Episode 28: HOW THE WORLD CHAMP FOUGHT BUDEW

Hello and welcome back to the Battle Frontier podcast where we aim to help you level up in your journey as a competitive Pokemon TCG player. I'm Aaron Curry here with me as always my co-host Jon Orgel and this week we're going to be diving into the results of the Monterey Regional Championship down in Mexico this past weekend before we hit up Jon with a time capsule for a deck that may be a little bit reminiscent of one of the decks that finished highly in that event and then we will talk about how we have seen the meta evolve and how we expect it to potentially further evolve headed into the special events this weekend and then further on into Milwaukee the following weekend and before we get into everything as is tradition Jon I want to know what were you doing this past week? This past week uh what did I do not a whole lot of Pokemon I uh let's see Saturday I had two friends come to town so we went to um art museum oh Sunday but we went uh I think we just played some board games and like hung out not too much just had a lazy kind of day and then Sunday we celebrated what we've now dubbed as Meatster uh we do a an annual tradition of going to Brazilian Steakhouse and um if you've ever been to Brazilian Steakhouse it's like basically all you can eat steak um and so we've done that just me and Sydney but this year we included a couple of our other friends um so we just do that um for the whole day and that is quite the fun experience I would recommend it um I don't know that was about it I was yesterday we had our league challenge uh so we had kind of a um trying to think uh yeah it was kind of cool one of our long-time friends of the cast um Ian Gardner got first place with his hopsization deck so that was cool to see um but it was pretty mid turnout like you know we had about 10 players um for our league challenge so you know it's fun um but yeah it was pretty pretty chill week uh you know I don't think every weekend has to be full of Pokemon to have a lot of fun sure but you know how about you I know you uh might have had some stuff going on over your weekend yeah unfortunately my son got sick last Wednesday night and spent the majority of Wednesday night in the ER at the hospital and then he was actually transferred to the children's hospital in Orlando up until Saturday afternoon wow so Julia and I took shifts being over there for the day and then whoever wasn't there was obviously at home like taking care of our dogs and everything and uh we just kept going back and forth and I spent a lot of the time that I was there since he was pretty out of commission I either spent uh playing TCG live or TCG pocket when I wasn't doing work stuff so I did a little bit of grinding on pocket and I'm almost a master ball now wow which is probably way more games than I should have be putting into pocket yeah that is I so I finally played the ranked ladder in pocket okay uh this week I got the second Giratina EX that I needed for my deck um so I had Giratina Darkrai queued up and I played like I think I won seven games straight with it and then I'm just like yeah I'm good like I don't think I can really do much before the ladder resets in like a week so I was just like you know but I can see where like it gets addictive like if you get that win streak going yeah you're like doing pretty well up until you hit ultra ball when that win streak goes away like it's it is pretty nice you feel like you're zooming through and then you hit ultra one is still kind of all right ultra two for a while feels like a brick wall but the nice thing they've designed it so that it's supposed to be like a progressive thing you're not meant to grind all the way to master ball in one season like the rewards are there for the people that are die hard and want to do it but because you don't reset all the way back to zero every season I think you go down like three tiers total okay after a season maybe it's four I don't remember honestly um but you get this kind of sense of progression over time so it would be a little bit better than something like what we have on TCG live but because there are actually rewards associated with it whereas TCG live is just you're playing into Arceus to have the privilege of playing with ostensibly better players and that does eventually come you have to get a decent way into Arceus to actually hit that effect but it is available to people if they are willing to grind their way through the madness to get there did you get to Arceus and oh yeah yeah I had Arceus every season like that's never a problem that's so funny I've never hit Arceus on live and you were just you were not committed to the digital Pokemon lifestyle I'm not I'm not that guy like I love Pokemon I love playing but I can't play live for like more than three games in a row I just like get to the point where I'm just like yeah I'm good like it's just like playing Pokemon on the computer like just drains me and I just be because like I don't feel like I'm literally like doing like puzzles like outside of the game because there's so much downtime in Pokemon I feel like compared to other games yeah and I mean when you're playing paper like you can talk to your opponent about whatever else or talk to the guy doing the game next to you about whatever else and it's a little bit more engagement that way I don't know it's something where I guess I'm able to just focus on it properly enough it hits me the right way where I don't necessarily get fully bored with it and a lot of it I think comes down to deck choice too true like if you find something that you really want to grind out or if you find something that just plays really fast games then you can kind of get away with it makes it a little bit easier to get through everything yeah so yeah so did that through Saturday and then unfortunately I ended up catching whatever my son had and I was out of commission Sunday night all through yesterday I told john before the cast I actually slept from like 10 15 p.m Sunday night through like 4 4 15 p.m yesterday so Monday probably the most sleep I've gotten in one stretch that's insane in the past decade and the last time that I slept that much I was probably equally as ill so that was not the most fun thing thankfully obviously they you know I'm on the other side of that and I'm slowly progressing towards being back to 100% but yeah I did get to on Sunday also tune in prior to my downfall tune in to a little bit of the kind of bootleg stream yeah for Monterey that uh Christian Fontano set up using I saw that too sticks TCG shout out yeah setting up his phone to display the projector screen that they had in the event the quality was absolutely terrible but I don't know what I expect when you have somebody streaming on either phone or maybe cell signal from a venue in a different country off of who knows how good of a quality the projector was and you know it's one of the things where it's like at least there's something available I guess at one point he had like 800 people watching it's crazy wow that is pretty crazy I mean the finals was yeah it was it was a good finals I think I mean the games were was like I think a 2-0 set but yeah we'll get into that well yeah but I think that that's a good enough a segue as any though that we can go ahead and just look at Monterey as a whole and to start with we'll just look at the metagame for everything so day one metagame percentages even despite the stream thanks to Robin once again over here at labs.limitlesstcg.com for all of your tournament needs because Robin is able to scrape that arcanine data we can still look at our day one and day two meta percentages and once again we see Dragapult Decimar as the number one deck heading into oh sorry let me combine our variants here so Dragapult over a quarter of the room day one wow uh Raging Bolt and Goldengo kind of flip-flopping places from last week in Atlanta to still be the number two and three decks respectively here but Gardevoir making a big big rise up to being number four after following the win in Atlanta. Terrabox interestingly maintaining place in that top six along with Archeloudon and then we see a follow-up for the other kind of smattering of decks further down the line and then we look forward to day two and Dragapult had a little bit of a dip with Goldengo kind of Goldengo and Raging Bolt actually making some gains wow converting I know we called last last week not good this week did better still didn't win very much in day two but a lot of people don't uh Gardevoir but really the top six decks maintain their position as the top six decks and the other kind of notable things are the decks that converted pretty well here and that would be the Joltik box which is something we're going to highlight here in a little bit was kind of a new deck that popped up in Japan initially in city leagues and people decided they wanted to bring it out for a test run in Monterey apparently and we also see some kind of decent conversions coming from Blissy of all things small sample size only two players but the other big one being the Eevee box or Flareon box whatever you want to call it and yeah then we get into our overall results here the winner of the event finally after all of the number twos that he's gotten this season alone Brent Tonneson brings home a win with Gardevoir over our current reigning world champion Fernando Cifuentes with Blissy um rounding out top eight we've got Yoko Valencia making another top cut with Tarabox Caleb Rodgerson making another top cut with Dragapult Goldengo Grant Shen making another top cut with Dragapult Goldengo Eder Hario making top cut with Dragapult Tyler Matthews making cut with that Joltik box Tanner Hurley making his back-to-back top eight with straight Dragapult and Victor Arano rounding out our asymmetrical top cut with Raging Bolt and so just to look at some of these lists we've got the winning list coming in here from Brent and it's going to look a little bit different from Henry's deck from last week right you know we don't see that Zoro arc we see just bulked up four copies of Stretcher no super rod and four copies of Research we don't see any of those Mortys hanging out in here and it looks like Brent just wanted to go fast and get his cards on the table yeah no no boss just the two countercatcher I think no boss might be more standard than Garde I might I might uh I can't remember if Henry played boss yeah that one I'd have to go back and double check um but yeah this is a very uh um just not different but just yeah more streamlined is a good way to put it you're running Cleffa for early game setup um just trying to dig I guess to find that turn to return three Gardevoir um faster uh and then the secret box uh with no Arvin in this list so you're literally just trying to draw into that Candy Gardevoir or just draw into the setup for all those things um and you're cool just hanging out you know with a bunch of monkeys uh moving the damage over to your opponent sure kind of this is a very good like comeback deck you don't run the unfair stamp but you still have a lot of counter play um with this just uh yeah I don't I mean this is pretty bare bones this is pretty you know when you think of Garde like this is like the lowest common denominator kind of thing where there's not a lot of moving parts to go wrong um but there's still enough tricks like three monkey dory three dark um three earthen vessel like you can find pretty easy access to dark energy and monkey dory to counteract a lot of the dragapults and to work really well in the mirror um I think three monkey is like a necessity in this format um you just can't get away with two we've even seen that in other decks like hop station and all that kind of just running three monkey um but yeah monkey dory this this deck just highlights the strength of monkey dory I think that's probably the the biggest takeaway yeah well and Gardevoir has always been kind of the deck that's best at utilizing monkey dory just for sure able to damage itself so efficiently yeah somebody it would seem like it would be a downside right when you put damage counters on yourself but Gardevoir just finds a way to like oh no I can just you know pick off stuff a lot easier and set up math really well and avoid taking knockouts that activate phazandipity and avoid taking knockouts that make my ionos stronger for me and all these kind of things um and allow me to use counterculture more effectively so you're a good player will be able to use monkey dory really really effectively and just line up a bunch of ko's and create a board state that really just benefits them I mean realistically like with this deck like you have the Clefairy the they have like three main attackers and then Gardevoir obviously but like that's it like you don't have a lot like the recovery of four night stretchers is really key to like just be able to find those pieces when you need to especially when you're playing so many research um but yeah we're just there's no poffin in this there's no uh arvin there's no you know it's really just a kind of a throwback if you're playing we've been playing long enough it feels more like a yes a statue deck of old like a dark cry hydra gun or something like that for juniper 4n and hope yeah yeah that's the vibe we got right this is definitely for juniper 4n and then yeah that's pretty funny I mean notably notably this is the same list that brent brought last week to atlanta with the only difference being that in atlanta he had three counter catcher and did not have the turro so decided that that cut and inclusion were worth making independent of each other I think the interesting exclusion more so than the onboard draw of the zora arc is the lack of the mu ex like you've got the three bravery charm to kind of put it out of the dragapult range we've seen how powerful that mu clefairy combo can be into dragapult specifically and you know even in some other matchups kind of like terabox it could be pretty pretty not oppressive but impressive as well being able to copy torrential pump being able to copy opposing clefairies being able to copy the demolish off of cornerstone you know just different ways to get around these kind of hurdles mu is able to really tackle a lot of them and i'm just a little surprised to not see it here especially since it also offers that supplemental draw on board right yeah i guess maybe brent was just saying okay it's a liability at the end of the day like i can afford to have all these one prizers and then play a game where all my my only two prizing players gardevoir sure for the most part um and you know maybe in his mind it's like a win more card in the dragapult matchup you know maybe there's just not enough scenarios like if you have clefairy and then just swing with gardevoir you're doing a one shot on a dragapult and like yeah yeah you don't get the cool snipe something on the bench and knock out the active play but like taking out the dragapult especially if you do it early enough when their setup's not enough and then you i don't know like if you're taking it out then i don't know him they can really struggle to like get a follow-up dragapult with any real sense of urgency sure sure well and speaking of decks that kind of maybe wanted to put the kibosh on dragapult we do get to see fernando's blissey deck here and this when blissey was first revealed in twilight masquerade we saw a lot of people trying it out with the express purpose of shutting down what we thought was the impending dragapult meta at the time so i guess it shouldn't really be a surprise since we've hit that critical mass of dragapult meta to see something like blissey come back out and have some success and if we just look real quick at the matches that fernando played we see one two three four five uh five and a half and then so six maybe maybe seven dragapult decks that you could argue that he played against and tied to beat the rest of them i mean it can't really be too surprising that this deck would be something that he'd choose to go with and at this point fernando kind of seems like the king of off the wall meta calls for events you know we've got blissey here we had iron thorns at worlds and i think secretly tech tm turbo energized might just be fernando's favorite card i can see that yeah it's a very cool list um definitely not something that my mind went to i mean it makes like it's cool to see like as soon as i saw like i didn't see it until the finals when i tuned in and i'm like oh blissey's in the finals and i'm like okay i guess that makes really that makes a lot of sense it's one of those decks that takes advantage of um stuff that if you can't one shot a blissey he's not going anywhere like he's got a bunch of hp uh he's really easy to heal and like manipulate energy to where even if you do start to knock out that blissey you can be like all right um we will switch in and put another blissey in or like find a way to um you know make sure that he doesn't just die right immediately um or get knocked out immediately um but yeah this is a really cool list i liked a lot of the inclusions here um it seems pretty focused around arvin as a build um getting that turn one precious trolley to help your setup is really important and then yeah just using ultra ball to find all the other pokemon uh for pokey gears seems like a lot but i guess it's getting to the point where you just want to find those supporters that you want to find the boss's orders when you need them you want to find that kind of stuff um but yeah i think that the town store engine is kind of cool too you can get the turbo energized easier um rigid band helps fix a lot of the math against dragapult makes it harder for them to two shot you essentially if you have the rigid band and then like two monkey dory there's like no easy way for them to two shot you so yeah that's pretty nice oh yeah i mean you you also deny the pikachu one hit ko with that true which can definitely be pretty big yep yeah i'm sure that came up in the terror box matchup in top four um so yeah that's cool uh definitely not a deck i thought would be in this tournament he's running 10 energy which seems like a lot for but i guess it makes sense if you're not running special energy that's where we're at now um yeah so yeah makes sense um interesting that he didn't do like a trumpet or something like that uh with the ogre pawn but i could see i guess it just doesn't really pay dividends to put the ogre pawn in play when you don't need to so that makes yeah maybe maybe i think that i don't remember like a crispin or something like that i guess you have the tmm turbo energized but there were times in the finals where he just he had his only bliss he knocked out and had no response for even even a drift flume you know so that was tough yeah the gardevoir matchup in particular doesn't seem super great for this deck just because they can even get around your rigid band by you know plopping the 30 damage on you and then hitting you for 300 which conveniently lets them clear you and you don't really have a wall answer to that deck you know i guess maybe you just hope you kind of run them over but i don't know that seems like a bit of a stretch especially under something like badoo but maybe if they've you know they've got a series of turns so they only have one ralts in play we are playing four boss in here and if you can just go boss boss boss boss boss and maybe that's enough to get you over the line but it still seems like a bit of a stretch in my mind yeah but you know everything's something that's anti-meta do well i mean especially this early in a format it's rare that we'll see somebody come up with a counter deck but i mean after atlanta you know when day two is 25 dragapult and then we look at this tournament it's 25 day one i mean it makes sense to have a deck that's just specifically to be draggable and like if you get lucky and you know fernando did he hit more dragapulse than he hit anything else um you can take advantage of that good matchup but yeah this will be interesting to see where bussy goes from here but we'll talk about that a little bit more as we let's look on the other decks um i can talk about this one a little bit it was so crazy because like this happened and then at the league challenge i hosted i had i think two or three players playing this joltic deck so that was kind of cool um it's crazy to see like how fast the community responds to um how what does well at tournaments like i was working at the card store that i sort of bulk at a lot of the time um today and like somebody came in and bought literally bought like a place at a guard of war and a place at a blissey and i'm like all right it's just so funny like blissey wasn't on anybody's radar now like now it's like and then speaking of not on anybody's radar like this galvantula like i was pulling stuff out of bulk and i'm like oh i guess i gotta start pulling this galvantula out now um but this was a glc card john true i guess i i forgot about that yeah um this is a cool deck so instead of using so we lost um a lot with uh maridon after rotation so this slows it down and kind of re-evaluates the strategy a little bit um so instead of using turbo energize in this build we're using uh joltic which has a pretty good attack uh jolting charge it's for one colorless uh search your deck for up to two basic grass cards and attach and up to two basic lightning cards and attach them to your pokemon any way you like so you can get four energy out of your deck and just attach them wherever you want to put them and that's probably the most powerful energy acceleration attack i can think especially on a basic for that i can think of you know it does have the downside of having 30 hit points um but i mean realistically like that's fine like you put it up there attach turn two or turn one and then you're set up like so and notably like the things you're setting up are the main two are iron hands and pikachu ex and iron hands you know has um amp you very much and we were talking i think i've heard on a couple different podcasts over the last few weeks like what's the best deck to use iron hands and people have bounced around different ideas well this seems kind of like the best way to use iron hands if you get the turn one jolting charge and to the turn to uh amp you very much and then you just keep building your board up from there like it's very very hard for any deck like especially these setup decks that take a long time that even if they run badoo you're just like okay cool amp you very much with badoo yeah take two prizes okay and then now what like what are you going to do to respond to all that unfair stamp okay cool knock out whatever you put up after unfair stamp for two prizes like i think it'll take somebody like maybe a tech inclusion of a mimic you or something like that to deal with this but that's getting a little bit ahead of ourselves um but yeah just any deck that can abuse the very very strong attack of amp you very much um like this can um will do really well in this meta that's dominated by dragapult and gardevoir um and then the other attack you know if it if it's not gardevoir or dragapult it's probably a big hit point you know stage one or ex pokemon um and then pikachu can deal with that and pikachu has uh prismat what is it something called topaz bolt for 300 damage and two of the three energy are fulfilled by jolting charge you know the lightning and the grass and all you need to do is find a metal energy and you run just enough resources with four crispin to almost guarantee that um so yeah this is this is a well thought out idea um i'm surprised we didn't really see this uh come up in atlanta um i think that same week or same weekend maybe it had kind of just started to pop up in city leagues and uh in a lot of ways a lot of the western meta often gets informed by japan i know sejun park also played it to the korean league the same weekend as atlanta so it was just an idea that maybe had not quite had enough time to incubate and catch on and people didn't necessarily want to fully innovate heading into atlanta would rather stick with what they knew yeah well either either way um the rest of it will round out the list it has the kind of other counter for dragapult once they do get that dragapult set up you still have the clefairy x to be able to knock it out with weakness and then i think the coolest inclusion is probably the iron leaves um sure just being able to like clean up all this energy that you spread out early you know a lot of times energy gets stuck on your iron hands and you really don't want to hit for 160 with arm press so you can just use rapid veneer and i think how much damage does 180 do 180 so a little bit more damage but just a clean attacker primarily is what it's nice to have um and then yeah you can also do the future booster capsule on the iron leaves to kind of give it free retreat which is nice to like be able to reset something um yeah i mean this deck makes a lot of sense heavy crisp and engine and then yeah you can still cheese with maractus i guess for a corner yeah that i haven't figured out specifically what matchup tyler has that included for because i know maractus does not exist in every list and i've seen some interesting variations of this deck like the galvantula is not always included obviously it's a great mimic you answer also one hit chaos melodic ex um the other neat thing i've seen some lists that opt to cut one of these energies down by one add a fighting and play one galvantula ex as well oh okay which is just a neat attacker and the cool thing about playing either the baby galvantula or the ex is that you get that you transform that 30 hp liability on your board away from being a free prize to your opponent into something that can actually notably do some damage and the baby galvantula is kind of an unsung card hasn't seen any plain standard prior to this but and for those of you who don't know what it does its ability is compound eyes that says attacks from this pokemon do 50 more damage to your opponent's active pokemon that has an ability and then it's shocking web attack does 50 damage for a grass and a colorless but if it has any lightning energy attached does an additional 80 damage so if you're hitting an ability laden pokemon with shocking web you're doing 180 damage and because a lot of pokemon are weak to grass in the current meta you can one-hit ko a lot of this pokemon notably things like charizard hydreigon uh and zora ark not all of those are super relevant but just when you have a joltik sitting on your bench that you could potentially retreat back and have an energy just sitting on it all game to have that thing potentially turn into a threat at some point is pretty noteworthy and worst case you could also one-hit kiss something like a mu with this even though it's not weak to grass and then you have a one prize or sitting in your active that your opponent has to deal with yeah or squawk ability or something like that that's pretty cool yeah yeah so it's coolest um yeah it'll be interesting to see like i mean i think players will gravitate towards this it seems like a fun deck list um but yeah i like this list a lot so definitely cool to see tyler he's always kind of coming up with crazy cool stuff uh he's played like he was a big anti iron valiant player for a while uh played binette with dust nor when that like when dust nor first came out so that was kind of cool to see uh so yeah definitely cool i think a lot of people have been just looking for a way to kind of people want to play pikachu like it is such a blatantly powerful card if you can set it up easily and this is a deck that reasonably if you tandem unit for two pikachus on turn one you could jolting charge and have two pikachus that have a lightning and a grass sitting on them on your bench on turn one and your opponent has to figure out how to deal with that but like you said john and a lot of the matchups where that doesn't fit the deck is able to compensate for that and instead go the iron hands route and iron hands can be super oppressive into some of these evolving decks for sure yeah especially if everything's focused on badu and taking a little longer this is kind of like answer to that in a lot of ways it's it's like well if we're gonna go slow okay i'll play a pokemon that's just a setup pokemon and set up my board and be perfectly happy with not playing items because whenever i can or whenever like i'm i'm set up like pikachu can be fully loaded with six energy then i can get two attacks with 300 damage off before we really even have to do anything and your opponent doesn't often have an answer for something because they can't one shot pikachu so here we are you know just kind of yeah yeah definitely i'm not saying that we haven't seen a setup attack be successful in pokemon in quite a while right so it's nice to see something like this actually have success in a modern tournament at a major level all right percent so definitely cool to see a couple other lists we can go through real quick um we have tanner hurley getting another top eight right after his atlanta performance i think this is the same 60 right uh no he didn't play jock last week okay so that was one change i don't know specifically what he cut from here to make the two jock fit i think maybe there's an arvin missing and then one other card but notably two jock in here now um still running the genesect with the aspect neutralizer or whatever oh and he's actually got two tools for his bidews to become beefier now so just really looks like he's trying to win that mirror match yeah i played a little bit with the hedrick list uh yesterday after the challenge sure uh luxurious cape is i was totally underrating it especially i liked it in the dust snore build a lot because you can put it on a dust skull turn one um and then basically prevent it from being knocked out um and then once you blow it up with uh as a dust snore like your opponent doesn't take their extra prizes right serious cape so it's only when they're not when it's knocked out from damage that they draw those extra prizes so it's pretty relevant um so yeah i definitely am coming around a little bit on luxurious cape at first i've always like giving up an extra prize is not fun but there's enough scenarios where like that's fine like either it never comes up or it's it's done its job you know right for sure yeah the only the only time that it's really bad is if you somehow manage to get in a position where like your 130 hp bidu is getting knocked out by a bidu and then you're then you're in a bad way but theoretically that shouldn't happen very often no i can't imagine that that comes up a whole lot uh yeah this is very consistent you know not running the dust snore um yeah definitely has answers to most of the like questions being asked by different things in the meta with the halucha with the genesect and then with the late game blood moon or saloon to close it out um just the one monkey door i think is enough and then definitely run on the legacy energy build which is kind of cool um i don't know definitely cool to see i heard some interesting math earlier that i hadn't thought about and the idea of playing luminous in this deck as opposed to playing a dark energy and how it theoretically if you attach a luminous to a dracloak on a given turn you actually have more outs to hitting the energy you need to attack with a dragapult the following turn than you would in a dust noir based deck where you know you attach a fire you've only got three psychics whereas if i attach a luminous i have two fires or two psychics that all fulfill my requirements so if i'm just i theoretically have more outs to hit what i need off of my uh recon directives the following turn so you know just more credence to playing luminous as opposed to playing another fire another psychic and one dark that yeah you can't search it which is a downside but you have the kind of more power as opposed to more searchability yeah it makes sense yeah i like that yeah pretty nifty list uh would not be at all surprised to see it continue to have success moving forward yeah i think it'll adapt well you can kind of tech it for whatever you need it to kind of handle we do have one more list and masters to look at and that is raul avila juniors roaring moon de dunsparce and this is a deck that after it saw some kind of middling success albeit you know some decent success i should say you know we did have a top cut at euic last year i think a ninth or tenth place at orlando regionals the following weekend that same season the deck just fell off the face of the earth and nobody wanted to touch it with a 10-foot pole until this weekend and the deck almost managed this weekend to that asymmetrical cut being just one place shy and honestly i could not tell you why it was successful this is a deck that i actually chose to pilot back when i feel it was more powerful we obviously had dark patch last season we've lost that card and in its place raul opted to play four great balls in the deck and the only thing i can imagine from looking at this deck list as a whole is that rule won a lot of games on the back of neutralization zone yeah and so that aspec stadium that prevents all damage under your non-rule box pokemon by your opponent's rule box pokemon is you know potentially pretty powerful you know a lot of people aren't playing stadiums right now and a lot of the decks that do play stadiums are opting into these research-based builds so there is a half decent chance that your opponent will get rid of all of their stadium outs and you can just stick a neutralization zone and use vengeance fletching until you win the game yeah i mean this is such a crazy build i played a little bit with a denunciar stack online over the last two weeks um it doesn't feel fun uh just so many games where like if you get iona in mid game you just if you don't see the dunsparce i get they get all shuffled to the bottom of the deck there's not easy ways to search out stage ones i guess great ball is where we're at now which is crazy to me like running for ultra ball makes sense because you're trying to discard all ancients and then yeah you can search out whatever you need but the four great ball man that seems just wild to me i don't know like i guess it i guess logistically it makes the most sense like especially like later on if you thin out all the ancient pokemon all the other cards and you're just trying to find the dunsparce like i guess once your deck gets to a certain point you keep shuffling in dunsparce into dunsparce it's more effective so that'd be the way to look at it right like once your deck's like 20 cards and like four of those 20 are hits for the dunsparcer dunsparce yeah that's cool but i don't know man it just feels pretty bad in my mind um i mean this is a cool list like it's cool that we see something with neutralization zone i think if you scroll like look at the top it has to be one of the cheapest lists that's ever done well yeah 17 bucks 17 bucks baby i mean you you're a new player here you go like for the price of like chipotle at this point like you've got a competitive list i guess so that's cool um definitely a beginner friendly deck you know i'd say so that's pretty well definitely attach player supporter and attack like you're not you don't have fancy monkey dory math to worry about you're not worried about attacking with the right pokemon like realistically it's almost always correct to vengeance fletching unless you need to frenzy gouging whatever your opponent's active is i think the trickiest thing with this deck now that we don't have dark patch is understanding the right time to bench the ex so that you can get it powered up reasonably in one turn just because the idea that you're going to push it to dunsparce up play asada energy switch that energy from one ancient guy back to the roaring moon ex and then attach from your hand when you're only playing six energies is kind of asking a lot the one thing that this deck did gain that it did not used to have is access to fan wrote them but and i would feel better about this as a concept if the dunsparce itself also had 100 hp right that's it's still like it's okay like it doesn't it you know it's you can poff it like it runs for poffin which is crazy right like that shows you where we're at like it doesn't run nest ball runs for poffin so like i i don't know man i got nothing this this was baffling me but i guess the for poffin is like i want to hit poffin turn one that way i can just go okay fan wrote them the dunsparce dunsparce and then use fan wrote them to get the other two to dunsparce and at that point you're you're not you're no longer a roaring moon deck you're at a dunsparce deck but i mean i guess you just want to amass a large hand size and start thinning your deck out as fast as possible with your earthen vessels and ultra balls yeah going from there um i mean yeah you just don't need a lot um you can burn through this deck really really quick um and yeah i mean i guess that's it that's really what it comes down to the games where this deck pops off it probably looks amazing and can probably pretty reasonably run decently well under an item lock and then you'll have other games where you just look at it and you don't know what you're doing yeah that's like for the entire game i don't know how this beats like we just looked at tenor hurley's deck like i don't know how this deck beats that deck you know what i mean and realistically it probably doesn't like back last year one of this deck's hardest matchups was charizard and that kind of dragapult deck really occupies a very similar space to what charizard used to occupy where you've just got a giant stage 2 ex pokemon that's going to be very difficult for you to knock out with anything outside of using frenzied gouging and now that deck also has access to being able to counter catch your ex to the bench and ko it with sprinkle damage potentially if you don't have a capsule available that's not something you really want to sign up for yeah i mean capsule helps at least fix some of that math but like i don't know man like it doesn't it doesn't feel good in my mind like you're if you're if i if i sit across the table as a dragapult player against this deck i'm like great you know if i set up i feel pretty good about this matchup because especially if you run halucha you're able to like manipulate damage really really well um on the dunsparce and if you can go like iono halucha knockout knockout like and then kill their draw engine and then leave them with like no energy in play i don't know it's gonna be tough so and you've just playing around the neutralizations that's that's the biggest factor i gotta say i'm sure that that that came up a lot in dragapult especially when they only run like one or two stadiums if that's some i don't know i think tanner's list might have ran a stadium i don't even remember if it does uh i think it had artisan yeah they usually run like one or two artisan um but yeah this stadium neutralization zone uh let's see yeah two artisans so you can get away with it sometimes like if the you know the first game one if the player discards two artisan is a dragapult player you can like all right neutralization zone and if they're not able to respond gg and i feel like that's definitely a win condition but sure i at a regionals like i don't know man it seems i'm props to roble like this is still pretty cool that he did well with it i just i i'd be surprised to see this make a top cut appearance once again anytime soon i mean it was eight oh and one going that is pretty impressive wow or sorry seven oh and one seven you beat ross that be the eventual winner okay gardevoir gardevoir seems like a good matchup i should say yeah like gardevoir is always a decent matchup for roaring moon base decks it's pretty easy to boss the gardevoir up in koa and when you're that's a matchup because you're trading with one prize attackers you're totally fine going into that yeah and i feel like definitely has pretty good golden go matchup yeah um because like you're able to two shot golden go effectively and then like yeah you can trade one for one with the um pouring moon big guy later on pretty effectively sure so um yeah i guess didn't hit a whole lot of dragapult from looking at that right no so i think that's part of it it's just you know getting lucky with not hitting a lot of dragapult which hey that's that's tournament what it takes yeah man that's tournaments for sure and then the last thing to look at is a senior's result and this is a repeat winner and repeat decklist from last week's regional so we have justin templar coming in once again with another regional win with dragapult decimal the same list that he and andrew hedrick piloted last weekend to a first and second place respectively in the seniors and masters division justin said you know what this deck was so good i'm going to go to mexico and win another tournament yeah it's interesting to see like um just the dominance of some of the seniors this year we were talking before the podcast like justin this is his fourth regional win um he's like i think he said he's he looked at his like placements at least all the the ones that were on limitless he's top cutted every single one of them um he's got like a i think a really good ic record at this point so he's he's not like if if uh was it vinnie if vinnie fernandez is this yeah gabriel i can't i mix them up i apologize if gabriel fernandez wasn't like currently smashing seniors like justin would definitely have the title of like best senior of the year um it's but like definitely best north american senior so far sure um and it's cool to see him run it back with basically you know the same list him and hedrick like hedrick gave him a shout out at the winner's interview or whatever so definitely cool to see his kind of brainchild do really well and yeah he just if it worked the first time if you get the dub the first time why not just run it back um so props it's still cool to see it's so cool to see somebody has that much confidence in their ability and their deck choice and all that stuff and this is a cool list i know i played a little bit with it uh yesterday like i said um it it flows really well like it it has a lot of answers um i think the two jock really help against item lock um like thinning out the arvin count and then yeah just the unfair stamp is definitely the best a spec right now um for dragon pull um when you can just go kind of catch your unfair stamp and then badoo or just you know whatever any of those things so yeah very cool absolutely so yeah that's gonna close the books on monterey heading into or closing out this past weekend and before we get into how we think things might shape up going into this weekend and moving forward john has a little bit of a detour for us i just wanted to take a look at an older list this is john roberts the seconds 2020 sorry 2012 list from nationals that year um and we looked at a rogue deck and blissey that was tanky and healed um and this is very similar it doesn't heal i guess is the wrong way to say but uses monkey dory to essentially remove damage from its side um and this was a little bit of a different concept concept, but the same kind of premise in a lot of ways, you're moving around energy, and then using a myriad of different attackers to hit for weakness across the board. So this was a really cool deck when it came out. This was a rogue deck at this Nationals. He beat, I think, Kevin Vance in the finals, who was playing, if I'm, I think, Mewtwo Eels. But yeah, I just wanted to look at this real quick. So for those that aren't too familiar with this format, you know, we talked about the 4N for research. This is before we had, I think, Sycamore, where research was in format. Juniper. Well, yeah, it just was called Professor Juniper at the time. Yeah, exactly. But this didn't play Juniper, mostly because you're running such thick stage two lines here that you don't really want to discard a lot of this stuff. It ran for Professor Oak's new theory, which was a shuffle and then draw six, and then copycat, which is shuffle and then draw for your opponent's hand size. And then 4N ends definitely the workhorse of this deck to just kind of allow you to come back from pretty far down. So the star of the show, in my mind, in this deck is the Shiftgear Klingklang. So the Shiftgear came out in the black and white base set. It has the ability to shiftgear. As long as you like, during your turn before you attack, you may move a metal energy attached to one of your Pokemon to another one of your Pokemon. So Energy Trans is like another way to put it. We've seen this ability printed a number of times. It's not currently in our format. The most recent iteration of it, I think, was Aromatisse that did well. Maybe there's one that I'm missing. We really haven't seen it too recently. Yeah, it's been a little bit. Yeah, but this is definitely one of those cards that, you know, we had a Hydreigon that did the same thing. If you go all the way back to jungle or base set, we had, was it Blastoise? No, Venusaur. Venusaur. That's what I meant. One of the other starters that had that same kind of ability. But this normally is an okay ability. But what really makes this good is the fact that we had some really good special energy in this format. We have Prism Energy and Rainbow Energy. Prism Energy is basically any type of energy, but only on basic Pokemon. So this provides colorless, but if it's attached to a basic Pokemon, this card provides every type of energy, but only one energy at a time. So any, like, similar to Luminous Energy, but just on basic Pokemon. And then Rainbow is probably the strongest variant of this gimmick. Rainbow is every energy type, with the only downside of being it places one damage counter whenever you attach it from hand to one of your Pokemon. So what is usually a downside isn't really too effective, like, it doesn't really impact this deck for a couple different reasons. The shift gear ability allows you to just put it on something that you don't really care too much about and then move it off. So where that damage can just stay on something that doesn't make a huge difference. And then the other one being that this deck really utilizes one of the most broken cards in my mind of this era, Max Potion, really, really effectively. Max Potion is an item card, which is crazy. And it just says heal all damage from one of your Pokemon, then discard all energy attached to that Pokemon. So if you guys know anything about that combo of being able to move energy off, heal all damage, I think you're kind of getting at what I'm getting at. You can see where this deck really takes over. So in addition to the shift gear, we have just a bunch of stuff that keeps it alive a little longer. We have four copies of Eviolite, which is a tool that reduces any damage done to your Pokemon by 20 damage. So just turns all of your beefy, beefy is relative here. So 180 was the max amount of hit points we had on a basic pretty much in this era that you're running two copies of Darkrai, two copies of Groudon, one copy of Kyogre with 170. Shaman EX, which you're running for Keldeo, I believe at this point, maybe it's a little too early for that. Yeah, I think Keldeo. No, Keldeo's not out yet. No. Must have been. Let me see. I mean, specifically, if your opponent's taking five prices at that point, you do 180, which is... Okay, so just as a big hitter. Maybe a late game closer, if you will. And then Cobalion's your good one-prize attacker to swing into stuff with Safeguard. So with Darkrai, it's probably the main attacker in a lot of scenarios. It has a really good ability that gives all your Pokemon with dark energy attached to them free retreat. And since Rainbow and Prism count as dark energy, everything gets free retreat, which is nice. And then it has Night Spear, which for two dark and a colorless does 90 and then 30 damage to one of your opponent's bench Pokemon. So this could just really set up math really well and work towards getting your other Pokemon to be able to do really well. Groudon EX, which wasn't really played that much in this era, but this was played in this deck as a Darkrai counter, because Giant Claw, basically you could set it up to where you put 30 damage on a Darkrai, and then Giant Claw just one-shot that Darkrai. One-shot it. So as long as your defending Pokemon already had two or more damage countered, it does 40 more damage. So yeah, you're just doing a lot of damage with this. And then Tromp was pretty good too. It set up math a lot of really well into some certain matchups. But the card that was the star of the show in the finals was Kyogre EX, which this card is not that great if I'm honest. But in this specific meta, Dual Splash did a lot of work. So against the Eels deck, Dual Splash, it's just for water water color does 50 damage to your opponent's Pokemon. And so you can just pick off the Electrics on the bench, and not a lot can really deal with this effectively. The Eels deck did hit it for weakness, but that wasn't as big a factor when Mewtwo was your main attacker, and that was more where you were centered off. I think the Eels deck did run a Zekrom, but yeah, it didn't really get going all that well if I remember correctly. Dual Splash just kind of put in a lot of work. But yeah, that's pretty much the premise. A lot of the other stuff, if you're not too familiar with this format, is pretty standard. We see three copies of Junk Arm, so one less than the max, probably because you don't want to be discarding a whole lot. But you still want access to the really strong effect of Junk Arm, which is discard two cards, and then you can get back any trainer card, which was a Rattata item. So you could just get back your max potions, and then you could also get back Broken Pokemon Catcher, which is similar to our current Pokemon Catcher, but the effect of having to flip a coin does not exist. You just bring something up to the active, so you can boss his orders on an item card. So a very, very broken card that really just makes this deck so much stronger. You could just strand something active and go crazy with Kyogre, and just pick off stuff off the bench, and that kind of stuff. But yeah, that's pretty much it. It is interesting that this was a list that, when I remember me and my brother were watching the finals, we had no clue who John Roberts was. He was a player from the Midwest that we had never heard of, and we were just like, cling-clang, that's crazy. Like, it just blew our minds that this deck did well. So I guess a lot of similar people might have, in a similar vein, a lot of people probably had the same reaction when they saw Blissey yesterday on the stream in the finals. They're like, Blissey? That makes no sense. It's a little more name recognition with Fernando, but John Roberts is a solid player in his own right. I think he's, I don't think he's ever matched this performance, but definitely I think had some deep runs in tournaments after this. So definitely a cool deck to feature. Definitely a cool deck if you ever go back and play this format. It's a pretty fun deck to play. All the Energy Trans decks are really fun. Like they kind of challenge you to think about resource management and energy placement and all that kind of stuff. And they let you do toolbox-y stuff in a little bit of a different way. The other cool thing about this deck in general is that it can leverage Heavy Ball in a way that most other decks couldn't, and that's an item card that we haven't really seen a ton of since then. And so just an item card lets you search your deck for any Pokemon that had a retreat cost of three or more. And so notably the Groudon EX, Kyogre EX, and the entirety of the Kling Klang line all have at least three retreat. So you're fetching out your engine card for utilizing all your Pokemon, as well as two of your more central attackers. And then to keep your big beefy basics alive a lot longer, the deck leveraged four copies of the Eviolite tool card to make them all take minus 20 damage from every single attack. And generally reactive cards like this aren't super great in the TCG, but at the time there wasn't really a way to get around these Pokemon aside from just catchering around them. So if you just put an Eviolite on every single one of your attackers, well, your opponent's not going to be able to really get it. Like, the way to beat this deck is to get the energy out of play. And if you can stop that from happening, well then what's your opponent going to do? And I think that that was kind of the strategy that John Roberts took on here by just implementing as much healing and as much damage absorption as he could into the deck. Yeah, yeah. It was definitely an interesting list. The idea of not playing any research, or sorry, Juniper this time was definitely anti of this era. Oh, for sure. There's like another cool list I'm looking at, nationals from this year, like Dylan Bryan, who was also, he was a really good player during this era, but ran Mismagius, and I just want to give a shout out to this. This kind of mimics what we saw in Blissey with Magical Trans. It says once during your turn, you can move a psychic from one of your Pokemon to another Pokemon. So similar to Kling Klang, but this is like more of a slower, tanky version that relied on Vileplume to disrupt, which is item lock. So this is another deck, maybe we'll look at it another day from now, but this is a fun format, 2012 nationals. The world's format's very, very different than this one, which is kind of crazy to see. It went from a lot of Mewtwo eels to more of a Darkrai centric era. So definitely interesting to see how it changed even in that short amount of time and focus more on. If you go and look at this, the main takeaway is people figured out that Smeargle exists and that it's pretty good in 2012 because we have like all these lists that don't run Smeargle. And then you go to, let's see, worlds for that year. Let's see if I can find it real quick. We're already, you know, all right, we're going to, here we go, 2012 world championships. Yeah. So yeah, this is all Mewtwo Darkrai. And so like, it's so funny to see, like, it goes from being such a varied meta to like a very homogenous meta and all these lists I can guarantee are running Smeargle, which, you know, wasn't really featured too much at that nationals. So very, very weird, like era, but very cool in its own way. But yeah, I just thought this was a cool deck to talk about, you know, as a rogue deck, not N'Gor's deck, sorry, John Roberts's Kling Klang deck, very cool deck to look at. And yeah, I think this was very impactful in its own way. It showed that like rogue decks could do well for me. And this sparked the brainchild that I eventually took and won a states with in 2013 with Plasma Kling Klang. So maybe we'll talk about that another day from now. But yeah, that's our time capsule segment for today. And thank you for just indulging me as I take a trip down memory lane. Of course, as we attempt to do as often as possible, because John and I are both old and we will never let each other forget that. For sure. For sure. But, you know, speaking of getting old, as we all do one day, we are going to look a little bit in the future here at the end of this week, we've got a couple of special events coming up, likely to be lesser attendance than the regionals that we've seen the past couple of weekends, of course, but wasn't sure wanted to talk about the meta trends we've kind of seen and how we expect any shifts to happen if we expect any shifts to happen moving into this weekend. So we've seen Gardevoir win the past two weeks, we've seen Dragobolt be the number one deck both weekends going into day one and remaining in day two, even though we had an increase in day two in Atlanta and a decrease in day two in Monterey. The question is, is Dragobolt still going to be the most played deck? Is Gardevoir going to win another tournament? Are these rogue decks like Blissey and Joltikbox going to come out of the woodwork and see larger numbers going into this weekend and maybe disrupt some of those results? Or just in general, what do we think is going to happen? And so I'm going to let you lead off with this, John. What do you think we can glean from the results of the past two weeks as people head into this weekend? Before we do that, I would need some housekeeping, I feel like, just to recap our predictions for Monterey. Oh, shoot. You're totally right. Yeah. So we can maybe edit this into another segment earlier in the podcast, but if not, we can do it real quick, just as a segue. So we did three predictions on an over and under, so we had said over under the number of Badoo in top cut, and the over and under was 11.5. Do you have it handy? I am pulling it up right now, so if you just stall it for a second. So you said over. And I said under 11.5 Badoo We had a decent amount of decks that didn't run Badoo in my mind we had the Joltec deck we had Blissey which didn't run Badoo we had some Other stuff I'm trying to remember at the moment. I think they're right. Yeah, you're right. We had we had Some Goldengo Dragapults. We had a Tarabox. We had a Joltec box. We had a Raging Bolt We had a Blissey and the total number of a Badoo in top cut including asymmetrical cut was five. Wow So definitely a huge decrease And I think that has a large part to do with not a lot of Dragapult being in top cut Sure, most of it being Dragapult Goldengo, which I think probably runs one copy of Badoo for the most part. Zero Okay, so even even better like you got to figure out what to cut and that's definitely one to cut there So I won that one the next one we had Was the number of Mexican players Sorry non Mexican players in top cut being over or under 6.5 and I said under And I said over and we have a total of two Mexican players and Asymmetrical top cut we have two Chilean players helping bring that number down for us. So we've got a total of seven Americans slash Latte other Latam non Mexican and one Australian So I guess maybe this wasn't necessarily the fairest question Maybe we should have said that the number of Latam players or number of non Latam players in a symmetrical cut But I'm gonna take the technicality and take It all right, and then the Finally question was what would be the winning a spec for this tournament and neither one of us thought Garty would win No again, so neither one of us picked the winning a spec of secret box Which Aaron put crystal and I put I think the second place What did Badoo play? Oh, I played trolley. Okay. No, we have to go down to the top four Third place was playing sparkling crystal. Okay, and other top four Energy search Pro. Okay, so you win this one as well. So By technicalities, which you know, we count those here on the battlefront tier Aaron wins this round of over and under and we've learned a lesson about Rephrasing our predictions to be maybe be a little bit more accurate moving forward now that we've upkept the house John. Yeah What do you think about this meta and how it has evolved so far and played out and what do you think it's going to do moving into this weekend, so My first initial thought is all the people that wanted to ban Badoo last weekend probably feel a little differently Maybe they don't but they should feel differently about that sentiment You know, we see dragapult slide off a little bit lose some of its ground Which I mean if you look back at like new metas at new tournament I got tournaments right after new metas like the one that comes to mind Was like the Palkia dominance we saw right after rotation like two years ago or something like sure when we have Palkia Dominating top cuts. I mean and like you could say the same thing about Lugia. I think coming out of rotation this year Maybe I'm misremembering that but The the formats in such a state of flux and people don't really know what to play right away And a lot of the lists are suboptimal or looking at them They're just not fully fleshed out. The meta is not established But like once you do have an established meta then you get to work then you're able to say, okay Well, if it's all dragapult all the time We can really play around that and play decks that take advantage of that matchup. And so we're seeing that now We're seeing decks that say okay Well, I'm gonna start cutting some of my Arvins and playing Jacques or you know decks don't run Arvin at all. Don't run Ness ball You know, you have the trolley and then you're setting up turn one and then you're just going from there so decks that really just take advantage of a Bidu start like you're able to like play the Jiltik and have a Something to set up behind So we're seeing those alternate strategies. I don't really care about Bidu Come to the forefront and that's really cool for me As a longtime player it means that you know The players that have been playing a long time that don't get freaked out don't throw their hands up and frustration are getting rewarded Which is really cool I'm excited to see I think you know, it's kind of like Once you once you play that Blissey deck once you play that Jiltik deck like the cat's out of the bag I Don't know I I think the Jiltik deck has some legs if Dragon Bolt gets played a lot both of these decks do truthfully but Like I don't know. I'm interested. I don't really see the staying power like they're not gonna be you know Tier 8 tier B maybe tier B but like probably tier C, which isn't a bad thing It's just the reality of the situation like the power level those two decks I mean the Jiltik deck it has a pretty high power level I will say that but the Blissey deck definitely doesn't have a high power level. It reminds me of like the Worlds where mega Audino won just because it was a meta call And that's kind of how it feels to me the Blissey deck But the Jiltik deck I think has a little more legs and could see a lot more play and I could see it doing pretty well moving forward yeah, the Blissey deck in a lot of ways I think occupies the same lane as straight walls or maybe even something going back to worlds like Iron Thorns where when you expect the meta percentage of the room to be so hyper concentrated and morphed around One specific deck and you hope to hit that deck over and over and over throughout the day When you successfully do hit that deck over and over and over throughout the day You're gonna have a great tournament run when you don't you're gonna fall flat on your face And it's the same reason we didn't see walls be successful last week and why I don't Expect us to see Blissey be successful Maybe it still would be this weekend but I think by the by Milwaukee is where we'll see a shift where Blissey won't be in as good of a position as it would have been this This past weekend or this coming weekend the Jiltik deck. Like you said, I actually think it's flexible enough That if people are kind of ahead of the curve with it and know Which cards to include with it like we said you can choose to play that Galvantula or not play it you can choose to Play the Galvantula EX, which it's not the most powerful card in the world, but has the ability to one-hit KO Clefairy Mew, Pheasant Dippity, Squawkabilly and a lot of things for two energy or Potentially do 180 damage and item lock your opponent Which is something that a lot of people just may not be prepared for So you've got that tech option you have the option to include neither of those cards and just include some other more consistency based cards in your deck if you're okay with just having a Jiltik sitting on your bench the rest of the game and Obviously Pikachu and Ironhands are both very powerful cards And if you're able to utilize them effectively the deck can hit the ground running and if your decks Not able to withstand that pressure early on or is not able to counter pressure them well enough that they can't get going You're probably in for a rough time You know interestingly one of the decks that kind of gives that deck the hardest time can be something like Raging Bolt especially the Single prizer focused Raging Bolts that are running either multiple baby bolts or baby bolt and Karidon and Slytherwing and Slytherwing in particular is that the card that really can give that deck a hard time, and I'm not sure it has a way around it either No, I didn't really choose through Pikachu for sure exactly exactly But it's an interesting thing to see pop into the metagame And I totally expect its meta percentage to increase over the next couple of weeks but with that being said we have to see some stuff kind of fall off for that to be the case though right and If that's the case where are those hits coming from you know is it going to be the Raging Bolts that are falling by the Wayside is it going to be the Dragapult percentage that just gets eaten into as people either feel less safe with the deck or Are again less and less comfortable with just bringing the quote-unquote best a deck as it has continued to not be the winner at the end of the day I mean Yeah, I think we'll see some Dragapult fall off. I don't think 25% is sustainable truthfully sure Like that wouldn't surprise me if it comes down below 15 at some point You know it's still really powerful. It's still considered like the strongest deck of format by a long shot But like players are adapting their strategies to be able to beat it, and it has a huge target on its back You know we're seeing hard people hard counter it right now Which we don't really see all that often in the Pokemon trading card game like especially the last few formats We've had like Dragapult like Regidrago had that kind of prestige But even then like we didn't see as much hard counters for it as some other decks. We've seen in the past So this is the first time in a while. We've seen like hard counters. I could see some players migrating from Dragapult to other decks for sure this next few weeks You know I can see Golden Goat coming down. Maybe a little bit It's still pretty good Had some pretty good showing we saw especially the Golden Goat Dragapult deck do pretty well at Monterey so I could see maybe people moving from Golden Goat to a Golden Goat Dragapult to maybe deal with some of the work like weirder matchups like a Like a Gardevoir that I might struggle with normally I don't know so definitely I Think Raging Bolt's always weird. This was a weird one for Raging Bolt. I think 10% is probably like where I expected to land at Maybe a little bit higher because it's still like the beginner friendly like this is your first regionals You play Raging Bolt kind of thing, right? Okay, there's a lot of those for the next few weeks that we have you know and now like Europe's getting their turn and Australia is getting their turn so they might go back to playing some of the more New card friendly stuff we saw at Atlanta So we might see some more Hop Station some more and Zorak this weekend I could see that kind of coming to the forefront too and not converting super Well, I still think the power level of those two decks is a little lacking But I definitely could see some people players just wanting to play the new deck new cards We'll see yeah, I feel like one of those decks is almost there and To me it's the ends deck Personally like yeah that the hops deck is it it's kind of like the Raging Bolt of that set Where unfortunately even though it's got some kind of tricks that it can do Because it's got the game plan of going from a two prizer to a one prizer to a one prizer to a one prizer to a Two prizer to close out the game and it's got a self-sustained prize map that's self-contained within its archetype that flows really well It still is too linear in the sense that it's just like I'm gonna hit you and I'm gonna hit you again I'm gonna hit you again I'm gonna hit you again and Oftentimes the 30 damage pings to the bench aren't enough off the back of a two prizer that can unfortunately be pretty easily one-hit KO whereas when you get the ends deck you have a Toolbox you approach on the back of something that's got a beefy enough HP pool that it can sometimes be difficult for things to one-hit KO and In the matchups where it's easy to one-hit KO like gold and go or our chalet on for example You can actually fall back on attacking with the one prizer in Darmanitan directly because both of those coincidentally are weak to that card And they you know speaking plane playing against the ends deck at Atlanta From the gold and go perspective. I Got pretty lucky that he prized our Amaka both games And I didn't have to deal with double Darumaka sitting on the bench at any point throughout my series Because for the life of me I feel like that matchup is Pretty bad If your opponent is able to set up multiple Darmanitan on the bench to be a threat and you're having to waste resources trying To chase them down rather than hitting these or arcs that are sitting in the active spot Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah, I definitely I think you're you're spot-on with that analysis of which deck is stronger Out of those two I'd agree with that and Zora just having that built-in draw engine to so nice, you know trade We've missed you we're so glad you're back like it's cool to see even in like non-standard Zora arc decks We're seeing it trade pop up again, which is kind of cool. Yeah, definitely harkens back to a different era But um, yeah, definitely some things to think about moving forward out of this weekend some cool rogue decks to maybe try out on live this week Or try at your local league. So that's definitely something that I'm excited to see Any thoughts on Like any predictions or anything that like what deck do you think will win? If you had to pick a deck to play this weekend, what would you play? I don't know man these special events can be such such a crapshoot, especially when you're talking like South Africa and I Don't know how big the one in Spain is. I It I'd be hard-pressed to not pick dragapult or Guardi at this point, I think But I know Europe really loves Goldengo and they do love Goldengo so I Feel like Goldengo is flexible enough maybe the cop-out answer is something like dragapult Goldengo and you kind of get the best of both worlds in a lot of scenarios and But I don't know I still feel like this is a format that's almost open enough that there are probably seven different decks that could win an event and I wouldn't be surprised to see Goldengo, Guardi, Dragapult, Eevee box or maybe even this Joltik deck take an event down, but I think you know, you know I guess gun to my head I would pick Goldengo if I just pick a specific variant probably Goldengo Dragapult Yeah, yeah, that seems like a safe pick I probably pick Dragapult But I could definitely like there's a alternate side of me that I would love to play that Joltik deck because it seems like it still has a really good mashup spread into the expected room for those two tournaments. Sure. If you hit a lot of Dragapult and Cardivore and Goldengo, I feel like you're like great, you know, you're happy with that Well, hey, do you have a League Cup coming up this weekend? Maybe? No next two weekends. I'm focusing on things other than Pokemon That's fair. If my anniversary coming up this weekend. So, you know, eight years of marriage to celebrate. And then the week after that is the prestigious Winchester, Virginia Apple Blossom Festival, which is my wife's favorite thing in the world. So it's like our hometown festival and we go to it every year. So it's a lot of fun. So you'll definitely see me there cheering on the parades and, you know, walking around with a beverage or two. So that'll be a fun time. But no, no, no real sense of Pokemon. I think when I get back that May 10th, I'll probably play in a league cup if I can. But that'll probably be the last one I play for a while. But till we get into NAIC and start doing that. Did you register for NAIC before? Oh, I did. I did. I did manage to get in through wave one. I know some people that unfortunately have missed on wave one and are gonna be sweating it out tomorrow morning. I had almost forgotten. I was actually out this evening with my father-in-law, my nephew and my wife, and we thankfully had stopped right around eight o'clock and needed to get gas. And so sitting there at a gas pump, like, oh yeah, it's like 7.58. Hold on guys. Let's wait a second. And then ended up in the queue system. I'm so thankful. I will say thank you RK9 for implementing this queue system instead of having people hopelessly refresh the website over and over and crash it. Yeah. Because even though it leads to some disappointed people who managed to get there at second one and not get in, it also prevents people who were there at second one who can't refresh fast enough because they're on a mobile data connection from not being able to get in. Yeah, definitely improved. I'm glad that, I mean, hats off to RK9 in general. They've been such a boon for this game from, and they do a lot of other games too, but especially I think they love Pokemon. Clearly their name is a reference to RK9. But definitely good to have Carlos and Dana Pero and then the Schmanskys all part of that group. They're all big, passionate people. And Will Post too. Passionate people for the game that are just a great part to have in our community. I am glad you got accepted as a player. I got accepted as a judge. I will be a TCG4 judge for the Master's Division. So I did the triple crown this year, which feels pretty good. This will be my third of three ICs all this year, which is still mind blowing to me, but it'll be a lot of fun. I'm really looking forward to it. And yeah, lots of Pokemon to play and digest and talk about between now and then. So we'll hope you will join us here on the Battle Frontier to do so. Yep, couldn't have said it any better myself. So once again from Jon and I, thank you very much. If you can follow us and the show on socials, we'll have links to all of those in the description of the episode. And don't forget, if you would rather check the episode out on YouTube instead of Spotify, we are over there now. Just search Battle Frontier Podcast and we would appreciate like, follow, subscribe on whatever platform you're listening on. Leave a rating review if you're on a podcasting platform and we will catch you guys next week. ♪♪♪