you make a Raging Bolt deck with this engine of Kilowatt troll and Belly Bolt yeah and then just kind of play with those two and I think that's not the worst idea ever but like there's always like the the thing is it's like the the game designers kind of come up with this pre-built thing and then we get like the Teal Mask effect where Teal Mask Ogre Ponk is thrown into different decks like you know Regidrago and you're able to energy switch off of stuff and attack with it and you can energy switch and kind of take advantage of Lightning Acceleration essentially yeah and speaking of taking advantage of Lightning Acceleration one card I want to give a shout out to that you brought up before we started was Enz Joltik which is just a 40 HP little bug but I think this is probably one of the more promising kind of just effects that we've seen on a on a little little guy for two colorless mind you so it can kind of sneak up out of nowhere by itself it has the attack Crackling Short for 30 damage it says before doing damage discard all Pokemon tools from your opponent's active Pokemon if you discarded a tool in this way your opponent's active Pokemon is active Pokemon is now paralyzed so auto paralysis is always worth a shout out in my mind just one of the most powerful status effects that we have in a TCG in a format where people are running Latias and not really running switch cards this could be pretty powerful yeah and then notably Enzorar can also copy this so you don't necessarily have to leave a vulnerable 40 HP Pokemon in your active spot either yep a shout out to Wellord for all our GLC fans Hydro Pump seems okay 50 for every water and then yeah pretty good yeah I mean if you're going down the GLC route I'm not a great attacker but I feel like and this is coming from a non-GLC player perspective Vital Samba on Ludicolo actually seems like a decent ability as well just making all of your Pokemon plus 40 HP yeah it's already already doesn't stack already doesn't stack so yeah Kricketune stacked and was a stage one for Grass um so I guess the game developers were scared to redo that I guess I don't know well they said Wellord's already got 240 HP how much HP do you need we can't let it go that much higher unfortunately water not getting a lot of love in this set you put a giant cape or whatever like luxurious plus yeah Ludicolo you're at 380 never dies yep never dies um anyway move on to our fire types here uh first one to talk about here is Volcanion EX 220 HP fire type Pokemon with the scorching steam ability that says once during your turn if this Pokemon is your active you may make your opponent's active Pokemon burned and then has heat cyclone for fire fire colorless does 160 and move an energy from this Pokemon to one of your bench Pokemon and I think the primary use case I see for this at least in the short term is just being something that you can push up after your opponent takes a knockout if you're playing a big basic strategy that you get to say your Pokemon is burned I have a lot of gas on my bench I can pivot this back to my bench and then swing on you with my attacker and you can hopefully set up a deck or a strategy where you're hitting a break point to where you're either taking a knockout you couldn't previously achieve or you're taking a knockout in such a way that the burn is taking the knockout and you're disabling your opponent's access to Pheasant Dippity on their next turn and not there's not necessarily a deck that can easily do either of those things right now but this is definitely a card to pick up at least one copy of and keep in mind for future use cases yeah I mean similar to Brute Bonnet um yep and the Petrarot and Promo Petrarot and Promo didn't really see play until we had some other things come into play um and yeah Latias allows you to just kind of ignore that three retreat cost which is nice um just a real shout out um to Magmortar uh who has an ability that lets you put is that three or two three more damage three more damage counters on your opponent's burn Pokemon yep so it goes up to five between turns I think yeah yep so that's pretty strong I mean five's nothing to sneeze at um you know burns a little less effective than poison as there is the chance that it goes away right after Pokemon checkup but uh still pretty strong a mobility there yeah and then the last Pokemon to talk about would be Enz Darmanitan so the other kind of premier attacker that you would be copying with your Enz or arc you have Backdraft that does 30 damage times the number of energy cards in your opponent's discard pile and Blaze Ball Cannon which does 90 damage and you discard all energy from this Pokemon this attack also does 90 damage to one of your opponent's bench Pokemon so Radiant Greninja obviously rotated and like you noted earlier Manaphy is gone and 90 is kind of that benchmark number that seems like it could be really really powerful when you're hitting two Pokemon you can notably take out two copies of Dracloak with this if you have like a boss's orders into a Night Joker copying Blaze Ball Cannon your two Dracloaks are KO'd your move and with things like Enz Castle and Enz PP Up you can kind of bounce between your Zora arcs and potentially do back-to-back Blaze Ball Cannons and you have access to set up these multiple stage ones a little bit more easily because of the trade so that's kind of the idea seemingly of the Enz deck is that you're making this toolbox approach thing that's made consistent because you have trade available but the thing that I struggle with is the fact that the deck doesn't seem to have easy access to one-hit KO potential unless your opponent plays into it by either discarding a whole bunch of energy for you to backdraft or putting a lot of damage counters on you for you to copy the first attack of the Enz Reshiram and hit them back for twice as much. Yeah and that definitely like we've seen that might work well at some times against some opponents but once you get to a certain level your opponents kind of figure out your strategy and can play around it yep but yeah I've seen some lists of Enz run the reversal energy to allow Darmanitan to attack on its own which is pretty strong just being able to yeah just for one energy basically do the 90-90 spread seems pretty cool so yeah I could see some promise in that I mean spread decks in 90-90 spread we saw the just how powerful Radiant Greninja was yep when you played it in a lost zone deck or in Vex Caliber it definitely felt like you had more board control than everybody else so that was really cool yeah I mean notably this cannot hit two bench Pokemon so we get do get to see a little bit of pullback from that Moonlight Shuriken was obviously a pretty overpowered attack yeah but still definitely has some potential and then the last card here was one you called out as being potentially noteworthy and that is Maractus yeah I just wanted to give this a real quick look at has an ability that if this Pokemon's knocked out you place six damage counters on the attacking Pokemon which is interesting in its own way but anytime that Pokemon prints a attack that says your opponent's Pokemon can't retreat as in this case with Corner for one colorless energy does 20 damage and then has that effect it's always worth keeping that in mind we do have Teal Mask or not Teal Mask Wellspring Mask Ogre Pawn that has the same attack for now but this is a basic Pokemon that is not worth two prizes and the ability is somewhat relevant if you're forced to boss around this that kind of preserves it in play like if you're if your opponent's unincentivized to not knock this out essentially you can keep up with your corner attack and like counter catch or bring something else up and corner again you know so that kind of vibe so I could see a world where this is played in control it's kind of annoying and it's important to I mean we saw decks that like control decks that played both Wellspring Mask and the Mawile so I could see this kind of having that same effect you know it does do damage which in this case is something that might be a negative for control players I think that was the reason why you ran Mawile is because you could use this attack without having to use a double turbo to decrease the amount of damage that's being done so I don't know but you know there might be like something that's resistant to grass like a metal deck or something like that that you could play this in or something like that so I don't know just food for thought yeah definitely worth keeping in mind moving forward but I think that's going to close things out for this set a lot of the more interesting cards were kind of at the beginning of what we talked about yep and that is our first look at Journey Together so like we said before pre-releases do start this week I believe that the 15th is the first official day of pre-release season and we have seen what the pre-release promos are I don't think that we have ready access to those promos but they are all owner's pokemon so I know it's Hop Snorlax and Darmanitan I believe okay Ionos Kilowattril and Lillie's Ribombee okay the Snorlax in particular looks pretty cool so if you are a collector of promos or like to play with cool artworks for your decks be sure to pick those up and let us know what you pull your pre-releases this weekend yeah are you playing in any pre-releases Aaron or no I am not unfortunately so spring break down here starts this Friday effectively and we will be heading up to your neck of the woods actually to visit some family you're getting out of Florida for spring break yeah that's smart but cool man yeah we welcome you welcome to have you yeah I know you're going up a little further than where I'm at so I don't think we'll be able to meet up or anything but yeah it'd be nice yeah I'm running mine on Monday so I'll report back with the cool polls that people pull on next week's pod but yeah just a reminder we'll have a little bit different scheduled entertainment for next week with Xander Bennett joining us and kind of doing a recap of his world's trivia that he performed at the 2024 world championships in Honolulu so I'm excited to have that and maybe we'll come up some trivia questions for Xander I don't know we'll figure something out sure sure sounds like a good time to me and if you're interested be sure to check that out as well if you want to find John or I on socials you can find me on x at underscore Aaron underscore curry and you can find John and I both on blue sky John is at John or Joel.bsky.social and I am at currytcg.bsky.social you can follow the show on x at bfptcgpod still a mouthful unfortunately we cannot fix it but it is what it is please go follow the show show your support we'd love to have you over there and we'd also love to have you down in the comment section so if you could like follow leave a review anything like that helps other people find the show and we are really appreciative of it yeah thank you guys so much for listening we appreciate it and we look forward to moving into a new rotation with you guys shortly so until next time have a good week