Episode 26: TOP TIER PICKS FOR ATLANTA

Hello, and welcome back to the Battle Frontier podcast, where we aim to help you level up in your journey as a competitive Pokemon TCG player. I'm Aaron Curry. Here with me, as always, is my co-host, Jon Orgel. And this week, we are pretty light on segments. We're going to jump into a time capsule that Jon has prepared before I hit him with a Blaine's Quiz show. And the meat of this episode is going to be doing a tier list ahead of the upcoming Atlanta Regional this week, where Jon and I will both be in attendance as a player and as a judge. First, I want to know, actually, before we jump into everything, wow, how did your week go this week, Jon? What were you up to? It was good. So over the weekend, I went and visited my friend in Indianapolis. I did install Volatro, and so I did play that way too much on the plane. I had a two-hour flight from Baltimore to Indianapolis, and I played Volatro the whole time. How many decks have you already won with? I think two or three, I can't remember. So I've played probably four or five hours of it at this point. It's hard, dude. It's so hard to win. But it's like, once you get like, I don't know, like, big number, make me happy, you know, kind of vibe, like straight up, like once you get those combos flowing, it definitely it's like a dopamine rush. So I had to be careful to be like, all right, Jon, like you're here with your friends, you can't really pull out Volatro and play right now. So like that. And I'm like, I'm definitely not gonna have to be I'm definitely have to like not play this at work. Otherwise, I will get nothing done. Right. Other than that, India, India was cool. It rained pretty, it's been really, really bad weather in the Midwest over the weekend and like, like late last week. And into the weekend, it was like raining really bad. So my heart goes out to anybody in Kentucky, that's affected by floods, we had some really terrible things happen. But India was pretty wet, but still had a lot of fun. We this cool, like my best friend Thomas from high school, he's, he's like a new father, his kids to now, but I hadn't met his kid. And so it was fun to like meet her and see him as a father, you know, it's cool to see like your friends that you've had for a long time become fathers and take on that role. And he does a really good job. So that was really cool to see. But we got to play some Pokemon. He doesn't play too much. He plays, like he got back into it, I think, the beginning of this year, like in the last year. Okay. So he had like a deck built, but it wasn't anything good. So I brought like five decks and showed him how to play like Mamoswine and he's like, this is this is too easy. And I'm like, Oh, all right, let's go. So then I gave him Raging Bolt to work with and he had a little more fun with that. But yeah, it was a good set. And then we went to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Museum, which is really cool. Yeah, yeah, it was a really cool time. It's like, you have to go underneath the racetrack. And so it's like in the middle of the speedway and the speedways. I mean, I don't think like photos do it justice. Like when you when you drive up to it, like it's I think I mean, it's two and a half miles around, but it's like two miles wide, you know, like it's it's so big. It's a city. It's basically a city just kind of pops up out of nowhere. So that was really fun. Um, yeah, it was just kind of bopped around, like went to a farmer's market, went to like a cool vintage store that was in a converted factory, and just went back home. And then yesterday, we had our regionals prep tournament at league. So that was fun. We had just a small turnout, like eight players playing, but we had some people that were getting ready for Atlanta. Sure. And what was good? Um, I think, oh, Terrapagos, the tanky one with bouffant build. Yeah. So, um, yeah, so nothing too surprising there. But yeah, it was it was good, ran smoothly, and everybody had a fun time. I had like, some extra things from like pre release stuff that I gave away. So that was kind of cool. Um, yeah, it's good time. How about you, man? How was your weekend? I'm pretty busy. I'm pretty busy, like a lot of Pokemon on Sunday, but I guess I can start on there really do much on Friday in particular, unfortunately, my son's been sick for like the past week. So he's been on steroids and not really able to do a ton because, you know, I don't want him like wearing himself out. So instead, he was just kind of a hooligan inside the house. But that is what it is. On Saturday, unfortunately, I had to go into work for a little bit. So my wife and son went out and we're doing something. So I got some stuff done around the house, like paint, painted a wall and whatnot. And then they came home and Saturday evening, we went and saw the Minecraft movie, which I would not really recommend to anybody. Yeah. But okay, it was there. And the kids that were in the theater seemed to have a really good time. Yeah, like, it was definitely a movie. Yes, yes, he did. He absolutely did. But honestly, I had read ahead of the movie coming out that it was horrible, and had that expectation kind of going in and then was very, very surprised when basically every showing at the theater was sold out. Wow. I mean, this is just you're capitalizing on a media franchise. Yeah, yeah. And I guess supposedly, it's the highest grossing video game movie ever, or highest grossing opening weekend for a video game movie ever. Which is kind of crazy. Yeah. Yeah. So that was my Saturday. And then Sunday, my friend Santiago came over, and we literally played Pokemon for like nine hours. Dang. And had a bunch of decks that are good decks, didn't feel super great, and had a couple that I thought were, you know, I had a preconceived notion that they were mid or bad, that actually felt pretty dang good. And we'll talk about that a little bit later when we get into our tier list. So that pretty much sums up what I've been up to. So we can go ahead and jump into our first segment here, and hit me with the time capsule you have prepared for this week. Yeah, sure. So for this week's time capsule, I figured I'd throw it back to the last time that Dragapult was really dominant in the metagame. And this was a different version of Dragapult. It was a Dragapult VMAX. And this is a list piloted by Tord Recklev at the Players Invitational, I think the first one that happened. So this was a tournament that happened during COVID. So it was like a format lost to time, essentially. And this was played by him and Henry Brand in the tournament, and I think he beat Mahone in the Players Cup tournament. This was just like an eight-player invitational tournament that they had, I think maybe round Robin or something like that, or double elimination, something like that. But this is a really cool list, and it has some similarities to Dragapult DX. So I figured it'd be kind of cool to go over it real quick. So the main attacker you have is Dragapult VMAX. It has very similar attacks in a lot of ways, with Shred being a little bit more powerful than Headbutt. It's 60 for one psychic, and then you can basically, it's classic Shred, you can go through anything, all effects on your opponent's active Pokemon. So it goes through anything that prevents a Mimikyu, essentially. And then its second attack is probably the most powerful attack in this metagame. Max Phantom, for two psychic, it's 130 damage. And then you put five damage counters on your opponent's bench Pokemon in any way you like. So very similar to what we were seeing from Dragapult DX. It's a psychic Pokemon instead of a dragon Pokemon. I think there was dragon Pokemon in this format, but this just wasn't a dragon Pokemon. Sure. Yeah, we've had a lot of psychic-type Dragapults, like it's a ghost. Yeah, we had one from Fusion, Strike, and another one, Infiltrator. But anyways, this is Dark Week, and then Fighting Resistant, which Fighting Resistant was pretty good. It just had the one retreat cost. So that's the main kind of engine of the deck. You have four Dragapult V, doesn't really do a whole lot. I mean, Drag Assault's okay if in attack, but you'd much rather be using, you really just want to get Dragapult VMAX in play as fast as possible. Sure. And then the rest of it is just kind of a support engine. It's a very simple deck. I feel like with Tord, there's usually like two styles of Tord decks. It's like four of four of four of four of four of four of four of four, you know, like all four ofs, or like 15 to 30 one ofs in a deck. And this is definitely the former of the two options. You have Jirachi with Stellar Wish. It's an ability that says, once during your turn before you tackle this Pokemon and you're active, you may look at the top five of cards of your deck, reveal a trainer card you find there, put it to your hand and then shuffle the other cards back into your deck. And then it does put this Pokemon to sleep, which would normally be pretty detrimental, but we do run Escape Board as a three of, which is a tool card where if it's attached to a Pokemon, the retreat cost of this Pokemon is one less than it can retreat, even if it's sleep or paralyzed. So it's a really, really nice tool to pair with this Pokemon. And you would get this into the active turn after turn and just kind of spam it and try to find a couple of different things. You have Mysterious Treasure in this format, which was a nice item card. It's if you discard a card from hand, you can search your deck for any psychic or dragon Pokemon and then put it back and put reveal it and put it into your hand so you can get all of the main attackers of the deck. You have Quick Ball, and those are like the main two ball search, if you will, Quick Ball and Mysterious Treasure. So you're using those to set up. You have a Scoop Up Net, so you could put a Jirachi in the active, and if you didn't get what you needed, scoop it up and put another Jirachi in the active and try it again, basically. This is a really, really broken card that I would say is probably... It's banned and expanded, so that tells you how powerful it is. There's not a lot of cards that are banned. This is one of them. It says put one of your Pokemon that isn't a Pokemon V or Pokemon GX in your hand, and then you discard all the cards. So the reason it's banned and expanded is because they didn't add EX or rule box Pokemon. But even in this era, if you play this era, you recognize this is pretty broken. I think the most popular combo was with the Sword and Shield Inteleon line, where you had Shady Dealings, and so you would search for all those, and that would let you search for item cards. This is more of a turbo build, so it didn't really run that. You have some Galarian Zigzagoon, which has... Why are you running a basic that has a bad attack? Well, it's because it has a really good ability, which says it's Headbutt Tantrum. When you play this Pokemon from your hand onto your bench during your turn, you may put one damage counter on one of your opponent's Pokemon. Similar to Hawlucha, you have this guy, so you can ping bench sitters and just basically run through any set up deck with the combination of Dragon Pulse, Max Phantom, and Headbutt Tantrum to kind of clean up bench sitters and stuff like that. This guy's a little bit different. I haven't seen it too many lists. This is a Giratina from Unified Minds. It just has an ability that's similar to, I think there's a couple of Pokemon. Enhanced Hammer. Yeah, Enhanced Hammer. There's some other guys, I think, that have this effect, like Circuit Tree, GX, Mawile. But its ability is Dimension Breach. It says when you play this Pokemon from your hand onto your bench during your turn, you may discard a special energy from your opponent's active Pokemon. So you can't do it wherever. But it's still pretty strong. Gets rid of, I think we had some really strong Beast Energies, and I think some Water Decks had Splash Energy, where it returned it back to your hand if it got knocked out or something. I'm trying to remember why exactly you ran this, but I am at a loss. But it's always good. Part of it might be the Horror Energy. So this is a special energy that you ran, and it says as long as this is attached to a Psychic Pokemon, it provides Psychic Energy, but if it's a Psychic Pokemon, if it's damaged by an attack, you put two damage counters on the attacking Pokemon. So it just kind of softens stuff up and fixes a lot of the math for Max Phantom. The rest is mostly just consistency, like I said. We are running a Dedenne GX, which is a really broken support Pokemon. With Dedechange, it's just during, when you play this from your hand onto your bench, you can discard your hand and draw six, and you can't use more than one Dedechange per turn. So I think probably one of the most broken, like more broken than Squawk. Squawk you can only use turn one, Dedechange you could use whenever. We run four Research, four Marnie, which is shuffle, and both players shuffle and put their hands at the bottom of their deck. You draw five, your opponent draws four, which was overpowered in a lot of ways in my mind. Not my favorite. I like Iona a lot better. You run three Boss to kind of manipulate where you're placing damage counters and what you're knocking out and all that. You run, like we said, the Ball Search. You run Acrobike to just dig through your deck. You run Energy Spinner, which is kind of like a precursor to Earthshatter. and vessel it just says search your deck for a basic energy card reveal it put it into your hand if you go second and it's your first turn you can search for three basic energy instead of one so it's like we had energy search at the same time but this was just a better version of that essentially with a little bit more of an upside reset stamp is in this deck which it's not my favorite card man i'll be honest with you um it's an item card and then it just has the text your opponent shuffles their hand into their deck and draws a card for each of the remaining price cards so for an item card you're able to if your opponent's at two prizes just say okay you're now at two prize two cards in your hand and good luck trying to figure out what to do from here that seems pretty unfair yeah yeah i mean it's pretty rough like you you could set up your board to where it wasn't as impactful necessarily but realistically like yeah it feels pretty bad um and then the last thing that i want to talk about um is uh your stadium you're running it's called shrine of punishment um it just says between turns you put one damage counter on each of your pokemon gx and ex both yours and your opponents um so you know just a straight up it just softens a lot of the guys um so like if your opponent benches to dene you can boss it up hit it and then over three turns or over between turns three times essentially today the dna gx will just get knocked out um and you can save some of your other damage counters for placement to just clean up other prize cards on board um but yeah this deck was really really strong uh like i said tord won this event with it uh if we go back and look at the meta a little bit from this era uh this is not what i'm talking about uh yeah here we go uh this was the players cup kickoff invitational so i guess before they had the players cup they did an invitational event where they had eight players including mostly from the u.s oh four from the u.s and four internationally so you had tord from netherlands mahone uh pablo mesa michael perumwat natalia fernandez uh henry brand roel and ross so like a stacked lineup um we had some really cool decks um but this was definitely the most powerful in this format um so this deck was really really good and then uh right after this format i guess like maybe a couple months later after um in late 2020 we had the release of a card called eternatus which is this guy and this kind of dominated the meta game for a really long time and since dragapult is dark week it can't really survive against this deck um sure so but i would say that uh in spirit um dragapult plays very plays very similar to the dragapult we have currently um it's less consistent that was a factor um but i think like your strategy or your ability to set up ko's you know with zigzagoon you know not quite dust nor levels of degeneracy but still pretty good with the scoop up nets um and then just kind of pick apart your opponent's board um and destroy a lot of setup decks made this deck really really good um so just felt like this was a good one to look at back in the time capsule and before we get into the new meta game i wanted to focus on something from the past so sure that's that's this week's time capsule yeah i mean this this highlights to me why evolving exes are just a much better design choice than v's and v maxes yeah like having something it's got the same hp as dragapult but it's effectively a stage one and its attack is just a slightly downscaled version of the same attack and i don't know if giving up an extra prize is enough of a trade-off for that added ease of access to the card just i don't know but yeah i think i agree i think having two prizers that evolve up from squishier 70 hp pokemon feels a lot more fair than just being able to evolve into this 320 hit point behemoth that's really hard to take down right that can just take over the game like you know even tag teams i felt like were more fair in some ways um because the hp was a lot lower and more manageable um yeah early v maxes like uh especially eternatus felt really bad when it came out um i don't know i had access it had access to too many tools from what i can see like you've got the zigzagoon you've just to help hit damage numbers that you're looking for i mean it's essentially terapagos right or mega or insert skyfield deck right and so same same premise and that in and of itself doesn't bode well because generally that type of deck is powerful and eternatus wasn't sorry i was gonna say when you couple that with a massive hp pool it has the potential to be abusive yeah eternatus when it was played never struck me as like the deck that was a thinking man's deck you know um it was kind of just like me hit big numbers and knock things out when it sure and that's a viable strategy i mean we've seen that basically since the beginning of pokemon with haymaker if you want to go that far back um but i think i like the interplay of like evolution evolving your stuff up getting your setup like eternatus like turn to your swinging for gobs of damage is 30 for each i think bench pokemon on your side so you know eight eight times 30 is you know what is that 240 yeah it's still terapagos numbers like yeah so yeah yeah i mean but it just felt in that format where stuff with had a lot lower hp um or gave up more prizes essentially it felt you know just unfair in a lot of ways but yeah you know some of them wouldn't be quite as bad like i know obviously eternatus and mu stand out as coming to the super busted ones when they were powerful the dragon bolt seems a bit more manageable just because it's not hitting for big one hit ko numbers in and of itself but at the same time i could totally see how an attack like that or a deck like that would keep something you know intelli on based on the back foot or kind of out of the format as long as it is a big player yeah for sure but cool thank you for that i think that that is all we have here talking about the past but before we jump into the present we're gonna hit you with a little bit of trivia this week with this week's episode of blaine's quiz show and so here for john i've got our usual blaine's quiz show questions or usual concept for blaine's quiz show so john will have three multiple choice questions for each correct answer he will be awarded with one point and he has access to one hint during any of these questions that will hopefully allow him to answer it correctly so that being said john before we jump into things i'm going to tell you that the topic for this week is not abilities that is not what i meant to include here bummer so we're going to cut that out so onto our first question then which of the following does not place damage counters on pokemon and your options are frost lass from twilight masquerade ancient tomb from hidden legends cursed stone from legend maker or shrine of punishment from is it that celestial storm i believe yeah we just looked at shrine of punishment in the deck list well i didn't know you were gonna do that man no i know uh maybe you get two hints this week yeah i think uh this is tough though i don't i don't know much about girthstone and ancient tomb um but i'm gonna be able to i think rule out frost last and shrine of punishment unless like the wording's funny where it's like no but i think it says place damage counter it's like frost last has built place damage for each pokemon has an ability trying to place for each uh ex or gx and v i think i don't know maybe not v but ex and gx something like that um yeah i think uh just trying to remember what ancient tomb does all on legends i think that ancient tomb did do like because i played hall on format and there's a card that might be ancient tomb that places for each like ex in that era and i think it is ancient tomb so i'm gonna go with cursed stone here it's my final answer okay so i'll let you know before i reveal the answer that the card you were just describing is actually desert ruins uh and the answer is in fact ancient tomb cursed stone is has effectively the same text as frost last where it places one damage counter on each pokemon with an ability or at the time it said pokey power it actually didn't hit pokey bodies interestingly enough and ancient tomb was a stadium that was very very rarely played i don't know if it ever actually was competitively successful but it simply removed weakness from pokemon that were not ex's or owner's pokemon huh okay so just trying to flip a tight match up on its head that's okay i misremembered i don't think i remember the name of it but yeah desert ruin definitely now that you've said it like i can picture the card a lot more effectively if you had not played back then i don't know why you would have ever seen this card although i guess interestingly i could see this being a good cube card yeah potential yeah maybe it helps for some yeah because like most cube decks are like monotype so if you get a bad type matchup i could see it helping anyway sure okay let's move on to question number two like lilies or bombi this pokemon from the stormfront expansion was able to pull pokemon from your opponent's hand onto their bench with its ability and your choices are magnezone lumineon tangrowth and mismagius oh no all right i'm gonna use a hint here this is like i don't have a clue i think like the last one i had some idea but this one i'm gonna have to have some help yeah i i may have made this one a little bit difficult so obviously some of the options are things that either have vines or magnets attached to them but i will tell you that neither tangrowth nor magnezone are the correct answer oh all right okay so stormfront if i'm trying to remember what all of these pokemon are in stormfront yeah okay because like lumineon i'm like is that newer i can't remember if i got when that but now i'm thinking of something else um what era was this if you don't mind giving me diamond and pearl okay okay so sps and might have been a little bit before sps but um i think yes stormfront is actually the expansion before platinum okay okay so we have lumineon or mismagius hmm i will go with lumineon here i think mismagius had a different ability um just kind of spitballing okay and you are correct now at the time this was a pokey power but i just wanted to go with ability for the sake of keeping up with modern trends lumineon had the fin luster pokey power that said once during your turn if lumineon is your active pokemon you may look at your opponent's hand and if your opponent's bench is not full choose one basic pokemon from their hand and put it onto their bench then additionally you would also switch that pokemon from the bench into the active oh wow so pretty interesting if this had been a basic it actually might have seen some play but being a stage one makes a little bit prohibitive to get set up yeah yeah i could see that you picked something i've yeah i have no clue i've never seen that card before so that's a good guess i'm not surprised so we're one in one so far heading into our last question here and i want to know what is the name of the special marker placed by the ability of guard of war ex from dragon frontiers and your choices are block captive locked or in prison so i know this because my friend has a cube with the guard of war ex in it okay it is in prison so i got it i got one for for free i guess so that's nice hey having the knowledge means you're equipped to answer the question you are totally correct it is the in prison marker being the name of guard of war ex pokey power and what the in prison marker does is prevent the pokemon that is prevent the pokemon that has that marker from using its ability and so this card again didn't see a ton of super competitive success i know at one point kevin nance actually played a deck that utilized this card that's cool to some pretty interesting success um shutting down things like pidgeot and i believe blastoise just trying to things that would want to sit on the board and continuously use their abilities and he went for this thing where i'm going to lock that down and then knock everything else out while this useless thing is on your board sure it was pretty interesting pretty cool card one of the guys in my league tegan hall shout him out um he played this deck i think we played like rspk sure and he played that he played this in that his deck for that so yeah i know this this card sees a lot of play in that format for sure for sure much better there than it was during standard but yeah there you go john two two and one this week respectable yeah very nice i feel like i got tripped up like i could uh i think i think i could have got three for three but I'll take two for three. That's still pretty good. Yeah, there we go. So once again, unfortunately, John and I have not done our homework, so we do not know the exact point totals, but I believe I am currently ahead by four right now. Yeah, four or five, one of that. Yeah, we will, at some point, be wise enough to put the point totals somewhere here in the show. That being said, that'll do it for Blaine's Quiz Show this week. And we will now swap over and look at the main topic for this week's episode, and that's which is going to be a tier list of decks in the Journey Together format heading into Atlanta Regionals this weekend. And we're gonna open things up by kind of defining our tiers as it were here. So our D tier is going to be decks that you absolutely do not wanna bring to this event unless you just have fun losing. And the example we have for that is, unfortunately, United Wings. This deck, obviously, this archetype, I should say, exists. These cards are legal. You can play them. You're probably not gonna make it very far if you do. That's just the unfortunate reality. Yeah, you'd have a lot of fun, but yeah, realistically, does this deck give you a chance to win more games than lose? Probably not. Sure. And then our C tier are probably gonna be decks that are potentially viable archetypes, but they just don't really feel like they're positioned super well into the format. And the defining deck that we have for this tier is actually gonna be Feraligatr. Despite winning Champions League, Feraligatr is kind of a known quantity now, and I think that that really takes away from what made it successful in that tournament where the Melodic played a pretty big factor in some of the wins that the deck was able to put together. And now that people are kind of wisened up to that, know how to play around the Retreat Lock better, are including more copies of Turo and or Switch in their deck, the deck just kind of falls short in a lot of ways as it has to set up this big multi-card combo to really get into games. Yeah, I think it also gets collateraled by people teching for Tailmask, Ogre Pawns, Sob. A lot of the strength of Feraligatr is based on its ability to trap something in the active and then use Monkey Dory a bunch of times. So once your opponent figures out, oh, yeah, I mean, it just gets collateraled. It's not well-positioned right now. Yeah. Next for our B tier, these are decks that are not odds-on favorites to win the tournament, but wouldn't be all that surprising if they do, and are probably pretty decent options if you're looking to make Day 2. And one of the decks that we think calls that out pretty well is Evie Box. And something that we saw, Drew Kennett actually brought this to Vancouver closing out last rotation. And it's something that looks even better, I feel, in the post-rotation format, where you do have a lot more Noctowl-focused decks. And the ability to put on some early pressure by either explosively evolving an Evie on turn one and getting a Flareon attack to power something up on the bench. Or like all Noctowl decks, if you're playing Crispin and Noctowl, you have the ability to play that Water Ogre Pond. And if you're playing the Terra Crystal along with that, you can go ahead and do that Torrential Pump play that Terra Box is so well-known for. And just being able to hit multiple weaknesses through the fire on Flareon. You could potentially play Leafeon if you were worried about Charizard or wanting to hit Cornerstone Ogre Pond for weakness. You can play Sylveon in combination with Lily's Clefairy if you want to one-hit KO Dragapult, another psychic weak Pokemon. Raging Bolt is another example. Or even that Angelite attack, really being able to set your opponent back. So the deck has options. And the big thing that I think stops this deck from being A-tier is that it does better in a more defined metagame. And when everything is still so raw right now, I think it's gonna have a little bit of difficulty finding true footing. Yeah, I agree with that. I think it is just like different version of Terra Box. It has different options. Some might say more options, essentially. More type coverage for sure. But I think there's definitely, it feels like a step below something like what we're about to talk about. Sure. And then A-tier, these are decks, they're gonna be popular. They're gonna make day two. They're very likely to make top cut. And wouldn't not at all be surprised to see them being top four and or winners of the event. And kind of the poster child for that right now is Dragapult Dusknoir. And surprise, this deck sticks around post-rotation. You lose the same things that most of the other decks do, except you still have a stage one draw engine to kind of supplement what your deck is trying to do. And we've seen some stuff where people have transitioned away from using Sparkling Crystal as their A-spec. And I've seen a lot more inclusion of Unfair Stamp. And I've actually seen a couple of lists that I've run into recently with Hero's Cape to try to push things through. I don't know about that per se, but the Unfair Stamp Badoo and keeps setting up while your opponent is trying to do something is oppressive to say the least. And then Dragapult is as good as ever at coming back from five or six price deficits. Oh yeah, for sure. Yeah, this is the mainstay of this format in a lot of ways. The main thing that I might put it like below some other decks we'll look at in a minute would just be it's such a known quantity that every player playing against you is gonna have an idea of how to play against this. Sure. Is gonna have a strategy for this. Whether they can implement it successfully and beat you is another thing. If you're a really, really good player. I mean, we saw Andrew Hedrick play it essentially to like perfection last format. And I think a lot of the texts, a lot of the strength of that Dragapult deck carry over to this format as well. Sure. So next deck we're gonna talk about here is Straight Dragapult. And John, where do you think this fits here on our tier list as we've defined it? That's a good question. It's interesting because you would think it'd be worse than Dragapult Dusknoir. You have less options, but I almost wanna put it above Dragapult Dusknoir in this case. At least going into Atlanta, it's a much more straightforward variant. And I think you have more answers for more of the meta game right now. Like the Tanki Terapagos deck I was looking at. I mean, and granted, you always have to take limitless meta percentages and matchups and all that kind of stuff with a grain of salt. But I was surprised to see it had a favor, more like a more favorable Terapagos Noctowl matchup than the Dragapult Dusknoir. And I think a lot of that has to do with you're not giving up the Dragapult or the Dusknoir prizes as much. And so you're able to just kind of, if you can give up the Badoo prize early, but then you can come from behind a lot more effectively. You run the Bloodmoon Ursulina on a lot of these lists, if not all of them. And you have a little bit more power to hit harder late game. So that's always helpful. But I think the strength of the Dragapult, as opposed to the Dragapult Dusknoir, you're able to run kind of some weird stuff that can help you out in a lot of your bad matchups. And I think right now I'd put it up above Dragapult Dusknoir. I don't think the deck's particularly stronger than Dragapult Dusknoir, but I think it's more well-positioned is what I'm getting at. Okay, that's fair. Yeah, kind of like a 1A, 1B sort of scenario. Definitely. Just kind of a spoiler alert. We're not going to put anything in S tier. John and I talked about this a little bit before the cast, and we decided that literally every deck that we're going to talk about here has at least one matchup that it just does not want to see. And by that metric, that means there's nothing that is absolutely kind of holding the format in the chokehold. And even when Regidrago was kind of the S tier deck and Raging Bolt was considered a quote unquote bad matchup, it still was beating it more than 50% of the time from what I've seen. So nothing here fits that criteria. So there isn't going to be no S tier here. Next thing on the docket would be N'Zurark though. And for me, this is a deck I want it to be good so bad. I really, really wanted this to be good. And I will say it does have a good tarot box matchup. I really think that that matchup is largely favorable, but it just struggles into Dragapult really, really hard. And for that reason, unfortunately, I think that this deck kind of has to go down into our C tier, because I do expect Dragapult to overall be more popular than tarot box at the end of the day. I'd agree with that, yeah. We didn't really talk about meta percentages, but I do think that Dragapult will be the most played deck in Atlanta. Sure. Between the two different variants of it, I definitely think Dragapult Dusknoir will be the most popular. But I imagine those two decks will make up 15 to 20%, like that range is what we'll be looking at. I think that's a fair way to say that. Yeah. And I also think for the ends deck, you actually struggle a lot into the Tarapagos deck as well. Just not being able to utilize your Darmanitan very well. It's definitely possible for the Tarapagos deck to make plays where they take one hit KOs on your Zoroarks, or set it up to where they hit you for a small amount of damage and you can't KO them back. And it just becomes extremely difficult for you to really do anything. Yeah, agreed. Next up would be one of the other most popular decks in the room. That's gonna be the Tarabox. Yeah, this one's interesting to me. Coming into this format, I think it was presumed to be best deck in format. We saw players play this as the hot rogue in the Champions League for this format. Torrid played it and did really well with it. And some other players, I think, but that's the first one that comes to mind. So this was the deck coming into Journey Together. But I think it's fallen off a little bit. I think that's fair to say. It's not quite high A tier, but I still think it's like on the border of A and B at this point. I wanna put it, I'll keep it in A. I think it still has legs for the most part. Sure. But I don't know, like another one of those, it's like one of those decks that just has a target on its back. Everybody's gonna have an answer for it. Sob's not gonna work like you would hope it would. People are gonna have answers for that. But it's still powerful. I mean, Welspring Ogre Pawn feels oppressive at times without having a bench barrier Pokemon to prevent stuff from just getting picked apart. And then, yeah, I mean, Pikachu hits for 300 damage and is really hard to knock out. I mean, when it's working really well, the deck can hang up against anything else. And it has a lot of room for skill expression, Noctowl allowing you to get any two trainer cards. It's impressive. So I think there's still like A to me, like A tier is just gonna be like the tier that allows for the most skill expression, allows for like a good player to play this deck and just kind of out-skill somebody. And I think you could still do that with Tarabox. Sure. Yeah, I can get behind that. I think that the deck is definitely difficult to play in the sense that there are many decision points throughout the game, including what you, like the big one is obviously what do you wanna get with Noctowl or which Terra Pokemon do you want to open the game with as you set up your Noctowl? Because oftentimes you'll have a board that's, you know, a Fan Rotom, two or three Hoothoots. And then you need to know what Terra Pokemon am I putting down unless I also wanna play area zero this turn. And being limited in that capacity, a lot of times it can definitely be a failure mode for some people. You know, I've definitely fallen victim to it by putting the wrong thing down and then realizing it multiple turns later, saying I should have definitely led with this instead. Yeah, bench management, you'd think with even eight bench spaces, like it wouldn't be that hard, but you can get punished pretty hard. Like if you play something down early game and then it gets discarded from your opponent bumping the stadium and you lose some of that access to that attacker late game, like a Clefairy or something like that, it can be really hard to close the game out from there. It's a really hard deck to play. It's deceptively hard. You know, like the first two knockouts might be really, really easy with like a Wellspring Mask and the Crystal, but then like if you burn through those resources early game, it can get really hard if your opponent's like knocks out your only Hoothoot and then Ionos and you're just kinda grasping at straws and trying to figure out how to get the last few energy to attack, it can be really tough. Yep. And the next deck, this is one of the ones that I alluded to earlier that I said surprised me because I have obviously been a very vocal Raging Bolt hater on this podcast, but I think Raging Bolt is at worst a B tier deck this week and actually might be bordering on A tier. Okay. I've played lists both with and without Noctowl and I think that they have individual merits for why they're both good. Surprisingly, the one with no Noctowl doesn't really feel like it lost that much consistency from losing cards like Pokestop and instead you include redundancy in the form of like an extra Squawkabilly or copies of Crispin to be like SADA number five and six and just be as aggressive as possible in the way that you open the game. Or with the Noctowl version, you have access to things like the baby Raging Bolt so you can do an offset prize map for your opponent instead of just being this big beat stick 2-2-2 deck that can't win unless it is going 2-2-2. But being able to leverage this prize trade where you're pinging off Hoothoots on your opponent's bench or Dreepies and Dracloaks on your opponent's bench while they're not able to really take advantage of your board in any meaningful way because you've just got like Hoothoots, Rodems and small Raging Bolts out. It can set up board states that are pretty interesting and actually feels much more skill expressive than an old-school Raging Bolt did. Yeah, I mean, I think that's fair to say. Yeah, I think I'm coming around to your point of view. I don't think it allows, like you said, for more skill expression in this format. And I think that's always the key I'm looking for when we're ranking all these decks. I'm curious, are you running the Burning Turbulence Slitherwing to counter Pikachu? Or are you just taking that kind of loss? No, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I know a lot of people, for some reason, in Japan in particular, they really like Karidon. Slitherwing literally does the same amount of damage as Karidon. So I don't know why you wouldn't run it. Yeah, that's my thought. I saw a lot of people playing... I was building some of these decks just to prep for... Some of my local players were like, let's get some games in. And I'm like, sure. So I was building Raging Bolt, and I was looking at a lot of lists. And they were not running the Slitherwing. And I'm like, that just seems wrong. You don't need a lot of damage for a single prizer, and you're hitting for weakness on... The main reason you run it is for Pikachu, in my mind. You need an answer for that deck. You need an answer for walls, I guess. I guess Karidon maybe hits for a little harder into walls? It hits for 90 and then burns. What does Karidon hit for? No, Slitherwing does 120 and burns. Oh, okay. So you're two-shotting. And Karidon hits for 130. It actually does less damage. Sure. But it doesn't damage itself. But it has a different... You have to attack with a different Ancient Guide that turned before. So there are ways for the opponent to potentially stop you from doing that. In my mind, Slitherwing is just better. But I guess maybe the argument is... If you Slitherwing their Pikachu, they can countercatch your Slitherwing to the bench. And then Wellspring, KO Hoothoot, and Slitherwing in the same turn. But that still feels like a stretch to me. Yeah, yeah. I don't think that's... I just don't see the argument. Yeah, I think if you're knocking out Pikachu and they do that, and they're not focusing on knocking out your bigger guys, you can still go 2-2-2. You're still doing that effective price trade. If you get the first knockout with Slitherwing, because they put Pikachu in the active thinking you don't have an answer for it, I think that just seals the game in a lot of ways. Sure. But I don't know. You've played a little bit more. I think we're kind of on the same page with it. Yeah, I like that. The idea that now Raging Bolt can play as a one-prize attacking deck. Which is kind of cool. But yeah. Let's keep moving on. I don't really want to make this a Raging Bolt... I don't know. No, no, no. We've changed our tune. We are the Raging Bolt believers right now. I'm still probably not playing it this weekend. But it is not a D-tier deck in my mind any longer. Gotcha. But yeah, we can go ahead and move on. Next deck we've got here on the docket is the Tarapagos Noctowl. And so this would be kind of the Bouffalant-based tank Tarapagos that has kind of risen up. Yeah, this is interesting to me. So as Tarabox was kind of the big deck in this format coming in, Tarapagos Noctowl was there. It was kind of a fringe deck, but I think it's moved into A-tier prominence now. And I think I put it above Tarabox. Okay. Yeah, I think it's still below the Dragapult decks in the most part. Maybe above Dragapult Dusknoir, but let's just keep it there for now. It's just so they have a little bit grouped together. I think there's a lot of things that Tarapagos can do that Tarabox can't. It has just a much better Dragapult matchup for sure. The Bouffalants are huge in a lot of matchups, including Dragapult. But they also just make it really, really difficult for a hops deck to do anything against you, or ends deck to do anything against you. So many decks just struggle to amass damage counters on the board. You're able to still kind of do the same things that a Tarabox deck wants to do. You're using Tarapagos a little bit more, but you're still able to do the Wellspring plays. You're still able to do some of those kind of things. And you run the Trumpets to help with energy acceleration. You can run a different build to it. I don't know. I don't have any lists pulled up. But I've been really impressed with it. Like I said, it did win our little For Fun tournament on Monday last night. It matches up into the meta really well right now. Yeah. Yeah, the big thing in my mind is being able to just make Tarapagos a wall. And being a 340 effective HP... Or no. Yeah, 340. Because you can slap a Bravery Charm on that turtle, and then put that Curly Wall in front of it, and suddenly nothing is knocking out your Tarapagos outside of the infinite damage decks, like Raging Bolt has the capability to do so. And when we'll get to it here in a little bit, Goldango has the capability to do so as well. But that still is a pretty hefty commitment. Yeah. I mean, Raging Bolt doesn't get the energy like it used to. It doesn't explode out of the gate as much as it used to, I'd say. Right. So it's really difficult to manage your resources and hit 350 or whatever it is after all the taxes or whatever you want to call it. To hit that number is a lot harder than it was pre-rotation. I think the other cool thing that this deck does, though, is leveraging still that Bouffalant ability, but making Rotom into an actual fearsome attacker. So your little 70 HP Rotom suddenly becomes either a 130 or up to 180 HP One-Prizer that can do some damage to your opponent's board by gusting up and knocking out their Rotom or their Hoothoot or something, and then demanding a response while your only investment is a single energy. Yeah. In a stadium. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. I think this deck, if I'm getting into Atlanta, I'd just keep smashing games into this one or think about playing it. Yeah, I'm interested. I think Trabago's Noctowl and Dragapult will probably be the top two, so I might put it up above Dusknoir at this point. Okay. Yeah, I think that's where I'm at, just mentally. Sure. But I think there are ways you can exploit it. It doesn't run a lot of non-basic attackers, so there's a world where a Neuvern or, I think we have, what is it? A Frigaraf. A Frigaraf, yeah. Would definitely be able to do well against it in some ways. So it's interesting to see. I think, for the most part, it will still be pretty good. But yeah, that's where I'm at. Definitely see it making waves this weekend. Next up, we're going to talk about Charizard Pidgeot, and this is not just Charizard Pidgeot. This has kind of evolved. This is really more of like a Charizard Noctowl deck that also still has a Pidgeot line that you have access to, but really just in the modern format stage 2s, lacking those V Pokemon and Seal Stone to give them the consistency boost, have to find it elsewhere. And this was like Charizard Noctowl was something that kind of existed in the previous format, but I still feel like it's just not in a good spot. I think that you struggle with a lot of the decks that are kind of above it here. The big things are the Wellspring Mask from Tarabox, just Dragapult in general being kind of a menace, and the fact that you'll struggle, you'll be trading two hit KOs with Tarapagos Noctowl, and a lot of them are playing either Scoop-Up Cyclone and or multiple copies of Penny to be able to just scoop those things up after you hit them, and you're not one hit KOing those things until they get down to one prize and you have a Defiance Band equipped. That's a tough sell. Yeah, yeah, for sure. I'm fine with that. I think Charizard, in my mind, is still a really, really strong attack, but it's weird to say, but it feels almost like it's been power-corrupted out of the format in a lot of ways. Sure. You're not running Dusknoir to fix that math a lot, so it can be really tough to just reach those numbers to hit meaningful knockouts throughout the game. So yeah, I agree with that placement in C tier. All right, next up would be everyone's favorite Cheese Coin Man, Goldango. Yeah, I'm actually pretty hot on Goldango coming into Atlanta. Yeah, I'd put it in B tier, probably above Eevee Box. I don't think I'd put it above... Maybe I'd put it above Raging Bolt. Yeah, I think there's a little bit more flexibility. You get the advantage of not necessarily... We did talk about Raging Bolt being able to play the one-prize game, but Goldango definitely plays that game a lot better, a lot easier. You just set up your first turn, a bunch of gimme ghouls, and just go from there. So I think Goldango makes a lot of sense coming into this meta. I mean, we've seen it last format. It had a really good Dragapult matchup, especially when you're running the Monkey Doors with the Dark Energy. And then definitely being able to hit unlimited damage is really nice in Terapagos Noctowl. So this is kind of like... I think a lot of the top players will be playing this as a sleeper pick. Maybe not a sleeper pick, because it's pretty well-known. But as a counter to the top two decks, I can see this pretty popular. I still think it's B-tier. I still think there are some weaknesses. You don't have PokéStop, so it can be kind of difficult to get your setup going for turn one. If you go first, it can get kind of difficult to get your setup before your opponent might be able to Wellspring Mask on their side or something like that. And then it can really just struggle from there. So there's definitely some... I mean, there's definitely Golden Gold Believers out there, but it's definitely B-tier. I think they're... I don't know. It's still pretty good, but I don't think it's going to be able to have that consistent finishes to overpower some of the other decks in the format. When it sets up, it'll do really well, but it won't set up as frequently as the decks above it. Okay, that's fair. I think in a lot of ways, Goldengo in my mind is kind of... This is probably not a fair comparison. I was going to say it's almost like the Lugia of this format, where when the cards kind of fall the way that the Goldengo player needs to, you're not going to win the game. There's nothing you can do about it. Yeah. But it's probably not quite there. It's close. It's close. Yeah, I think that's a fair thing to say, because it definitely feels like it takes advantage of a prize map more effectively than a lot of other decks. Sure. Sure. And definitely, especially, like, 260 is kind of an awkward number for decks to hit right now. Sure. Next deck would be Gardevoir, and this is one... I'm going to have a hard time placing this confidently, but the big thing, obviously, Gardevoir lost access to that Refinement Corlea, and the way that we're seeing people build these decks now is more as kind of a turbo list, as it were, including some people, like, you know, the Ben Morse list that we featured last week, opting to play cards like Brilliant Blender as their ace spec to just turbo through the deck, have a more consistent way of putting energies in the Disco Pile, no longer being an Arvin TM Evo deck, instead being a multiple Rare Candy, multiple Knight Stretcher, Professor's Research-based deck. And I think the deck is less consistent than it was before, and I'm going to struggle to actually put it higher than low B tier. I think the things it has going for it are that it can still kind of make a comeback in the sense that Gardevoir itself is a very good attacker, just because it is so difficult to knock out. If you can get your board established, you know, in a similar vein to Feraligatr, but I think Gardevoir is a little bit more resilient, just because Psychic, and particularly with Lily's Clefairy paired with it, is a very good type right now, and Monkey Dory continues to be probably the most broken card in the game, and Gardevoir is the card that can best take advantage of it. But I still think that it kind of has weaknesses into a lot of the decks above it, and also has the potential to just kind of get steamrolled out of the game pretty easily. Yeah, I agree with that. I think I might put it higher in B tier if I was on... It's hard to place it, I think you're right, but I think it'll have its champions this weekend for sure, and I think we'll see it do pretty well. I think there'll probably be like one or two in top cut easily, and we've seen it time and time again that people sleep on Gardevoir or say, I can't play that deck, and then it just does really well, like Piper will play it, or it's Henry Chao, basically. Oh, well, if it's Henry Chao, Gardevoir, then we're going to need another tier up here. We need a Henry Chao tier, yeah, for sure. I mean, but that's the thing, I think there's some... So we've seen some builds that just want to abuse Monkey Dory as much as possible with two Badoo, no bravery charms, just basically trying to be as disruptive with Monkey Dory as possible. I think I kind of like Gardevoir going into this tournament, not that I would play it because I just have a hard time playing Gardevoir, but yeah, I think B tier, and then I might move it up higher, but that's my personal opinion. Yeah, I mean, we could put it here, I think. Yeah, I think that's probably a fair play. That's not too surprising. Yeah. Next deck is a deck I know you're a pretty big fan of, so why don't you sell me on Hop, Zosh, and where you think it should be on this list? Sure. This is the deck I probably spent the most time playing in this format. I want this deck to work so bad. I think there's a lot of potential there. You know, I've talked about it on the podcast a couple of times where it feels like buzz wool when you're able to prize map with... you know, the 2-1-1-1-2 kind of line to just prevent your opponent from taking the game over. You're able to just deny prizes like that. But at the end of the day, it struggles, especially if we see Terapica's Noctowl do really well, and that becomes a larger percent, like if that deck's anywhere near close to top three decks in the tournament, or like a eight to nine metapercent share. Hop Station really, really struggles into that deck. So I could see, I think it's like top of C tier for me right now. I don't know, maybe it's even worse than Endzora Arc, but I definitely, I still think it has a lot of potential. It has some cool tricks it can pull off, but I don't know how good it is at the end of the day. Like I don't think it does anything better than a lot of the decks above it. Even like, like Wallspring Ogre Pawn just feels better into a lot of things than Zacian does. And like, Cramorant's cool, but it doesn't really one-shot anything effectively. And Monkey Dory's is cool, but this deck, I think, struggles to use Monkey Dory a lot of the time. If your opponent's taking one shots against you, we've seen people having to put Calamitous Snowy Mountain in their decks just to get damage on their side of the field, just so they can use Monkey Dory. And that, to me, that doesn't look, like that doesn't look like a winning deck to me. No. It has a decent Dragapult matchup, being able to, but even then, like a good Dragapult player should be able to play around a lot of the strategies of this, like they can just kind of play around Cramorant effectively, forcing you to just use Zacian and Snorlax. And that really kind of ties your hands behind your back for sure. But I still like the deck. I still think it's fun. I think it's a good deck. It just, it might not, I don't know. The power level might just be a little too low for it to be in the top A and B tier, for sure. I can agree with that. I think this is a deck that you will come back to next rotation, honestly. And I think that at present is just a step behind. I'm personally a fan of the Iron Valiant version of this deck, much more so than the Monkey Dory one, just because in my mind, like you said, it's hard to get the damage on your board for the Monkey Dory to even be useful to begin with. And the way that you typically do that is by utilizing the Calamitous Snowy Mountain, which means you don't have Post Wick in play, which means you're doing less damage raw. You just have more control over where that damage goes. And I just love Iron Valiant. I mean, doing jet energy shenanigans with Iron Valiant, it's a lot of fun. The argument against it is obviously having extra two prizers on your board is not a great thing overall, but the deck can steal games from people. It can literally, it can steal games from any deck up here. Literally any one of them. You know, you turn one, especially the Iron Valiant one, to turn one, donk, whatever, insert Pokemon. Your opponent opens Badoo, you open Iron Valiant, Jet Energy, or you open like Technoradar, Jet Energy, Future Capsule. Cool, I win the game. If you open with the ability just to do an insta-strike with Zacian on turn one and knock out a Dreepy on the bench or a Hoothoot on the bench, a lot of times that can just offset your opponent by enough tempo to steal a game from some of these quote-unquote better decks. But this still, at the end of the day, feels like a 5-2-2 kind of deck. Yeah. I mean, it feels kind of hard to tie with it, so maybe 2-2's probably not the right thing, but like a, I don't know. 6-3 for sure. 5, yeah, 6-3 at best. Yeah. Like it's just not gonna, it's not quite gonna squeak into day two in my mind. Yeah, I mean, I can see it where it's really back and forth. Like you're, when I was playing with, like when it operates really well, you're able to pick apart boards really well. Like the Devo in the deck feels really cool in some matchups. For sure. And you're able to out-skill like somebody that doesn't really know how to play against you, but like once you get further into the tournament and somebody's like able to like see what you're trying to do, see that you're trying to prize map, you know, the strategy falls apart when your opponent's like, okay, Turo. And like now your thing that you've been building up for the last three turns is just gone. And now you're just like, well, I guess I can't take those two prize cards. What do I do now? So yeah, just any deck that gets nerfed by Turo. Turo's pretty much played in all of the top decks in A tier and yeah, like all of them essentially, if not, you know, Turo or Penny or scoop up Cyclone even in some of them. And that doesn't bode well for a Hop Station. No, no, unfortunately. But be on the lookout a year from now when we talk to you about the next rotation where Hop Station is a menace in the format. For sure. But if Team Rocket cards have not taken over the game by then. Yeah, I mean, that's the thing. Shaming gets printed out next set. Oh, that's fair. And I think that's just kind of squashes a lot of set of decks or squashes Hop Station from being effective against set of decks. But it was, you know, just because a card exists doesn't mean everybody's running it. Like man, if he went in and out of decks throughout the format. So, you know, it's TBD on Hop Station. But you were talking about a deck that cheesed wins in Hop Station. I think this one does even more of that. Yeah, definitely. The next one up here is the Poison Archelodon deck. And this deck is terrible. I don't think anybody should play it. This in my mind is literally the worst version of Archelodon you can play. And you're essentially banking on the fact that your opponent is going to have a poor enough setup for you to steamroll them and not let them play the game. And if you're trying to do that with this, if you want to do that with the Poison package, you should play Roaring Moon instead of Archelodon. But in that I still would probably put in this tier. I think Archelodon is a strong card. And the thing that makes it a strong card is it's a large HP pool. And to take full advantage of the way that this deck functions, you have to nerf that HP pool by a significant amount. Yeah, I remember playing Ladder with Hopsitization at the beginning of the format. And I would get paired up against Archelodon. I'm like, oh, this is an auto loss. And then they would bench a Brute Bonnet. I'm like, oh no, I auto win. That's how I felt. That's the degree to which the Poison package just destroys your ability to win games. I agree 100% with your assessment of saying Archelodon's strength is being able to just Turo after you've been hit for 230 damage or whatever. Yeah. And just say, okay, here's another one. Can you deal with this one? You know, very similar to like Arceus and Teleon back in the day with Charon's Care, just being able to cycle those attackers again and again and again. It's really good. But yeah, Poison Archelodon, not really good. I forgot to place this in the tier list. Yeah, definitely bottom of C. I think it is playable, you know, but. And you'll definitely cheese wins here. Like you'll donk Hoothoots, you'll donk Rotoms, you'll donk Badoos. This deck probably actually has a pretty good Tarabox matchup just because the Poison package does give you access to one-hit KO Pikachu. You can leverage the entire game without putting the Perilous Jungle into play. So you do still have a thick HP pool to work with. And you can honestly, in a lot of circumstances, go out of the way to not Poison your Archelodon while still doing that 220. So that matchup is good. I just feel like it makes it much more difficult to beat Dragapult in particular. Yeah, I agree. So we've talked about the worst version of Archelodon. How about just regular Archelodon? Well, I think I feel a lot more favorable about this. Yeah, I mean, do I think it's B tier worthy? Yeah, it's tier definitely not. I don't think it's A tier. I want to put it in B tier. I want to, especially going into this meta, if we look at the top two decks, I think Turapica's Noctowl can threaten it, but Dragapult's gonna really struggle to deal with it. I mean, Dragapult Dusknoir is a little bit more favorable maybe. But I don't know, like looking at the meta percentage, I think it was like surprising because yeah, Dragapult Dusknoir. The Dragapult deck, sorry, I'm getting lost in the weeds real quick. No, you're good. Take your time. Matchup wise, I want to see this versus Archelodon. Yeah, it's about 50%. So I think Archelodon, like into Dragapult, that should be a favorable matchup, but it ends up being closer to 50%. That makes me want to put it in C tier. Like if you're not able to beat the deck that you really like are built for to beat, I don't see how that goes well. So let me see, Turapica's Noctowl versus Archelodon beats it 55% of the time. Sorry. 54% of the time. So yeah, I don't think, like if those are the two top decks, I think if you've got a 50% or losing percentage, I'd put it in C tier at that point. So maybe the top of C tier or closer to the top. I'm going to give you some pushback on this one. Okay. I actually think Archelodon is at worst a B tier deck and actually might be an A tier deck. And it entirely depends on which version of the deck you're running. There are a lot of partners for this Pokemon right now. I mean, we've obviously see the Poison one broken out here. I've seen straight lists. There are lists that are partnered with all of the Hop's Pokemon. There are lists that are partnered just with Hop's Dubwool to have access to extra gusting cards while still being able to utilize Turo for the turn and being kind of the big, I'm going to 2-2-2 but be harder for you to take 2-2-2 into me because I'm so massive. Notably doesn't offer up easy prizes for Wellspring Mask Ogre Pond to take advantage of. I think that the limitless game percentages that you're seeing are skewed by a decent amount just because I feel like higher skilled players in limitless tournaments are more likely to gravitate towards Tarapagos and Dragapult than they are to Archelodon. Yeah, I mean, Archelodon was like the free deck for this latter period, I think. If we look at that. So that might be part of that too. I mean, I could still see it being below these kind of infinite damage decks, which I think are probably what I would say the ceiling of B tier is. But I do think that it is a better play than both Gardevoir and Eevee box that I think will struggle into some of the higher tier decks. I think that's fair to say. Do you run it with Hop'sization in your deck? Like, do you run, I think, is that your? No, my favorite build right now is the one that utilizes N'Zor Arc as a draw engine. Oh, okay. I think I saw Zul playing with that. So that's cool. So you just take that loss, I guess. Take what loss? The Cornerstone Ogre Pawn. Oh, I mean, it still plays a Hop'sization. Oh, okay, okay. So you have an out to one hit KO the Cornerstone. You don't care about that. Yeah. No, okay. I'm just making sure like that seems like a pretty exploitable weakness, but yeah, that makes sense. That's pretty cool. Yeah, I haven't really played any games with the Hop's, or sorry, the N'Zor Arc variant. So I saw Zul play like briefly on stream, but I didn't really sit down and watch it. But yeah, okay. So that's, yeah, I mean, that's pretty cool. I guess I'll leave it to your opinion a little bit more because I definitely don't have a lot of games with it. Yeah, and the nice thing I think is that, I think the double one is actually pretty viable as well. And that one is a little bit obviously less consistent because you don't have an onboard draw Pokemon, but you have the ability to say, I don't care about your Cornerstone. I'm gonna go around it forever until I can't anymore. Or you have the ability to just take easy free KOs on your opponent's bench Pokemon, like their Pheasantipidae or their Latias or what have you that they're probably gonna have on board and getting away from the thing that you don't want to hit into, like the big bravery charm Tarapagos. Yeah. So you can go knock out something else instead and you kind of go on your way. But that's enough about the bridge. The last thing we wanted to talk about are the wall deck, the dedicated walls deck, I should say, because I do believe the walls are typically present in most for Alligator lists now, but the just melodic Cornerstone, Firigarath, Mimikyu, I'm gonna play all the walls and hope that one of them is enough to get me over the line against your deck. And I just feel like this deck only pops up when metagames are centralized, only really succeeds when people aren't prepared for it, similar to what we saw in Baltimore this season. With the Cornerstone Noivern deck, nobody was ready for it, so it did very well. I assume a decent amount of people are preparing for this and people are diversifying their deck enough that they can kind of get around it. And that may not be the case for everything, but like if we look at this straight Dragapult as an example, you can't hit melodic with Dragapult, obviously, but if you play the Bloodmoon or Saluna in your deck, you, as the walls player, you have to take prizes to win this matchup. This is not a deck where I'm trying to win an attrition war. And if your opponent is able to kind of do anything, just putting a little bits of damage on you and then sweeping your melodic with a big bear that they can't one-hit KO. So you have to put something else on your bench that is then vulnerable to the Dragapult. And there's enough maneuverability there that the deck does not just solidly beat these other cards. And same goes for some of this other stuff like Terapagos Knocktowel. Yes, it's all basics, but a lot of the Terapagos decks are leveraging Dark Energies and Monkey Dory. So even if you put that Furigrath in front of them, one, you're not doing that much damage thanks to the Bouffalants. And two, any damage you do put is able to be reflected back to you. And if you put anything else down to try to get around that, Terapagos can one-hit KO Cornerstone. You have... a lot of times they play their own Cornerstone even to just hit into your walls. And the wall deck itself is super vulnerable to Cornerstone. You know, only having your own Cornerstone to work with. And if they have a Cornerstone and Monkey Dory, and you might also have Monkey Dory, but they can probably leverage it a little bit more easily. It's just a more consistent deck against your wall deck. I just don't see it being successful overall this weekend. I agree with that. I think the big factor Walls had going for it is a surprise factor. And then the second factor, it would be the predictability of a metagame that it could exploit. And I don't see either of those factors for it this weekend. I mean, I'm not saying it's bad. I think control would be probably something we didn't really put here. But I think that would be a little bit higher than the Walls deck. Maybe in B tier even. But that's another deck that works best in a metagame that's well-established. It's kind of in flux right now in the lead-up to Atlanta. So it'll be interesting to see how much of this comes to fruition. But yeah, I don't know. Is there any other decks that you're thinking of that we might have left off? I don't think so. I mean, I know Goldengo Dragapult was popular in Japan in this format. I personally don't see the appeal of it. I think you're taking two very good cards and making them worse by putting them together. Future Hands kind of popped up a little bit. This goes in what I would consider Raging Bolt tier. Or previous Raging Bolt tier. Where you're just kind of praying that your opponent falls victim to what you're trying to do. Froslass Monkey Dory I actually think is pretty interesting. It might be your C tier deck overall. Yeah, I was surprised. It did really well in some of the late-night tournaments or whatever you call them. I think it's pretty good. Another one that I would call out as kind of a weird pick that I could see making a splash is a Blissey-based wall deck. Just because Blissey itself is a pseudo-wall. And is able to help with that kind of energy maneuverability that the wall deck struggles with overall. And has options to play other tech cards to make those cards more impactful. Yeah, Blissey is really, really good into Dragon Bolt. Super good. There's not a lot of stuff that hits for fighting weakness. I think Cornerstone doesn't hit for weakness, right? No. Not a lot can one-shot a Blissey. So if you're able to just kind of cycle them similar to Arch-Haladon and you can get pretty effective with it. If you get three Blisseys in play, you can definitely cycle your energy around and heal pretty effectively. Utilize Monkey Dories to move some of the damage and kind of go through stuff like that. But I don't know. I don't think it's super good. No, it's probably not going to win the event by any means. But it's something that I think would be a more effective version of walls going into this event specifically. Until things settle down a little bit and you can kind of refine the wall deck to target specific decks that you're looking for. Rather than trying to cast this broad net that hits everything at the same time. But yeah, I think that about sums it up. Is there anything that you would want to move around on here before we just ship it and say this is the list? No, I'm pretty happy with this. Yeah, I don't think there's anything I'd change. Okay, cool. I think people are going to think it's funny that we put United Wings on there. Maybe, maybe. We'll post it and see what they think. If you did see this online, let us know. For sure. There we go. It's their problem now. So that's going to close things out for the tier list for this week. The last thing that I wanted to kind of bring up as we start to kind of wind things down is that we are going to start uploading the show to YouTube in addition to our Spotify uploads. So be on the lookout for that. We'll be announcing that on socials when they start going up and we're going to have not every episode. Unfortunately, I'd have to go back and re-edit some of them because I don't have the video files for them anymore. But I know I've got video files that go all the way back to I believe episode 13 or 14. And so we'll have a good catalog of those available for people if video viewing pleasure is more suited to YouTube than Spotify in your specific instance. But otherwise, John, was there anything else you wanted to say before we close things out for the week? Nope. If you're in Atlanta, I'll try to say hi if you're interested in saying so. I'll be busy doing deck check this weekend. So I don't know how much floor time I'll be on there. Like it'll be probably a little less than what I'm usually used to. But I'll definitely try to make a point to, if I can, say hi to as many people as possible. I'm there to work more than to socialize. But it's still fun to see people, especially in Atlanta. I grew up in Charleston. So it's really cool to see a lot of players that definitely don't travel as far as some of the other regionals we've had this year. But we'll travel to Atlanta. So it'll be cool. One of my friends from when I started playing. I'm rooming with the professor who ran the league that I played in when I started playing, essentially. Oh, wow. Dave Griggs. I don't know if you know him. Yeah, I'm rooming with Dave Griggs. OK. So that'll be fun. Cool. Yeah, yeah. It'll be good to catch up with him. And then, yeah, my friend Will Beers is coming. And my friend Josh Harvely. So just a bunch of people that are from Charleston or from South Carolina that I know pretty well in the community. It'll be good to see. If anybody listening is coming and wants to say hi, I'll definitely say hi back. I got to give Hunter his reverse plasma energy for the trivia. Oh, yeah. I'm bringing that. And then, yeah, just excited to kind of see everybody and cheer you on respectfully as much as I can. You know, I'm definitely not biased at all. Well, I appreciate that. I know. Yeah. For anybody listening, John and I are definitely approachable. May not look it. I've been told that I can look intimidating at first glance, but just come up and say hi. Like, if I'm not busy doing like actively in the middle of something and I have time for a conversation, I am more than happy to oblige you with that. And I'm hoping to actually bring some kind of some old format decks with me. So if you're looking for some play with that, I don't know specifically what I'm going to bring. But if anybody's looking for some games and some older formats, come find me or hit me up and we can see if we can schedule some games if we have some time. I know I'm not staying in the city itself. We're staying with a friend, actually, probably like half an hour or so outside of the city. So that may make things a little bit more difficult, but hopefully it won't be too bad at the end of the day. Yeah, I think that that's about going to do it for this week. And hopefully we will be back next week to bring you all up to speed on the results of Atlanta and the goings on there. So that being said, thank you for listening, and we will catch you guys on the next episode of the Battle Frontier. Have a great week. Transcribed by https://otter.ai