Episode 24: SO LONG F BLOCK

Hello, and welcome back to the Battle Frontier podcast, where we aim to help you level up in your journey as a competitive Pokemon TCG player. I'm Aaron Curry, back at home this week. And here with me as always is my co-host, Jon Orgel, who I believe is also at home. Looks like he's in a familiar setting. And this week, we're going to be coming at you with the results and a few interesting lists from the Stockholm Regional this past weekend. We're going to talk about an old format deck that Jon is probably more familiar with than he realizes, but it's going to be a surprise to him as well. And then we're going to talk about the community letter and the updates coming to TCG Live this week before we talk about our first impressions of the Journey Together format, and a couple of cards and or decks that we either loved or hated that are going to be leaving us with this upcoming rotation. But before we get into everything, I want to know, how was your week, Jon? I know we had some Pokemon related activities going on. My week was pretty good. Yeah, I got to play in a League Cup on Saturday. And I did pretty good. I went undefeated in Swiss, I went four wins, zero losses, one tie. And then I lost in top four to, I was playing Dragapult, and I lost to a Raging Bolt that beat me in a three game set that was really, a really good set. So I felt really fun. The guy that I lost to eventually went on to win the cup and he's a cool local, so I wasn't too bummed about it. But, you know, it was just cool to just get back out there kind of had some really good games, some really like cool six prize turns with Dragapult, you know, where you blow up the dust snore and plan out everything perfectly. So that felt really cool. Like there was one game I had against an Archelodon that I was texting you about excitedly and I'm like, I haven't felt this like, galaxy brained, like Jimmy Neutron brain blasts like coded in a long time. Like it just felt like I, I don't know, like I didn't see the line. I didn't see the line. I didn't see the line. And then like it all came together and I'm like, Oh, yes. So I was able to like pull off, you know, because I think he had poisoned me with like an archer. So he hit me like he wasn't able to get like he was able to get a one shot with Archelodon. He was running like Archelodon with poison package before rotation. So with like Housouin Radiant and Sneasler and all these other bench sitters, which was good for me at some point, but he had like a Fezadipity and then like another Duraludon on the bench and then an Archelodon with like 260 damage on it or something like that. Yep. And it damaged itself. And then I was able to boss up Fez, hit the Duraludon for 50, or I didn't boss, I counter catch it, but hit the Duraludon for 50 with the Dusknoir, not Dusknoir, Duskclops, Duskclops. Thank you. And then just set up the map perfectly to get five prizes in one turn. So that was really, really cool. Cause I didn't see it right away. It took me a little bit longer than I probably should have, but you know, the fact is I told my opponent one of my rounds, I'm like, I think I'm just smart enough to play this deck. Like I don't feel like I'm dumb and making a bunch of misplays, but I'm definitely not like you know, crushing it. Like we've seen so many players on stream or whatever, just like see the lines immediately. I'm definitely not at that point, but that's okay. Like you can still have fun and still do well and still get a lot out of it and definitely had that experience on Saturday. And then we, I cubed my friend, Ben had his birthday on last Thursday. So we had a little birthday celebration. I went over to another one of my friend's house and we cubed his cube, which was like kind of, it's all over the place. It's like EX air all the way through Diamond and Pearl, but then has like trainers from every area. So it's like similar to chaos cube, but I think it's a little better cause it has more like level X and it was a little more balanced. It doesn't have a whole lot of, like all the two prizes are like early EXs. So the power level is a little lower, but it was fun, but yeah, it was most of my weekend. Yeah. How about you, man? How was your weekend? Well, so you mentioned that you played Dragonfall Dusknoir this weekend. I know we were talking back and forth and we ended up playing the same 62 league cups on Saturday. I actually ended up playing in two league cups on Saturday. Interestingly enough, the first one, both of them were like really low turnout. Surprisingly, I'm not sure. I guess there were a bunch of pre-releases going on in the Orlando area. So people were more excited to hit those up instead. So I ended up only playing three rounds in both events and the first one ended up going 1-1-1 and managing to come in third place with that same Dragonfall deck. And it just, it felt bad, literally. Your experience, you thought the deck felt great. I thought the deck felt absolutely horrible. And I don't think it felt great. I think we both had the same kind of experience because I started like Radiant Alakazam two of my games. And then like in the final round of Topgut, I started like with Minion and that just lost me the game because they went 2-2-2 and I'm like, okay, cool. And that was pretty much my experience was I started Luminion round one, Rotom round two and Alakazam round three. And I'm just like thinking to myself, and I actually, so I still won round two because it was against a, round one and round two were both against Cloth decks. Round one, I opened Luminion, he gets a KO on it with Cloth on his first turn. And then I just don't really have a way, like I never got a drag cloak out that game and it was just, he basically had everything he needed and went, took a KO, two-price KO that turn, took a one-price KO the next turn, one-price KO the next turn. I finally got a dragapult up and he was able to assemble the whole black belt shenanigans and one-hit one-shot it as well. And that felt bad. Round two, my opponent bricked pretty hard, didn't play any items on turn one going first. And I opened Rotom, so I just put a rescue board on it, swapped to Badoo and Itchy Pollened and got to the point where he actually had two brute bonnets out because he anticipated that I was going to KO the active one and didn't want me to Iono the other one to the bottom of his deck and have him not have access to it. And well, I mean, it ended up being to where I lost vacuumed one and they both had booster capsules on them. So I did end up KOing the active, lost vacuuming the bench booster capsule. And unfortunately, he got access to his third one, but I was just so far ahead by that point. There was no way he was going to be able to do anything. And then in round three, I played against Lostbox and I'm 90% sure that if we had a little bit longer, I would have been able to win that game. But unfortunately, I ended up like my opponent decided he didn't want to lose, so we tied. And that tie made it to where he and I were like flip-flopped or tied for contention for fourth and fifth. And just the coin flip went my way, I guess. I don't really, I didn't actually see the standing, so I'm not sure where resistance was. And I managed to get top four points for that, which is very, I don't know, almost sad. It doesn't feel good to go 1-1-1. You take it, but yeah, you're definitely like, okay, cool. The whole like, your, what is it? Your regional points are from Puerto Rico and your elite cup points are from an eight person cup. I don't know. It makes it worse. They pay the same, man. They pay the same. The second cup actually had less than eight people, but I did go 3-0 at that one to win it. So, I mean, I swapped to Lostbox because Dragapult felt terrible in the first event and ended up beating a Roaring Moondeck round one, Maridon round two, and Lugia round three. And so, you know, relatively decent matchups, I would say, for Lostbox. The Maridon obviously could potentially go either way. And he had a very unfortunate Pokestop on his last turn where, or just throughout the game in general. Like he used my Pokestop on turn one and milled a boss, which was unfortunate, and then had to discard one for Squawkabilly to get things going. And then on his last turn, I think he had three lightnings left in his deck and he had grabbed, he had a one card hand that was a generator that he had Arvind for the previous turn and was holding it to try to, I don't know, maybe quote-unquote have better odds of hitting the lightning as long as he didn't topdeck an energy, I guess. And then decided to stop before he used the generator to thin his deck out a little bit. And he hit lightning, lightning, boss. And... Janey. Yeah, that's bad. Jim. That was real bad. And basically that, the game was over then because he only had one energy left in his deck and he had already used his Nightstretcher as well. So he literally could not attack for the rest of the game. Oh. Yeah. So that was rough. But, you know, plus 50 points and a playmat. So that was pretty cool. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, other than that, oh, actually also, so in between all that, so this is a really big Saturday. Shortly, Cup for the first one, got some store credit as part of the prizing for that, used that to pay for a pre-release that they let us run with the people that were at the Cup because they were going to do another flight for an officially scheduled pre-release later. And managed to get two Mammo Swines and an Illustration Rare Wailord out of that, which I think for considering I ended up only paying like $10 for the pre-release, that seems pretty worth the money. I'd say. Yeah. I definitely wanted to pick up the Mammo Swines at some point and definitely do not want to pay pre-release pricing for them. So I would say that it worked out pretty well. So, but, you know, plus 82 points on the weekend, that was, that was literally my third and fourth League Cup for the year. So just need to replace some finishes and try to make a push to get deeper into invite territory. I know right now, if I cap everything out, I'll be at 600 points, which is in like the, I think like the 100-ish range as far as placement goes, which is still not great. Obviously going to need some points from regionals or Atlanta regionals, I should say, and NAIC one or the other to really kind of hit that threshold of probably 700, which will be a bit safer. But, you know, we're going to talk about those future format tournaments a little bit more as they get closer. Sounds good. But first thing we wanted to talk about here was the Stockholm regional that happened this weekend and surprise, surprise, the former king of second place, which, you know, maybe he was in contention with Mr. Shemansky, you know, it might be a little bit of a Graham Manley. Okay. Okay. Fine. Fine. Fine. There were multiple kings of second place. Well, they are now down to one member as Isaiah Bradner has taken down a regional for himself piloting Gardevoir of all things. So pivoting off of the Goldengo that he and his group had been playing previously, I believe he said in an interview that Goldengo had lost some kind of the surprise factor that allowed it to be a bit more successful and just felt that Gardevoir was better positioned into the room to talk about a bit more of how top cut looked for Stockholm because we don't want to spend a ton of time on this event. You know, we've got one more regional in this format, and then we're saying goodbye to a bunch of cards in these decks. But there was a top 10 asymmetrical cut. So we did see a Reggie Drago piloted by Thomas Linnae. So Reggie Drago still alive and kicking didn't couldn't make it out of asymmetrical cut, though. Unfortunately, I believe lost to a drag uphold at the end of the day. Ron coming out again with Snorlax, and I believe is now going to be permanently the most CP winningest Blocklax player or most limitless points earningest Blocklax player. It's a pretty cool title to have. Interestingly, Nicholas up here was actually number two on that list. And so they were just neck and neck fighting for that top position of the king of Blocklax. So that's pretty interesting to see. But we do see Fabian Pujol coming out here with a Gardevoir deck. Again, we know Fabian's been an enjoyer of Gardevoir in this, not Stellar Crown, my gosh, in this Prismatic Evolutions format. So no surprise to see him playing that. Moving on, we have Thomas Hellkamp with Lugia, Drew Stevenson with Cloth Tarabagos, or, you know, we should say Badoo Tarabagos, of course. Drew is actually the number one seed going into top cut before being eventually taken down by Kim Pobega piloting Dragapult. And we have Julius Brunfeld on Archelodon, Alessandro Comascoli coming out with Pidgeot control, of course. And then as we mentioned before, Isaiah Bradner. So we're just going to take a quick look at a few lists here. First one is Isaiah Bradner's Gardevoir deck. And the real notable things here, in my mind, are the third copy of Monkey Dory, the diminished Arvin count in favor of copies of Professor's Research, the inclusion of TM Devolution, and the exclusion of both Bravery Charm and, you know, associated Pokemon like Drifloon, as well as the exclusion of Boss's Orders in the deck, and opting instead to say, hey, I'm going to be an attacking Gardevoir deck, and I'm going to move all my damage with Monkey Dory, and you can deal with it. So really just kind of demanding answers from his opponent rather than submitting a weakened one prize attackers as the game plan of choice for the deck. Yeah, we see Energy Switch, which is kind of a cool tech that I really didn't see before this weekend. And yeah, there's like, definitely more of an emphasis on just building up that impenetrable board state of just that one big Garde, a couple Corleos, and like possibly three Monkey Dories. You have a Cresselia inclusion, which has been kind of more and more part of Gardevoir with Dragapult moving forward as such a big factor. And yeah, Clefki obviously for Maridon and for other turbo decks, just shut them down while you set up. But yeah, I think this is a continuation of how we've seen Garde played, opting for the secret box for more consistency. There's like, not a whole lot of innovation, but just enough for it to catch a couple things off guard, like with a devolution and Energy Switch and all that, where you can double Monkey Dory with just one dark energy attachment or something like that. So you can pull off some cool plays with this. Yeah, definitely not having boss seems like it'd be a handicap, but it doesn't really factor in as much as you would think if you're just attacking with Gardevoir, and then you still have the flexibility of Screamtail to pick stuff off the bench. Nobody's running Manaphy anymore, so there's really not a need to bring it up to the active. Yeah, I think the big thing is you just have to make sure that you're more careful with your countercatchers, I guess. But definitely interesting. I know that Henry Chow helped work on this list, and I think you can kind of see some of his fingerprints in it with the secret box inclusion, with the Professor's Research inclusion, and just Henry has always been a fan of Gardevoir as an attacking Gardevoir deck with multiple copies of Monkeydory in the mix, so no surprise to see that there. The next deck we're going to look at, and we're going to zoom out a little bit for this, is Alessandra's Pidgeot Control deck. And of course, as is tradition, Pidgeot Control can never fit in a 100% zoomed-in internet browser window. So we do have the standard Pidgeot line, some perennial inclusions like Luxray V, Rotom V, Luminion, and Mawile Mimikyu. But then we get to see this melodic inclusion, the mentally calm melodic from Twilight Masquerade that states that your opponent's Pokemon in play and all cards attached to them cannot be put into your opponent's hand. So really just being here as a scoop-up Cyclone or Professor Turo scenario denier, and allowing Alessandra to lock people's actives more effectively because people really just aren't playing switch cards. They're either relying on Latias or they're relying on Turo to move their active out of the active spot. And if you have this Mawile that can Tempting Trap something, and you can make sure that it cannot get picked up and out of the way, a lot of times the game just ends. I know we saw Alessandra's asymmetrical cut game against Fabian, where they both literally drew past their entire deck multiple times over thanks to repeated use of Iono, where Alessandra identified eventually that there was no way he could lose the game as long as he just drew his cards and announced Tempting Trap. And some other things that kind of work their way into that, I guess, would be the accompanying Flute. You can kind of create a pseudo-lock if you don't quite have the Mawile ready by using Calamitous Wasteland, and along with things like Erika's Invitation or that Flute plus Countercatcher, we have some of the more controlling options like Airy and Giacomo. I think it's a little interesting to not see Xeroxic. I would think that in a lot of matchups, maybe that would accelerate things a bit better than Airy, maybe. But, you know, I'm going to defer to Alessandra because I would say he's a much better control player than I am. Yeah, I think the way I was looking at it when he was playing was he just wanted to buy turns in order to set up a board state where it was a lock. And like Xeroxic's a win-more card, essentially. If you're able to play to Xeroxic, you're probably already able to get them to deck out, even if it takes a little longer. So there's an argument, I guess, on that front where it's like, well, maybe you can win the game faster by decking them out faster. And we might have seen that in the finals where he just kind of, you know, I'm not going to win a game in 30 minutes, essentially, against Gardevoir. I will say the Calamitous Wasteland, it was really cool watching it work with Badoo where you bring up something that has a one retreat cost and then put Badoo in the active. And then if they don't have any energy attached to it, they can't retreat. So you can buy a turn, just enough of a turn to maybe set up a melodic, which we saw, stuff like that. No, a lot of cool card inclusions and a deck that has... The Festival of Lit Grounds, is that to kind of prevent status effects? Yes. Yeah. So as long as you have an energy attached, any Pokemon with an energy attached cannot be affected by a special condition. So allows you specifically in the Gardevoir matchup, if you can't get a missed energy down on your Mawile, you know, some of the Gardevoir lists, like Isaiah's, we're playing TM devolutions. So sometimes you may have to commit that missed energy to your Pidgeot to prevent it from being devolved. So you can just attach a double turbo to your Mawile and still have access to the removal of special conditions thanks to that Festival of Grounds. Now that's kind of, I guess, the way that Alessandro wanted to go about that Gardevoir matchup was locking something with Mawile while you have a Defiance Vest and a way to deny special conditions on it. And that effectively makes it, you know, you can lock a Monkey Dory in particular, I guess is what I should say. And that the Monkey Dory is limited to only doing 20 damage to you. So unless they have, you know, three Monkey Dories out, and they're able to put 90 damage on their board to move over to you, they're not KOing you in one turn. And you can just penny up your whole Mawile and just do it all again. Or just use Radiant Serena to heal 20. Yep, that too. Yep. But yeah, definitely teched for Monkey Dories in particular, in my mind. Like you have like, and then Turros. So the cool thing about Pidgeot control is you can really tailor it towards the metagame you expect. And we see Alessandro do that beautifully here. A lot of the thought, a lot of the skill, a lot of the time and effort goes into making a decklist like this for control. And obviously there's a high level of skill that takes to execute it, like execute the strategy effectively. You're throwing so many curveballs of what you prize, what you draw, you know, if you're not hitting Rare Candies or Energies or whatever you need to attack or set up. And then thinking about what's your preferred attacker here, if you even do attack, if you're using Rotom instead, those kind of thoughts all take a lot of thought and careful precision, essentially, even if it may look like you're just kind of trolling your opponent by countercatching something up and Mawiling or Badooing, you're definitely having to play a lot of different cards for different scenarios. And this is a really cool list and I'm glad that we got to see kind of near the end of this format, control, make a big last impression, which was cool. Absolutely. By a great player too. Yep. And then the last deck, this is actually, I believe, 24th place, 23rd place by Nettie Kosak. And just wanted to bring it up because we haven't actually seen Hydreigon do anything super great. So it was pretty cool to actually see one make top 32. A little surprising even. And the list doesn't really look crazy by any means. You just have your Hydreigon line, your Pidgeot line, some kind of supporting cards like Petron so that your block matchup stays a little bit better. And because you can effectively attack with it at the end of the game if you need to. Fezendipity is obviously a perennial inclusion in pretty much every deck in the game. And then you have Luminion and Rotom as mainstays of stage two decks. And then we get to see kind of lesser played A-spec in the Neo Upper Energy. And then the TM Evolution and, you know, thicker or inclusion of stage ones that otherwise wouldn't be included in the form of the Pidgeotto, just to play around the Badoo presence in the format. Yeah, this list is cool. I think it's a departure from some other lists I've seen that run like Sparkling Crystal or something. Right. That seem to try to use Obsidian more than once in a game. This is saying, you know, Obsidian is great if I can get it early and like maybe just destroy my opponent's board by doing that. Awesome. But realistically, like the first attacks really, really good too. Yep. Yeah, I don't know. It's, it's a it's a cool deck. I don't know how good it'll be moving forward. But I mean, you don't lose a whole lot other than I mean, you lose a lot of your, your Vs and the Radiant Greninja and some of the other cards that help with consistency. So that might be a challenge to set it up consistently. But it's still cool. I think, I don't know, I would you play? I, I love Hydreigon. He's probably one of my favorite cards. Would you play this moving forward in the new format or not? Probably not? No. I do. I mean, I say that because I think the card is really cool. But I think that it just stage twos in general, I think lose a lot more than people realize, moving into the new format, like, because we are losing things like Luminion and Rotom and Forest Sealstone, it just becomes significantly harder to set up a stage two. If it isn't named Dragapult, really, you know? Sure. I mean, even Gardevoir losing their Refinement Corlea is going to have a bit of a harder time in setting up. But I don't know, maybe Pidgeot can still kind of hold these types of things together. But I definitely feel like you'll get a turn to Pidgeot much less consistently in a post rotation format than you would here. That's fair. Yeah. But still cool to see somebody do well with the off the wall. Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. Gravity Mountain is a cool stadium. I mean, it's just teched for like, Dragapult, I'm sure. Well, it also lets you do like double obsidian KO Pidgeot. True. You know, one thing that I think would be cool to see here that we don't see would be like a copy of that TM devolution. That would make sense. I feel like that would help a lot and would accomplish kind of the same purpose that the Gravity Mountain does or a similar purpose. Yeah. Yeah. I think that about sums up Stockholm. You know, pretty cool to see Isaiah finally take down an event. Has he not won a regional before? No, this is the first time. That is crazy. He has made the finals. I believe this is either his fifth or sixth regionals finals. Wow. And he now has one win under his belt. And he got an IC finals at one point, right? Like, that's Yeah, yeah, last year. I mean, props to him, dude. He's consistently been one of the top players like his name isn't, you know, less than because this is his first regionals when it's it's even it's like Johnny was a couple years ago, where it was always in second place. And yeah, like you said, Alex Schmansky. Yeah, definitely. Cool to see, you know, one of the guys clutch up, bring it home for the US, if you will. We'd love to see that. So absolutely. Yeah, I want to shout out Dean Nizam here kind of flipped when I saw his name, longtime Virginian player. You know, Maryland, rather. So cool to see him represent the US and good to see him. He's a longtime player. So it's good to see him doing well. For sure. For sure. One thing I actually want to look at real quick, because I hadn't considered this until now. I'm actually not positive. If has anyone in Europe actually won a European regional yet this year? They got to Yeah, you have Ajaven. Oh, darn. You're right. You're right. Okay. Nevermind. Okay. I thought that that was going to be a really cool stab. But you totally you're totally correct. Actually, Arnie Arnie one as well. So nevermind. Yeah, the fins though the fins have been dominant this year, dude. Absolutely. It's been pretty, pretty sick to see. Yeah. What we've got two Japanese wins in Europe, to finish wins in Europe. And then, I mean, you know, James Cox kind of counts. Right? I mean, he does live over there, even if he's Yeah, being Australian. But I think that the Australians would still claim him. He'd probably call himself Australian, I think. Yeah. Yeah, that's gonna close the book on Stockholm for us here. The next thing we're going to look at is a time capsule. This isn't going to be a super extended one here. But I do want to highlight a deck from back in 2007. So before many of you either started playing the game before some of you may have even been born. And that is Flareados or Flareon Ariados. And this deck is a kind of click combo attacking deck that utilizes the two namesake cards of Flareon EX and Ariados and the Flareon, you know, made famous by Jimmy Ballard, obviously, with his 2006 finals at Worlds, has the evolutionary Flame Poképower that says once during your turn when you play Flareon EX from your hand to evolve one of your Pokémon, you may choose one of the defending Pokémon and is worded that way because you could have two actives if you were playing a two on two battle. But that Pokémon is now burned and confused. And this is important, because Ariados has the reactive poison attack that for one colorless does 10 damage plus 30 more damage for each special condition on the defending Pokémon. So by just burning and confusing your opponents active, your reactive poison is now doing 70 damage, then they would take 20 damage from their burn. And you know, you're going from there. And you know, that's 90 damage is a lot in this format, where we look at these stage one EXs that only have 100 or 110 HP. So the deck had some nice consistency in the fact that the Eevee had a call for family attack. And you got to play a little bit of this toolbox approach where you could play some of these other kind of guest appearance Eeveelutions, and you could tech them depending on what decks you expected to see. And the ones here that this was John Silvestro's list that was top four from US Nationals that year. And one of them was the Jolteon EX with the Evolutionary Thunder. So when you would evolve into Jolteon, you would put one damage counter on each of your opponent's Pokémon. So you could take that 90 that you just were doing with your Ariados, all of a sudden you're doing 100 and you're setting up your the rest of your opponent's Pokémon for future Reactive Poison attacks. And also in and of itself, Jolteon was a serviceable attack with a second bite that would do 20 plus 10 more damage for each damage counter on the defending Pokémon. So very easily you could hit something with a Reactive Poison, and you could pretty much guaranteed knock it out with second bite on the following turn if you needed to. Thunder Blast is here, does 70 damage and you discard a Lightning Energy. You're probably not using that very often, but it does exist. And then the other tech EX here is the Umbreon EX that has the Darker Ring Poké Power, which is evolve into this and you boss up one of your opponent's Pokémon. And then it actually has Sob, named Black Cry here, but Sob is the first attack. And in addition to Retreat locking the Pokémon, they also can't use any Poké Powers. So anything that you locked active, like at the time there was, I believe Pidgeot from FireRedLeafGreen was still legal in this format. That actually might be incorrect, because Pidgeot was released in 2005 or 2000, 2004. But just as an example, Pidgeot was a free Retreat Pokémon, did have Quick Search back then as well. And if you were able to Darker Ring up the Pidgeot and then Black Cry it, it would be Retreat and Ability Locked, which is just a pretty powerful effect, honestly, at the end of the day. And we could power up all of these potential different attackers with either our basic energies here. So we've got six copies of Grass primarily for Aeriodos, the Fire for Flareon. Lightning for Jolteon, and then we have Multi-Energy, which is effectively the same thing as Luminous Energy. Just a rainbow energy, but if you have any other special energy attached, so a second copy of Multi-Energy, renders each Multi-Energy as a single colorless energy instead. In games where you couldn't necessarily get your Flareon set up to apply the special conditions to your opponent's active area, Aeriodos does have another attack, and Spider Trap, that for one grass energy allows you to either put the defending Pokémon to sleep and poison it, or you can choose to drag up a bench Pokémon and then put it to sleep and poison it. So you just have a lot of disruptive capabilities in this deck, in addition to having a single-prize Stage 1 that can do a good bit of damage for a single energy. And then, as far as consistency goes, pretty much every deck in the 2007 format was running the Halon engine. So we had Halon's Transceiver, which was an item card that allowed you to either search your deck or discard pile for a supporter card with Halon in its name, and put that into your hand, and we would get copies of Halon Mentor. All of the Halon supporters have this text that says you have to discard a card from your hand to play this card, but Halon Mentor allowed you to search for 3 basics that had 100 HP or less, which is literally every basic in this deck. Halon Adventurer was just discard a card and draw 3 cards, not relevant to this deck in particular because there are no Delta Pokémon, but if you did discard a Delta Pokémon, you would draw 4 cards instead. Well, does it say Delta or just a card that has Delta on it? It says a Pokémon that has Delta on its card. Yeah. Halon Farmer was discard a card to put 3 basic energy and 3 basic or evolution cards, and this is eventually worked out to where you could do up to. Initially, the way it's written, you had to have 6 cards, but it was ruled that you could do up to. And then Halon Scientist allowed you to just draw cards until you matched the hand size of your opponent. So you had a little bit of hand filtering, like if you had extra copies of some of these supporters, you could play a Halon Supporter to discard a card and then do the effect and just thin a card out of your hand and make things a little bit more streamlined. We had a Professor Elves training method that just allowed you to search your deck for an evolution. At the time, I guess I should preface this, we didn't have ball cards in this format, so there was no Nest Ball, there was no Ultra Ball, and so we really relied on supporters to set up our board and draw cards. Or you would rely on supporters to set up your board and then you would have abilities that would help you draw cards. To help draw with this deck, there was an interesting supporter called Mary's Request that just allowed you to draw 3 if you had no Stage 2 of all Pokémon in play. And believe it or not, this was actually a decent card at the time in this format. Wow. Which is wild considering that we've had Hop, Mimona, Friends in Insert Region, Charon, and those cards are all trash. But back in 2005 in Stage 1 decks, this was actually deemed to be a decent card. That's crazy. And then last couple things here, we had Super Scoop Up to allow us to either recycle our EVs to reuse their abilities, or you could pick up a damaged Pokémon to try to deny a prize from your opponent. We had Windstorm, which was basically like Field Blower, I guess was the best comparison. Allowed you to remove 2 in any combination of Pokémon tools or Stadium cards in play, and then you would discard both of those. And the big thing here was getting rid of Cessation Crystal, which would shut off abilities, thereby denying your EVs and making it impossible for you to really combo off on your opponent. But you could also get rid of Troublesome Stadiums or do something like play a Giant Stomp, which is like Collapsed Stadium Plus, where each player can only have 3 bench Pokémon. And so you could play a Giant Stomp to discard some liabilities, like an EV that you've already used that you would want to shuffle back in with a Holland Farmer to just not have a 2-prizer sitting on your board. And then you could Windstorm that Giant Stomp and have that bench slot available again to put a new basic down to ready yourself for your next turn. So just a pretty streamlined Stage 1 deck. It's actually decently consistent as well. And I don't know, pretty fun to play. I think it's a pretty good deck in this format if you have any interest in 2007. One real question for those that haven't played in this format. Why are you running on a random Electrode without a Voltorb? Gotcha. Sorry, I did not talk about this. So the Hollands Pokémon were Pokémon that could also be attached as energy. So the Voltorb and Magnemite could be attached as a single colorless, and then you had Hollands Electrode, Hollands Magneton, and Hollands Castform that could all be attached in. They would provide two rainbow energy, but the requirement for attaching them was that you had to bounce an energy from the Pokémon you were attaching it to back to your hand. So this just allowed you a way to actually search energy when you played a Professor Elm's training method, as an example. You would go find an Electrode, put it in your hand, and that gave you two rainbows to be able to attack with an Eevee evolution if you needed to. I'm curious. Does it say it counts as a special energy? Could you play Luminous and Hollands Electrode on the same Pokémon? Yes, this is a special energy card, so the multi-energy would be a colorless. But this is giving you two rainbows, so that effectively fulfills everything that this deck requires. And there may be some more updated versions of this deck, as people have tried to explore and refine some of these retro formats, but I wanted to highlight an actual tournament-based list. Yeah, it is wild that you play more supporters than items in this deck, left by a good number. It's a lot different than Pokémon Now. It seems a lot slower. Yeah, even if we go back and look at the format. Let me see. Yeah, so even here, this is Alec Brousseau, also known as Big Chuck. You know, friends with Jason Kulczynski, longtime, very successful player, playing Banette, which is considered an aggressive deck in this format. And so I would assume an aggressive deck should have a lot of items in it, right? No, we've got a total of six. And the big thing, everything really centered around this Holon engine. So you needed copies of your supporters to either draw into them naturally, or you had four copies of Transceiver to go fetch them. And everything was just very heavily supporter-based at the time. Did you play a lot in this format? I did. I actually got top 16 at this event. Oh, hey, there you go. And this is a deck I'd like to talk about another time as well, but it's a lot of times. Yeah, we will definitely save that for another time. Jimmy Ballard's Ambush deck. Do you have any of it built? Like, I'd love to play this with you sometime. No, I absolutely don't. I wish I did. Alright, I'll build some for Atlanta. Maybe we can try to get some games. I've been talking to people about this a lot recently, where I feel like a lot of us... Well, I mean, I'm relatively young at the time. Teenagers that were playing at these Nationals events that knew, you know, rotation is coming after this. These cards are going to be totally useless. I'm going to sell everything. And now to go rebuy this deck, I would probably have to pay at least triple what I ended up selling the cards for. Oh, God. Way more than that, unfortunately. Yeah, I'm sure. Like, the Jolteon Star alone in that deck we just looked at is like $2,000 minimum for a decent condition one or something. I don't know. It's prohibitively expensive. But anyway, that's why I print proxies on a printer and just shove them in front of energy. They play the same when you're playing retro. Yeah, so that's going to close out our time capsule for the week. The next thing we're going to hit up here is something we don't normally cover news a lot on this podcast, aside from set releases. But this one felt a little bit different, just because I know a lot of players, you know, competitively focused players, have felt that TCG Live is unfortunately not necessarily the client that we want it to be or we're hoping it was going to be. And we got a community letter coming from the devs this past week to highlight some changes that are coming to it as Journey Together is released and Rotation is implemented on the client. So Rotation will be implemented on the day that this episode releases, Thursday, March 27th. And at the same time, they're adding some new features here. So just to start and read a little bit of this verbatim, this community letter we have from TPCIGlowMoon says, Hello, Pokemon TCG Live community. We've got a lot to cover. So let's jump right in, starting with the new game mode coming to Pokemon TCG Live Trainer Trials. And Trainer Trials is a brand new game mode available within the casual matchmaking tab that offers rotating deck building challenges to change up how trainers play the Pokemon TCG. And just to kind of skip down to look at, so like it says, we've got some rotating queues that are going to be coming. And the first two weeks here, we're going to have Singleton Showdown, just uses the standard card pool. And you can, because it's Singleton, you can only have one copy of every card that is not a basic energy. So it's kind of a step toward Gym Leader Challenge. And I know a lot of players like Singleton or Highlander formats. And, you know, I think the option to have alternative formats available in the client and have them quote unquote, officially supported. It's actually pretty neat. The next set we've got is Twin Battle. And that's instead of Singleton, every card has to be a two of, which is interesting. It makes techs a little bit less viable and allows you to make your deck a little bit more consistent than it would be if it was a Singleton deck. And then in the fifth and sixth week, we see the official Gym Leader Challenge format being implemented. And the thing to highlight here is that they've got all of the bands that the official Gym Leader Challenge has implemented, except a lot of these cards aren't even available in the client at present. So I think the interesting thing will be to see if they do implement the cards that are older than Sword and Shield prior to this being released, or if it's really just going to be Gym Leader Challenge that's Sword and Shield on. I don't know. We'll have to see. Yeah, I think that's a big discussion point. And yeah, I definitely would love to see like support for, you know, essentially an expanded format or expanded card pool. Yeah, I know. Like one problem is, you know, we'll talk about or people talk about all the time. There are a lot of bugs in the client, unfortunately, that we see on display rather frequently. And that's without implementing all of these other cards. So if we did have to add all of these cards, who knows what all they would end up adding to that. Yeah, there's lots of scenarios that could come up when you add 15 years worth of cards at this point. Yeah, I'm sure that'll make the developer's days a lot more stress filled. But I mean, it's so cool. Even like, I don't know, if you make it in this capacity where there's not like as much at stake in theory, and it's like more of a beta version or not quite a beta version, like a trial run, it seems more like than an actual like we're going to have an official. I mean, it's cool that like Pokemon essentially is making a ban list for recognizing the ban list for GLC. That's been that's come up a couple times when we have GLC at like regionals or something. It's like, is this, you know, Duskull band or whatever? But yeah, it's cool to see. Closing things out, we've got the silver series for week seven to eight, which is basically GLC, but only for silver bordered cards, which are the Scarlet Violet non cards, which is pretty interesting. I mean, and that's something that people can play literally right now if they really wanted to, I believe, because all of those cards are standard legal so that you don't aren't bothered by the fact that you can't do expanded friend challenges. So you could still do this if you wanted to. And then the last thing is the CU Cup, which does include the expanded card pool. Again, same limitations. We have a GLC right now. We don't have the full expanded card pool, but potentially that is something that could be added prior to this coming up, because this actually won't be implemented until late May. But it's the expanded card pool, but only commons and uncommons. So it's GLC with even more restrictions. Yeah, I mean, if you've ever gone on Limitless and looked at alternate formats that they have going on, there's like the team format that was at the top that's been in there. I don't think it was expanded. It was standard at that point. Okay, so yeah, it's standard. But there's some definitely like I've seen it expanded too. But there's like alternate formats that have been recognized on Limitless. And like when online was a thing, we had like Legacy. We've had like other formats that aren't officially supported formats that Pokemon's talked about or played or whatever. And it's still cool. I think, yeah, like it's cool to recognize like, hey, we hear you. Like not everybody that plays Pokemon wants to play standard. You know, or if they want to play standard, they don't always want to play standard. We should have other opportunities for players to kind of stretch their legs as a deck builder or innovate and create new ways to play Pokemon cards. And it's cool. I mean, that's kind of why GLC came up. It came about in the first place is like we're tired of smashing VMAXs into each other. Let's go back and kind of go back to the basics of deck building and like learning all the different forms of, you know, Cinderace to where we can figure out the best Raboot to play in our deck or something like that. For sure. You know, so it's fun to see. I like it a lot. Yeah, we'll just have to see where this kind of goes from here. Like, obviously, I would assume that Trainer Trials is not just going to disappear after the 29th. So they'll either give us a maybe this queue will just repeat itself or they'll add additional formats that they potentially want to support. Or some of these may become just officially supported formats within the client as a whole. Like maybe there will just be a GLC queue in the client, which I know a lot of players would be very excited for. For sure. Yeah, I'm almost surprised that they didn't make it more of a just have GLC. since the start, like it's such a popular format that I feel like that's warranted, but it's still cool. I think, you know, GLC will probably be the most popular cause it's the most played at this point of alternate formats, but the other ones still reward creativity and originality and kind of that, that's pretty cool. Yeah. Yeah. They didn't, notably, they have made some other quality of life improvements that they wanted to call out. So you can now mute your opponent's avatar emotes. So if somebody's giving you a whole bunch of, huh? Or thumbs ups or thumbs downs or whatever, you can just say, nah, I don't want to deal with that. And you're done. There's automatic price selection. If they are, the price cards you would take are your final price cards, which I guess is fine. Like it saves you a couple of seconds. Yeah. I mean, I've had games where like my opponent just doesn't, like they either quit or like walk away from their keyboard after like, you know, you use dust snore to knock something out. Right. I don't know. Maybe I guess that's a bad example, but like, yeah, it does like anytime that you can save time by just like, cause it does feel kind of like, why am I clicking my last three price cards? Sure. If I've taken my last three price cards, like clearly I won the game. Like I don't need to, you know, select the order for any reason. No, it's just a quality. It's a small quality of life and upgrade, but it's like one of those things that's like, if a player is trying to like optimize their time on TCG live testing wise, like it makes a lot of sense. You know, I definitely like, I think my biggest qual when I'm playing is like, I just want to get to the next game as fast as possible. And it often feels like I have to like sit there and like wait for the screen to be like, you won or you lost. And then like have to watch them emote and then have to like click, click, click, click, click, click, click. Okay, now I can exit off of this. And like, oh, now I have to wait for the animation to load that shows my progression on two different ladders. And oh, I went up one rank and it shows me the whole animation of going up a rank. And oh, you got another tier on the ladder. And it shows me, do you want to get your packs now? And it's like, of course I do. Cause I have problems with instant gratification. So it ends up just being like almost a minute between games. And sometimes I just saps my like desire to keep playing. And that might be a good thing to be honest sometimes. But it definitely like, if you're just trying to cram games for like two hours before you go to bed or before you have other responsibilities, it definitely cuts into that. So it's cool to see, yeah, these kinds of quality of life, just minor things. But yeah, that one seems minor, but any little bit helps. Yeah, the next one I think is a lot bigger of a deal, especially for people that are attempting to use TCG Live as a testing tool. And that is when you are challenging trainers from your friends list, you can actually disable all match timers. So that would be the full game timer, as well as I believe the turn timer being disabled. I haven't actually used this feature yet, but I imagine that anyone playing in a limitless event feels that this is pretty cool. The one thing I would just hope that nobody's abusing the fact that the turn timer is being removed, but it also, I think, allows people to potentially start to dip their toes back into using TCG Live as a coaching tool as well. Yeah. And if that's the case, having something that's a bit more streamlined, unfortunately you still can't rewind turns, but that aside, I think that it's a step in the right direction. Yeah, I agree. I think that's kind of a no brainer. Like if you're playing a friend and sometimes you're just hanging out playing each other, it's nice to be able to talk over thoughts and actions that you're like, hey, this is my hand. What should I do here? Whatever. And yeah, coaching is a huge factor for that too. So it's good to see. This card movement thing, I don't know. It doesn't really matter to me. I guess it appeals to the people that are coming into TCG Live from TCG Pocket. Maybe they want to be able to examine their cards a bit more thoroughly. That's kind of whatever. I mean, it is nice. Like if you play Hearthstone or play Pocket even, you have more stuff to fidget with when you're waiting on your opponent to do something. So like that part of me said, I know it's silly. You should be paying attention to what your opponent is doing. Often, yes. As they take their five minute turn to set up, play double Poffin and search every time and take way too long. Sure, yes. I need my undivided attention to all that. Hey, that's one thing. Well, okay. It's still, so to not form that habit, what I've been practicing, especially when I do paper play now is I just literally take my hand and put it face down on the table. Like I don't even touch my cards when it's not my turn anymore. Okay. And because I know I used to be the biggest, not hypocrite, but one of the guiltiest people of just fidgeting with my cards throughout my opponent's turn. And half the time, I'm not even looking at them. It's just literally like blind, like fidget or nervous tick or whatever you want to call it. And I realized now, I don't think that that was helping me focus or when I started playing again and I was still doing it, I noticed all I'm doing is distracting myself with this and it makes me want to look down at my hand. So I just set it down on the table, put dice on top of it to indicate how many cards I have there. So my opponent can always reference that and then just pay attention to what they're doing. Has that helped you a lot? I think so. It helps me try to maintain focus a little bit better or I can see what- You just intimidate your opponent more. No. Maybe. You put the dice down, it's like your turn. Maybe that's what's happening. Yeah. Some of these other- Yeah, I've known players to do that and it always strikes me as like, oh yeah, this guy means business whenever he puts his hand down. Cause like, that is one thing, like my wife doesn't really go to Pokemon tournaments, but like one thing she like, we went to when we were getting, I think right after we got married, my cousin got married the year after in Atlanta and it was like right around New Year's and they had the Georgia Marathon going on at that point. And so we went and we went to like a city championships. That was part of that. And I wasn't playing it or anything like that, but I just wanted to walk around and see some friends and like, you know, the thing she told me was like, no one made eye contact with me and like the nervous energy is just almost unbearable. Just like the amount of fidgeting and noises people make is flapping cards and shuffling decks and hands and all this stuff. She's like, I could never, like I can't, I couldn't be here for a whole day. I'm like, yeah, I get it. It's intimidating. So yeah, I don't know. It's funny that Pokemon players do that. And now we can do it in TCG Live. We can distract ourselves. For sure. Maybe this is how you'll be able to see texture on full art cards. Ooh, that'd be fun. That would actually be, that would be worthwhile because right now, you know, full arts and things like that, they look a little bland, but if you can actually see that texture, maybe it's a little bit better. And maybe that's why they've gotten to this thing where they, what they're calling overnumbered crafting updates. So overnumbered cards, anything that's essentially an illustration or secret rare in a set is no longer craftable for I believe, what, six months after its initial release on TCG Live, which this reads to me as a really weird change, but I guess they just don't want, you know, they know that a lot of players that have had TCG Live for a long time that ported over accounts from TCG Online had tons of excess tokens or whatever the currency is now to be able to craft these cards on day one. And maybe they're trying to make it so, I don't know what your desk looks like, John, or how many code cards you have sitting in front of you, but I've got a stack of what looks to be at least 800 code cards sitting over here next to me. And they're just doing nothing because I have no need to scan them in because, I mean, now granted, I'm not going out and crafting the max rarity version of a card as soon as I need to, but I could. And- The code card market dipped really, really hard once we got rid of trading. Sure. Because now you just, you either buy one set and then just keep buying that one set, like of Palde of all or something like that, that's cheap. If you're trying to buy a bunch of code cards or something like that, or you just enter in like me, I think I just enter in whatever sealed product I get. I've never had to like, I don't know. I mean, you could pretty much at this point, like once you get established, it's not that expensive to just play a ladder and build whatever deck you want if it's lower rarity. I don't know. This, I guess, appeals to collectors more than players. Sure. People that wanna play with max rarity. Now it's more of a chase for them. Now it's more of a thrill if you get to open packs. I guess that might be part of it is, now you have to open packs, so. I guess. And I guess people are, it's more showing off when you have a max rarity deck than, but to kind of compensate for the fact that you can't craft them, they've made it so that your daily quests now give you more experience on the battle pass. So you get there a little bit faster. I guess they've increased battle, either quantity of rewards per level or number of levels that I'm actually unclear on. You get some more rewards for the ranked ladder as you progress through it. They all have additional login rewards and other things such as switch drops, email newsletters, pass codes, and other various promotions that we have to look forward to. And so just all of this is coming together starting this Thursday, March 27th. Yeah. And also I think I read that you don't go back to the lowest tier whenever the ladder resets. You go back to the second lowest tier. Okay. So it's like, I don't know, slightly better, but it's still a disgusting amount of grinding. Save you what, like five games? Yeah. Yeah. That's my least favorite part of grinding on live is like getting back up to the higher ranks. And a lot of times if I'm not, like if I don't have a big tournament coming up, I'm not going to do that. Yeah. Like I don't have a lot of like grind in me, like just playing, I don't know, bad deck after bad deck after bad deck for like five hours. Not that fun. Well, what's interesting to me is I feel like there's still some amount of internal or hidden MMR associated with the game. And that I feel like even though I'm getting a reset to Pokeball tier, every deck I play against is still a meta deck at the very least. Maybe the quality of player isn't quite the same. That I have no way to measure. But the, I'm not playing against Joe Schmoe with his, I don't know, attacking Pidgeot deck or his Tyranitar EX deck or, you know, whatever other random nonsense card. Yeah. Yeah. Or the worst is when you get like the Evolutions guys for the last few months, or last two months where it's just been like, I'm trying to get all the Prismatic Evolutions daily quests where you're like play Umbreon for three games or something like that. And then their decks suck, but they get Umbreon and play and then they just, yeah. It's not like fun, but I don't know. No, see, I haven't seen, I haven't even had that. I'm just griping. Hey. Yeah. So that just goes to show that not everyone even has the same experience on this game. True, true. Is what it is. I would love to, I don't know. It's weird. Like if you make it to, you know, a certain Arceus point threshold, maybe it should drop you to a tier higher than this or something. Like I know, I think Hearthstone had a similar system where if you were within a certain legend ranking, you only got reset down to like diamond two or something. And if you were whatever it was, and I know they've changed their whole ranking system a couple of times as well. I have no idea what it looks like now. I haven't played Hearthstone in years, but the whole point is that it can be iterated on and hopefully improved to a point. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's the good thing is, I think we're seeing TCG live, try to evolve, try to adapt, try to listen to players, try to be responsive to concerns and to input from the community. Sure. You know, the counter argument is, while these have been concerns and been things we've been asking for basically since day one for a lot of these things. And I'm not saying like, you know, this is groundbreaking. This is amazing. It's more like, oh, that's good. You know, I'll play, I'll be playing Pokemon if it sucks. Like if it's TCGA.me, where I have to drag all the cards and like write all the damage counters and all that stuff before we had an online client, I was playing back then and I'll probably play if it gets back to like sticks and rocks and, you know, no more internet at all or something like that. But no, it's cool to see the game, at least like try to keep up with other clients and other games, at least on some levels. Yeah. It's good to have some alternate formats. It'll be fun to play TCG live. I'll go back to playing it a little bit more, I imagine. Oh yeah. Once rotation hits, for sure. That's been the big thing stopping me. Yeah. It's just not having rotation or, you know, something where, now granted, even though I did, you know, we both played League Cups this weekend, that's not something that I feel a strong need to test for. Not at this point. Especially with this rotation being right around the corner. You know, just want to play more games with that. And, but with that in mind, since we do have that rotation coming up very soon, we're gonna have a lot of new decks to talk about, new decks coming in. We wanted to really quickly highlight some cards that we might be a little sad to see go as they leave us in rotation. Or happy. Or happy, for sure. Yeah. So we've got, we've got a, so a deck and a card that we are happy to, happy to see go, and a deck and a card that we are sad to see go. And John, if you don't mind kicking us off with whichever one of those four you want to talk about. I'm going to talk about my favorite cards. I have two cards. I couldn't decide between the two that are going to, I'm going to be sad to see go. The number one is Hisuian Heavy Ball. I think it wasn't an auto-include in every deck, and it still isn't an auto-include in every deck. But like the decks where you run a lot of tech Pokemon, one of Pokemon, it allows those strategies to just be so much more effective. Like control, or like the cloth deck that would be so much more effective. you and I both kind of grew to love. And now if you look at like some of the post-rotation lists, like we're having to run two of a lot of important tech cards. It just feels really bad when you have to run like two Duraludon or like two, you know, I don't know. I've seen decks with like two Latias as an example. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it's just like, if heavy ball was in format, you just run that and it just feels so much better. And then you just get the added benefit. Like I know that price checking is important skill to learn. But I'm lazy. So I like being able to just play a card. Oh, I loved, I loved every game I opened with heavy ball. Yeah. It feels so nice to just like, now I don't have to think about it. I can just write my prizes down real quick. And like, we can just carry on. So that was a really cool card. And then the other card I wrote down was Thornton. I think Thornton is probably like, Thornton just feels so sick. Like when you get like something gets knocked out and your opponent's like, I'm glad I don't have to worry about that evolving and, you know, taking a knockout and you can just Thornton and then like, get it back and play. I played it and lost Tina. Like so many games would just be like, oh, they don't have a Tina V on the bench. So I can just be safe and playing my, you know, ex Pokemon or V Pokemon down and not having to worry about it. And then, bam, out of nowhere, Tina V, Tina V star, and then just, you know, lost mirage gate or whatever. Go from there. But Thornton was a really cool card. Just the mechanics of it are really cool. Like a lot of that, like, I think we've seen it with like swoop teleporter back in the day, something like that. Or like ninja boy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think not to not not to, but Naru, I think was one for dark types. Never really saw play, but kind of that same premise. But yeah, those were my two favorite cards that are rotating out. I'm probably could come up with some more, but I think those are the first two that popped into my mind. What about you? Um, so heavy ball would definitely be up there on my list as well. But I think I'm going to talk about a Pokemon. And I would say one of my favorite Pokemon that we're going to be losing was Palkia V star. And, you know, a lot of people might dislike Palkia just because it's been associated with some decks that are potentially unfun to play with or play against. But this will kind of segue into me talking about the deck that I am going to miss playing from this format in particular. And because it did, you know, spoiler feature Palkia, but Palkia is just such a versatile card. And that, you know, it saw its time in the limelight as both in primary attacker as a support Pokemon, as kind of, I guess, I mean, support an engine kind of go hand in hand, but it was just the thing that really, like, fueled what you were doing with your deck, even if it wasn't necessarily the focus of the deck, or it allowed a package to be inserted into your deck as kind of a side strategy, even if it wasn't the main focus of what you were doing. But you could also tool your deck in a way because we had the tools that build around it, like Radiant Greninja, like Irida, that you could build a deck that was like Palkia heavy, Palkia focused, and you end up with situations like what we saw with Australia shortly after Palkia was released, where it was just far and away the best deck attacking with Palkia, coming out swinging with this big beefy guy. And just like a big dude doing big numbers is always pretty fun, especially when it's as self-sufficient as Palkia could be. But the thing that I enjoyed about it was, like I said, where it was both the, or had the potential to kind of be the point guard, be the main player, but also was a role player in some decks where it just passed the ball off to Greninja or whatever else you wanted to funnel those energies to. Yeah, I think it was definitely probably, I remember listening to Tag Team Podcast, I think, and they said Palkia was like the most broken V-Star that got printed, essentially, even over Arceus. And I'm like, you know, it's hard to argue with that. Like when Palkia was in its heyday, it definitely like, I think that was the Melbourne regional or something like that, where it was top eight of all top eight was Palkia and Taliyan. Just what a combo, man. Like that card, yeah, that card's busted. Even the fact that it had such longevity, like it came out of the format for a while, but it came back in near the end of it for a little bit. So that's kind of cool. I mean, that was the thing that I thought was really cool about it was that it left, like you said, and even though it did come back, it wasn't the best deck in the format when it came back again. It was just something that was a serviceable deck. And like we saw, you know, people try to play this kind of water box deck in Yokohama that was like Chien Pao with Palkia and switch cards and things like that. And it may not have been super great, but it was an option and it was a deck you could play. And then, you know, we saw things like when we brought Palkia Dusknoir out and it originally appeared in Japan. And I don't know that, and I'm going to segue really quick. That's going to be the deck that I wanted to talk about, the deck that I'm going to miss the most, because it was probably my favorite deck that I've played this year. And a lot of that kind of goes with Pokestop being a super degenerate card, especially when you combo it with things like Nightstretcher and Dusknoir. But having access to Palkia and Radiant Greninja to kind of shore up and give you the options to do your opponent's board is gone play is super cool and super satisfying to pull off, even if your opponents totally hate when it is happening to them. Yeah, definitely. I think that was one of the decks where you just have those turns where you just go, okay, knockout, knockout, knockout, knockout. And your opponent just is left with tatters and you're just cruising from there. And you Iona them to like two or three cards. And you're like, okay, your turn, buddy. Yep. Draw a pass. Yeah, pretty much. No, that's a cool deck. It was a fun deck. It was cool to see you guys, you and some of the other Florida guys kind of innovate off of that Japanese list. Make it your own. Do well with it was cool to see. My favorite deck. Again, I only I have two because I'm very indecisive. Probably one from like right after worlds or one before worlds and one after worlds for this format. Sure. Um, so before worlds, I have lost Tina. Oh, no. I know. Well, you can shake your head and you have an opinion. And that's fine. Because that was my deck for like six months, dude. That was that's where I lived last year was my bread and butter. I won some league cups with it. And I, I one of my locals, Jacob still well, shout out to him if he ever listens to this. He got like a sable I writing jet energy on his arm as a tattoo as a shout out to getting his worlds invite solely off lost Tina primarily. And then played it played played lost Tina at worlds and did absolutely terrible. But you know, you know, the play the deck that got you there. And that's the thought. Sometimes it works. A lot of times it doesn't. But last you know, it was cool. You know, I played Thornton and that but that was fun. But like the comfy engine, the lost box engine having lost lost zones, just a cool mechanic. I'm so glad that they brought that back with lost origins. Even if only got it for one set, it was still quite such a powerful set. And all the lost zone mechanics with lost Tina, like having 10 in the lost zone and just being able to KO something for two energy was super, super cool. And then the other deck I wanted to talk about, and I don't think this will be a surprise to anybody listening to this who's listened to this podcast before, but it's Reggie Drago. You know, you know that you hate it, you probably hate it more than you love it at this point. But that was my other favorite deck, just played a lot like mu three, which was one of my favorite decks from the tag team era. And just being able to play any card out of your discard pile. And I mean, it got to the point where it's really, really boring to see mirrors and see kind of Reggie Drago played over and over again. But I think what's lost is that the deck feels really fun. Just having the versatility of using any attack allowed for some cool deck building choices, even if it ended up not really panning out like that too much. But we saw like haxers come in, we've seen, you know, a lowland executor or EX, we've seen so many cool tech attacks, and then here I'm kind of just push the deck over the edge, I feel like for a lot of a lot of different reasons. But just having that ability to, you know, canceling clone and board wipe your opponent, similar to dust nor Palkia. But for a one energy or for a three energy attack was really, really powerful. So I don't know, I'll miss that deck. I don't think I think it was probably my favorite deck to play after worlds up until you know, the prismatic evolutions format. Okay. So I don't, I'm not, I'm not like, you know, I feel like I'm the villain in this story. You are. That's okay. Yeah. What are your favorites, Aaron? Well, like I said, my so my favorite, my number one was definitely Palkia dust nor, you know, obviously, I've got a soft spot for cloth. I think that just combo decks in general, have always appealed to me. So doing something where it either requires multiple pieces or requires you to go through a certain sequence of cards and doing that properly and navigating that properly is always interesting at the Unga Bunga, I'm gonna raging bolt you has never been my thing. Yeah. But, you know, I can't deny that it's effective at times. Sure, sure. But definitely, I know what you mean. Definitely cloth doesn't feel like you're playing Pokemon when you're not combo. I mean, not not like my book, why it's not my play style, you know, but I would say that definitely the Palkia dust nor and the cloth drop it goes. So just like losing the double turbo, losing the oranga rue, the big thing is losing for a seal stone. But I don't know how much I'm gonna miss that card. To be honest with you. I do love that cloth. He's right there. What a good guy. He's unhinged. He's unhinged. Yeah, he needed an illustration or that's what it's gonna be like it for. Oh, that would be sick. Yeah, it is a bummer that he never got one cloth would be a cool like third mascot for the channel, I feel like. Sure. In some ways. Yeah. So that's enough about things we liked that are leaving. How about some things we don't like, John? I'll go first. My least favorite card from the yellow border era from Pokemon Go. It is Snorlax with the ability block. And I know that. I mean, that's probably not the worst defender. I'm sure somebody could come up with some other ones. But like this one personally, for me, just gets under my skin a little bit. I will not sit here and say like, Oh, you don't need skill to play that deck. Oh, that deck is just broke, you know, brain dead or whatever. It takes skill, but it's just, it's such an unfun way to win a game of Pokemon when you're just saying, I'm not gonna even attack. I'm not gonna. I'm not gonna announce it a single attack. This whole game. I'm just going to put this Pokemon in my active, bring up something that you can't retreat and pass and pass and pass and pass. And it just gets to the point where it's just not fun. You know, like if your deck doesn't have an answer for it, you lose. And if it does, you win. That's just kind of how it feels. There's some skill that comes up to, you know, okay, well, my deck has some outs, but I have to hit them before they misfortune sisters. And if I run Turo, I can maybe pal pad it in before they are at a pal pad. And you have lines of play that definitely you have to play out correctly. You have to manage your bench effectively. If you're playing a deck that, you know, they can Erica's or flute something into play. You have to like fill your bench up effectively. So there's strategy for sure. But the, the Snorlax deck just doesn't feel like it's like you just play your cards like that. You're dealt. And I don't know, obviously it takes skill, but it definitely feels like the least fun way to win a game of Pokemon currently. Sure. So I will not be sad to see that card go. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, a lot of the burden of playing around it is kind of on you as the opponent rather than on the Snorlax player. Like they just kind of do their thing. I mean, they asked the question, if you can answer the question, you win. If you can't, you lose. And you know, at the end of the day, that's kind of what Pokemon is. You kind of, you and your opponent take turns setting puzzles up for each other to solve. The problem is that the Snorlax deck just gives you the same puzzle over and over and over and over again. And it's always the same flavor and the same quantity. Yeah. It's like the puzzle of like, can you find your keys and get to work on time? Like, it's not a fun puzzle to like, it's not like a, it's not like a, you know, escape room puzzle. It's more like a doing your taxes puzzle. And that's kind of my frustration, I'd say. Yeah, that's, I think that that's a great analogy. Honestly, I think for me, a card that I'm not going to miss or that I'm kind of happy to see go, and this might be a little surprising for some people. Some people may not dislike this card as much as I do. But I know that I've talked to plenty of people about my distaste for Forest Sealstone and how, as a concept, I get why it was printed. I can understand that since, you know, if you wanted people that were not playing dedicated V-star decks to help, to not be handicapped and not have access to this mechanic. But the problem is that they did that with, you know, the Earth and Sky Sealstones and those saw basically no play because they were either super niche. I think that was a big thing was they were super niche. And that was my problem with Forest Sealstone was that it was too, it was like a bandaid that you could throw on your deck at the end of the day and just say, Okay, well, I'm going to include Luminion and or Rotom. And oh, look, Forest Sealstone. It wasn't really a problem until Arvin came out. And then when you could just go find your Forest Sealstone willy nilly, at the end of the day, it just made all of these decks uber consistent and made it super easy for all of them to just set up everything on turn two or turn three every game and it made things kind of feel more, I don't know, like Yu-Gi-Oh-esque, I guess is a way to describe it. That's a good way to look at it. Instead of trying to slowly evolve up through things, everything became a big bang boom combo deck that I'm going to pop off with Rare Candy Pidgeot, Rare Candy this other stage two, go find this, go find this, do this, do this, blow everything up your turn. Yeah, the whole Charizard and then Arvin turn two for Forest Sealstone Rare Candy. candy or candy to Pidgeot, Pidgeot for Charizard and another candy, you know, it just gets the point where it's like, okay, cool. Like it's, it feels cool the first three times you do it. And then you just get to the point where it's like, yeah, it definitely loses its luster for sure. Yeah. And that, I mean the card almost feels too versatile for what it allows you to do. Like quick search is obviously a really broken ability, but that was to the point that we had to include a stage two, two prizer, if we wanted access to it in our deck. And you're telling me that I just have to include a tool card and a V that I probably want to play anyway, given how strong something like Luminion really is. I don't know. Yeah. A hundred percent. No, I like that answer. Yeah. So I think segwaying off of least favorite card, I just wanted to touch on my least favorite deck from this era. I have to say Lugia is my least favorite deck. That was my answer. That's okay. We can both hate Lugia. I think the problem I always had with Lugia was how intoxicating it felt in practice. And then you play it in a tournament and it just like breaks your heart. I played it for one regionals and it was like the worst I've ever done at a regionals since like at least in the last eight years or so. Like I don't even remember if I made a, I might've dropped, I think I dropped from that tournament and yeah. So that like I didn't have a winning record or if I did, it was like barely winning when I dropped, but it definitely felt like, like I remember one game in that regionals it was like maybe a Lugia mirror or I was going up against Palkia or something. And I forget exactly the scenario, but I didn't get a Lugia in play the whole game. And I still like almost won the game. And the whole time I'm playing this, I'm like this decks, it's just, what are we doing, dude? Like it just felt so painful to like know the power level that you can reach when you set up, when you get that, you know, and broken Lugia, like before rotation, like we forget how toxic that deck was where it just shoved out every other deck in the format. When you had Yveltal that could just Oko anything and you had, it was Ironhands at that point before rotation. I know Amazing Raikou was in there. I don't know if they had Ironhands yet. Similar to Ironhands, Amazing Raikou destroyed a lot of set up decks because it could just snipe off like two Pokemon pretty easily. But yeah, even after, you know, moving on right after world Lugia kind of had that same evil energy and it would never really reach that same height as broken Lugia, but Lugia just like the frustrating thing for me was just like, you knew it was powerful and it didn't even matter. Like you could be the best person at sequencing and you could still just draw bad hands and like lose with Lugia and that's just Lugia hands and there's not a lot you can do about it. So I don't know. Not my favorite. Yeah. I mean, and I would say that's similarly similar to what I would say my problem was with the deck is that as a Lugia opponent, what I'm doing largely doesn't matter and it's more so how well did you as the Lugia player draw? So if you've got, you know, Lugia, Ultra Ball, double Archeops on turn one, well, I'm probably not winning the game and obviously some decks could still play around that and were able to come back, which just goes to show the power level of other decks in the format, I think. Because earlier on, like probably like NAIC last year around there, maybe a little, maybe the format before that, that's probably a good spot because that's where Shinchino came out. That was a format where I almost considered playing Lugia NAIC because it felt like if I, if you drew, you know, Ultra Ball, double Archeops on turn one, you were probably winning the game and there wasn't much that most decks could do about it. And just, I don't know, that's just, that kind of summarizes the Lugia experience in my book. Yeah. Yeah. It definitely didn't feel like the games that I won were because I like outplayed my opponents. It was because I set up and like executed like the two, two, two game plan, either using iron hands or whatever. Yeah, it definitely, I mean, I'm sure like, you know, there's definitely a skill that's I'm not trying to take anything away from anybody that has accomplishments with Lugia. But it definitely just, it's not, it's just, it doesn't feel like, like, again, I think both of us favor decks that allow us to play the game of Pokemon with more agency and Lugia. There's definitely some decisions you have to make like energy management and board management, bench management, all that kind of stuff. But it definitely just felt like miserable to play a lot of times and miserable to play against. Yeah. I mean, the truly interesting games with Lugia, in my opinion, are the ones where you are forced to only play with one Archeops. I think that those get, those get really interesting. And if you're able to leverage a board that's powerful enough that your opponent can't go after that single Archeops for a turn without you pulling too far ahead, then the deck becomes can show, I mean, that probably just shows how powerful the deck is if you can function with only one Archeops and still win games at times. Or like you said, you almost won a game without ever even getting a Lugia up. So obviously you had zero Archeops in play. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah, definitely. It's a weird, it's a weird deck. Like, I don't hate it in that sense. Like, I don't think I hate a deck. I mean. You hate Snorlax. I don't, yeah, I kind of hate Snorlax. That's fair to say. And I'm not saying, again, I'm not saying I hate the deck, not the hate the player kind of vibe. But yeah, Lugia, I just have a love-hate relationship. It feels like an abusive relationship, essentially, where you're playing against it and you're just like, man, this deck like is so good. How could anybody like ever lose with this deck? And then you pick it up and play it and you're like, man, this deck's a pile. Like, I can't get Archeops out. How does anybody ever win with this deck? So yeah, just that journey. And I feel like that's pretty familiar to people that have played against and played Lugia through this format. Sure, sure. But I'm excited to move on from this era. I think, I don't know. I don't hate. Like, I enjoyed playing Pokemon the last few years. The last, you know, Scarlet and Violet, or not Scarlet, Sword and Shield era. It's been kind of a good ride. I didn't love the VMAXs, but I did like a lot of the V-Star mechanics. It's felt a lot of fun. You know, we've had a lot of variety, a lot of different strategies, like Rapid Strike stuff has come through, and I think we moved from that. But I don't know. I've really enjoyed the last year of playing, and I look forward to Rotation. And I guess that leads well into our next segment, where we're going to talk a little bit about Journey together and what we've been playing since, you know, Rotation's looming right around the corner. Sure, sure. And I can lead things off. I've only played two games of post-Rotation so far. And I played both of them with Tarabox and just played against Raging Bolt and I think the other one was Dragapult. And just learned Clefairy, good card. Noctowl, good card. Yeah. And then that's about all I learned in the games that I actually played. And then I watched some games as well, and I learned that decks that don't have Noctowl in them seem to be at a disadvantage compared to decks that do. I'd agree with that. Yeah, like we said earlier, you lose Forest Sealstone, you lose Luminion, you really feel the losses when it comes to those things. Like, not being able to Ultra Ball for any support in your deck really starts to hurt, where you have to like, yeah, like that's the advantage of Noctowl, where you're able to just evolve and search out two items. Not a lot of decks can do that, that have it. I mean, you can get close with Pidgeot essentially, but like that's a stage two. It takes a lot of setup and dedicated setup. And it's getting a lot harder to set up stage twos now. Yeah, I think the format is going to slow down a lot. I think that's what we were talking about between now and after Rotation. We're losing a lot of consistency cards. We're losing Forest Sealstone, Arvin, or not Arvin, sorry, Forest Sealstone. I'm going to start this over again, this is really bad. We're losing a lot of consistency cards. We're losing Forest Sealstone, Rotom, Luminion, and then, you know, just stuff like that. We're losing the Curlia in Guard of War. We're losing just so many things that allow us to draw extra cards, and that's what you always want to be doing. And then just having more support to set up set of decks and stuff like that. And we're losing, yeah, Radiant Greninja. I think that's a huge loss for a lot of decks. Decks that like, you know, are Chalidon or something like that, where you're not really, you don't really have a lot of on-board draw. You were able to splash that in there and kind of get some early discard paired with some early draw too, which was really, really key. We'll still have access to Fezendipity for draw, but like having Fezendipity as your draw engine feels so worse than like Radiant Greninja or Curlia or something like that, because your opponent can play around it a lot easier. Just landing KOs with Monkey Dory to where they can just take two knockouts at the same time, or, you know, take them all at the same time for that matter. Yeah, I just go over what I've been doing. I built like six decks, I think. I didn't really get to play a whole lot. Played a little bit with Terrorbox, but I didn't really know what I was doing when I started playing with it. Yeah, I don't know. I feel like the Walls deck I played a little bit. I don't know, man. It's not my favorite. That deck doesn't have any draw power other than supporter-based draw, and that feels really, really bad. I will say that I played my... I think my favorite deck I've played so far is Hop's deck. And now is that like Dark Energy Monkey Dory version? Yeah, yeah, yeah. The one I've seen and one I've played the most is using Monkey Dory, and I run like a one on Lake Acuity or whatever. Not like Acuity, sorry. A Calamitous Snowy Mountain to damage my Pokemon and then move that damage over to like get extra ping damage. And I don't know how good it is, but it definitely helps like against some matchups where you're trying to get that early spread, early just like board presence to take off a lot of stuff. That feels pretty cool. I don't know. It's one of those decks like it reminds me a lot of like we talked about a couple weeks back with Buzzwole where you can sequence stuff and set up your board state to where you're really just creating a board presence that's really hard to overcome for your opponent. And so that's what I really enjoyed about it is it rewards you from like early on in the game to like placing that 30 damage to where it really matters late on. And you get like the payoff of like a cool Devo player or something like that later on in the game to really like close the game out. Everything feels a lot slower, which is good and bad. I think that's pretty common. If you've played in any other like post-rotation formats, like stuff slows down, which makes sense. You're losing a lot of cards in the card pool. We talked about before, you know, with Hisuin Heavy Ball leaving stuff's just getting clunkier and less like your prizes matter a little bit more, I'd say. Or at least you have to account for your prizes a little bit more with that leaving the format. But, you know, that's an easy enough adjustment to make. I don't know. I think I'm excited to see what like Western players play coming into this weekend and going into post-rotation like on TDCG Live and as we get some online tournaments to start to look at and kind of get some preliminary lists from content creators and stuff like that. It'll be fun to see like where people's minds go. Is control possible? Is there other like archetypes that are more established that we can develop and reclaim in post-rotation? Or are like the newer decks going to be really powerful? I don't know. Have you played with any of the new like owner's Pokemon at all? Or like seeing any gameplay with those? The only one... I mean, I've seen some people attempt to do stuff with N. I think everyone's pretty much accepted that Iono is either just a totally dead card or the only way that it's going to be viable. And this admittedly sounds like a really cool strategy. I have no idea how feasible it really is, but using Iono as an engine for Raging Bolt. Mm-hmm. And because Kilowatril seems like a good card, honestly. Yeah, yeah. I just... Unfortunately, you have to have... If you don't have the Belly Bolt paired with it, it doesn't function nearly as well. And then the Belly Bolt obviously serves its purpose as just dumping a bunch of lightning energy to your board to fuel your Raging Bolt. And then you're just filtering a bunch of cards to try to find Sada every turn. And so between like Sada and Palpad, you're doing something similar to what you would be able to accomplish with your Teal Dance plus Pokestop or something to that effect. It just gets clunky because it's a bunch of stage ones. And you're just kind of at the mercy of your opponent's board again. The same problem Raging Bolt generally always has. And then the Ends cards are just... It's big problem is that it can't do big damage unless you get hit. Yeah, Ends Pokemon or Ends deck, like the Ends Zoroark deck is really limited to the Ends Pokemon that are in format. I think that's pretty well understood. And the main two attackers we've seen are the Ends Reshiram and Ends Darmanitan. And they're both really okay. Attackers, they're not bad. They're, you know, even arguably good in a vacuum. But in a meta where like a lot of Pokemon have over 300 hit points, like a two shot meta, like it just, it feels pretty bad in a lot of matchups to not be able to one shot anything. And kind of that leaves the ball in your opponent's court. And if your opponent's able to like Turo, or, you know, just retreat, and you can't put it back in the active, and it has Tara attributes to where it can't be hit onto the bench, like, feels pretty bad, you know, so but I mean, I don't know. The cool thing is like, somebody will see that ends deck and be like, Alright, I'll make a control deck with it or see the ends deck is just a draw engine. And then maybe like you take in a restroom or something like that. But then the rest of it is like, I just needed a draw engine for my, you know, I don't know what's a good Pokemon discard deck or something like that. Like United Wings. Sure. Go with that. That'd be fun. But that's the kind of now I'm cooking. I'm thinking about United Wings. That'd be fun. I don't think it's good, but could be. But anyway, I think that's, that's the fun thing about innovation. And like post rotation, it's like a blank slate. And you're able to just like, it's like a playground, you're able to kind of build what you want to build, test whatever you want to test. You know, it stinks a little bit, but it's also exciting that our first regionals is like the one that the first one, I'm going to be judging for a little bit since EU, EU, I see. And the first one you're playing in since like Puerto Rico, I think, right? Right. Is post rotation. So that's exciting. We get to be on the forefront of a new meta. And I am excited to see what we come up with. I know we'll be cooking up some new ideas, especially after the set comes out on Thursday this week. Yep. We'll be bouncing stuff back and forth in our group chat. And I'm sure a lot of you guys too, or a lot of you players will too, as you get into it. Um, yeah. So anything you're willing or excited to test out the next few weeks, like anything you want to think about the decks that I haven't, I actually built an EV deck that I considered playing at my second cup this weekend. And it's something that I want to tinker with, but I think that it's almost, I think it's a decent deck, but I don't know if it's the right deck for the first tournament in a format, because I don't know if it's good enough as a catch all deck. Whereas the versatility of like the toolbox of the EV evolutions is that you have the ability to tech, you know, leafy on in the meta is super N or Charizard focused or Sylveon if it's really Dragapult and Raging Bolt or Jolteon if it's, you need something to KO. What is Jolteon KO? It probably KO something. I honestly can't think of anything lightning weak. That's not sure. Sure. Yeah. Just, just something like that. Honestly, it seems like it's got a lot of options and I, I obviously I like options and in that same vein, the other deck that I haven't had a chance to quite build yet, but I want to is for Alligator because I think that it, you know, obviously it won champions league. I'm not sure if that list is where I want to start at, but I still might use it as a starting point and jump off from there and see if I want to make any changes to it. That's the nice thing about having a tournament based list is that you can just use it and then make tweaks as you want to, as you see fit, as you move forward with it. But I have some ideas for Alligator that I want to try out. I think that the ability to use the, you know, Retreat Log is obviously really good. And Monkey Dory is obviously really good. And the ability to do 280 is obviously really good. And that deck can do all three of those things. It can very easily do all three of those things. So having access to all of that just seems like that the biggest concern would be time. And I know that that is kind of my biggest concern going into a format like this. And that's why I might shy away from playing that in a tournament setting. But the deck definitely seems powerful. And it reminds me a lot of, you know, some of the slower Gardevoir decks that we've had in the past. But it's obviously less consistent. Like, you don't have the Curlia. So maybe that'll just kind of shut it down before it can really get going. No, I can still see Gardevoir being relevant. Like, you know, even without the Curlia. I mean, we lost Mirage Step. And we thought, oh, well, how could Gardevoir, you know, be good after losing Mirage Step? I don't know. I think losing Refinements is a bit bigger of a loss than... I know it is. And I'm not disagreeing with you there. But I'm just saying I caution the death of Gardevoir may be, you know, grossly exaggerated. Yeah, that's the quote. You got where I was going. Yeah, I need to play Dragapult after post-rotation. I haven't really had any time to play that. And I think that's still good. It obviously has a target on its back. You know, so that'll be a challenge. But I don't think that that's a challenge that it's not capable of overcoming. Sure. So I think that'll be cool. It'd be cool to see like what people come up with to counter the counters in Dragapult. You know what I mean? Like counter Lili's Clefairy, counter the Cornerstone Sealmask. And we'll definitely see that in the next few weeks, I'm sure. And then I'm sure people will be holding on to some of the spicier stuff leading into regionals, leading into NAIC coming up in a couple months. Well, by NAIC, we get all these fancy Team Rocket cards and whatnot that we'll have to talk about. We'll talk about those pretty soon. Yeah. I'm excited about that because I've seen, I don't know, I saw a card I think it either released today or yesterday. That was an Ampharos that takes me back to a deck from back in my day. And I'm not even sure. So I didn't see it. So yeah, I've been busy with work today. So it's been a little, little challenging to keep up with all the Pokemon news. But yeah, definitely something I'm gonna look forward to. Dude, I will say real quick, as I said, like off on a tangent, like getting sealed products and trying to get stuff for the set has been a real challenge. Thankfully, I've started helping sort bulk at a local card store for the couple days, like a week for like a couple hours here and there. And that's helped a lot ensure that I have some access to like playables. But it's still just my heart goes out to anybody that's like living in an area without a good card store, or like an area that has a card store that just doesn't sell singles or something like that. Yeah, it's difficult to get the stuff you need for your deck TCG player is a good resource, but it's not a great resource. Like, it's unreliable. Yeah, it's unreliable. Like you order stuff, you know, and it's, oh, it'll be here in two weeks. And then you're waiting six weeks later, and your tournaments, you know, that Friday, it's like, well, I get my stuff in time, or I have to like shell out a bunch of money, or like trying to get there super early, and trying to get it from a vendor at the site. And or do I have to beg, borrow, steal from friends or people I know? Like, that just it's not fun. So my heart goes out to anybody trying to get stuff from journey together. And then especially do the new set, like pre orders for the Pokemon Center went up yesterday. Yeah, yesterday month or Yeah. And it's just disgusting. Like, I don't know, I haven't attempted to get anything off Pokemon Center months. That's where I'm at, too, man. I'm, you know, I see like, I have Facebook groups that I'm a part of for Pokemon, and they start out as competitive Facebook groups. And then all the buy, sell and stockholders find those Facebook groups and try to like leverage those into finding out where all the distributors set up and what time and all that and I don't know. But like, before I left that group on Monday, like, I saw people were complaining about not being able to buy their Pokemon Center ATBs and how the queue was like a million people or something like that. Like not even exaggeration. Like it was over a million people trying to buy ATBs for that crazy destined rival. Yeah, it's, it's kind of the point where, like, am I happy that Pokemon super popular and the game I love is like doing well financially. And, you know, it's successful in that regard. Sure. But it feels bad. Like, I ran pre releases, and we had product for that. And then last on Monday, I did build in battle tournament. And I had to sell the building battle kit. So I didn't have to, but it was almost like I had to like, think about, okay, the pre release kit, and the extra packs costs $30, right, which I wish I could just sell it for that. But like, market price for a building battle kit is close to $50 at this point, for journey together. And so like, it doesn't make sense for the store to sell that for $20. Even if that's MSRP, like that's less than half of market value. And like, you can't I think running successful business, it depends on what they're paying. They're still paying the distributor price, I think you can justify running it at the MSRP price, with the caveat that if you're running it as part of an event or something like that, you break the seal. As soon as you sell the Yeah, that's fair. The problem is that distributors are no longer selling it below as MSRP, they're selling it out, like below market price to where you can still make a margin on it. Yeah, but to where it, it doesn't make sense to, like sell it at MSRP, or you lose money if you're selling it at MSRP. So it got it's getting to the point where, like, it's artificial inflation, because it's at the end of the day, it's it's paper, like it's, it's like, right, you can just print more. And that's the scary thing. It's at a certain point, I wonder if Yeah, how many game stores are gonna end up closing as a result of all of this? Yeah, I mean, that's part of it. Like the card store I run, I run my league at, they don't have a lot of distribution power, like they don't run a lot of card games, they don't sell a lot of merchandise for TCGs. They sell Orkana, and they sell Pokemon, and they sell some like, game board, like board games, and card sleeves. And that's it, like, they don't really sell like magic, right, or Yu-Gi-Oh, or anything like that. So they're really dependent upon what they can get from distributors. And the allocation for journey together was laughable. I think, I don't know if he got any sealed product for journey together. And if he did, it was way lower than, you know, what he asked for. And I think that's a really common story from what I'm hearing. 100%. So it's really just disheartening. All we want is, you know, the ability to play this card game. And when that doesn't exist, it feels really, really difficult to like, be excited about new stuff coming out, because you're just like, well, that's cool. Maybe I'll touch it one day. When I'm 85, and, you know, the world's on fire, and I can burn my Pokemon cards to keep warm. I mean, at the end of the day, for competitive players, the singles market largely isn't very different than what it has been in the past. I think the ones that are really going to suffer are, like you said, people that either want to buy a sealed product or the game stores themselves, and maybe the local communities in the short term. But what you're seeing a lot of times is these people are either scalping or they're running like the rip and ship stuff on like YouTube, whatnot, TikTok, etc. And sometimes they'll just open a whole bunch of stuff looking for whatever, like the Greninja or the Pikachu or the whatever it is from this set, the Clefairy, I think. And everything else, they just take to a local game store and sell it as bulk cards to try to recoup their losses. Because they're not going to take the time to sell those cards individually. So I would encourage everyone go out and support your local game store if you can do not buy sealed product on eBay. Whoever is selling it to you does not have your best interest at heart. And they are probably trying to price gouge you. Yeah, I mean, it's it's a weird spot to be at. I think that's good advice for sure. I would always encourage you guys to vote with your dollar when it comes to this stuff. And don't panic buy, you know, I know regionals are coming up. And it might be like, you know, shoot, I need to get this, you know, and Zoroark for my deck, and I need to have a play set of it, I need to have it tomorrow. You know, and you spend like right now, like, I can see the pressure. I mean, the tournament's three weeks out, right? And you want to have the cards here on time. And so there's that pressure right now before release date, you know, the street dates, like the release dates, not till this Friday. So that are, I guess, when this releases, it'll be tomorrow. But so there's the pressure to buy those cards right now. But you're going to have to pay three, four times what you'd have to pay, you know, two weeks from now. And so like, that's the one upside of having a local card store, if you can buy singles from them, please just wait until it'll be there. And use your friends use your resources. Like if you're going to Atlanta, Atlanta is a great area, like maybe try to get there Thursday before and like, call around to a couple local card stores and say, Hey, can I place an order for these singles and pick them up or something like that? I know that's not always a realistic thing for everybody. But like use your resources, use your friends, if you have a friend that's driving in from a different area or something, excuse me, if you have a friend that's driving in from a different area, you know, hit them up and say, Hey, I need these cards. And that's one of the best things about the Pokemon community. I've never had an issue with if I need a card and I absolutely need it. If somebody has it, it's more than likely perfectly fine for me to borrow. I've let like almost complete strangers borrow cards for me in the past. And like, even if they don't give them back, I'm never really mad about it as long as it's like a one or two card you know like hey man they needed it more than i do kind of thing so pokemon communities this is your time to shine and i know it'll come up and step up to the challenge for sure yep absolutely um one last thing um we did get news there is a pokemon pocket set also releasing on thursday we don't have the full card list for it yet so we'll probably talk about it next week because it is a rather old news light week heading into next week we'll probably just preview for next week going to be doing some tcg pocket for that new set and some more journey together stuff heading into atlanta that following week but with that being said do you have any other final thoughts john yeah i have one more thought uh good luck to those that are applying for naic and world's applications if you're a judge or a professor or just somebody that's volunteering in the community and um you know i'd encourage you guys to push yourselves to definitely apply if you can or even if you don't feel like you're fully qualified to just put yourself out there there's no real harm in doing that and um i just wish everybody that's a professor that's trying to get into those coveted uh two spots uh coming up naic and world's good luck um i hope to see you there i'll definitely be at both either as a player or spectator or judge if i don't get accepted um i've already kind of made plans to vacation out to california for world's with my wife so um tbd on what exactly happens uh in the interim um you know but uh i definitely will be at naic and will definitely be at world's but um i'm hopeful that um those processes go well for me and then i'm able to kind of have that dream year closed out really really well that'd be really fun to see absolutely absolutely super sick well with that being said uh we'll have all the links to all of our socials for both the show and ourselves in the description of this episode um we we are going to start cross-posting to youtube at some point i'm going to get a channel set up so we'll have the videos available there as well for people that would rather be in a full video format rather than having to depend on spotify for the video um but for all of your audio content you can obviously still check us out on spotify and all other podcasting platforms for whatever fits your desire and with that being said from john and i thank you we appreciate your support and we will see you next week