Episode 29: IS GARDEVOIR UNSTOPPABLE?

Hello, and welcome back to the Battle Frontier podcast, where we aim to help you level up in your journey as a competitive Pokemon TCG player. I'm Aaron Curry. Here with me, as always, is my co-host, Jon Orgel. And this week, we're going to look at some of the results from the special event that happened over in Sevilla, Spain, this past weekend, before we hit you with some trivia in Blaine's quiz show, and follow that up with kind of how the meta has developed and how we expect it to continue to develop heading into Milwaukee this coming weekend. But before we get into all of those Pokemon results, I need to know, Jon, what have you been up to this week? So this week, it was pretty quiet. What did I do Saturday and Sunday? I know you said you weren't going to do a ton of Pokemon. That's true. My wife and I celebrated eight years of marriage. Today was our anniversary, but we wouldn't take a... Congrats. Thank you. Thank you. We took an anniversary trip over the weekend up to Northern Virginia. So we stayed at like a super nice hotel in the... If you're familiar with Northern Virginia, which I don't think you are, but it was in Tyson's Corner, which is like the bougiest mall in America, essentially, or one of them. They have like a Prada store and all this kind of stuff, like just all the luxury stores. We didn't shop at any of that, but we stayed at a nice hotel. We had some like rewards points with our credit card or something like that. So we just booked a nice hotel and then hung out Friday and then Saturday went into the city and went to the National Gallery and just walked around and looked at art for four hours and then ate some good food for lunch and dinner. And then, yeah, we just did a little bit of bar hopping, I guess, at the night. Sidney, one of her best friends from college era, went to George Mason or George Washington, one of the... Whatever is over in Arlington, I don't really know all that well, but we went to one of her like favorite bars from that era. So that was fun. Okay. And then came back Sunday, we did some shopping, came back and then yesterday had GLC night, which was kind of a dud, but that's okay. We had like some people still, some new people show up, so it was fun. So not a whole lot of Pokemon, but a great time just hanging with my wife and, you know, having some kind of quality time in that relationship. So that was good. How about you, man? How was your week? I definitely need it. Pretty good. Pretty good. Except on Saturday, I went to a League Cup and unfortunately went three and two with Goldengo Dragapult and just had the worst best of one experience that I've had in a while where first three rounds was either, first three rounds didn't open with a supporter and just managed to still somehow come out of that with two wins in three of those games and then go into round four and play an actual like legitimate game against a straight Dragapult deck, which was pretty interesting. Like we were both playing Genesect, so we shut off each other's ace specs and kind of went back and forth. And I was able to talk, like we talked about the game afterwards and I was able to get Monkey Dory down on the bench with a Dark early enough that I could boss up his Dracloak that had all of the energies on it and just put him several turns behind and kind of swing the game back in my favor from there. And then it turned out that he had actually had the Dragapult in hand and he just decided to be greedy and go for an extra turn of Recon Directive because he wasn't, he didn't feel like he was ready to attack yet. And then the next round after that played against Raging Bolt and lost. That was a game, and I know you specifically have said that you don't like when people complain about this, but I feel like I lost the game purely off of my prize cards. So I prized the 1-of Countercatcher and Pheasantipity, and I feel like if I'd had one or the other of those, the Fez wouldn't have really guaranteed anything, but the Countercatcher would have set me up for a play after they took a prize on their first turn KOing a Dreepy with Fan Rotom. I could have bossed around that one prizer, killed the Teal Mask Ogrepon on the bench and taken two energy off the board and removed the only Terra Pokemon that they had in play. So making Noctowl unavailable and just kind of really slowing things down, making it more difficult to take the knockout with Bolt, and instead I had to settle for a simple tiny little one-prize KO and just being a turn short essentially the rest of the game. But that happens, and unfortunately that is the business that we play in with League Cups and League Challenges with Best-of-One. It was a really sour experience with the deck as a whole, like for half of my games to just feel like the deck didn't function, and also having like a 60% win rate is not super great when you need to do better than that to make cut at these events. It put me off of Gold Dango pretty far, I don't think that I'm going to be picking it up for the rest of this format, even though I do have another League Cup coming up this weekend. Cool. Yeah, I'm going to try to plan a League Cup coming up on the 10th, but it just depends. I have to go out of town for work one weekend next month, so we'll have to see how that all shakes out. But yeah, I mean, Best-of-One, I feel a little bit more sympathetic to people prizing stuff in single game than I do in like a series where you can like, okay, I'm not going to win this game, so scoop, I'm going to go next. Sure. Yeah, it sucks. That happens. But it happens, though. It's just not your day. Part of that is, that's card games at the end of the day. Because of that, I've just, unfortunately, I let that kind of ruin the rest of my afternoon for Saturday, which is just, that's a me thing. I didn't need to let that happen, but I was in just a really sour mood for the rest of the day. But have come back around in a positive manner, I think. Even though the ladder just reset like two days ago, I'm already back in Arceus here on TCG Live, mostly off the back of playing the low elo Donk deck that has been going around to burn my way up to Ultra Ball, and then from there, playing real decks to get the rest of the way. So you really only need to win like a net, I think, 15 games to make it to Arceus once you get to Ultra Ball. And so when you play the hardcore 4 Petra Runt, 4 Brute Bonnet, multiple Squawkabilly, Iron Valiant, I'm only going to win if I Donk you deck, you can freely concede at the lower elos because you don't lose any points. And so that has become a somewhat popular strategy going into, but it's silly, but it kind of highlights the fact that people don't want to play at the lower end of the ladder, especially if you end up in a game with someone who's either not playing what they would consider a real deck, so they don't feel like it's a good use of their time, because they're trying to use it as a practice or testing tool. And I don't know, it just kind of highlights the fact that the system probably needs to change in some regard. Yeah, definitely not a hard reset every ladder reset like that. I mean, you go down to like, Great Ball, or is it even? I don't even, I don't, I don't remember which one it is. It's either Poke Ball or Quick Ball, I think, but I'm not sure which one it is. How long does it take, generally, to have to grind up to Ultra Ball from there? Oh, it takes forever. I mean, because the gains are the same. So normally, if you win, you get 10 points. If you're on a win streak, you get 13. And if that win streak ever gets reset, again, you don't lose any points until you get to Ultra Ball. And if you're losing in Ultra Ball, you lose anywhere from three, I think it's three points if the person has more points than you, six points if they have less, and then if they're in a lower tier than Ultra Ball, you lose like 10 or 12. So it is possible to demote out of Ultra Ball, I think. But realistically, like if you're just playing a half-decent number of games, once you get there, you can pretty easily progress. The other things that have happened, though. So the TCG Pocket finished their first ranked season. I did not make it to Master Ball. I just could not bring myself to finish that grind, even though I was in Ultra Ball 1 and needed like right around 100 more points to do it. I just did not find the will to push through what felt like an iron wall at the end of the day. But that's okay, because the way that their ladder reset works, it hasn't happened yet. Like ranked is not available yet in the game. They're waiting for the new set to come out, which actually drops tomorrow morning as of our recording of this. And for the first time in the recent history, we don't have any leaks, aside from the cards that they revealed in that trailer. So we cannot talk about any new pocket cards this week. But except for one, except for one. There's one very notable card that we already know is coming to pocket. And I think that is going to be a game changer and actually might make a lot of people more interested in playing the game. And that is Rare Candy. So we know Rare Candy is coming to the game. That means stage twos are back on the menu. And what has otherwise been a hardcore Darkrai, Giratina metagame, being able to do something like lead with Spriggetito and Rare Candy into Meowth Scorata, which attacks for two energy or any other stage two that attacks for only two energy, or doing something like using the new Charizard EX from Shining Revelry, you Rare Candy into that on turn two and use its attack to go fetch three energy to itself. Like stage twos, select stage twos, I should say, have a pretty decent chance of coming back in a big way in this expansion, I think. I agree. But we'll have to see the rest of the cards to see how that shakes out. And I don't know, man. I think that I know I've said it every single time we talk about pocket. I am waiting for them to announce the official circuit for this game. Yeah. Um, I probably I can imagine something at Worlds like they do a showcase or something. Yeah. But yeah, I don't I don't see it. It might not be till next season that they announce anything. I don't know. But yeah, I definitely I like pocket. I played a lot of I actually started playing ranked a little bit more. I haven't lost a game in ranked yet, but I'm still like at the bottom levels. Sure. I'm curious. I'm curious if you've actually played against a real person yet. Like, I'm wondering, did everyone grind out of pokeball? So you're only playing against bots until you get to like great ball now or. I played so pokeball and great ball. So it's like a beginner pokeball, great ball. And then I think now I'm in whatever this after great ball, after great balls, ultra ball. Oh, then I'm still in great ball. Okay. So let's see. So, yeah, pokeball was like mostly bots. Yeah. And then great ball was like three people for everyone, like three to one for bot ratio. Bots are terrible, but like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's literally late in great ball. Every almost every game was against a real person. So, OK, but like, you know, they're still not like to dark, great. It's just dumb right now. Like, I'm glad that we're getting rare candy and hopefully it shakes it up because the meadow is getting kind of stale. Yeah. So it's one of those decks, though. It's the first good deck in a Pokemon card game that I've actually found enjoyable to play. True. And that's because probably that like the weird the customization in pocket is a little bit different than what you would see in a standard physical TCG deck and that it all generally comes in the trainer section. And so when you take that same dark idea, it's in a deck. If you play cards like Rocket Grunt or Pokemon Center Lady or how many tool cards you play or how many Cyrus and Sabrina you play and different things like that all affect the mirror matchup in particular. And that's actually a pretty interesting matchup when both people draw decently well and are setting up. Yeah. But playing the mirror is fun at times like you have to like kind of think a few turns ahead and then figure it out from there, like, OK, well, I don't want to swing with Giratina first because then they can just go respond with their own Giratina and then like damage it with a Dark Riders and respond, take a knockout. But yeah, it's not like a hard deck, but it's still like has intricacies for sure. I think I like the direction pockets going after playing it more like it's just like I can definitely see this having legs and like getting to the point where we're having competitive battles that actually like feel enjoyable and take skill to play. So that's well, now that they're introducing cards that actually provide decision trees for people instead of just, OK, attach your energy and attack or flip for Misty and then attack, you actually like, OK, do I want to trigger this ability? Where do I attach this tool card? Do I need to attach to my Dark Ride this turn or my active? Like when do I want to do this 20 damage ping? Do I heal this turn? Do I need to do I need to worry about my opponent getting rid of my hand? Do I want to get rid of their hand? And you have a bunch of options as the game goes on. And generally over the course of that prolonged game, you'll have access to your entire deck. So being able to properly sequence things actually becomes a skill that is relevant in the game where I feel like earlier on in its life cycle, it was just in a lot of ways the variance factor was much higher. I agree. Yeah, definitely. I'm playing this deck. I mean, it's also just playing big basics, I guess. But sure. Like if you get the Dark Ride and Giratina out, you're having a full game. So like, that's fair. Like the only games that I lost or like didn't feel good were like when I only got one basic Pokemon the whole game. And yeah, but then you talk like that's variance, that's card games. And then you just hit play again and you move on. Yeah. Yeah. Speaking of moving on. Yeah. We will move on from this now. And we'll probably take some time, maybe a little bit to talk about some of the new cards from pocket, depending on how that looks following next week, depending on what other news we have outside of the Milwaukee results. But before we get to that, we first need to talk about what happened this past weekend over in Sevilla, Spain. I believe I'm pronouncing that correctly. That's how it looks like. It looks like Seville, but I know it's a Spanish word, so I'm going to assume that it's Sevilla. But anyway, so we're looking at the general metagame percentages for the overall tournament. And we can see once again, Dragapult, number one deck. If we turn this variant grouping off, Dragapult Dusknoir continues to be the number one deck. But Straight Dragapult on its own legs is number four. So when you combine them together, number one archetype as a whole, Raging Bull. in Goldengo, still occupying those two and three slots in Gardevoir, creeping up ever so slightly more again, continuing that rise. You know, I think that these are the same top six decks that we had last week in Monterey, and the only difference being that in Atlanta, Gardevoir was not in that top six and was replaced by, I believe, Tarapagos, but it may have been something else. I honestly can't remember right now. But then, when we go and look at the day two metagame, we see some shakeups. You know, we see Joltik rising up from its, you know, day one, it was number seven, admittedly, but when we look at day two, it jumps up to number five. Tarabox and Archeloudon fall down by the wayside slightly, and our top four gets a little bit of a shakeup as well, with Gardevoir converting better than Goldengo, and Raging Bolt to move up into that second place slot, while Dragapult maintains number one. And none of this is really surprising if you've been following this format. You know, Gardevoir and Dragapult have proven that they are far and away the most consistent, most powerful decks, and it's a wonder that they aren't the number one and two most played to begin with. And I think that the probably perceived simplicity of decks like Goldengo and Raging Bolt are what cause players to flock to them more, coupled with the fact that we have people saying that Raging Bolt theoretically has a good matchup into one or both of these stage two decks, which is not an opinion that I believe Jon or I share, but... but then Goldengo, by the same token, you know, it's something where it has anecdotally has a good matchup into Dragapult. It can be teched to be good into both Dragapult and Gardevoir, but I think you have to selectively choose which of those matchups you really want to target in your list, and in doing so you're probably sacrificing the other one a fair bit. But the big thing to talk about is just the continued rise and continued increased play rate of this Joltec deck, and in a lot of ways, we're going to talk about the list here in just a little bit, but in a lot of ways, Jon, this reminds me of Lugia from the pre-rotation format, in that you take your setup turn, you get your big board of guys set up, and you just start swinging, and half the game you're just looking for boss to end of the game, and you know, if your opponent doesn't have an answer to your attacker, you just keep swinging, you know, you go for the early iron hands, and that's a play that Lugia was often able to leverage pretty early on, except this now has two potential game plans that it gets to accomplish into two different sets of matchups, and it kind of leverages attackers like iron hands and like Pikachu, which are good in different situations, and it leverages them very effectively into those two different situations, allowing the deck to have more flexibility than you would kind of first assume it looks like it should have. Yeah, I think it's probably the... it's definitely the best way to play drag... iron hands right now. Oh sure. And that's similar to how Lugia was the best way to play iron hands when it was in format, so that definitely has a lot of similarities, and then yeah, we talked a little bit before, but I felt like, yeah, I agree with it, the statement. Lugia is all about your bench management, and like you win and lose based on what Pokemon you put on your bench, and you're basically just creating like checkmate scenarios for your opponent, and saying do you have an answer for this? Okay, great, and how about this one? Okay, how about this one? And it's the same way with Jolting Box, like if you get that set up turn one, turn two, you're basically just posing questions for your opponent and forcing them to have answers, and that's basically your whole game plan, and we see basically if you put yourself like... and as long as you don't... like as long as you don't checkmate yourself, like as long as you don't fill up your bench with too many Pokemon, or like put your energy in a bad spot early, you should be pretty good. Like you should have multiple ways to close out a game and go from there, and I like the deck. It's a cool deck. I haven't really played any with it. It's one I probably need to pick up and play, because I don't think I have it built or anything like that, but I definitely want to try it out probably in the next few weeks. Sure, and so moving on, we can look at the results from this event, and we see once again, Gardevoir takes another major dub, and we're not going to pull this list up. Yoann played literally card for card Brent Thomas in 60 for Monterey Regionals last week. Some of the... and then in second place, we have Pedro Vicencio on Straight Dragapult, Harvey Scheinman on Enz Box or Enzorak Darmanitan, Piotr Matlinsky on Tarabox, Thomas Jones on Straight Dragapult, Arthur Vincent with Froslass Monkey Dory, Bali Oliphon with Gardevoir, Kim Pobega on Straight Dragapult, Raquel Hazim on Raging Bolt, and Thomas Abbott bringing that Joltik Box into the asymmetrical cut, rounding things out at 10th place. And so some of the lists we're going to highlight here, the first one we're going to look at is Pedro's Straight Dragapult list, which is consistent, is one word that I could use to describe this deck. You know, we see four Buddy Potts, four Ultra Ball, four Brock Scouting, four Research, four Boss, four Iono, a third copy of Dragapult. It's got three Countercatcher in addition to those four Boss, you know. And to make room for all of these additional consistency cards, Pedro opted to cut Arvin out of the deck completely, and is also running zero tool cards. Yep, zero Rare Candy, zero... No Crispin, no EXP share. No gimmicks, it's all consistency for the most part. No Knight Stretcher, which was a big thing I noticed, and it kind of puts you in a weird spot if your opponent knows that you don't run any Knight Stretcher, they can target your Monkey Dory, and then you're not able to use that the rest of the game. You know, this is a kind of big departure from how Dragapult's been played at the beginning of this format. We're definitely seeing the effects of Badoo more and more as this format progresses. We're now at the point where, okay, we're just not going to run items. We're just going to get our Poffin turn one, and then Brock Scouting and Recon Directive for all my energy, and then it doesn't matter. Like, if you Badoo me, it's like, cool, I can still accomplish my game plan. You know, Brock Scouting for the Dragcloaks, Brock Scouting for the Dragapult, and then I can find my energy just using Recon Directive. I don't even run Earthen Vessel in this list. Like, you don't run any way to search out energy as an item, so you're basically relying upon drawing into it, including your... I think this is probably the biggest shocker for me was seeing a Neo Upper in this list. We've seen Unfair Stamp more and more, so this was definitely like a big change of pace from previous, I'd say. It doesn't run any tools, which I guess fits with Tooljammer. I think you already said that. I apologize. But it's such a different take on this list. I don't know how you feel about it. I definitely was a little, like, hesitant to embrace this kind of a play. But it's consistent. I mean, you can't knock it for that. Like, you get to run some really powerful Pokemon. You get to run a Monkey Dory. I don't know. I don't know if I like the Neo Upper at all. It just seems like you have no way to search it out. But I guess it's probably the best A-Spec if you're not running Unfair Stamp or running Crystal. When you're not running Arvin, you can't really effectively run those cards as well anyway. And so when you're not, you know, the deck's not running Crispin, it's not running EXP share, so it needs some way to be able to attack with a Dragapult with no energy on board. And I think that that's kind of the angle where you approach Neo Upper from. There are things, like this deck, looking at it more, it reminds me so much of old Pokemon decks, where you've just got 16 or more Supporter cards, and then you're using an on-board Pokemon ability to filter out for the other cards that you're looking for. And the effects of a lot of these Supporter cards are very reminiscent of old-school, very simplistic Supporter cards. You're not doing anything super fancy with your Supporters, but you're doing very powerful things. And being able to leverage that with probably the best Stage 1 evolving ability in the game right now, and one of the best attacking Stage 2s in the game, is generally just a pretty good recipe for success. There are things about this list that I personally would want to change. Like, I feel like, like you mentioned, the no Knight Stretcher, I feel like you either want one Knight Stretcher or even maybe a second Super Rod. Just playing 4 Research and only 1 Recovery card, what if you have to discard that pretty early on? It just makes your resources so finite for the rest of the game. Prize of Energy, like you prize a Luminous, and then you have to discard a Fire, turn 1, then you have 1 Fire, 1 Luminous, and then the new Upper. Like, if your opponent gets that Genesect with the A-Spec Neutralizer or whatever ability, you've basically got 2 Energy for your Dragapults for the whole game. And if you attach Luminous, you have to find, like, I mean, that's not too bad, but I don't know. I do like the synergy with Luminous in this. You know, I think that's a cool thing that we've seen come out is the Luminous for Monkey Dory, and then you can flex it into using it for Dragapult. I wonder if we'll ever see, like, Enhanced Amber come out now and try to make a comeback with Luminous being on the rise, but probably not. I think with our itchy green friend, the card that we might be more likely to see is actually Ruffian, which 1. Targets the tools that are going on a lot of these Bidus, but also has the flexibility to go and hit the Luminous Energies, the Neo-Upper Energies. I guess theoretically you could hit, like, Jet Energy, but it also hits Sparkling Crystal. It knocks tools off of things that have a Vengeful Punch. It knocks the tools off of Genesect. You know, so it's got merit, but I feel like it would have to go in a very specific deck that really needs that utility out of the card. One thing I did want to look at before we move on from Pedro's deck is just what all he ended up playing against. Just to see... I was curious how much Dragapult Mirror he ended up having to play. Seven, eight... So we see three? Three total throughout the event? Looks like that. And none of them were... I don't know if it shows Dusknoir in this. It would, yeah. Okay, so they're all Straightpult. Which, Straightpult now, I think, is... is that the preferred variant? Like, Day 1, was that the preferred variant? No, it was actually... the Dusknoir was more popular, and I think in a lot of ways that's still because that is the one that the average player is more practiced on. Okay. And for... in many scenarios, I think a lot of people view Dusknoir as, like, a security blanket for Dragapult. You know, they're more afraid to tackle things like that Mirror without it. And reasonably, the Dusknoir variant is more favored into Gardevoir than the Straightpult variant is. Sure. I still think it's probably unfavored on... on the whole, but it is more likely to win because... just because it has the ability to one-hit KO Gardevoir, whereas the other variant does not. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I... I think that's been interesting, is that Dragapult, like, if we've looked at what has done well, what has basically made the finals, other than Hedrick, I think, who had pulled... Dragapult had Dusknoir in his, right? Yeah, yeah. Everybody else has had no Dusknoir. And we've seen it time and time again from the last few weeks. Like, Dusknoir is kind of on the way out, right? At least at the top, top, top, top. Like, I mean, from the top players, I think a lot of top players have moved away from Dusknoir. Yeah, well, you know, without that Dusknoir line, you've got five spots in your deck to leverage for more supporter cards or just other powerful cards that you want to fit into your deck, like the Monkey Dory, like extra copies of Boss's Orders, or just more draw supporters, more search cards, making your deck more consistent, albeit while sacrificing some potential raw power or some options in that regard. Yeah, it seems that that's probably enough Dragapult for now. We can go ahead and move on to one of the new kids on the block in the Journey Together format that I wanted to see be successful and just kind of fell flat pretty early on in the metagame. But now things have cycled around enough. Gardevoir has gotten itself back into the mix. And that's allowed the Dark-type and Zoroark-focused deck to come back into the limelight and do what it does best. We've seen it come up more and more, I'd say. I think I've heard rumblings of players trying to switch over and play this while it's still relevant, while it's still good. But we just, I think we had to find a good list for it. That was a big part of it. And this is a really narrowing in on that. This is like a good, I'd say this is a good list in my, like, from everything I've seen, this is the way I'd want to play this deck. You're stable to use Darmanitan with your reversal energies. But yeah, just a good mix. You know, you're running Badoo and Cleffa. Cleffa, I think, was a huge include for this deck. In the interview for this list, from the pilot of this, and I think his top four match, or sorry, top eight match, Harvey, he won it and he's just basically like, yeah, the deck's great once you set up, but you have to run cards like Cleffa in order to set up, which makes a lot of sense. Like the early turns with this deck, it's kind of a clunky, you don't have easy ways to search the cards. This list is, instead of trying to go with an Arvind build, much more focused on the research and Iona angle, like we've seen from a lot of other lists as this format's progressed. But since you're running stage ones, you just kind of have to burn through your deck and try to find stuff. You don't run that much recovery, but you run enough. You run, you know, one night stretcher, one super rod, and that should be enough to get you to the finish line. Once you get set up, you're pretty good. Like you don't have a lot of, you know, you don't have a lot of things going, like not a whole lot of moving pieces and trades just broken. Like anybody that's played. trade, you know, has fond thoughts and memories of it. And now yeah, we get to see like, just this, this is dialing on the right kind of combination. For sure. And you have tools in this deck. I think the metagame is one of the things that really held this deck back before. In that, you know, like you said, the setup can be clunky, like the big stumbling block. And this is a design choice by the game devs, I believe, is like Darumaka has 80 HP, so you can't buddy poffing for it. And that makes it ever so slightly more difficult to get things off the ground, which is fine. Like that can be a weakness of the deck is it may be a little bit slower to get going. And then the requirement for your Zoroark that it needs a partner on the bench to ping an attack off of because Night Joker is pretty powerful and being able to use a wide swath of attacks, even though it often gets narrowed down to just flame body cannon and virtuous or victorious or whatever Reshiram's attack is called, or rage, I guess as well. But with Gardevoir coming back, being able to go something like countercatcher or boss Garde and hit it for 340. And then your opponent's only response is to build another Gardevoir and get a bravery charmed Drifloon to come take you out. Like you're in a pretty good spot to then leverage that matchup, boss the Drifloon to the bench and flame body cannon for two prizes or not even boss it just KO it and KO something on the bench. So that match is pretty easy to seal up nice and tight. And with a good enough start, you can also leverage things pretty well into Dragapult as well. Now that people are starting to include things like power glass. So you can have a Zoroark that uses flame body cannon and immediately recovers the dark energy to pass to pressure a potential flame body cannon on the follow up turn as well. Yeah, this this is like a list that's running all the cards that we want to run in this list. And the way that it does that is by like thinning out kind of the there's not many Arvin, you're just saying I'm going to draw into everything. And so that's kind of the cheat code for this in a lot of ways. And you know, you're just you're saying I'm going to rely on trade to find me what I need when I need it. And I'm not going to worry about some bordering it out or secret box or whatever the hyper aroma any of that I'm going to run prime catcher because when I have a snipe attack, and I can just cherry pick targets like I can wipe cliff, you know, to cliff curlia at the same turn or to drag cloak in the same turn. Yep. Seems pretty good. Yeah, definitely. And finding everything more consistently off of trade makes it even better. Yep. And like you said, I think that the Cleffa is an interesting nod where a lot of people have used to but do in the past. And this deck doesn't typically want to do this long drawn out, but do or you want to go hunt down the stage one. So having something that more proactively lets you go filter through cards in your deck to find them is a pretty good shout. Next deck to talk about here is the frostless monkey Dory from Arthur Vincent. And notably, I feel like this list doesn't show anything that people haven't necessarily seen before from this deck. But if people haven't seen this deck before, the general game plan is your item locking with itchy pollen, or counter catcher and corner stalling something with Maractus while you slowly amass damage on your board and your opponent's board and move the damage from your board to your opponent's board with monkey Dory and just trying to make your opponent's life as awful as possible as you slowly whittle them down throughout the game. Yep, this is a this is kind of the control deck of the moment, I'd say. We've seen a little bit of Pidgeot control the very beginning from a lot of Blitzle in the like online era of this format. But as we've progressed, we've moved away from that. And we've seen a lot more of corner come up. And court and Maractus has been included in a lot of decks lately. And it's seen here too, which is kind of an interesting include for this list. We've seen buddy frost last before, and everything else, but I definitely think practice is a good include, you're able to pile up, like if you can get like a physical dip in the active, and get three or four turns of just passive damage from frost last, you can definitely control the game from there. Yeah, this list isn't anything too, too crazy. I like the counter gain. In a lot of ways, you can run it for Maractus or for blood moon. I don't think there's anything too innovative other than the Maractus. Yeah, I don't know. I'm looking at this just kind of, it makes a lot of sense. The two TM devos is really nice. In this format, especially when you have, you know, the two top decks being stage two attacking or decks that damage themselves. So once you get, you know, a few turns of passive damage built up, you can just go okay, TM Devo, and now we're at the point where we can just kind of board wipe from there and remove any threat from that side and just clean up with, you know, blood moon or even, you know, whatever, at that point, monkey doors can just for sure do enough to knock out everything else on the board. But yeah, TM Devo is really strong right now. I think it's kind of underutilized in a lot of decks. Especially now that we don't have rare candy, I guess it's not as impactful. You know, if we're not trying to work any stuff out, it doesn't make a big difference. But it's still really good when you have the ability to like put a bunch of damage on something and then TM Devo. I mean, that seems really good. Absolutely. So like, this, this deck is, like you said, I wouldn't, I don't know if I'd fully put it into the control category. But it reminds me a lot of control in the sense that it's not a deck that people enjoy testing against. And therefore, unsurprisingly, a lot of people are probably under tested into this matchup. And if you are not able to formulate a game plan and how to go about, you know, evolving your guys, what pace do you want to evolve your Pokemon at? When is it safe to go in and put a bunch of abilities on the board versus holding cards back to try to mitigate how much damage is building up? Is it okay to put this thing down that could potentially be a countercatcher target? How many switch outs do I still have in my deck? You know, things that you don't fully always need to think about in every matchup are very, very crucial to think about in this matchup. But you know, for people that are less familiar with this matchup, one of the generally pretty easy ways to go about it is to actually hard target either the Froslass or the Monkeydory with the Dark on it, depending on how many Monkeydories they already have established. But most of the time, this deck operates with one Froslass on the board, because if they have more than one, the damage accumulates on their side of the board a little bit too rapidly for them to really pull it all off of them without giving you opportunities to kind of counter push into them, or they end up taking prize cards too rapidly. And that's not the game plan that this deck wants to do. It wants to control the pace of the game as much as it can and move it in the way that it wants to while maintaining generally a prize deficit until it's about to win the game. And with that, you'll notice there's only one card that directly searches Froslass in this deck list. So if you are able to knock out that first Froslass, they're then dependent on either raw drawing into a new one, or they have to Knight Stretcher to recover that and that's another resource that is finite within this deck that you're able to pressure outside of that. So if you're looking at how to tackle this deck, and it's something that you're not fully familiar with, the first thing I would lean into is clearing the Snowruns off the board, obviously. But if there is a Froslass on the board, take it out. If you cannot take out multiple Monkeydories turn after turn after turn. Yeah, definitely. That's good advice. I played a little bit of this on the ladder. And yeah, definitely like if they start realizing that your Froslass are the real threat, it gets pretty over pretty quick. So I don't think that's solid advice. Yep. Next deck to talk about is Raging Bolt from Raquel Hazim in ninth place. And again, I don't have because we're using the Labs site from Limitless. I'm not positive about this claim, but I'm pretty sure this is the same list that Olat Blitzle and Christian Fontenot played to Atlanta. If not, it is within two cards. But just the big thing, you have your new modern owl-based Raging Bolt deck with one Baby Bolt and one Slitherwing. The things that are pushing Raging Bolt into being more successful as this format has gone on are the decrease in Dragapult because I feel overall Dragapult is the worst matchup for this deck between Dragapult and Gardevoir. And also now the increase in Joltik in particular is actually a very, very good matchup for this deck, because it is one of the few decks that can very easily answer what your opponent is trying to do. So you have Slitherwing, which answers literally every attacker in their deck that is not Iron Leaves or Clefairy, I guess. But you KO the Ironhands and the Pikachu, the two main attackers of the deck, go down to a Burning Turbulence. And what's your opponent's response to that? To come take one prize from you? If that attacker is not a Pikachu, you have a Raging Bolt sitting in the wings ready to come take them out. And if they try to play back and do things like some weird slow game plan, that's when you can leverage something like the small Raging Bolt, which your opponent has a pretty hard time knocking out for a, you know, a meaningful gain in prizes. You know, you can't amp you very much that Raging Bolt for two prizes very easily. I guess some lists do play one of the future booster capsules, so maybe, maybe they can. But even so, the pressure that this deck is able to put onto Joltik in particular, is something that if you expect Joltik to be very heavily played in your metagame, whether that's at Milwaukee, or any League Cups or Challenges you're playing this week, I would definitely consider sleeving up Raging Bolt heading into this weekend. Hmm. That's a, that's a statement that I don't think I could say. I don't think I could ever recommend Raging Bolt. I think it's, it's still good, but it's still very linear. Like it has some good tools. And we've said it's been better positioned in this meta for sure, than it has been in a few in the last few weeks. But I still think like, if you're going up against somebody that knows how to take advantage of, you know, your recovery or your lack thereof, and just do you at the right time, it can be really, really difficult to win this game when that when against those kind of decks or if they corner you, you don't really have a lot of good options for that. So there's just a lot of ways to play around this deck. Still, you know, sure, but it's still good. Like if you're looking for something that just has the highest raw power level in the game right now, it's probably this or Golden Go. And I'd give the nod to this over Golden Go, as far as a consistency to like, if you're looking for a consistency, like a deck that has the highest level of consistency, I'd probably say this is this is there, you know, just having an octal engine squawkability. And then yeah, just being able to accelerate with SADA. SADA is such a good supporter right now. For sure. And then the deck now being able to play Crispin more reliably because you have the owl engine because the format slowed down enough for that to be possible. You know, we had seen people try to utilize the owl engine with Raging Bolt when Pokestop was still in the format. And decks were just too fast for it back then. But now that that is more reasonable to do, and decks are a little bit slower, you get to see cards like this baby Raging Bolt come out to play and actually be impactful in games. One last note before we move on. The reason also that I would say that Raging Bolt is a slightly better position to this weekend in particular, are that we're seeing these Dragapult lists that are actually moving away from Unfair Stamp. And I've seen people are either going back to Crystal, or they're putting in the Neo Upper Energy. Or I think that there actually were a couple of fairly successful lists that even played something like Hero's Cape, just to make the biggest Dragapult possible. And, you know, if something like that is happening, this deck doesn't care if Dragapult has an extra 100 HP, you just blow it up anyway. But the big thing there is not having the Stamp. Like the Iono or the Disruption cards are really what hurt Raging Bolt the most. And when those are less in the picture, the deck has a better chance to thrive. Yeah, I agree. This cool running Energy Switch, I like that in this build. Allows you to like maybe, you know, if you have Burning Turbulence one turn, and then they're trying to like, they don't knock out your Slitherwing, and you don't really want to use Burning Turbulence again, because you might knock yourself out again. You can Energy Switch off and put it on a Raging Bolt and they go from there. Or I think probably more importantly is get powering up the Raging Bolt, the baby Raging Bolt's first attack and picking stuff up. Really, really key for that. And some matchups. Thunder Burst Storm for lightning and fighting. It does 30 damage for one of your opponent's Pokemon for each energy attached to this Pokemon. So yeah, you need three energy to knock out pretty much anything useful in this format for 90. So very helpful for that. Yeah. And the big thing, you know, that this deck, this card is the most powerful when you're able to get it down on turn one with an energy on it. It applies the most pressure and that Energy Switch is kind of the mitigation for when that isn't possible for you. One thing that we don't see in this list that I actually do think is probably a pretty good inclusion for Raging Bolt this weekend is Ditto. Just because it makes it more consistent for you to either get a Raging Bolt out or to get an Ogre Pond on the board for your Noctowl going into turn two. And just there's a large amount of pressure that you can apply into a lot of evolving deck matchups by having a baby Raging Bolt with energy active on turn one. Yeah, that's good advice. That's that's a good way to look at it. Sorry, last last deck here. Before we move up there, there's one more deck I want to talk about, but it's not actually from Sevilla. But the last deck from Sevilla is just a more standardized, more streamlined version of the Joltik box that we saw from Tyler Matthews last weekend. This is piloted again by Thomas Abbott coming into this week. And I'm sure there were other very successful lists, but this is the one that actually made an asymmetrical cut. And it has kind of all the hallmarks that we've seen from this Joltik box in the past. We've got our 2-1 Galvantula line to have a one prize option that can one hit KO Zora arc in particular coming out of this weekend. That is a notable KO that you can achieve with Galvantula. You have your two Maridon for consistency, two hands and two Pikachu as your primary attackers that you want to go fetch with that tandem unit ability. And then just kind of the smattering of tech Pokemon, you know, Iron Leaves to get you out of retreat lock or one hit KO anything that's grass weak. Blood Moon still being one of the best Pokemon attackers in the game. Gladiast for flexibility, and then Fez and Mew for consistency. And Clefairy because, you know, we need a way to one-hit KO a Dragapult sometimes. Yup. Yeah, I think this is a little more traditional in approach. Sure. Going back to using Arvin more than Research, which I think I like in this kind of a build. You really don't need much turn one. You just need like the Joltik and then something to power up for the most part. And you're able to do that pretty consistently with this build. Yeah, I like the tools for the most part. And EXP Share is cool to like put on a Pikachu or something like that. If you lead with Iron Hand, you can then follow up with Pikachu later on. Something like that makes a lot of sense, or on Maraudon. But yeah, I don't know. I'm trying to think of... There's some disadvantages like running Rescue Board and Gladiast. I don't know what that's exactly all about. I think I would have probably maybe put a switch in over the Rescue Board just for how many things are in corner right now. I guess you can search it out with Arvin is the thought early game. Exactly. That's the exact game plan is if you open any basic... Well, not any basic. If you open anything that is not Hands and not Blood Moon, you can Nest Ball for Maraudon and then Rescue Board whatever is active and get into Joltik. And that's something where like you don't... Otherwise you need two Ball Cards to get Gladiast and Maraudon into play. Yeah, okay. I'm coming around to that. Okay, makes sense. But I guess if you open Iron Hand, you can get the future booster capsule. Right, exactly. So the only truly bad starter is Blood Moon. Yeah, it's pretty bad. But Blood Moon is such a powerful card, I don't think you can cut it. But then you could somehow get Iron Leaves and use that, I guess. If you're getting cheeky. Sure. But yeah, we saw... This was one of the decks, I think, that featured an Ace Sim. So just missing out on the top eight here. We did see it get taken advantage of by Miractus' Corner. So that's kind of why I brought that up. We wanted to talk about it real quick. But yeah, I think this is still a cool list. A good starting place if you're trying to play this deck. I think a very good list to start and try out with. Pretty consistent looking. I'm not seeing any like spicy ticks like Tyler Matthews' lists included. Fort Crispin seems pretty good. Even if you're not able to get the Joltik down, you can still get pretty into your attackers fairly effectively. Sure. Which is good. I don't know. Yeah, the one tech card here is like the Gravity Mountain. Oh, true. Giving you the ability to one-hit KO Gardevoir and or Dragapult with Pikachu. But Gardevoir in particular, being able to be one-hit KO'd is something that the deck notably could not do before. So your only hope was to run them over with Iron Hands. Or hope that the Iron Hands gave you enough pressure to get you through the rest of the game, I guess is a better way to say that. One thing that I think I would like to see in this deck. It's a little iffy because you don't have the best means of finding it. But I feel like Penny would actually serve a lot of really good utility in here. Even if it's just to pick up Iron Leaves and have two switch outs. To that end, maybe just a switch is better. But there are a lot of circumstances where you want to put something like Fez down and then get it out of play so it's not a liability. Or if you open with Blood Moon, you want it off the board so it can't be countercatcher and itchy pollen repeatedly. So I just feel like Penny has the potential to be a pretty useful supporter in the deck. I don't know specifically what I'd cut for it, but it just seems like an interesting include. This is a relatively straightforward deck that takes, I would say, a rather low number of games to really fully understand. So if you're low on practice in this format, this is probably the deck I would lean on to get the most success going into a tournament in the near term. Before you potentially want to move on to something that requires a bit more time to really get comfortable with. Yeah, it's definitely a good entry point into the meta game right now. Yeah, I mean your general game plan, literally every matchup. Attack with Joltik turn 1, figure out which attacker between Ironhands and Pikachu is correct in whatever matchup you're in, and go from there. And then there are some really weird niche circumstances you could get into where you could find Blood Moon on turn 1 and go load him up with 4 energies and be ready to go to Beartown after that. Probably not the best game plan, but it's available. Yeah, I mean Beartown's not my favorite place to visit, but I could definitely see a world in which I have to go there because you don't have a lot of other options. But yeah, this is definitely like, I'd probably either give this or Raging Bull to a player getting into the game right now. For sure. A deck that I would not give to a player getting into the game, and the last deck that I want to talk about before we move on from events from this past weekend, is Tarabox. This is actually the second place list from the Johannesburg SPE that happened down in South Africa. Now there was notably a Tarabox in the top cut of Sevilla, but that was literally towards Fukuoka Champions League list, so I didn't really want to rehash it because it has not, in my opinion, kept up with how this format has evolved. Whereas there are some inclusions in this list that I feel are important, as far as being noteworthy that the creator of this list has kept track of what is good in this format, and the need to play around or answer those things. And those three cards in particular are the Brock Scouting to give yourself access to Noctowl under Badoolock, just to formulate a game plan in future turns moving forward. Or, if you get Badood, you still have a way to go find two basics to get a Terra Pokemon in play so you can use a Jewelseeker. Same thing, depending on what your board looks like, what your hand looks like. Jamming Tower coming in as the third stadium, as opposed to just running three area zero. One gives you the ability to bump your own area zero, to get some liabilities off your bench, maybe boot some Noctowls to your discard pile so you can Knight Stretcher or Super Rod them back into your deck to get that Jewelseeker back into play for yourself. Or allowing you to clear things like Pheasant Dippity, or Mew, or the Blood Moon you started with, or a damaged Pokemon off your bench by getting that area zero out of play. Also, turning off the tools against Gardevoir in particular is another really big use case for that card. And then the final card is probably like an undersung card in this deck that I think is not nuanced, but just something that you can kind of glance over if you're just looking at this list, and that is the Rescue Board. And it serves the purpose of being able to attach to a Noctowl in particular, just because Latias provides free retreat to every other card in the deck because they're all basics. But one of the pitfalls that this deck can hit is when your opponent does something like Unfair Stamp, Countercatcher up a Noctowl, and Itchy Pollen while I build my board back up as Dragapult after you Torrential Pump me. And if you coincidentally find yourself in a situation where you can still get access to a Noctowl on the following turn, you can specifically go find Rescue Board in Crispin. And suddenly, your... oh my gosh, I almost said Sobmask. What is this thing called? Wellspring Mask Ogre Pump is back in the active spot using Torrential Pump again, thanks to that Rescue Board on that now swiftly moving Owl as it heads back to the bench. So just some nods to... I don't remember which player this is actually. This is HarpTCG, do not know their actual name. Oh, HarperKaiser, there we go. So second place at Johannesburg, was able to take Terrorbox to its best finish so far in this format, notably in probably the smallest major tournament of this format. But still, you know, we are seeing some more success for this deck as the format has evolved. And there's probably less of a spotlight on it, you know? Yeah, I definitely feel like we've kind of put Terrorbox in the backseat a little prematurely. And give a shout out to Wancho Saldana. Yes. He got first place with a Terrorbox list. So I definitely think it still has legs in this meta. And definitely, I wouldn't say I mean, we were like, oh, people tech for Terrorbox and are tested against it. And it's like, yeah, that's true. But it's still pretty high power level. Still a good deck. And we definitely see that here. And definitely, the cool thing about it being a quote unquote box deck is that you can switch cards in pretty easily and make accommodations for a metagame. And once you do have a feel for a metagame, you can be like, okay, you know, we didn't like, you know, this card or that card. What can we do instead of running? You know, all these different things. I think people got fixated on the Torrid 60 is like, this is the optimal way to play this. And we can only play it this way. You know, we lose sight of the fact that well, since it's a box, you can play it however you need to. And go from there. And go from there. Shout out to harp here. The aura of this deck list is insane. You have so many different artworks, just that don't match up. That puts me on tilt. Just looking at this, you have the rainbow rare professors research mixed in with the regular art Crispin and full art Crispin you have probably the most tilting for me was seeing my favorite generations energy, which optimal energy. That's just my opinion. But that's correct. Mixed with a reader energy. And then you have what looks like a hollow graphic scarlet. That is for sure a prize pack metal. Yeah. So price pack or some other like 151 era metal holographic and then for basic grass energy. So if I had to play against this guy, it's like, he literally put whatever was in reach, or I guess, I don't know, this is a deliberate act. Like this is a this is a hate crime against my eyes, for sure. But, you know, what is I can't even tell like some of this stuff, like, he's running the SIR variant of ogre pawn in the top left there, I think, but next to this, and then like the full art one. Yeah, I think that the tilts me the most with a non matching artwork. So yeah, mismatched Crispin's the mismatched energy switches, and then three different nests. Yeah, that's a bit much. That's, but then he's running all same, like, the knock towels are all the same artwork. And like, right, I don't know, it's, it's, this is the thing, like, you're like, you're like, well, if he's going for all mismatched, he doesn't do that. He just goes for just what, like you said, whatever was closest. No, this is, but this is not whatever is close. Like, this is a deliberate, like, you're planning on tilting your opponent by like, just overwhelming their senses. Like, you're just saying, Alright, you know, the especially like, in the era after I think one of my favorite things about the scarlet and violet era is that we no longer have to look at rainbow rares. And he went like all the way back to the rainbow rare professors research. And like, that's just a that's, that's so mean. I hate rainbow rares. They shouldn't people people have been collecting them more and more, I think, because we're far enough away to now where they're like, nostalgic or look cool. Sure, but I know they're still ugly as sin. Gosh, they're so bad. I hope they never come back. Yeah, please don't. But anyway, that is enough from tournament results from this past weekend. Before we jump into more talk on the evolution of the metagame moving forward, I'm going to go ahead and throw up Blaine's quiz show for this week. And so, as is standard, it is my turn to host Blaine's quiz show this week, where I will be asking John, a series of multiple choice questions, where each question is worth a total of one point. And John has one hint available to him throughout the course of these three questions that he can exercise at any time. And I will, I will make that one singular question easier in some way for him. And so this week, we have a category of promos. And so, John, I've got three questions for you here, like I said, and the first one is going to be, how many cards were there in each expansion of the POP series of promos? And so POP was a series of nine promo sets that Nintendo put out during the Ruby Sapphire through Ruby Sapphire Emerald era, I believe, and it may have actually gone slightly further than that. It may have gone into Diamond and Pearl as well. And each of them had the same number of total cards contained within them. And your options are 15, 16, 17, or 18. Um, all right. I think it might be risky to just use my hint this early, but I think this is my weakest area, so I'm just going to use it and go from there. The answer is an odd number. An odd number. Okay, good. So I was leaning towards 16, so I'm glad that I used that. So it's either 15 or 17. I think 15 makes a little more sense if we're thinking about, like, just organizationally, like 17 is a prime number, 15, a little bit more divisible, so you can like, divvied up a little bit better. Yeah, I don't know, maybe. Let's just lock in 15. I like the logic you used, but unfortunately you are incorrect. There were in fact 17 cards per set. And with the exception of Pop 5, which had the Espeon and Umbreon star promos in it, each set had 6 uncommons, 6 commons, and 5 rares. Gotcha. Moving on to the next question. There were 4 Blackstar promos that were released with the first Pokemon movie when people went to see it in theaters. Which one has the lowest promo card number? And the 4 promos that were released with that movie when you went and got a ticket in theaters were Electabuzz, Pikachu, Mewtwo, and Dragonite. Dude, uh, thanks. All right, so I remember the Mewtwo promo. I think that's probably the most prevalent. Oh, it was definitely the most playable, that's for sure. Yeah, definitely the most playable. I don't remember any of the other promos, to be honest with you. So I think I'm just going to put in Mewtwo, and then just hope that's the payoff. And I don't have any other logic to go off of, so. Fair enough. Unfortunately, you are incorrect there. The lowest promo number is Electabuzz at promo number two. Promo number one was a Pikachu, not this one, but it was actually a Nintendo Power promo, back when that magazine had promo cards in it, and when that magazine still existed. So, you know, most modern children probably have no idea what Nintendo Power is. Yeah, I vaguely have a memory of it, like seeing it as a kid. But yeah, I never subscribed or anything. But yeah, I don't have any way to... No, that's fair. This was definitely... This was a tough question. And then the last one. Which generation of cards has the fewest number of total available promo cards as of April 2025? And your choices are Scarlet and Violet, X and Y, Sword and Shield, or Sun and Moon. I'm leaning towards Sun and Moon for this one, but it could be X and Y. I think as the sets, like, progressed, we got more and more promos. So it's either like an earlier one here. Let me just go X and Y. I think that's... There was a pretty quick turnaround between X and Y and Sun and Moon. So I think that might be my logic there. No, that is definitely sound logic. And you are actually correct. Finally got one. So I had a different question that I was going to ask here. But just real quick to provide some numbers. X and Y had a total of 211 promo cards, whereas Sun and Moon went all the way up to 248. Sword and Shield went up to 307. And despite the fact that it is not yet ended, Scarlet and Violet is up to 215 as of April 2025, with more cards on the horizon. So I think that, interestingly, the first question I wanted to ask is which of these is not a promo number one in its given era? But I now realize that every single generation, the first promo of that generation is the Grass Starter. And so it would have been just a dead giveaway of this card is different from the other three. What was the... You said there was one that didn't have a promo number one, or... No, no. Every single generation, even going back to like Diamond and Pearl. The first promo card of that generation is always the Grass Starter Pokémon from that generation. Gotcha. Yeah. Which in and of itself is a pretty interesting trivia question, but hard to do multiple choice. Yeah. It'd be cool to see like what's the last promo for each generation. I did think about that too, but that one was a little bit more difficult and generally kind of vague. Like the X and Y, the last promo card, do you have any guess as to what it is? Maybe... So X and Y, we had Megas, so I'm guessing like a Mega Glalie or something like that. It is Lucario Spirit Link. Okay. Is X and Y promo 2.11? Yeah. Is Lucario Spirit Link, which is just something that I would never would guess. Like I wouldn't think that a random like tool card would be the final promo card for a generation. That makes sense. Yeah, definitely kind of random. But that's like the Megas were like a lot of promos. That's how they printed them in the U.S. Oh, for sure. For sure. And so, John, thank you for playing Blaine's Quiz Show this week. You did come away with a 1 of 3 questions and we will have handy dandy point numbers right here for the week. And we will get a better point tally system moving forward. So I do not have to put them in post. I think I'm in 3 now. 3 away from you, right? Yeah, I believe so. I believe that's what the gap was because I definitely had a big ol' goose egg last week. Closing the gap. Yep, definitely. And so now that we've gotten on the other side of trivia and we've seen some more deck lists and we've seen some more results from tournaments, how likely is it, do you think, John, that Gardevoir is going to win the tournament this weekend? Pretty likely, I'd say. I mean, Don't fix it, right? Exactly. All right. Like and we've seen top players gravitate towards it and not all of them. I think probably the majority of the quote unquote top players are still on Dragapult. But, you know, it's going to be in my mind. It's either between Dragapult and Gardevoir. It's between Dragapult and Gardevoir. But I mean Gardevoir just I guess has the closing power, has the Monkey Dory power, if you will. And I mean, yeah, I think Monkey Dory right now into Dragapult is so powerful. Once you get like two or three established, well, once you get two established, really, you're just negating the damage placement from Phantom Dive every turn. And you're just swinging that matchup so effectively with just that tech or just those cards included in there. And Monkey Dory, like I think it's probably, you know, that or Bidoo are tied for most impactful Pokemon in this format. And I know like Dragapult and Gardevoir might be seen as the big two dogs, but they're just kind of, I mean, Dragapult obviously has its own merits as an attacker. But I would say like in every deck that we talked about for the most part in our recap, other than maybe Raging Bolt and Tarabox, they all ran Monkey Dory or Bidoo, right? Sure. So yeah, I think that's a fair statement. Outside of the Noctowl decks and Joltik, all of them are running Bidoo and or Monkey Dory for sure. Right. Or both a lot of the times. So I think, yeah, just being able to manipulate damage counters when it's your turn on your opponent's side of the board instead of KOs effectively and just negate what your opponent is trying to do effectively. It's so powerful. So just, I don't know. I think you never can call it saying, yeah, for sure. 100% Gardevoir is going to win this next tournament. We don't know that. But if you had to like pick between that or the field, you know, it's getting harder and harder to pick against Gardevoir in that regard. Definitely. Okay. So with that in mind, I think the best way to handle this upcoming weekend is with a handful of predictions. All right. You want me to write them down? Yes, if you would not mind recording them for this week. The first one is going to be what has become a standby or a standard prediction in this format. And that is an over-under on the number of Bidoo in the final top eight. So not asymmetrical, final top eight. How many Bidoo will be present? And so, like we said, we expect Dragapult and Gardevoir to continue to be very successful. Even decks that are rising up like N'Zura Ark or random things like Hydreigon that saw some play on stream in Sevilla this past weekend also ran copies of Bidoo in their deck. And so we'll set it at an average of one Bidoo per list because that seems to be pretty standard as of now. So over-under of 4.5 Bidoo in top eight. And so I'll lead off here. I actually think I'm going to go and take the under on this because I'm optimistic that neither Dragapult nor Gardevoir is going to win the tournament. Wow. That's a statement. Which is a pretty bold claim to make. But I do think that we're seeing the rise of some decks. Particularly, I think that we'll see a surge of Zura Ark this weekend. I really do. And I think that this is probably the one weekend where the deck has the chance to truly be successful. Because I also think that we will see a decrease in Dragapult, an increase in Gardevoir, and then if there is also an associated increase in Zura Ark to match that, we'll see Gardevoir kind of fall by the wayside as it gets just demolished by this sea of Flamebody cannons. I don't know if I'm quite that believer that Zura Ark is going to be our savior from the Bidoo format. Well, it's funny because the Zura Ark still plays Bidoo. So maybe it's totally not the right way to approach the situation. All that to say, I'll take the over. I think just pricing it out and saying, all right, can we average one Bidoo per list if some lists are running two and most lists are running one and some are running zero. So I'm expecting at least six Bidoo in the top eight. I don't really see a world in which we don't have multiple Dragapults, multiple Gardevoirs, and then obviously other decks. If we have a Monkey Dory Frostlass Bidoo, that's three for me. So that'll help boost my numbers immensely. So I'll take the over on that. Bidoo's still kind of the pollen king right now. You know, it's still spring. We still have to be taking our allergy medicines. It's still an itchy pollen season. Okay, well then here's another new prediction to go into it. Over under on number of Monkey Dory in top eight. And for this one, because we do frequently see Gardevoir lists running three and if you play something like Frostlass, you'll have up to four in your deck. So I'm going to set this over under at 7.5. So 4.5 for Bidoo and then 7.5, okay. So in keeping with the probably faulty logic that I applied to my Bidoo prediction, I'm going to take the under on this one as well. Because I do think that this is going to be the week where Gardevoir finally has a lower level of success compared to its previous showings. Yeah, I would have to take the under too. 7.5 seems a little bit higher than I would think for a top eight. So my logic for that number was if you have two Gardevoirs and then two other decks that have one Monkey Dory, you hit the over already. So I don't think that's too unreasonable of a scenario, but I'm really hedging on Gardevoir not making two spots in top eight is what it boils down to. Yeah, I think even if it does, I think there's enough other decks. I don't know. Dragapult's at the point where now it's starting to run Monkey Dory itself too. At least all the straight ones without Dusknoir are definitely on a run. At least one Dragapult Monkey Dory. I'll just be contrary and I'll take the over. I just hope for the best. John is a Gardevoir and Froslass believer. Team Froslass. Froslass would cover the bet so easily. For sure. One Gardevoir, one Froslass. It gets the Badoos and the Monkey Dories all in one swoop. Who can I pick? I guess it's a prediction, but it's not numerical. What will be the highest placing Noctowl-based deck this weekend? Obviously the options we have are Terrabox, Raging Bolt, Tank Terrapagos and Flareonbox are the primary four that I would say encapsulate what I would consider to be a Noctowl deck. Obviously you can play Noctowl with other things. We've seen it with Charizard. You can pair it up with any Terra Pokemon. But I would say those four are probably the most likely suspects. Of those four, which one do we think will be the highest placing this weekend? I'll let you lead off on this one. I'm tempted to pick Flareon. I really like the deck. Especially into the Stage 2 setup deck meta. That being said... I want to take Terrabox. My heart says Flareon, but my head says Terrabox. I'll just stick with Terrabox. Take the easiest answer there. I think Tank Terrapagos has fallen off a lot. For whatever reason. I just don't believe in Raging Bolt. Y'all should know that by now. That's fair. I think Flareon is actually in a pretty bad position now. Or a much worse position than it was after Atlanta. Now that Joltik has hit the scene. Because that is a matchup that is just not good for that deck. That's fair. The deck has very poor answers to Pikachu. Especially if you Angelite my Pikachu. I just Tandem Unit it back out and attack with Joltik. Eventually, as the Joltik player, I win that war. At the end of the day. With that in mind, I would not pick Flareon either. Again, be contrarian. I think that I would lean toward Terrabox as well. But just to have a different answer from you. Or at least look like I'm not copying your homework. I'm going to pick Raging Bolt. Which is... It hurts me to say that out loud. But... I don't know. I also did say earlier I think that this is a weekend where Raging Bolt is better positioned than it has been previously. And we'll just have to see if that really pans out for it. I think this is fun. I heard Uncommon Energy do this. They said pick one player to win the event. Just as a pick your horse kind of wager. So I hope... Let's do this. So pick one player you think would win Milwaukee. Gosh, I don't even know who's going. I'm going to... I don't know if he's going. But if he is, he's made top 8 at both Regionals. He's gone to so far in this format. I'm going to pick Tanner Hurdley. And I'll pick Ian Robb, I think that'll be my pick, I think he's long overdue for a regionals win. Is he actually going to Pokemon this weekend, or is he still playing Magic? I don't know if he's played Magic as much, did he play like in the last few months? I thought he was just at another either Pro Tour or Pro Tour Qualifier, I'm not sure. I don't keep up on Twitter, unfortunately. That's a good question, well we'll just have to see, we'll let you know next week. Like we said, neither of these players manned up at the event. So I'm just hedging on Tanner seems to have a pretty good grasp on the format and has been making adjustments to that Dragapult list that seem to suit the meta even as it continues to evolve. But like you said, Ian Robb is not someone you can ever not expect to go pretty deep into a tournament. It's a pretty safe pick as well, he's there. So it'll be interesting. I would love for either of them to win, because that is someone who has not yet won a regional. And I need Henry Chow to stop stealing all these invites. Yeah, it's like almost you want to pick Henry Chow, but I'm like, is he even going to go? Like that'd be crazy, just to like start stealing invites, or I don't even know. He just shows up because he knows it's a paycheck, I mean. Hey, can't fault the guy, you know. If you can't beat him, you know, it's on you anyway. But I think that that's a good enough note as any to end our pre-discussion on Milwaukee heading into this weekend. Did you have any other final notes you wanted to close out on before we close the show? I don't think so. I think I'm excited to see how NA responds to two weeks off, essentially. Mexico is part of North America, but you know what I mean, like the main circuit for North America. I guess Mexico is considered Latin America for Pokemon purposes, which always blows my mind, geography-wise. But yeah, I think it'll be interesting to see, you know, like how much Joltec Box rises in popularity, how much Archelodon falls off. I know Tank Tarapagos definitely will fall off compared to where it was in Atlanta. So it's interesting, like the metagame, you know, the top two decks have been the same, I think. Well, I guess after Atlanta, the top two decks have been the same. Like we've had Garde and Dragapult pretty much at the top, you know. Even if Dragapult, or even if Garde is not necessarily the most played, it still feels like power level-wise, it's in step with Dragapult in a lot of ways. And Raging Bolt is still popular, and it's converting decently, enough to where it probably won't fall off significantly. Like people that were playing Raging Bolt won't be pressured into changing their decks necessarily. So I don't know. I think I like to see that we're getting a couple new decks. I'm expecting that, yeah, like the meta will be pretty similar to what we've seen in Sevilla. But I don't know, you know, who knows, like maybe somebody's been cooking up something. I haven't really been keeping up with anything like Hydreigon or anything crazy like that you brought up. So I don't know, what are you thinking, are you ready to do any shakeups? I don't see any new stuff really coming out. I think one thing that I've played a little bit this week is Blissey, but not the like straight wall variant. Blissey as a card feels super flexible right now, mostly because a lot of decks are terra-based and are giving you access to your area zero pretty easily, pretty reasonably. A lot of decks aren't running tons of stadiums, so when you do put it into play it's easy to make it stick. And when you have the terra in play, Blissey is a card that can facilitate Glass Trumpet very well. And Blissey naturally has a good matchup into Dragapult. So the big problem, big stumbling block has been trying to find a good answer to Gardevoir. And I don't think like the walls Blissey does not answer it very well. And so far I still have not found a really good answer. I think one cute thing I haven't tested out yet at all, but an idea was to run a 1-1 Umbreon because you can put the E.V. down, Glass Trumpet to it, get the E.V. into the active because of its ability, it can evolve immediately into Umbreon, and then you can happy switch an energy up to it, attach to it, and then it does 320 and one hit KO's a Gardevoir. But the problem with that is that's a stage one line and it only kills one Gardevoir. It's not fully answering what your opponent's doing. And in that vein, something like Friggirath is probably a better answer because it can one hit KO the Gardevoir while simultaneously sniping the Drifloon or Screamtail off the bench to try to clear things up from your opponent. And also leverages some other matchups a little bit better, like makes Raging Bolt easier to win because they don't have an answer to Friggirath. I don't know. I think that Blissey's pretty cool. I think that it is positioned decently well, but as long as Gardevoir's on top it's not going to be able to win an event. Yeah, it definitely has a Garde problem, holding it back. Tooljammer I could see somewhat effective preventing that Drifloon from reaching to get the one shot in a lot of ways if you're able to run them out of artisans and then just kind of stabilize from there. But that can be tough. They can just kind of ignore the Blissey and the active or two shot it and be fine with that. Because you're not able to one shot essentially anything on their side. Exactly. And you can't generate damage on your own board to be able to move it over to KO things with your Monkey Dory. So you just are in a losing position kind of from the jump, unfortunately. And that kind of is what it is. Every deck has at least one bad matchup and that just coincidentally happens to be Blissey's. And it's not just a deck that you don't want to have a bad matchup going into an event right now. Yeah. Yeah. It definitely had its moment in the sun when we had, like, Dragapult at 26% play and Gardevoir wasn't as popular quite yet. But I think Gardevoir will probably be in the top 3 this weekend for Milwaukee as far as played decks. I think that'll be my kind of big take. It'll push out anything else. Like if we're lumping all the Dragapult together, I think somehow Raging Boat will still be the number 2 deck. So you see Goldengo taking a big hit this week. Yeah, I definitely do. I don't think we've seen Goldengo do quite as well the last few weeks. I know that Goldengo saw us as believers, and it had a huge showing in Atlanta, but not a huge payoff for a lot of people. So I could see a world of where we just move away from Goldengo. Because right now, I mean, Gardevoir has won 3 regionals in a row. Somebody wants to ride that hot hand, makes a lot of sense. So I can see that. Yeah, definitely can't fault him for it. No. I think that that's going to close the show out for us. So once again, if you made it to the end, thank you for listening. We do appreciate each and every one of you and all the time that you put into listening to the show. And we would welcome any feedback you have in the comments, either on YouTube or on Spotify. And if you're hanging out on Spotify, if you could leave a like, leave a rating, leave a review, or Spotify, Apple Podcasts, whatever your podcasting platform is, we welcome any and all feedback you have, any interaction you have, helps other people find the show, makes it more visible, and allows us to continue to produce content for everybody. And if you haven't, go ahead and head over to YouTube, hit that subscribe button, again, helps spread the show out so more people can see it, gives us a wider net, and helps people better understand the type of content that we're bringing to the table and lets us kind of try to tailor it to the type of content that people would want to see. So giving us that sort of feedback is also extremely welcome and helpful. But that, like I said, that's going to do it for us this week here at the Battle Frontier. Thank you for hanging out with John and I all the way to the end, and we will see you guys on the other side of Milwaukee. See you.