Episode 3: Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Bolt?

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, and with me as always is my co-host, Jon Orgel. Jon, how are you doing today? I'm doing pretty good. I'm fully recovered from the eight-and-a-half-hour drive out from Louisville and back. Shout-outs to all the people I rode in my car with, or not my car, but yeah, we did a good carpool. I had a great time. I judged Saturday. I was a TCG floor judge for the Masters Division, and I did that for the first three rounds, and then round four, I was on stream for probably one of my favorite stream games I've ever had the pleasure of judging. It was Cloth versus Okidoki, and if you haven't watched the stream, please go back and do yourself a favor. If you're having a bad day, go back and watch it. It's two players that probably won't be on stream again. No knock on them, but it is what it is. Just one of those times where you're just like, Pokemon's a great community, and we just got to see such a fun matchup with all the poison status conditions and Okidoki's cool ability, and there was a legacy interaction with poison that I had to do a judge call with. So just navigating all of that, it was so much fun. So the rest of the day was pretty even keel after that. I did judge another stream round on round seven, but that was not as eventful. And then, yeah, day two, I had a great time. Like I said, I played in the Sun and Moon through Lost Thunder format tournament, ran by Simon Beauchard, I hope I'm pronouncing his name right. There was 64 players for that, too. Oh, wow. It was quite a big turnout. So we played six rounds of Swiss, 30 minutes, and then we cut to a top eight with 50 minutes. And I went undefeated in Swiss, I went 5-0, and then I ID'd my last round to be the second seed overall. Pretty smooth sailing in Swiss. And then I got to top eight, and I had a really, really good set against Granbull. I ran a 1-0-1 Solgaleo DX, and I leaned really heavily on that. And in that matchup, you're able to use a double colorless energy and just hit through Granbull for 240 with weakness. And you can kind of save resources doing that. It's a really tough matchup. I usually targeted down the Macargo and then hoped that they just brick. And so I'm usually going down like four prizes before I mount a comeback, so it took a lot. So we went to game three, and then time was called. And we were tied on prizes at four each. We were both kind of struggling. My last turn of time, I knocked something out, and I got a Vulpix off my prizes. So I put it in the active, beaconed, got a Ninetales GX, and then I was able to just use my Ninetales to get the trainers I needed to close the game out. It was a very exciting ending. That's one thing I hope we have in the future is all these recorded, because it'd be fun to go back and watch it. Oh, for sure. So I won in top eight, and then I played against a really cool deck that I want to share with you guys. And while you're pulling that up, do you know, are the results for this event recorded on like a limitless page for the event? That's a good question. I know that the names are on limitless, but I don't know if the decks are. Okay. The best place to go is probably Simon's Twitter account. Sure. He's pretty active on Twitter. It's Starshine, at StarshineSimon on Twitter. But yeah, this list is pretty wacky. This is a control deck, right? Yeah. So in this, it has Regigigas, which is kind of a wall, and Hoopa, which has like a safeguard ability. None of the Segalia or Gardevoir can hit through the Hoopa. So they're able to kind of just put that up as a wall. So I had to use my Marsh Shadow to attack it. And you have only, you have the triple, I think triple boost, or super boost energy. Right. Right. And you can use that to one shot Hoopa, but then they run Baba. Yep. So they're able to get that and just get rid of it. And then they also run, it's a supporter where it discards energy from your hand. So if you're sitting on that super boost energy, they can just play that at any point. So this, yeah, this is quite the deck. I haven't even seen, I didn't even see the Breeder in this. This is crazy. There are so many supporters. Yeah. And running four Tate and Liza is pretty wild. But once they basically get to one Stevens, they're able to like establish their hand pretty well because you can kind of change Stevens. My opponent used a Lycanroc at one point to take the knockout on my Gardevoir because I had a full bench. Okay. He used Hoopa a lot. He used Carbink after I had no way to attack with the Kirlia because I think the Kirlia is the only one that doesn't have an ability in my deck that I'm attacking with. And then it also has the one condition of unknown hand where you have, I think 40, I forget how many cards it is, but it's just like, if you just have, you know, Hoopa active and your opponent can't deal with anything, he can eventually get to unknown hand and win the game with an alternate one condition of that. And then Shuckle GX has got a really good attack for what he played against in the finals, which was Lost March. I think Shuckle says if your opponent's Pokemon has two or less energy attached to it, it can't attack Shuckle. And then you're able to just kind of deny their energy because they're just trying to use the, you know, basically they don't want to attach two energy to attack and take your Pokemon. So you're able to control the board with that pretty well. The week leading up to this, I watched LAIC, like I watched probably half of that coverage. Okay. And I just, me and my friend Ben played maybe like four or five games. And then me and Chip Richie, one of the casters met up Saturday after and played a little bit of Sun and Moon, he played thankfully the Zoroark Decidueye deck. So I knew how to, I knew how to beat that, but that was like the only matchup I had prepped for. Honestly, that's probably what I would have played as well. I know that, like, thinking back on that format, that the decks that I was a big fan of were the Piranha Punishment, Buzzwole, and then the Zoroark Decidueye Ninetales. Just because just the options that you have and the ability to do your little like pings and everything with Decidueye, it's, it feels very tactical. It feels very rewarding to play, especially when you do it properly. Definitely if you guys, viewers, if you're ever interested in watching or learning retro, this Sun and Moon through Lost Slender, I think it's, it's a really good format. Because it's mostly, it's really inexpensive compared to some of the other ones that we've seen. It's a really competitive deck for like 40 bucks, pretty easily. It's a fun format. I would definitely go back and play it again. But yeah, definitely like if you're interested in retro, there's some, I'd recommend definitely follow Simon on Twitter. He always posts retro stuff. Him and Xander Bennett have been crushing it for non-sanctioned side events for regionals. So please follow them. Xander is also on Twitter. And they're really good about posting stuff whenever they're going to regionals and getting tournaments and stuff like that. So there's always, that's the one thing I would encourage players to do. Don't just feel like you have to obviously like play in the tournament, have fun with that and then play in side events if you want. There's some good side events at regionals, but there's also other stuff going on. Plenty of other people just playing retro, playing cube, lots of cool other formats going on. So that was really cool to take a part of that. But enough about my ramblings of retro. How was your weekend? And how was your week? Listen, hey, your week, well, I don't know if I would say more interesting. Yours is definitely more Pokemon filled, I will say. I know, obviously we recorded last week prior to the hurricane hitting down here. And hopefully anyone who is listening fared as well or better than I did. But thankfully for us, the only thing we'd lost was our shed in our backyard. So I spent the better part of this weekend cleaning that up and then building a new one. So that was super fun. But beyond that, as far as just kind of hurricane activities, it gives you a good excuse to stay inside and play board games or do things that, you know, because you never know when your power is going to go out potentially. So my family, we own all of the expansions for Disney Villainous. So my wife and I started playing a one-on-one bracket with each of the characters randomly seated. And we still haven't finished it, unfortunately. We didn't quite have enough time to get through it, but we're about halfway done. And it's just been fun. Like we just roll dice to see who's going first each game we've randomly selected. So she's going to be the top side of the bracket the whole way through. So you're not like nobody's guaranteed to get better characters the whole time or anything, or you're not even guaranteed to play the same character the whole time. But that's been a lot of fun. Still been playing some TCG Live. I'm kind of a broken record at this point. So I'm just playing Palkia Dusknoir, dropping some cards here and there. I'm on 2 Froakie right now for anyone that's interested. And I think that we actually saw a little bit of that in Louisville. So with that being said, I think we can go ahead and jump over and talk about what happened in Louisville this weekend. Oh, actually, before we do that, I have one more piece of information to share. I'm sure you may have seen if you're already clicking on the show, I have an actual logo now. And, you know, that is thanks to one of the individuals who is part of the team that is currently sponsoring me, which is Team GoGo. They're a relatively small organization who I'm the only TCG player that they have. They also sponsor a BGC player out of Canada, and then they have a few Unite teams and a couple of other games. I think Valorant is one of them. But they have some in-house art and other content creators who one of them was kind enough to put this together for John and I. So John is a big fan of duck Pokemon. Quacksly is actually number two, but it fit better on theme with the one that I wanted to put in the picture with Foycoco. So we have our nice little logo here with Foycoco and Quacksly having a nice little camp out on some portion of the battle frontier, is what we'll say. I wanted to make sure we called this out. I thought it was really cool. We got it turned around relatively quickly, and it just looks really nice in my opinion. This is super sick. But that being said, we can go ahead and jump over now. So this is a slightly smaller event than Baltimore, didn't quite crack that 2048 player threshold that was necessary to have the nine rounds on day one and four rounds on day two. And instead they played eight rounds day one, four rounds day two. Still needed to go X two or better to make it into day two. And we made some slight predictions of what we expected the day one meta to look like, and we were a little right and a little wrong. Raging Bolt was, like we both expected, the most popular deck in the room. Barapagos definitely saw a surge in popularity. Dragapult was up there, still extremely popular. We were both right in our V-star picks being in the top five with Lukia and Regidrago both making it, but Charizard is conspicuously absent. And to my surprise, a lot of people picked up Palkia following Dortmund. And we see it taking up almost 8% of the room. Then jumping into day two, this time Raging Bolt didn't fall off. Raging Bolt stuck around as the number one most represented deck and actually converted roughly, you know, almost one-to-one, like 10% of its numbers made it into day two. When 10% of the field converted into day two, Barapagos maintained that day two, or not day two, second place slot as far as meta percentage is concerned. Both Regidrago and Lukia got bumped up because Dragapult disappeared. Maybe it had some unfavorable matchups. The meta may just be a little bit too hostile for it right here because the Charizard that was not present in that day one meta suddenly has reappeared here. But if there weren't a lot of those to take advantage of, it could pretty easily see Dragapult not converting super well. As I just mentioned, Charizard makes its way back onto the graphic, and then Palkia stays roughly right where it was converting, again, almost 10% of the number that it initially started with. And this day two meta is more or less what we kind of talked about last week, is expecting to be close to the top six decks in the room. I do think that I expected Dragapult to be above the Palkia, but as far as power level is concerned, I could easily say that these are six of the most powerful decks in the format. Yeah, for sure. I am curious as to why Dragapult fell off so much. What do you think was the main, if you had to guess at why there was such a big fall off, I think my theory would be that Raging Bolt probably is just a good matchup for Raging Bolt. You're able to one-shot the first Dragapult, and they can really, really struggle to build a second one after that. If you get the quick knockout on a Dragapult, like turn two, Dragapult can really struggle to keep chaining the second and third. They usually don't get a third Dragapult out, and there's really not a lot of good backup attackers in the Ryuki build. Sure. Well, I think that the thing that actually makes the Raging Bolt matchup unfavored, and we'll see this when we look at the deck lists, are a lot of people chose to include the Bravery Charms in their list this weekend, which makes it much harder to set up these multi-prize turns that Dragapult really likes to play with. And then, like I also mentioned when we were looking at the day one graphic, or the move into this day two. graphic. The lack of Charizard in day one, or at least a significant amount of it, makes it more difficult for Dragapult to do well. And then I do also think that you have the potential, depending on who's going first, for turns with Regidrago to really just wipe all your Dreepies off the board, or if there is a large contingent of Palkia, like we did see in day one, you could also see all your Dreepies wiped off the board there, or against Tarapagos, so it may have just been too hostile of a room for Dragapult to really perform properly. Yeah, yeah, I think that's valid. Yeah, I remember talking to one of my locals, I guess my nemesis, if you've been following along on the podcast, Johnny Ravis. He played in this tournament. I think he missed his winning in for day two, but he's played Raging Bolt, and he was trying to find ways to fit bravery charms in his deck last minute. We were talking at the League Challenge he played at the week before, and like looking at his deck list and saying, okay, what can we cut to fit more bravery charms in? How can we tweak your build to better accommodate that? You know, maybe like looking at you're playing a lot of Pokestop or something like that, let's figure out exactly what's the best build for you for this tournament coming up. Sure. And yeah, I think a lot of players did that the same way. They just said, okay, well, nobody's running Lost Vacuum, nobody's running Jamming Tower. Bravery Charm makes my Bolt pretty much bigger than anything that hits in this format, other than another Raging Bolt. So let's just put Bravery Charm in there. I think we might see some more tool removal, more Jamming Tower moving forward. Sure. We'll get into all that a little bit later on in the podcast. But yeah, let's keep going over some of these decks that made it into day two and made it really deep runs into the tournament. Sure. So I think we'd be doing a disservice to a lot of people in the community if before we talked about the top eight, as far as the composition of it, we didn't talk about the fact that at this event, once you had two losses, you were no longer able to make top eight. It was a clean cut of eight players who all had a record of X, one, one or better. And that's got to be really disheartening for somebody that makes day two at 6-2. You know, there's no way that I'm making top eight. I can no longer win this event, and I'm competing for ninth place at best. Yeah, it's really tough. I think it's the collateral of the new format we've established. I think you and I were talking before the podcast, we were at that 1,900 and let's see, 38 players played in the Masters division for this event. The threshold for nine rounds day one is 2,048. Yeah, I guess it probably is 48, because once you reach that threshold, it should be, I think. I'll have to look at it later, but anyway. But yeah, there were more than enough players registered in this tournament to reach that threshold. I think at the talk of it, when we were in the lead up to this tournament, we were, as judges told that, we were prepping for nine rounds. And then once the tournament started, we didn't have nine rounds. And so yeah, it's tough. It's already become almost impossible for a casual player that only plays sporadically to make it to day two. And it's just so disheartening to know that if you have one loss in your day one, you can still make day two, but you're not going to be able to compete for the victory anymore. And that's got to be quite a blow. And I think that's specific to these tournaments that aren't getting to that 2,048 mark and above. I don't think there's going to be too, too many regionals in North America, at least, that are taxed for that. And I think all the European ones that are not quite at that threshold will probably be a little lower than this 1,900 we had here. So it won't be as much a factor as it is in this one. I think when we just get close to that threshold is when we have to start thinking about, well, maybe I can't take two losses at any point in this tournament. But I think it caught a lot of people off guard. And I know a lot of people were unhappy with feeling like they did everything in their power to put themselves in position to make top cut. It just didn't work out. And yeah, it really, it's a new thing we have to consider, or new thing that players have to consider, and maybe something that Pokemon looks at. I don't think they're able to fix it mid-season, because I think that might invalidate these past two tournaments or any of the regionals that have gone on so far. I think changing the format mid-season, like we've seen in the past Pokemon change championship point totals necessary to qualify for worlds. We've seen them kind of look at those and say, OK, well, we don't have the numbers we're quite reaching for or whatever. Let's lower the bar a little bit. But changing the format for tournaments is something that I think takes a lot of diligent thought and preparation for the organizers and for organized play in general. And I don't think they're really motivated to change it, even though we do have something like this happen. I think players will have to be the ones that adjust, not so much organized play. Yeah. And you're definitely right on the micro scale of this season, just if you're looking at it as an isolated event, even though it is multiple events kind of combined into that singular event. If you wanted to look at it at a more macro level and how can you adjust this moving forward? If you as a player are unsatisfied or unhappy with how this system is operating, make sure you're submitting support tickets to Pokemon. Like that's really the only thing that you can do. You can complain about it on Twitter all day or you just yak to people at your card shop about how this system is terrible and you're not a fan of it. That's not really going to do anything if Pokemon themselves don't hear it from you directly. So I encourage everyone, if you do have a problem with the system or if you like the system, like send a support ticket. Either way, let them know how you feel about it. But like you said, sorry, I guess before we get into too much more, do you feel like this is fair for, you know, we've reached a game, we've reached a point where our game is so large, but we're still trying to make worlds special. How do we ensure that players feel like they're playing for a championship, but also like, like, I don't know, what would your fix be, I guess, maybe to throw it in your court? I mean, as far as just how do you fix this situation in particular? Perhaps, yeah. Like if you're the tournament organizer. You either make top cut, you either make top cut top 16, or you make top cut like asymmetrical, but instead of eighth place, the cutoff is x2. And I think that that solves most of the problems. Honestly, yes, it makes the day a little bit longer on day two. But that's just kind of a logistics thing that might be unavoidable if you want to, you know, in the eyes of a lot of players maintain integrity of the event. Obviously, you can get pushback from people that would say, this is only a problem, like you said earlier, at kind of some point in time, at kind of specific percentages of these matchup thresholds, or round thresholds, player thresholds, whatever, like some combination of those terms, where we didn't see this be a problem in Dortmund, which had, I think, around 1400 1500 people. But as we got, you know, closer and closer and closer to that threshold to the next round being added in, something's got to give and it turns out it was just the point threshold that you needed. Now, there was a chance, if any of the people that made top eight, tied going into top eight, I believe, I think it was like places five through eight, if they had tied rather than winning their games, we would have had like a 17 player top cut. And so this may not happen every single time, but it has a chance to happen. And that can be, like I said, extremely disheartening for people. So I think that the easiest fix, in my mind, would be to just figure out a way to extend a top cut and make people feel like it's something that they can achieve. If I made day two, I still have a chance to win the event. Yeah. And I think that that's probably the goal that I would shoot for. Yeah, I mean, but just kind of, you have to pick your poison, I feel like at the end of the day, because you're not able to have unlimited rounds in a tournament, you're not able to, you know, I think if you do, if you make it a top 16, that means you have, in this case, one person bubbling at 17th, right? Or 18th, I think there was looking at the data, we would have 18 players at an x2 or better record, if we did that format. So you'd have two players still bubbling at a top 16. And that's back to where we are with top eight, you know, last season. Well, that's where my asymmetrical x2 cut comes into play. And it said you have that playoff round, because the current rules already have it set up to where you could go. The current rules are set up, though, to where you could potentially have a top 32, as long as enough players have met the proper match point threshold. So the way that I'm proposing doing this isn't adding any rounds of the event that don't have the potential to already exist. Sure. I'm not advocating for let's play 18 rounds of Swiss and then play a top 64. I mean, we've had events in the past, you know, years past before we arrived at the modern system, where we played nine rounds of Swiss for day one, and then day two was a top cut single elimination top 128. Yeah, yeah. And I know, I mean, this is way back in the day, at this point, this was like 2013, where there's actually a six prizes article for this, that I played against Rahul in top 128, where I went 6-3 in Swiss, he went undefeated. And then I'm sure he was not very happy to then lose in top 128. But it was something where I was able with, you know, a moderate record, able to get into top cut and have a fairly deep run in the tournament, I ended up making, I think, either top eight or top 16. I actually can't remember. I guess that's the counter argument. It's like if you go undefeated at a tournament, and then you have all this asymmetrical, like, top cut nonsense, I don't want to say maybe not nonsense is a strong word. But you know what I mean? Like, if you feel like you can get knocked out by the 18th seed, or the 17th seed as the first seed, it just feels really like, why did I try to make a good record? I mean, I guess, like seeding doesn't matter as much. And then I think, what's it look like for the top eight perspective here? Like, sure, it's unfair that x2 didn't make it to top eight, but just, you can make the argument, well, you just have to play better. You just have to. I know it's a tall ask, but people did it. You had eight players that did have a better record than x2. And the reality is, like, they earned top eight. They figured out a way to navigate the tournament, play the play the meta game that they wanted to play the deck that they wanted and put themselves in a position to win the tournament. Like that, that's the reality is, okay, well, yeah, I guess now that I know that there's this many players, now I have to just play better. And the good thing is there is pricing. For top 32, there's still cash. So there is still stuff to play for even if you don't make top eight. There's still lots of CPS to be had. Lots of like these, like I would feel if I, you know, it's discouraging, I'm sure for somebody that barely makes day two, and then goes undefeated, or then goes undefeated in day two and doesn't make it to top eight. It just feels like, you know, you had such a good run day two. For what? That's got to be pretty tough. But you're still making you're still walking away with a decent chunk of change at the end of the day, I think 2000 bucks, right? And sure, I mean, that helps ease the pain a little bit. It does. I think that the argument initially for the way that they changed the point thresholds for day two, though, was that the idea was that you were only letting people into day two, if they could still make top cut. And having that not be the case. And I mean, I can just understand why people are a little salty. But I think that we've kind of like waxed philosophical enough about this for this week, at least maybe we'll revisit it. But we can go ahead and look at what I think is actually a relatively interesting top eight since we have seven different decks represented. And we'll start here at the bottom with a name that should be fairly familiar after the past two weeks with Yurko Valencia, who I believe this is his third top eight in a row. Yeah, this list apparently is slightly different. But I believe had hit top eight at Joinville, top eight at Lima, and now has made top eight here at Louisville. And looking at his list. He pivoted more towards the Raikou. It looks pretty standard. Well, I say that there are definitely some standout things, but it looks very similar to what we've kind of come to expect from Rahul's success. The big oddities here are the inclusion of the two lightning attackers, but not having the basic lightning. And then Yurko has also chosen to include a copy of Arvin, which is fine as a singleton because you can search it with Luminion. But the Arvin is being used to search Vitality Band, which allows your Lugia, if you don't have a double turbo attached, to one-hit KO Toropagos. And if you do have a double turbo attached, you can still one-hit KO Pheasant Dippity or any of the Ogre Pawns that are not Cornerstone. And that's a pretty neat inclusion in my mind. I mean, and then obviously the other oddity, if you compare it to Rahul's list, is the Wellspring Ogre Pawn. But I know a lot of people have been kind of bouncing back and forth. I'm personally not a huge fan. Obviously, it can be really strong against Evolution decks because a lot of people have not been including Manaphy up to this point because Dusknoir kind of invalidates that card in a lot of instances. But at the same time, I'm not a fan of using my Primal Turbo to fetch 2 energy and then put them back in my deck. It just feels like you end up in a lot of situations where your Archeops can be very vulnerable for sure yeah no i think it's cool seeing some innovation i know that rule has been running the same 60 you know since worlds basically but it's cool to see some innovation in this lugia deck um and i'm definitely you know not a lot of new cards it's still everything's basically the same as it was from worlds other than i think i don't yeah there's no new cards added from any set other than yeah not even fezzanipity in this uh so literally zero cards from before twilight masquerade uh so yeah it's kind of like new lugia old lugia at the same time yep uh moving on we go up to gabe smart seventh place with tarapagos and gabe's list looks more or less like what i would consider to be a pretty standard what i think is a really solid 60 for tarapagos moving forward you can make an argument if you wanted to include the bouffalants to cut the mana fee and then maybe like one of the researches to include those as you kind of your bench protection motif but otherwise i think that having the single card that protects your bench keeps your little pidgeys and hoot hoot safe from some of these big bad mean greninjas and whatnot the deck looks good it looks solid obviously it's really strong going first um there's not really anything that kind of stands out here to me no i think the man if he's the main thing um you have to run vitality band or the finance band uh three night stretchers a little bit more than what we saw from south america um but yeah everything else looks pretty normal i'd say um yeah looks uh looks good i really like i like i like the mana fee inclusion for this weekend um knowing that um looking at the graphic like we did earlier that palkia does snore was such a high play for some really good players um it was cool it was a good inclusion for this weekend unfortunately i do think palkia is still a really really tough matchup for tarapagos especially if they can get the greninja ex online um moving on in top eight we have kieran farah who i believe this is he made finals in baltimore right and i thought for some reason i thought this was the same 60 but it looks like it may be a couple of cards different here it's still on 2-2 chinchino no raiku squawkability of course four boss i mean this also looks like a really easily viable way to run lugia it just kind of depends on whether or not you want to have those extra kind of tech attackers to fill your situations or go for a more consistent thing and then have the thicker chinchino line in place of those texts to kind of just kind of plow through things yeah this is just like the max consistency lugia from kieran here um you know i think i think that he just kind of ran it back from baltimore similar mindset yep uh rounding out top eight we have a another canadian benjamin herbert with reggie drago and adopting the isaiah bradner technology with the 1-1 knock towel um i still don't know how i feel about the knock towel but i know that um radner and co did run it back this weekend and i actually think made it a 2-2 line instead and then we've got the canceling cologne in here nod for thorns potential nod for manaphy um or i guess klefki as well um and then the temple of sino of course like you mentioned earlier we could see jamming tower make a comeback if we do expect more bravery charms in the raging bolt decks that might have came back and i think that it's and then and i don't know who he played in top four or top eight rather um but i i let me look at the bracket from real quick i want to say he played caleb because i'm pretty sure benjamin was first seed going in uh caleb played yorko it looks like oh okay um we had oh no benjamin played sebastian because it was charizard yep so okay so yeah benjamin played sebastian last met in top eight and somehow sebastian managed to come back in a match-up that many people consider to be nigh unwinnable or did going into worlds at least and you know it looks like maybe the inclusion of briar gives the deck enough tools to really come back a modern standard of a 3-1-2 charizard line uh still rocking the dust noir has the full suite of support pokemon in rodent lumineon pheasant dipity and clefa um has the thorton is using unfair stamp as a spec of choice and then has a missed energy for this weekend presumably for any dragon bolts that make it cropped up here or there and then also because we did see kind of a resurgence of lost box from a lot of top players may have played a role in those match-ups as well but otherwise this looks to be you know that is consistent of a charizard list is what i would expect in modern charizard you see the increased nest ball count to account for the fact that you have to blind first in a lot of match-ups so that you can try to have as consistent of a setup as large and robust of a board as possible even when you go first um for as much as it feels like a lie i think that unfair stamp still is obviously a match like a raw strong a spec to play um we do see a lot of people still playing either prime catcher or um hero's cape in this slot instead and i think hero's cape also would have been a really strong pick going into this weekend in particular but especially with the lack of tool removal or tool denying denial uh a la jamming tower but moving forward may not be as effective maybe unfair stamp is the move yeah and then we still see the thorton and the taro kind of rounding things out you see so many comeback cards in this deck um you know you can go behind two three prizes um even with counter catcher with defiance band with unfair stamp and then moving into briar and the dust snore line like you can um we saw on stream a couple times where we had four prize turns um where the dust snore ko and then briar and then ko a v pokemon or an ex pokemon for three prizes um charizard's definitely still powerful i i will be honest i did not think that the deck was in such a good position um going into this weekend so it is a it is exciting to see charizard kind of retooled by the the loyalists um here with briar i think that's definitely a new inclusion um that we haven't really seen as much and then unfair stamp is really really powerful even with like if you can go counter catch your knockout physindipity on fair stamp um your opponent like the tarapagos player or uh whoever is going to really struggle to get anything going after that i feel like um right yeah it's got to be really strong in tarapagos in particular especially in like unless they can get the pidgeot set up of course but if you can deny that you know you're probably in pretty good shape i would say unfortunately for sebastian though he had some rather rough match-ups available to him in top four so moving on to round out our top four we had kyle i'm totally gonna butcher your last thank you i'll we'll go with that but kyle's playing kind of a hybrid version of the build that grafton took to ninth place in baltimore and then what stefan played last weekend or two weekends rather to top four in dortmund in that he has the two copies of irida in addition to the rodent v and then also now has an extra copy of earthen vessel which is an inclusion that i really like and then they kind of fit all that in let's cut down to one trekking shoe which seemed to put in some work for the games that he was on stream but also seems really odd to me that you couldn't find a single card that would be better than just putting a shoe in your deck he just likes the one shoe man i don't know he's just uh saying hey i can't think of anything he's kind of a safety shoe like a safety blanket you know just it's it's there yeah you're uh you're feeling lonely you just need to rip off and get a mu or get a um rare candy or something i don't know but yeah i mean shoes so shoes work when they work they don't when they don't and it feels really bad when they deck is obviously strong if you haven't picked it up by now i would pick it up especially if you're planning to play it at laic or any other event moving forward pick it up sooner rather than later so you can get your reps in practice your sequencing because the deck is very sequencing heavy michael davidson comes in at second place with lost box of all things and you know we've seen a rather steady decline of reggie drago in terms of meta percentage since the start of this format and as a result of that lost boxes can kind of come out of hiding it's not afraid of the key room anymore it's not afraid of having its board wiped repeatedly and it's to play with a you know modified version of andrew hedrick's build since michael is part of that whole ddg crew but this looks pretty bare bones as far as locks box goes you've got your multiple copies of vacuum or copies of pokestop you're trying to just get to 10 turbo it out as quickly as possible and then swing fast with ursula swing fast with iron hands deny evolving basics off the bench with radiant greninja maybe even sable i turn two in some matchups and just getting that out hard and fast i know that michael and other members of people that were playing lost box this weekend said that they just accepted if they sat down across from reggie drago they were going to lose unless their opponent bricked but that was a risk they were willing to take because they expected that meta percentage to be smaller and for in michael's case it really paid off psychic energy was interesting i'm interested to see why he played three um as opposed to maybe like a third lightning uh to maybe use arm press more i don't know i mean maybe um you just want to see it early and often you don't you want to draw into it as opposed to mirage gate it out because you're using such an energy efficient attack and lost mine would be the rationale um but yeah it's interesting to see because um that's one thing that sticks out to me but everything else i don't know i don't think there's any it's a lot of one of um in this list and the one uh rescue board which i think is good um for pokestops is pretty standard i'd say for a lost box at this point um which i guess is funny to say i don't know what's what is standard for lost box anymore i haven't really thought about lost box in a long time uh basically since before worlds it's it's such an interesting deck we saw it such a high high at naic right and then immediately after going into worlds it just fell off the face of the earth and so now it's interesting now that reggie drago is a little bit less we're able to see it kind of climb back and assert hey man you know i'm still a really good deck like don't forget about me i don't know i'd love to play with this i think i might pick it up and rebuild lost box after not having it built for a couple months um it might be something i'd do moving forward sure yeah i mean if you don't expect to have reggie drago be a heavy presence in your metagame i think that it's definitely still has a chance to be kind of fitted to what you expect your local metagame to be because i like there are definitely metagames where i would want to still include ryko where you potentially want to include something like roaring moon and kind of retool your energy count to account for that and make it work um just kind of some of those things that the text that you would want to consider and make the deck very adaptable to what you sit across from as long as it is not a reggie drago deck yeah and then taking the victory over michael in the finals was a rather familiar face and caleb gedimer taking it down with raging bolt of all things something that we said last week we did not expect very many high caliber players to come into this event with raging bolt and then caleb said you know what hold on a second i'm going to roll up and i'm going to show you who's boss and like we talked about earlier with johnny ravis trying to fit the bravery charms on his deck caleb found a way to fit three copies of bravery charm into his list along with the slitherwing in place of sandy shocks to be able to one-hit kaotarapagos with a one-prizer which is also safe to sit on your bench ahead of time from a dust noir curse blast thanks to having 140 hp you can kind of prep it in advance and then also the kind of other interesting thing that you would note here are is the luminion v to just guarantee that you're going to have sada or boss when you need to have it while also choosing to exclude any form of hand disruption so caleb has i'm going to execute my game plan i don't care what you are doing yeah this is some very interesting decisions um it's it's like this is a vibe this is this is this is a strategy we're just foregoing any comeback mechanic we have for pure aggression pure pure speed um we still have some prize advantages i guess we can take with slitherwing and but other than that i think that's just for terrapagos because uh right i mean you're not you're not trying to beat anything like a single prize attacking deck but there's just really none of that in this format we're not really seeing right you know we saw cloth on stream but like that's i think most players don't think about single price attacking decks like ancient boxes nowhere to be seen there really isn't anything like at all in this format right now everything is pivoted towards if we're gonna in lieu of using single price attackers we're doing dust snore things we're doing briar things we're doing stuff like that you know to try to gain a prize advantage yeah um before we move on is there anything else in the top 16 or anything like that i think there were some snorlax decks because i do think it's important in this case especially when we're talking about the x2 players maybe trying to finish out their their tournament um and sure if we just look at i believe x2 the cutoff was 18th place we've got two more copies of palkia another copy of terrapagos another lost box deck two snorlax builds and two more loogie a list, another Charizard, and Xander Perrault on Raging Bolt. I know Xander's list is relatively interesting in that he chose to play four copies of Bravery Charm in his Raging Bolt deck, but I don't necessarily want to take too much time to dive into each of these lists individually. But yeah, just to give you a relative idea of what other decks potentially could have made top eight, how do we enter it into that kind of Twilight Zone alternate timeline to let all of them sneak into Topcat? So we can move on now, and I believe we are going to now jump into Jon doing this week's segment of Blaine's Quiz Show. So Jon, take it away. Yeah, so you used this format, and I liked it a lot, so I'm going to just copy-paste what you did. Alright, so Aaron, let's go through how to play. You will be given three multiple choice questions. If you are truly stumped, I will give you one hint, and you can use this for... you get to choose which question you want to use. You can try to save it for the third one, and I did try to rank it up a little bit in difficulty. I mean, we saw how that went last week, so we'll see if that actually means anything. But if you are truly stumped, you will have one hint you can ask for at any time. Hopefully I can give you something to work off of. Are you ready? I sure am. Gardevoir and Lost Box made up the first nine places at NAIC in 2024. What deck placed 10th? Was it Garde, Maridon, Raging Bolt, or Snorlax Stall? I have absolutely no idea. I know... I want to say... It's not... Oh no, actually, I believe I do know. I believe that this is Ian and Rob playing Maridon, so that's what I'm going to go with. Oh, okay. Final answer? Yes, I'm locking it in. And you'd be wrong. It was Snorlax Stall. I don't remember the name off the top of my head. Okay, well, there was a Maridon at 11th place. I don't think it was Ian and Rob. You're off by one. But yeah, all right. So, first one down. No points for this one. That's okay. We'll come back on the next one. Ready? All right. During the Sun and Moon through Lost Thunder format, there was one tag team Pokemon that became legal before the release of Team Up. What was it? Was it Eevee and Snorlax, Magikarp and Wailord, Clefairy and Venusaur, or Pikachu and Zekrom? So, I know it's not Pikachu and Zekrom, and I know it's not Celebi and Venusaur. The other two, I'm not 100% sure of. I know Eevee and Snorlax had a tin that came out, but I don't know if they were also released in the set, or if they were the one that were released ahead of time. Magikarp and Wailord seems like something that would be released as a promotional card, just because it's sillier. But Eevee and Snorlax are more popular. I think I want to save my hint for the next question, because I've already got this down to a 50-50. So, I'm going to have to guess again. Unfortunately, I was not playing competitively at this time, so I'm going to guess Eevee and Snorlax. Well, you did narrow it down to a 50-50, but you picked the wrong half of the 50-50. It was Magikarp and Wailord. 300 hit points. Goofy fish deck. Fish Pokemon. All right, so 0 for 2. Let's see if you can finish out strong. You still have your hint, so let's go to question 3. All right, Swalot got its first printing in a long time in the Stellar Crown expansion. What was the last set to be graced with this weird Pokemon? Was it Celestial Storm in 2018, Chilling Rain in 2021, Phantom Forces in 2014, or Fates Collide in 2016? Well, John, you weren't kidding after last week when you told me that you were going to really just go for the throw. Considering I could not tell you 80% of the cards in two of these sets, I think I'm going to need my hint here. I'll also say I'm really glad that I saved it for this question, even though I got the other two wrong. Yeah, fair enough. It's older than Chilling Rain. Well, that does let me eliminate Chilling Rain. Okay. Um, I don't think it's in Phantom Forces. And even if it was in Phantom Forces, there could be a newer one. Right. The joke's going to be on me. Swalot is in all of these sets. No, I wouldn't do that to you. That would be so mean. So, Phantom Forces, we still had Megas. Fates Collide was a break set. Well, actually, I take that back. It is in two of these sets. Sorry. But, um, yeah. Okay, but I need the second newest printing of the card. So, I know if it's in two of these, then I now know it is not in Chilling Rain, and it is not in Phantom Forces. Or, even if it is in Phantom Forces, that is not the answer. Okay. So, that brings me down to Fates Collide in Celestial Storm. And I'm going to have to do another 50-50, and I'll probably get it wrong again. Which one has more letters of Swalot's name in it? That's a good strategy. I don't know. They're both pretty similar. So, I think that we're just going to guess Celestial Storm. All right. Let's see. You got it correct. Yes. Got the Swalot question. Salvage one point. One point. So, we've confirmed you don't know much about the Pokemon Trading Card Game competitively, but you do know a lot about Swalot. Congrats. That sounds about right. It was printed in Phantom Forces. I forgot about that. Okay. Yeah. That was the second after Celestial Storm. That was the last time it was printed. There's only been eight Swalots ever printed for the Pokemon Trading Card Game. Interesting. Yeah. So, it's definitely not a much-loved Pokemon, but we can all appreciate the Poison Bag Pokemon, right? Well, thanks for playing Blaine's Quiz Show. I take a tiny lead. Yeah. Some weeks we crush it, and some weeks we have something to build on, and this is definitely one of those weeks. All right. But yeah, I'm looking forward to next week when you try to even the score up. Hopefully, you're not too... I mean, I think we've got a good dynamic going. I'm asking some newer stuff. You're asking some older stuff. So, yeah. I'm enjoying this so far. I hope we keep it going for a long time. I'm going to ask you what the first set Swalot was printed in. So, study up. Is Swalot any better? All right. Well, let's move on from Swalot here. And so, following that horrible, horrible beatdown that John just delivered to me in Blaine's Quiz Show, we're going to try something out a little bit different again this week. Last week, we went through and John did the ranking haul going over the Championship Point Leaderboard, and we got a little bit of feedback that that content may not be super interesting to players on a week-to-week basis. So, it's something that we may revisit either bi-weekly or monthly, or it's something where we'll have to play with the frequency of that inclusion. But in its place this week, we're going to talk about a concept that is going to be very familiar to our more hardcore competitive players, but maybe less familiar to someone who is more casual tuning into the podcast that maybe wants to try to figure out how to become that more competitive player. And this week, the topic that we've chosen for the segment that we're going to call Frontier Fundamentals is price checking. And so, John, first, can you just go over the basics for me? What is price checking? Yep. So, at the very start of the game, you're going to put six cards off to the side. Those are your price cards. We all know this. And those price cards kind of dictate what lines of play we can use to win the games that we're playing. One of the first things we do when we do our initial deck search should be taking into account what those cards are when they're prized. I'm going to speak about what I know with Regidrago. Say I'm going against a Lost Box deck. All right. So, what cards do I want to see in this matchup? I want to see Kyurem. I want to see if I'm running at Hawlucha. Maybe the Canceling Cologne to turn off a Manafee. And I also want to see Dragapult EX. On my initial search, I'm looking to see what attackers I have available to me, what Regidrago line I have, all that kind of stuff. I'm looking at also what I need to attack. So, not just my attackers, but my basic energy, right? I'm looking to see if I have any fire energy prized. If I have two fire energy prized, then I definitely can't discard one early game and be expecting to attack with Regidrago. Beyond that, you know, you're looking at supporter counts. So, if I have a boss prized, I know that that's something I can get later on. That's one thing that we can talk about real quick is if we know we have a lot of draw supporters prized, like two or three, we can play with that in mind. So, if we say, okay, I have two research prized and I have four prizes left, I can do a more aggressive line of play and then take two prize cards. And I have pretty good odds to hit a draw supporter from that. And I can take that and run and go with the next turn. And my opponent might think, oh, he's going down to zero card hand. He's got to have nothing in hand for next turn. But, you know, you're able to leverage that knowledge you gained early with your deck check into maybe potentially your opponent not playing in that I-O-N-O. And now you're able to just go, okay, you know, research, draw seven, and continue the pressure that you applied early on in the game. So, that's important. I know just the deck knowledge. Being able to know your deck list front and back is where to start. And this is a skill that doesn't really take a whole lot of effort to learn, I'd say, compared to some other skills we see in the Pokemon TCG. You can get decently good at it. You can just kind of play solitary fishbowl hands. So, you just do your six prize cards off to the side. You do your opening seven, and you can just, you know, play that nest ball that you would play on turn one, or play the, I don't know, whatever. Take your pick, deck search card. And then just go through and kind of go through the whole process. And you can do this while you're watching TV, or watching a stream, or something like that. Or listening to this podcast, even. And I think it's a really fundamental skill. I'm going to pass it back to you. Do you think you have anything else to add to that? The big thing that kind of goes hand in hand with this, and not every player does this, I know that I'm really guilty of not taking physical notes. But a lot of players do take physical notes. You can carry a notepad with you at events. Every round, you just have to start with a clean sheet of paper. There are some kind of digital notepads that people have been able to pick up as well, that you can just erase the contents of it when you're going into it. And what that does is kind of alleviate the mental stress of having to remember what you have prized. And instead, you can just say, okay, I've got X, Y, Z prized. Now I know how to play around that. And I think that's kind of the biggest thing, just that you would want to add into your rotation. So if we look at prize checking and learning how to prize check as a process, the thing that you would want to do, if we just follow this like stepwise, if I was writing procedure with teaching someone to prize check, the first thing you want to do is learn your deck list, like John said. And there are a multitude of ways that you can go about doing that. Like John said, you can fishbowl hands. You can literally stare at your sheet of paper and learn what your deck list is. You can just play games of TCG live until you have memorized your deck. Just the repetition of playing games with your deck is probably the best way to go about learning what the contents of that deck are. The other important thing would be just sticking with a 60. If you change things up too often, it can be very confusing and very difficult to memorize your list. Once you do feel like you're comfortable and have your list memorized, go through and practice prize checking, like John said. That's when you pull out your physical deck. I'm going to goldfish a hand, deal six cards off to the side, and try to figure out what those are. And then you figure out the method that works for you, as far as how are you going to actually go about prize checking. Like John said, I've got this stack of basic energies as an example. I have four of each energy in here, and I deal four of them off to the side. Now suddenly, I want to go through and figure out what are the contents of this stack. So I'm going to go through and I can move all of my grass energy to the front. And then I can move all of my fire energy to the front. And you could simultaneously do this. Some people do things where they just like pop a card up taller, and that indicates it as part of a certain subcategory. And that's just something like just whatever works for you. Find the method that works for you. Practice that method. Again, repetition and practice are going to be the best ways to really get this nailed down. And then to supplement that, get comfortable doing this in a timely manner as well. Because there are definitely time constraints that are a little bit relaxed on the first turn, at least currently. When you're going through and doing your prize check, you're often given the leeway currently of having anywhere from 60 to 90 seconds to complete your initial search and complete your action. Assuming that you're going to pick up your pace of play and complete your next series of actions in a much more expedited manner. The other thing you could do is not try to fully prize check your deck all in one sitting. You could go through, like John said, if I'm playing a nest ball, let me just go take account all of my Pokemon right now. Because that's all that really matters when I'm playing a nest ball. I need to know what all of my Pokemon are. Maybe you can go look at something like how many energy you have as well. Or if you know you're going to play two search cards, you don't necessarily have to spend all your time doing your initial search on that one card. You know you're completing two actions. That gives you the allotted time necessary to go back through. So just being respectful of your opponent is something you also have to keep in mind when you're doing this. The context of what you need to look for unfortunately is not black and white. It's going to vary depending on what your deck is, what tools you have available, what search cards you have, what your goals are with the deck. So I think that starting with what you kind of said, finding the cards that are key, like cornerstones for a matchup, is probably a good starting point and then as you get more comfortable with that you can expand to doing more and more within that a lot of time frame until you get to a point where you feel you can reasonably price check your entire deck if that is something that you feel gives you more comfortability and the ability to be more competitive within a game. It's not always totally necessary but it's something that some players who are considered to be some of the more elite players in the game do feel is something that they need to complete in basically every single game that they sit down and play. So at some point some portion of that is probably worthwhile in learning. I know we just threw a lot of words out to really describe a concept that really just the easiest way to learn it is to sit down and do it yourself and kind of figure it out but hopefully we gave you the tools and kind of the building blocks that you can use to get your foot in the door and kind of build from there and we will hopefully bring this segment back at some point with another topic and hopefully try to keep bridging the gap between casual and competitive so that everyone can be more successful in their Pokemon TCG journey. And so did you have any other thoughts on price checking before we leave that topic? No I think we got everything I wanted to think about but if you guys have any suggestions for us for topics in the future please please please please put those in the comments and let us know what you want to see. We sure I've been playing a long time we kind of forget what it's like to be beginners sometimes and it can be a really challenging game to break into compared to some other TCGs so I'm definitely curious as to what you guys think we should look at and what are you struggling with in the Pokemon trading card game that we can maybe help you with? Absolutely absolutely and that being said we can move on now and I'm going to throw a lot more words at people in this week's segment of the time capsule and I'm going to jump way back into my prehistoric stage looking at 2004 again with the deck that actually managed to win the World Championship in the Magma Groudon deck. Really it was just a Team Magma deck. Key feature of this deck is that everyone kind of wrote it off when the initial Team Aqua Team Magma set came out and then Japan brought the deck to Worlds and kind of took the tournament by storm and they actually managed to take four of the top five placements at this event with this deck and so this list yes this is the first place list that was piloted by Sugiyoshi Yamato but I believe this is actually the same list for all four of those players and so the thing that the deck was able to do was be very aggressive in a format that otherwise like we talked about the Blaziken deck two weeks ago was a little bit slower and people were trying to kind of just do their thing and set things up and I'm gonna get my board and you get your board and then we'll crash all our big guys into each other this deck instead said no I'm gonna start taking prizes on turn two and the way that it was really able to do that was just kind of capitalizing on some of the weaknesses in the format and that dark was a good type to have colorless was a very good type to have and psychic was a very good type to have now if we look at a lot of these Team Magma Pokemon like the Groudon here is a fighting type but it's also a dark type and so some of these Magma Pokemon were able to be dual types including the Groudon and the Claydol they were able to hit multiple weaknesses and the whole archetype kind of just works synergistically together and that you have Team Magma Zangoose which has a call for family attack that lets you go search your deck for a basic Team Magma Pokemon and put it on your bench then also has an attack that does 10 damage for each Team Magma Pokemon in play and this is important because there was a Rayquaza EX that was weak to colorless at the time that only had 100 HP and so when you have five Team Magma Pokemon in play you have a one prize basic that's able to knock out a two prizer something that if you look at the modern format and you had like Ancient Box when it was able to up trade into other decks it's just a very important trade-off to have that can make the deck very powerful moving into those matchups and then the engine that really makes the deck work is you set up a combination of Team Magma's Claydol and Team Magma's Camerupt on your bench so Camerupt's overheat poke power which is essentially an ability states once during your turn before you attack you may search your disc or pile for a basic energy card and attach it to Team Magma's Camerupt you put two damage counters on Team Magma's Camerupt after you do that energy attachment and so the damage is relatively inconsequential you're not really super worried about it because a lot of things if they're going to snipe the Camerupt are probably just going to one-hit KO it anyway but you get that extra energy acceleration for your turn and then Team Magma's Claydol has the Magma Switch ability that says once during your turn you may move an energy card attached to your Pokemon with Team Magma and its name to another of your Pokemon so you would accelerate the energy to Camerupt, Claydol can then move it off to something else and you're able to just kind of get this surplus of energy built up on your board while you're pressuring your opponent and so you see cards that are reminiscent of the modern Pokemon Catcher in the form of Pokemon Reversal literally does the same exact thing as modern Pokemon Catcher and so your opponent could be trying to hide something that you would consider a prime target on their bench and boss's orders did not exist in this format so this is really one of the only ways that you could gust something up and then to combo all this we're running a fully one prize deck there are no EXs in here and it plays at Desert Ruins as a stadium of choice which was a newly released card in the Hidden Legends expansion this is at any time between turns each player puts one damage counter on his or her Pokemon EX with a maximum HP of at least 100 what this did was soften up cards to get them in range of being able to be KO'd by Groudon by Zangoose by Claydol the other kind of key thing I kind of gloss over this because the Groudon and Claydol are dual types with darks we had a special dark energy at the time this was actually before basic dark existed and this said if the Pokemon that this dark energy is attached to does damage with an attack the attack does ten more damage and then at the end of every turn you put a damage counter on that Pokemon unless it is a dark type and so you just have a thing a deck that's able to hit hard hit fast and kind of across the course of a game pick off targets on your bench with those Pokemon reversals and it just made it really hard for decks to trade into it properly and we saw Chris Fulop was able to like I mentioned in the Blaziken edition of this segment take advantage of that Bellossom to kind of combat the deck slightly but so ultimately ended up falling to the deck in the finals so it's a very powerful deck I know that there are some more kind of optimized modern variants of it like I know that the underground expedition supporter that Yamato chose to include which just reads look at the bottom four cards your deck put two in your hand and put the other two back on the bottom obviously not the best card for the deck when you look at it in hindsight I know Magma's Groudon or Team Magma I should say has continued to be a strong mainstay in the 2004 retro format as people continue to try to innovate and refine the decks from it it's something where if you have enjoyed the one prize decks that have existed over the course of more modern formats and you want to visit a retro format I think this would be a great starting point yeah it's definitely cool to see like the pink chunky or yellow chunky borders on stuff real quick before you go on what is the magma energy do is it just oh I totally glossed over that thank you for bringing that up magma energy just provides two dark or two fighting and then you discard it at the end of the turn and made it so you could go from having no energy on a Groudon to attacking with it in a single turn with its pulverized attack Team Magma's Groudon and Pokebody which again when we can combine modern terms with Pokebody Pokepower eventually get merged to ability at a later state in the game's history but his power saver ability says as long as the number of Pokemon in play that has Team Magma is three or less Team Magma's Groudon can't attack this does count yours and your opponents but it was very rare to see a Team Magma mirror so it was mostly you just had to have three Team Magma or four Team Magma Pokemon in play for Groudon to attack and then its first attack for a fighting and a colorless is linear attack which just lets you do 20 damage to any Pokemon in your opponent's board and then pulverized was the big attack that you would use that magma energy to power up which did 50 damage and then if the defending Pokemon already had at least two damage counters on it you would do an additional 20 damage and so something that already has 20 damage on it you then hit it for 70 you're putting it up to 90 typically the way that the Pokemon would already have damage on it is because it's an EX so you're getting that repeated kind of chip damage from that desert ruins over the course of a game and Groudon was just able to do a lot of big damage out of nowhere was really able to take out a lot of evolving basics in the format most things that were evolving basics at the time had 40 or 50 HP so you could do something like reversal up a Torchic and just pulverize it and it gets knocked out and you take a prize and if your opponent trades back into you typically you're okay because you're probably only losing one energy if you use the magma energy to power up the Groudon and so it's all about taking kind of efficient trades where you can and capitalizing on your ability to kind of amass a critical mass of energy and putting it where you need to so you get to do some strategic gameplay but you also get to hit hard hit fast and not have any of the frills of having to worry about your prize or sitting on your board. Gotcha. What's the card next to reversal there? The magma ball? Team magma ball is roughly equivalent to capturing aroma in the modern game you flip a coin if head search your deck for any Pokemon that has team magma in its name if tails you search for a basic with team magma in its name. Oh yeah all right well thanks Aaron yeah this is such a cool deck and it's a strategy what's the camera up line is it a 1-2? See I glossed over another very important card to the deck you can get away with a 1-2 because you have the maxi supporter that lets you play from your hand or discard pile a Pokemon with team magma in its name and put it on your bench if it's a stage two you put damage counters on it we're not worried about that drawback because you're not running into any stage twos but it lets you just play your camera up for free or if your camera up gets knocked out because you've built up excess damage on it using that overheated power you can go fetch it from your discard pile with maxi and put it back into play and you could also use this to accelerate a clay doll onto the board in the in like the circumstance where you couldn't get a bow toy out so yeah very very powerful I know we're looking at all these cards and was like a 50 damage for three energy for like you know like we're looking at this it's like the Zangoose doing ten times the number of Pokemon you haven't played with team magma and you're like 50 damage is like so weak but like you got to remember like Aaron I think was talking about like the exes the two price Pokemon you know they they didn't have more than 100 120 hit points right yeah some some of the stage twos would be up to like 150 but even then a lot of things in this format even with those exes kind of in the mix the the ones that were able to take big one eight ko's were glass cannon so they were also easier to ko back the ones that were beefier oftentimes where maybe they could ko one prisers relatively easily that weren't like stage twos as an example but you would have a hard time this is more to hit ko'ing things than what we have in the modern game where everything just it's not having one hit yeah there was more interplay more back and forth we will have a link to this list in the description of the episode for anyone that is interested you can find a majority of these decks either on ETCG legends or the affiliated Alex Wilson github website but yeah I think that it gives us a spot to go ahead and close our time capsule for the week and move on to the finals segment for the episode talking about what we expect to see in the meta with the Lil regional championship coming up in France this weekend I know that the event it's going to have lower attendance numbers than Louisville and I expect that people are going to be in a position where they now potentially have to consider that they may have to go better than x2 to make cut and that could influence people's deck choices and then we also have to now look at the fact that these bravery charm heavy raging bolt decks are performing well and how does that impact deck choices and dragapult didn't do well after it one Dortmund so how does that influence people's deck choices so John again I'm gonna ask you what are your top we'll just say three just because it's the same format the decks haven't changed too much what do you think are the top three decks people should have on their mind going into this weekend so Louisville should get up a little bit for me I'll say I I said confidently dragapult going into Louisville and okay it looks like if you'd gone that route you might have struggled a little bit to kind of handle the raging bolts out there I think raging bolt has a target on its back now I think people are Europeans might try to seek to counter that with like a Neuvern maybe or something like that I could see control doing really well this weekend so I think that's probably I'm not gonna just choose like the top three I'm gonna choose what picks I think I'll see I'd like to see this weekend I think I'd like to see a control style variant we saw a couple do okay like top 128 we saw some Snorlax decks just miss out on top eight so I'm hopeful that we're gonna see like a Pidgeot control do well have a deep run the meta is more established and we usually see after a meta game gets established that control is able to do more I know dust is really tricky to deal with if you're a control player but I think I think we can see something like you know a walls or a Neuvern kind of variant I'd love to see that do really well this weekend so that's one pick beyond that I think lost box still has a really good showing I think people don't go back to Reggie Drago away. Um, okay. I, I don't think it was, I mean, how much was it in Dortmund? I'm trying to remember. Uh, it was pretty popular. It was, it was still sitting around like the seven, 8% mark. Like it's definitely been on the house. So if it stays at that, I think lost box is still in a really good spot. I mean, it got second this week, uh, by all intents and purposes, I'd say it was in a decent spot to close the tournament out and then just got a little unlucky. Um, we did see something, uh, equivalent to a misplay leading to just, um, Michael Davidson getting in a weird spot in game three and it being really hard for him to recover from there. But, um, yeah, I think it's still in a really good spot going into this weekend. And then I think, uh, I want to see Palkia does snore. I know do really well. I know that you're always cheering for that deck, but it's still in such a really good spot right now. Um, and I don't think these results from this weekend really changed that too much. Um, I don't, I don't know if it's better than Trapigos. It's, it's definitely at least equal to it, but you definitely have more options. Um, it could struggle against a lost box deck perhaps, but I think with Greninja, you're still doing really well. Like most lost box decks aren't running Manaphy. Um, they're not really countered. They're not built for it. They're not, they're not built for Trifrost. So they're definitely not built for Radiant Greninja. Um, so I think you're still in a really good spot in that matchup. Um, but I'm, I'm interested to hear your thoughts. What are you thinking about, um, as you look at into this weekend and what, what do you think the metagame is going to look like? I think similarly to what you just said, that lost box still has the potential to do well. Um, I do think Regidrago may pick up ever so slightly. It's, it's weird. It's kind of a weird balance because Regidrago is incentivized to be played more because of lost boxes, but it's also incentivized to stay kind of hidden or on the down low because of the Raging Bolt presence. And so you think is, is the inclusion of Jamming Tower enough to bring that, Jamming Tower plus Noivern enough to bring that matchup back to being winnable? And the answer is maybe. And if that's the case, then maybe Regidrago does better this weekend. But if Regidrago stays on the down low, is kind of just biding its time, waiting for the format to be more friendly to it, then like you said, I could definitely see Lost Box doing well. But simultaneously, if Regidrago is also on the downswing and the Lost Box stays away, I could also see Charizard actually doing fairly well this weekend. So I think that the three decks that I would want to watch this weekend are Charizard because it is historically good into Raging Bolt. I believe it has a solid Terapagos matchup and it has the potential, depending on your list, to kind of take people by surprise and just power through games that you feel like it has no business winning. So I would put Charizard up there. Like you said, I'm always a fan of Palkia Dusknoir. I believe that it has the potential to overcome pretty much any matchup. I think that these triple and quad charm Raging Bolt lists could be extremely difficult to overcome, but you know, I guess it just really puts a lot of emphasis on timing your vacuum properly and targeting the right thing with it. Would you consider running two vacuum maybe? No, absolutely not. It would be a dead card. You just don't have the freedom to really play that, especially not twice. You don't necessarily have the resources to kind of sustain that properly. It's not something like Lost Box or Regidrago or even Raging Bolt where you're, you know, drawing every turn even when your opponent doesn't take a knockout, you're drawing, you know, four plus additional cards to your hand on top of your supporter. You're just looking for key pieces and trying to make sure that everything kind of filters through properly. So you said Charizard, Palkia, and was there a third one? I think the third one, I'm gonna take a cop-out answer and say Regidrago or Lost Box, and those are both kind of more meta-dependent, I think. I expect Raging Bolt to still be played in high numbers, and I think that that makes the format more favorable for Charizard. So actually with that in mind, I'm gonna backpedal here a little bit and say that Lost Box would be my answer for number three. If Raging Bolt stays up, then I think a Lost Box lixed with three vacuums has the potential to do a lot of damage this weekend. Yeah, I could see that. It is interesting, I mean, we've had, I think this is probably the fourth or fifth week of majors we've had in this format. It's getting a little stale, I'd say. People, we've already seen people complaining, okay, Dusknoir is just too powerful, you know, we need to nerf it or something like that. How do you feel about Dusknoir? Are you, how do you feel about it? Do you feel like you're dreading playing in this format for a lot longer with Dusknoir being such an oppressive force? I know you've been maining a deck with Dusknoir. Is it really just whoever goes first to you wins this format, or is it something else? Like, what does this format feel like to you right now? I think in a broad sense, not every format is for every player, and I think some people may not want to hear that, some people may not like that idea, and there can be times where if you're not happy with the game, if you're not having fun, don't play. Like, it may, it may hurt to hear that, it may not be the most fun thing because you may want to say, well I like Pokemon, I want to play Pokemon, but if you're not having fun with the game, then don't play it right now. Come back, like wait for the next set to come out, come see if it fits better, or just play games that aren't in a competitive scene. If you want to be competitive, though, you know, there's nothing you can do about the format. The format is what it is. I think that the opening coin flip does have a lot of weight, this format, but I also think Dusknoir is totally fine, people need to get over it. I agree with it, too. I don't think it's unfair. I think there's, it has a really good balanced mechanic where it gives up one prize card for every time you have to use it, and I think that honestly keeps it in check on its own. Like, you can't overcommit to, you have to be very strategic with your Dusknoirs, you can't just blow them up and then try to piece it together afterwards. You have to have your, your lines of play already figured out before you even start evolving them up and getting them into play. And I think it rewards players, like we've, you know, we talked about earlier in the podcast that we've seen top players repeat with the same deck or with similar decks week after week, and the trend continues, Aaron. I think when people are saying it's an unfair format, but we keep seeing top players doing well, then it's like, well, maybe you're just not enjoying it. And that's like you, like you said, that's fine. But I mean, Lugia is still doing well. I don't think, it's not all just Dusknoir decks, right? Like, we looked at that top cut from this past week. It wasn't all just Dusknoir decks. Like, it wasn't the thing that people were dreading where it's like, you either play Dusknoir or you lose. It's, that's not the case. So I don't think, I think it's a lot of hot air. Pokemon players love to have crises. And I'm saying that as a Pokemon player, that has had crises. So I'm self-aware. But yeah, I'm excited to see what happens. You know, it's old, but, you know, European players always seem to find new ways to play. I'm sure we'll see like an Iron Thorns make a run or something like Maridon, maybe come back out. Maybe Yella comes back down with Golden Go for a little, you know. Oh, Yella's a lock for top eight. I don't know. It's just, it's going to happen. So it's always fun to watch European. I know you got to wake up a little bit earlier on the weekends, but that's why they're, they're always, always recorded and you can always watch it a little later. So, all right. Anything else you want to talk about before we close out? No, I think I'm good. We have rambled on long enough. I would say just final thing here. If you have any feedback again, I know this is probably the fifth time we've mentioned it this episode, but we would love to hear it from you. Please let us know in the comments of this episode on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, on YouTube, wherever you are listening or watching, let us know what you think. And let us know if you feel like we're just way off base on something. Let's have a discussion. For sure. If we'd love to see it, we'd love to be in touch with you. Otherwise, I think we would want to just wish everyone, you know, best of luck if you're competing this weekend. Be sure to keep an eye on these results and the results of all of these majors as we head into LAIC because it is the same format. It'll be here before you know it. Recognize that Dust Noir is not going to be banned for LAIC. And even if it was, you would probably be complaining about wanting to ban Pheasant Dippity too. So neither of those things are happening. Thank you. We will see you next time on the Battle Frontier.