Episode 30: A RAGING GOOD TIME IN MILWAUKEE

Hello, and welcome back to the Battle Frontier podcast, where we aim to help you level up in your journey as a competitive Pokemon TCG player. I'm Aaron Curry, here with me as always, my co-host John Orgel. And this week, we're going to come at you with some competitive updates involving Pockets' newest set, Celesto Guardians, before we hit up a Blaine's Quiz Show, where John is going to give us his thoughts on the new Pokemon game. He's going to ask me some questions, and I try to widen our gap ever so slightly. And then we will recap Milwaukee regionals, including the day one, day two meta percentages, as well as some interesting trends in the conversion rates from that event, before we talk about the top cut and some more interesting decks from throughout that event as well. We'll go over our predictions from that event, before we hit up a time capsule to close things out for this week. And you know, we don't have any events coming up next week. So we're not going to do a huge in depth meta analysis about what we expect to happen as things evolve, as we get a little bit of a downtime before we hit up Portland regionals here in a couple of weeks. But before we get into everything proper, as is tradition, John, we're going to go over what we did this week. And I want to know what were you up to? Yeah, we had a nice little trip up to where my wife grew up in Winchester, Virginia. They had the Shenandoah Apple Blossom Festival, which there's not a lot of apples. It's like the tree blossoms. So like there's cherry blossoms in DC. And Winchester has a huge amount of apple production. So there's apple blossoms in Winchester. So it's just like an excuse to get drunk and watch parades, essentially. So sure enough, that's what we did. Went up Thursday, and all day Friday, all day Saturday, just kind of moseyed around town, watched parades, ate like fair foods and had a good time. So nice. Yeah, nice little relaxing weekend. And then I came back Sunday, my parents came into town, we were pretty beat by then. So we really didn't do too much. I'm going to try to play in the Professor Cup this weekend. There's like an online one. So I might do that Saturday. What's the format for that look like? So I can pull it up real quick. I sent it over to you. So let me just find it. It is on TCG Live, single game Swiss, open deck list, standard format, but the restriction is all decks must have at least one copy of a Magikarp card. And the special rule is every round is either hide or seek. For any specific round, all players will either be hiding or all players will be seeking. Whether a round is hide or seek will be announced at the start of the round and will be randomly rolled by the judge team. The hide rule is when you achieve a win condition, you cannot have a Magikarp in a public zone. If you achieve a win condition, but there's a Magikarp in your public zones, you lose instead. So discard pile, bench, any of that. We don't have loss anymore, thank goodness. And then special seek rule is if a Magikarp KO's another opponent's Pokemon by damage, the Magikarp player instantly wins the game. And then players may only take their last prize card if they have a Magikarp in their field. If a player achieves a win condition, but they do not have a Magikarp on their field, they lose instead. So that's about it. Some FAQs. In seek rounds, what happens if my opponent achieves a win condition without a Magikarp in play, but I have zero Pokemon in field? In this case, you should play a tiebreaker game as both players have one win condition. In seek rounds, what happens if Dustnort's Curse Blast ability to KO my opponent's Magikarp when my opponent only has one prize left? In that case, both players have one win condition. A tiebreaker game should be played. And then. Okay. Okay, so it's all just about Magikarp. That's pretty much it. Interesting. Yeah. So I'm still trying to figure out the best deck to pair with Magikarp. Like my initial guess was like a Pidgeot control, but that just kind of seems too hard to pull off right now. And I'm not confident that I can really pilot that to much success. And then still try to like navigate having a Magikarp in play. Sure. So I thought like Frostlass Monkey Door would be fun because you could like manipulate a lot of damage counters. And like maybe get the Magikarp to take a KO with all that. Oh, that's fair. And that way you could also stop your opponent's Magikarp because you can always just move counters to it and KO it. Yeah, yeah. I think you're gonna see a lot of Magikarps with Lux capes on them. Maybe. Yeah, I could see something like that. But like then, yeah, you could just also play Dragapult with like Luxurious Cape already in it. So it's pretty easy to just throw a Magikarp in there. And like Bidoo shuts stuff down pretty effectively. Okay. I thought about like other stuff like should I run something that prevents like the, what is it called? Totus Scrool that prevents you from putting Pokemon from your discard pile back into your hand. That'd be pretty good. Or like the Melodic that prevents you from scooping it up if it's on your bench. So you can like lock your opponent out of something. So I don't know. I'm still working on stuff more mentally than actually trying to build stuff and play it right now. Sure. But we'll see. It's so weird though, because the rule set is so vague that I would not at all be surprised to see a bunch of people just place good standard decks and take a card out and put a Magikarp in and call it a day. Yeah, definitely different ways to approach it for sure. So yeah, hopefully I can figure something out and keep my like pretty good streak of Professor Cup. Yeah, for real. I think I've cut all the online ones I've played in ever. Yeah, that sounds right. And then I've cut one of the two or three that I played in person. So I'm looking at the trophies over there. But yeah, we'll see. It should be fun either way. What about you, man? Enough about goofy alternate formats. What have you been doing Pokemon wise? Pokemon wise have just been playing a lot of pocket, honestly. Obviously, I finished, like I said, last week, I hit Arceus in TCG live already, and I've still been playing some standard games. But since the only events that I have left for this format are League Cups, it doesn't really feel as important to really test for those because the local meta in most places typically doesn't evolve the same way that a regional meta does. They kind of stick with whatever deck that they just want to play. And there's less that you need to really keep on top of as far as meta trends are concerned. But the pocket meta, with a new set being released last week, has evolved very rapidly, and the rank ladder had reset itself. And as of this evening, you know, just a couple of hours before we started recording, I hit Master Ball in pocket too. So just grinding up through the ladder on both of these games, spending probably too much time playing Pokemon cards on my phone. But it's been interesting. And that's going to kind of segue into the first topic that we're going to talk about. And that was just how the competitive meta game in pocket has evolved and how it has started to become what I would consider to be more competitive as that format has opened up. So for anyone who is at all familiar with pocket, in the last set, the meta was totally centralized around Darkrai Giratina. And there, you know, we would see these big online tournaments and 40% of the field would show up with the same deck within two cards of each other, and it would be the vast majority of the top cut. And admittedly, it is a very skillful deck to play. And a lot of times you are rewarded for understanding how your deck functions more so than a lot of other decks in pocket, just because it is one of the more consistent decks. But thankfully, with some of the cards that were released in the Celestial Guardian set, which highlights a lot of sun and moon based Pokemon, and introduced very importantly, Rare Candy into the mix, we've seen a big shakeup in that tournament meta game. And some of the cards that are going to kind of highlight that shift are things like this Oricorio, for instance, which is available in, I believe, the Solgaleo pack, I think. I know there's a Solgaleo and a Lunala pack. I'm not totally positive which one this one is in. But anyway, it's got the safeguard ability, which paper TCG players will be very familiar with, you know, same ability that our very own Mimikyu has currently. And you just prevent all damage done to this Pokemon by attacks from your opponent's Pokemon EX. A lot of decks in this game are fully centered around EX Pokemon and oftentimes don't feature any one-prizers whatsoever. You can just wall off some decks completely by just sticking an Oricorio and you're active. And we've seen it paired up with some, a couple of different things. You know, we've got a Magnezone Oricorio list here that took second place in a tournament this weekend that had over 1000 players online. And, you know, we've got Mono Energy, Oricorio sits there and walls stuff while you build up your Magnezone in the back to come in and do a big chunk of damage all in one swing. And the other kind of interesting inclusions here, we don't see Rare Candy just because Magneton is so important to this deck strategy, but we do have the Guzma supporter, which does not do what Guzma used to do back in the day when he was a paper TCG card. Instead, this one acts as just a mass tool removal for your opponent's board, which is pretty interesting in pocket tools have become really important in a lot of decks. And just this manages to take off things like Rocky Helmet or the newly released Poison Barb, which are the ways that these EX decks try to get around safeguard on Oricorio. So definitely cool, solid inclusion thing that has popped up. The other big notable card, like I mentioned before, is Rare Candy, just kind of bringing stage twos back into the mix, making it so cards like Greninja, or the Charizard from Shining Revelry, or Rampardos from Spacetime Smackdown are all seeing much more play than they were previously, because it is just easier to get them in play, you can get them in play one turn quicker. And that makes all the difference in the world when you're trying to keep up with these fast big basic decks. And so some of the stage twos that have seen fit to play this card are the newly released Incineroar EX, with its Fire Fang attack that for one fire does 30 damage and burns your opponent's active. And then for two fire and a colorless, Incineroar does 140 damage, if it has any damage on it whatsoever. And with a large HP pool of 180, he's very difficult to take down so it's very likely that you'll be able to get that 140 hit off. And interestingly, with the Fire Fang, you can't do damage to Oricorio directly, but you can burn it, so you do have the way to kind of get around Safeguard because there's nothing like Mist Energy in pocket currently. Is burn still two? All of the special conditions are identical to the paper TCG. Okay, cool. So that's a nice crossover. One thing I thought was interesting was that they made Rickhandy an item card instead of like a supporter card. So like we've seen like certain stuff get debuffed in this game. Sure. And that's one thing I was very surprised that they didn't try to make like a supporter card. I think that the rationale for that would be just that Darkrai, Giratina, or Bake Basics in general were probably too powerful. And you need something that catapults your Stage 2 into play like this. So you can still play like a Research and draw Rare Candy or draw your Stage 2, you know, whatever piece you're missing, and be able to get it into play the same turn that you already played a different supporter. That's fair. I guess it is like, since you don't have as much card draw and as much Pokemon Search, like there's other limiting factors. So I can see why, okay, Rare Candy is not overpowered if every other aspect of getting a Stage 2 into play is really difficult. Right, right. One of the other new Stage 2s that came out in the set is of course Solgaleo EX. And I know, John, you pulled a couple of these. I still unfortunately only have one, but it's a pretty powerful card, pretty interesting card. So Stage 2 Metal Pokemon with the Rising Road ability, which will be very familiar to any old heads out there that knew what Keldeo EX did with its Russian ability. So once during your turn, if Solgaleo is on your bench, you can switch it with your active. So we've seen it paired up with a lot of high-retreat Pokemon like Snorlax or Kangaskhan that are just kind of big, beefy basics that can take hits while you set up your Stage 2 in the back. Or some more aggressive basics like Skarmory that can just do a lot of damage for the same energy type that Solgaleo already wants to run. And it can effectively serve as your counter to Oricorio as well. And one of the other tools that all these Stage 2 Pokemon picked up is there is a Lily supporter that allows you to heal your Stage 2 for 60. So these things have big HP pulls and effectively become 240 HP Pokemon by the time you factor that in, or up to 300 if you're running two copies of the card. And it just makes it really difficult for your opponent to take that two-prize knockout that they're looking to pick up. Yeah, there definitely was a Solgaleo with Burning Road or something like that back in the day that I think had a similar ability. Oh, you're totally right. There was. It's like a shout-out to that too. For sure. Last new Stage 2 to talk about is Decidueye EX. And super cool card. I love Decidueye. I feel like almost every Decidueye that gets printed is pretty on-brand and kind of flavorful for what Decidueye is as a Pokemon. And this one's no exception. It has the Pierce the Pain attack, which for two colorless does 100 damage to any of your opponent's Pokemon as long as it has damage on it. And then it also has a two-grass for 80. Nobody really cares about that. The cool thing is Pierce the Pain. And you've got a lot of combos with that. You've got things like Spiritomb that puts 10 on everything. There's a Lurantis in the set that puts 20 on everything on your opponent's board. You can pair it up with Darkrai to just ping something for 20 and then hit it for 100 because you don't care about running Dark Energy in your deck. or you don't care what energy you run in your deck with the Situai, because Pierce the Pain is too colorless, you can run it with Greninja. And that's kind of the cool thing with Rare Candy as well, is decks that run multiple Stage 2s are kind of on the menu now, whereas before, that would be a total pipe dream, because you're committing 18 of your deck slots to your deck before you do anything, essentially, but once you put Poké Ball and Professor's Research in as well. Yeah, but that really kind of closes it out as far as new cards. Obviously, this is one of the biggest sets the game has ever released, but don't want to belabor this too much. The set's already been out for a week. Anybody that's really interested in it probably already knows what all the cards do, and just wanted to look at how it has impacted things competitively. So the last thing that I'm going to pull up here are a couple of other deck lists from that big Earthy Day tournament this weekend that had like 1,060 players, I think, or somewhere around that number. And so first place, it was a Greninja, Snorlax, Giratina deck. And we'll notably see there's no Frogadier in here. Because we all have that Rare Candy, you want to naturally draw into it. Greninja is one of the kind of premier Stage 2 abusers, almost, of Rare Candy, in that Water Shuriken being able to ping things for 20 is extremely powerful once you get it out of the gate on turn 2. And then there's just other combos, like while you're sitting with a Snorlax active, Giratina can kind of absorb energy on the bench to be a big game-closer if you need it to. It also means that you can run if you want to only Water Energy in your deck, so that you can always attack with Greninja if you need to. And the Snorlax also has the ability to attack, thanks to that Berry Supporter, which reduces its attack cost by 2 for a single turn. So there's a lot of kind of synergy that works here, and then the 140 HP on Snorlax is a nice breakpoint for a lot of things. It doesn't get 1-hit KO'd by Giratina, unless a Dark Rhyping gets involved. It doesn't get 1-hit KO'd by Solgaleo. And just avoids a lot of things. It's very difficult to take down in 1-hit, and it's only a 1-prizer, which is pretty important too. We already talked about this Magnezone deck, and the last one here is a deck featuring that Incineroar we talked about earlier. And it also involves the Charizard from Shining Revelry, which is kind of one of the other big winners from Rare Candy hitting the game. And with its Stoke attack, if you Rare Candy and Charizard on turn 2, you attach, you use Stoke, you get 3 more fires. Suddenly you're doing 150 on turn 3, and there's nothing your opponent can really do about it. And that's just enough to win a lot of games. So Rare Candy has definitely accelerated things. I think that it's made the game a lot more interesting, just because you're not playing against the same deck every single time you queue up a game now. And yeah, I'm excited to see where things go from here. I know this weekend on the cast there was a 15-minute segment that they did involving Jody Azzarelli, who's a pretty well-known VGC player. I believe he got second to Seijin Park the year that he won with Pachirisu, notably. But he's been getting really heavily into Pocket recently, including doing a lot of YouTube content, been promoting it a lot on Twitter. And so they pulled him up on stage, talked about the game, opened some packs. It was him, Wancho, and one of the VGC casters. I can't remember her name off the top of my head. But it's just pretty cool. So the game is definitely getting notice on the mainstream, and I think that they're probably going to use that as a gauge for whether or not it's popular enough to pull in moving forward competitively. Yeah, definitely. It seems to still have a good market presence. And yeah, definitely adding Rare Candy adds definitely more strategy elements to it. We're seeing a lot more deck development. Now it's not just... Like we were saying, Dark Ride Giratina was skill-intensive, but it wasn't a hard deck to make. No. So now we're seeing... Go ahead. It was very reminiscent of 2010 World... or 2012 Worlds, where it was just Dark Ride Mewtwo mirrors all day. There's nothing wrong with that, but it's still skill-intensive. Yeah, it's a pretty interesting matchup at the end of the day. And a lot of times the better player is the one that comes out on top. But it's not fun to watch. No, it definitely feels like gambling more than this kind of strategy-intensive. And I mean, there was deck-building elements even in that, but this is definitely more like, Oh yeah, the berry, being a cool play with Snorlax, thinking through how to best utilize your Stage 2. Your Stage 2 line, what does that look like now that you have Rare Candy? All that stuff. Yeah, this one, I can play Rare Candy most of the time, so I don't need to get... I can run three Stage 2s, but only one Stage 1. Yeah, only one Stage 1. No Torracat involved, don't need the second Tremillion. You have Pokemon Communication. You free up a lot of room. Exactly. Pokemon Communication helps make this a bit more consistent in finding the Pokemon that you need to. Iono also serves as like a redraw, essentially, to go find your Stage 2 pieces or your Rare Candy pieces. And yeah, I mean, if you're somebody who had kind of fallen off the game and weren't interested in playing it anymore after the first couple of sets, I would highly encourage you to get back into it. If you haven't been opening packs, it's going to be a little difficult to find the cards you need to. But the Wonder Pik system definitely helps. Trading definitely helps. So you should be able to put together something at least fairly competitive pretty easily. Yeah, I mean, that's a nice thing too. There's some decks that really don't... Like Aura Correa, you don't really need a whole lot. Nope, super easy. Yeah, you could just get... Like the Magnezones are pretty easy to get. And then, yeah, Aura Correa is not that hard. You can use your pack points if you just open up enough. I'm strictly free to play, and I've been able to play pretty much every deck I wanted to play. Yep. Not necessarily right on release, but within like a week or so. Yeah, as long as you have a little bit of patience and admittedly a little bit of luck, it's pretty easy to put together at least a couple of pretty solid meta decks. But yeah, I think that'll be enough about Pocket for now. The next segment we're going to jump into is going to be our Blaine's Quiz Show. Alright. So while John pulls that up, I can proudly say that we did our homework this time. We do know the point total is going into Blaine's Quiz Show this week. I still may throw them up on the screen because the sound effect is nice and fun. But as we go into things this week, the scores are currently John with 20 and myself with 23. Alright, you ready? Yep, go ahead. Why don't you explain to everybody how we play the game? Yeah, so same rules as normal. I'm going to give you three questions. You'll have a hint you can use at one point. So if at any point you say, I don't know the answer to this question, I can just help make it a little bit easier. And yeah, other than that, the category this week is alternate types. So all the Pokémon. Yeah, we'll get into it. Alright, first question. Which of the following Terra-type EX cards, so that means they have the Terrestrial trait at the top, is an alternate type from the energy listed on its attack cost? So it's a different type than what energy it uses to attack. Sure. Is it Arcanine EX, Dedenne EX, Revaroom EX, or Macargo EX? This one is a slam dunk for my boy Revaroom EX. Okay. He is a lightning type that uses metal type energy. You are correct. I don't know why you know that, but it is correct. I legitimately almost played this card. Almost is probably a strong word. We floated the idea of an Archelodon list that used Revaroom as a draw engine and had Revaroom EX as a cornerstone answer. Okay. Early days of the format where we had to have the cornerstone answer. I guess it comes up in conversation. Sure. All right. That was an easy one out of the way. Next one. Which baby Pokemon did not receive a Delta species variant? Is it Chingling, Pichu, Elekid, or Smoochum? I know there's a fighting type Elekid because when you evolved it, you got the Delta Electabuzz that drew cards off the bottom of your deck. I think there's a fire type Smoochum to go with the Jynx. I don't remember. Did Chingling even exist when Delta species came out? I know Chimecho did. There was a metal type Chimecho because you could play it in LBS sometimes. I also don't remember if there was a metal Pichu or not. Oh, man. I'm going to say – no, Delta species should have still been during Gen 3. Oh, wait, but is Chingling Gen 3 or Gen 4? Oh, man. Did Chimecho have a baby when it first came out? I'm going to go with Chingling. I'm going to go with Chingling. I'm going to say it didn't exist yet. All right. And you are, once again, correct. Chingling is the correct answer. I couldn't remember if it had a baby or not. I was like, this or Bonsly, but I feel like Bonsly was a dead giveaway. Yeah, because there's only like two Bonsly cards ever. Yeah, so Chingling at least makes you sweat a little bit more. Sure. I think maybe all the babies in this format had a Delta species, but I'm probably wrong with that, so don't fact check me on that. Tyrogue did not because there were no Delta Hitmon guys. Yeah, yeah. All right, so two for two. Last question. All right, how many EXs were dual type in the only set that had dual type capital EXs, Steam Siege? Was it 2, 3, 4, or 5? Okay, before I say anything to influence your hint, I'm going to go ahead and accept your hint on this question. Okay, the answer is an odd number. Well, that is not good, because I was thinking it was either 2 or 4. So I know Gardevoir is one of them, and I know Volcanion is one of them. I can't for the life of me think that there would be three more though, because dual type EXs. I know some of the other dual types in the set were like there was an Azumarill. I think there might have been a Galvantula, but he wasn't an EX. I'm going to say there are not three extra ones on top of what I said, so I'm going to go with three. All right, and you are perfect once again, Aaron. It was almost impossible to stop you from keep winning. No, you got me last time. Steelix, okay. Mega Steelix was the last dual type there. Yeah, definitely, these were cool. If you guys haven't seen them as players and newer players, at one point for one set only in the XY era, they had dual type Pokemon, and yeah, this was a cool mechanic that they had. The first two were pretty competitive, and Mega Steelix I don't think ever saw any play at all. That was going to be my question. I remember Gardevoir and Volcanion definitely being strong cards, but the Mega Steelix I don't think I couldn't for the life of me remember it ever seeing any sort of play. Five Energies is a lot. Yeah, even in this era. I think we had Mega Turbo. We did, but what are you going to commit all of your Mega Turbos to one guy? The attack wasn't that good. No. It says each of your bench Pokemon, so that's just bad. No, no, no, it's each of your opponents. Oh, you're right, but that's not all that great. No, you one hit KO a Gardevoir, and then what? You die to Volcanion. Yeah, right. You're weak to fire. It's just kind of weird. Fire is not a great weakness in this era, so that was part of it too. But yeah, this was an interesting format with the spare raid and all this stuff. Yeah, this is the same set that gave us the Rainbow Road Xerneas too, right? Yeah, I think so. Steam Siege. Yeah, so that's why we had all the dual types because it did extra damage for each type on your bench, so you would have, and we had Skyfield, and you would be able to get all the types on your bench essentially to one hit KO a lot of two prizers with one prizer. So there were some cool things that came out of Steam Siege. This was also the first year that there was a set released right before Worlds, or that was legal at Worlds without having any other events before it. Yeah, definitely, which I think is good and bad. Mostly good. I like it. All right, but yep, Aaron, you've pushed your lead to 26 now over my 20, so we will see if I can try to close the gap again next week on Blaine's Quiz Show. I have faith in you. I'm glad you do. I was like, this seems like a good category. I know you'll get the first one because you're weird like that, and then the Delta Species one I felt like you'll get, but that last one I was like, oh, I had to think of a way to make it challenging. I'm like, I can't just ask him straight up what Pokemon. Honestly, if you had said what were the dual type Pokemon in this set, and you had listed like Vulcanion, Gardevoir, or Vulcanion, Mega Gardevoir, Mega Steelix, and insert other Pokemon, I may not have been able to get it. I would not have remembered that Steelix was a dual type. I didn't even remember Steelix was in that set to be honest with you. Yeah, it's interesting. There was a lot of like filler stuff I feel like in that era, like just so many Megas that were promos. So maybe a future question down the road. All right, man. Yeah, those are for this week. So moving on, we will now be looking at some of the Milwaukee information from this past weekend. And the thing we're going to start with are the meta percentages. And notably, we're not going to use the stream graphics from this week because for some reason, somebody backstage decided that they wanted to take Dragapult Goldengo and give it its own kind of stat column on the screen. And that really threw a lot of stuff off. turn off variant grouping here. You can see that Goldango and Dragapult Goldango are, you know, down here. But then for some reason, they didn't separate the other Dragapult variants and then group them together. And it just makes everything really weird and throws everything off. So when we group everything together on day one, top six decks, you know, best of the best, most played things, we've got Dragapult at number one at 19.2%, Goldango variants at 14.9%, Gardevoir at 12.4%, Joltec Box at 11.75%, Raging Bolt at 8.06% and Terra Box at 5.03%. And this is kind of what we anticipated coming into this event. I know that we talked about Goldango probably having a bit of a fall off with, you know, kind of the lack or kind of mediocre results that it's seen previously, despite having several top eight finishes, just not really seeming to be able to break through and progress into even the finals of an event. But a lot of players still decided that it was the deck to bring. And so as we look at how they converted into day two, we still see Dragapult number one and increasing, breaking through that 20% gap once again. So 21% Dragapult, Joltec Box jumps up to being number two at 16.3%, Gardevoir maintains at number three at 13.5%, Goldango falls to number four at 12.46%, Raging Bolt sticks around at number five at 7.5%, and Enz Zorark comes in from downtown and shares that number six spot with Terra Box with both of them being at 4.98%. And kind of the interesting thing that I wanted to talk about here because it's a little boring to say, okay, yeah, we still got basically the same top six decks with the exception of this Enz Zorark and kind of the further progression upward of Joltec Box. But the real kind of interesting conversation to have here is kind of the conversion rate of these decks, I think. So when we look at this, I can rattle off a whole bunch of numbers to you, but the real standout ones to me were Joltec Box obviously had a really strong positive conversion with a 23%, almost a quarter of the people that brought Joltec Box into the room made it into day two. So for the reputation that the deck has among a lot of people as being really simple to pilot and theoretically that means that newer or lesser skilled players would gravitate toward it, for them to still be able to convert that well, that's gotta mean something for the power level of the deck. Yeah, I agree with that. It definitely, I think, is the main takeaway from all the meta or the conversion rates from day one to day two. We looked at further down, I guess, Roaring Moon and Charizard also had really good conversion rates. Roaring Moon was 35 and Charizard was 21. But I feel like you can chalk that up to more of the people playing it in like a lower sample size, kind of skewing those numbers. But Joltec Box at 46 decks making it into day two, like that's a large number, no matter how you separate that. That's more than Golden Go, that's more than Gardevoir even at this point, which is really impressive and more than Raging Bolt. And yeah, Golden Go and Gardevoir both had more decks in the room on day one. So that's, yeah. Going back to just talk about Joltec Box, I think that goes to speak to how effective the game plan is with that deck. Like it's not hard to prize map when you have iron hands, essentially. 2-2-2 is a lot easier and setting stuff up with a basic non two-prizer in Joltec and then just saying, all right, now you're gonna struggle to take three additional knockouts on two-prizers. Just makes it a little harder for your opponent to like game plan against you. So like you're able to execute your game plan pretty effectively, pretty consistently. And you have like, we talked about it last week, we have iron hands and you have Pikachu for any real threat on your opponent's board. And you're able to just say, all right, I see your Dragapult and knock it out with Pikachu. And then like early game, the strategy, I don't think we have to rehash it at this point, but it's pretty straightforward, but it's still really effective and really hard to deal with. We might start seeing people tech for it. And I think we touched on that a little bit if we're gonna talk about some deck lists real quick, but we see some techs pop up for Joltec Box, I think at this tournament. And I can definitely see that happening more and more as the minute progresses. Yeah, I just wanted to pull up real quick and see kind of how Joltec Box was doing against a lot of these decks. And, you know, having over 50% win rate against Dragapult, a little bit under, I think the weird thing, this deck seems to have a pretty high tie rate despite how aggressive it is. You know, I'm a little surprised, I'm not surprised here, cause it's a mirror match, like that's kind of whatever, but actually I am a little surprised to see that you would have 42 ties in a mirror match of two decks that are just gonna go jolting charge, swing, swing, swing, swing, swing. And I guess maybe it's just a lot of people trying to jockey for position, get their Pikachus in the right spot and do things that way. But other things, you know, seeing it be successful against Enz and Zurark, not surprising. Being good against the Noctowl-based decks, also not very surprising, with the exception of Raging Bolt, just because Raging Bolt is uniquely positioned in the realm of Noctowl decks to have answers to Pikachu and Iron Hands, respectively, with Slitherwing of all things. Yeah, yeah, definitely. I think that was a surprise from the weekend too, is just how successful Raging Bolt was positioned in this meta. I know I lambasted it a little bit last week and you were more of a defender of it and we'll get into that in just a minute. But yeah, definitely had a good showing this weekend in multiple ways. I mean, yeah, it does feel better positioned now than it did at the start of the meta, like Tera Box. I don't know, there wasn't a whole lot of, like, Girafarig or anything like that to really prevent it from winning. But there doesn't seem to be any, like, it has a pretty good matchup into Dragapult, pretty decent matchup into Gardevoir, I'd say. And really good matchup into Golden Goat, for sure. But yeah. Well, not according to these numbers, but I don't know. Ties get calculated in a really weird way. And that also potentially gets skewed by, like, the pool of players that are, again, the pool of players that gravitate toward Raging Bolt in a lot of circumstances are probably skewing these numbers to some extent. I do think once you get up to the higher end, especially with some of the gameplay that we saw on stream this weekend, including in Top Cut, that the deck has a higher ceiling than you may otherwise think. Before we move on to results, the last conversion rate I wanted to call out was Archeladon and just how abysmal this conversion rate was. You know, we had 63 people brought Archeladon to day one, five of them made day two. Less than 8% conversion rate. One of the worst conversion rates in the room, outside of Hydreigon, which had 15 players in day one, and nobody made day two. Yeah, I think in a format where people are starting to move away from Dragapult, if not, like, and then now we see the rise of Raging Bolt, potentially, and then Golden Go is still a presence. I don't think Golden Go was such a big presence when, in Japan, Archeladon was doing well. Right. So it definitely, it's one of those decks that, it's not a terrible deck, it's very linear, it doesn't have a whole lot of, it reminds me of Arceus and Talion back in the day, where you have a pretty simple game plan of avoiding getting your Pokemon knocked out, and you can kind of bounce stuff back to hand. Sure. And heal that way. But, yeah, once your opponent's like, okay, I'm gonna wipe off all your energy and your move, and you don't have a way to one-shot them back, then it gets just abysmal. It feels so bad. Like, for sure. So, and I don't see that changing anytime soon, unfortunately, if you're really a big Archeladon fan. It's not gonna get better for a while, so. No, especially as the format has evolved. If you look at these top six decks, four of them are bad match-ups for Archeladon. Goldengo, bad. Gardevoir, bad. Joltik Box, bad. And Raging Bolt. Problem, Raging Bolt is winnable, but it's definitely not favored by any of these. Yeah, it being 240 versus 220. 240 stuff. Yeah, that makes it a little bit harder to one-shot, and they're able to one-shot you a lot more easily than you are able to one-shot them. Now, I think there are ways the decks can evolve to make a couple of these match-ups a little bit better, but it's one of those kind of pick-your-poison things at the end of the day. You know, do you tech for these big basic decks by including some cards that we'll talk about here in a little bit, or do you tech for Gardevoir because you wanna play the Jamming Tower? Do you tech for Goldengo by playing things like Genesect and Rescue Board in your deck to be able to shot their E-Search Pro and make it more difficult for them to take that one-hit KO? And that's just asking too much from a deck like Arch-Haladon, I think. And it doesn't help that a lot of people are still gravitating toward the Poison deck, which just, in my mind, if it isn't donking people, it's not winning games. No. Yeah, the power level just depends. Like, the strengths of that deck are the early turns, and then after that, you just have so many liabilities on your board that, like, any Dragonbolt player or, you know, basically any other player, like a Tarabox can just tear it apart. So, yeah. So, if we come back now and look at the results from the event, we have the largest asymmetrical cut that we've had to date. And I think a lot of that has to do with kind of the size of the event. You know, when you've only got eight rounds of Swiss and only four rounds on day two, it's much more likely for a lot of these records to be more homogenized, and you'll just see this bottom end of people that were initially tied for eighth place kind of balloon up as you hit that threshold. And this, that separation happens as you have more Swiss rounds. Isn't it, like, if you're closer to the cutoff, like, I think the cutoff's, like, 18 for another round, right? And then- I don't know. If this was, like, 16 or something like that, that's my understanding. If you're, like, close to the cutoff and below it, you're gonna get really close to having more ace-end players. Sure. Oh, yeah, yeah. That makes sense. Yeah, just the closer you get to achieving- Needing another round. Right, without actually crossing that threshold. For sure. That makes sense. I think that that would happen, you know, at smaller level events as well. Just, it's more noticeable, something like this. So we do have 14 players in Top Cut, and it's a pretty stacked lineup, too. If, you know, if I have to say, we've got Christian Labella taking the whole event down with Raging Bolt, of all things. So, a little spoiler for later when we come back to our predictions. But Makani Tran getting Finals with Straight Dragapult. Alex Chandler making Top 4 with Joltik Box. Julio Santos de Leon with Dragapult Dusknoir. Owen Dalgaard with Dragapult Dusknoir. Ian Robb making Top 8 with Flareon Box. Benjamin Hebert with Straight Dragapult. Brent Tonneson making another Top 8 appearance with his trusty Gardevoir deck, which I believe is literally the same 60 he's been playing since Atlanta. Or, I think it's one card different because he put that Turo in. But Lucas Zing making Ace Im with N'Zorark. Ryan Antonucci with Straight Dragapult. Cal Connor with Straight Dragapult. Justin Tse with Gardevoir. Evan Pavelski with N'Zorark. And John Ng with Dragapult Dusknoir. And just a, you know, for the people keeping track of things at home, we've got one Raging Bolt, seven Dragapult decks, one Joltik Box, one Flareon, two Gardevoirs, and two N's decks. And so I definitely would not have called that N's would be the second most popular deck in Ace Im, even though none of them made it into Top 8. But Dragapult being half of top cut, I mean, I get it. It's hard to call it surprising when it's the most popular deck in the room. But, you know, at the end of the day, it feels like even though it has always been the most popular deck in this format, it hasn't necessarily converted this well into cut before. Yeah, I think, in my mind, it's still underrated. If that makes sense. I don't know, maybe I'm just being biased a little bit. But there being different ways to play it, there being players saying that Garde can beat Dragapult if you run three Monkey Dory and have different strategies against it, and they're not really closing stuff out. It feels like players aren't still, people aren't still, if you're looking at just what wins the tournament and you're not seeing Dragapult at the top, you're biased. You're saying, well, Dragapult can't win a tournament, and so it's still not the best deck in format. You know, and I think we saw that shift after the last few regionals of saying people aren't winning with Dragapult, so therefore it's still not bad. But I think you're kidding yourself at the end of the day. Like, you're still, the results speak for themselves. Even if it's not winning, it's still dominating. Yeah, it's still definitely doing really well. There are different iterations of it, and there's different ways to play it, which is really cool, in my mind. We haven't seen a deck like that in a minute, where you have three different variants at the top of it. And they're all fairly equally played with between Gardevoir, or no, sorry, between Goldengo, Dusknoir, and Straypult. I mean, the Goldengo deck, with the exception, there's one list, I did not currently have it slated for us to talk about it. There's one list we could talk about that leans a bit more into the Dragapult, but that's a Goldengo deck at the end of the day. You just kind of have the Dragapult there. Fair enough, fair enough. But even still, that's still cool that you get a little shout-out. Two solid decks. Two and a half. Yeah, sure, sure, I'll give you that one. I'll give you a half. Yeah, the one of note is somewhere down here. I have to see if I can find it. Calvin, or Caleb Gedimer. No, I was, oh, Caleb did one too? Yeah, it's right outside of Topcut. Oh, Caleb Rogerson. Sorry, sorry, misspoke, North Carolina. No, but this is still the 2-2-1 Dragapult. This is what I was talking about. We leaned into, we leaned into, this is Dragapult Goldengo. Yeah, yeah. Four foot, two Dragapult. That's crazy. So that's a little different. This one, if everyone was playing this, I would say, yes, there are three Dragapult decks. But, you know, shout-outs to Maddox from the Beach Court podcast, Florida Local. um interesting list innovative i i guess but definitely not anything i would expect to see when i sit down if my opponent if i know my opponent's playing drago but goldengo this is not what i'm expecting to see no and it's still like super slow without but running but do you don't have a way to power up no it's still just you don't run chris you're just getting a goldengo it's still a goldengo deck and you just have this extra dragapult package sitting back behind you that's wild okay um yeah i think overall i i don't know maybe it's foolish to say underrated but it definitely isn't getting the respect it deserves at this point in my mind no i think that people have stopped really like teching for it in a sense and they're more focused on some of these other matchups because they say you know i may have a game plan going into dragapult but i need to tech for joltik box or i need to tech for gardevoir or i need to you know do xyz and i'll just accept that this is my dragapult matchup and then as these dragapult lists change these other lists may not necessarily be able to you know perform that same game plan that they had in mind previously yeah i mean that's the nice flexibility especially with straightpole like there's so much we've seen you know blood moon or saluna we've seen so many things like i think somebody ran clefa right or i'm misremembering maybe not that um we've seen a little bit of a rise in clefa in decks in general a lot of decks that used to run two badu or now we're running one badu one clefa and accepting well maybe me item locking you isn't the best thing for me to do this turn maybe i just want to go set myself up a little bit better yeah so definitely so many ways to play it to where if you sit across from a dragapult player they flip over a dreepy you're like okay what am i playing against you don't know the list you know that's the beauty of closed deck list tournaments is they can pull out a bag of tricks and unless you're just copied the 60 from the last tournament you know a lot of but we're seeing a lot of innovation still i mean as opposed to brett tonnison who's playing the same 60 every week a lot of the dragapult lists are changing from week to week for sure and no shaman playing the same if it got you there right right the worst i got it's clearly still working for him i mean yeah three regionals and two top eights including a win i mean i would take that all day for sure take that all day so moving forward um we can look at a couple lists and i also wasn't going to talk about christian's list but i think it'd be a disservice to him as a player to not pull up the winning deck list from the event um unfortunately it's not really anything super crazy at the end of the day the one kind of notable thing is that instead of iono that a lot of people regularly play he has a copy of judge um big thing bravery charm maybe yep being interesting otherwise no caride on and said we have this just the slitherwing and baby bolt um yeah we've got the bravery charm over a copy of something like energy switch and other than that i mean it's kind of just a raging bolt deck like we've got three big bolts i think i've seen a lot of lists that have cut that down to two um maybe christian's just looking for that added consistency like i think five is kind of the sweet spot of ancient pokemon in this deck and whether you cut the big bolt for another either baby bolt or caride on just another one prizer or i guess maybe in this instance christian saw fit to just have another big bolt be more consistent getting that pokemon on the board so you can take those bit one big one hit ko's when you need to yeah um yeah definitely pretty similar to raging bullets we've seen before um he was very good at playing this though i think that's the differentiating factor he might have had a similar list a lot of original players but if you watch the games that he played on stream um he definitely had a masterful control of this deck and knew the strategy he needed to do to beat dragonpole to beat some of the other matchups he's played against in the finals he really i mean he got he got lucky like that's straight up um there's no denying that he drew he drew so well other was like like you watched i think the finals because i saw your uh if your screen name in the twitch chat or whatever but yeah like he started uh both games turn one energy on the baby raging bolt and like was able to pull off the turn to attack with it um but then like multiple times throughout each game like the one set or i think game one he got like unfair stamped or iona to two or something like that and had one grass energy um after the top deck um and teal danced to ogre pawn and top deck sada and then off of that soda needed a fighting energy and hit it and it was the last fighting in the deck too yeah it was just like this guy just give him the trophy and it was game one but it just it felt like it was over like after that like how do you come back from that right it's just it's hard to you know because even after you knock that out you're just able to spawn trap any drapey or drag cloak yep and you can't get it like as a draggable player you can never get re-established no it becomes it gets it becomes very difficult i actually i played this matchup at a cup this weekend and had a what i would feel was very similar circumstance to what makani experienced where i i owned up my opponent to one it ko'd their pheasant dipity and mu the same turn while also taking their baby like i took a five prize turn to but it's tied at one to one and my opponent's one card was their fourth copy of sada to win the game i'm gonna say okay well you know if you like you just you can't win them all no and that was that was after having you know a start where baby raging bolt took three prizes by itself so yeah this card is incredible menace in the dragapult and guard of our matchups and on top of the top of everything it's a one prizer so and the consistency the big thing for me is the consistency of i think i don't know if every list for this deck has run ditto but i think this is a deck above pretty much all of the other noctowl decks that takes the most advantage of ditto and you can argue terabox takes really big advantage of ditto like getting a water ogre pond in the active spot on turn one is really important and really powerful but a raging baby raging bolt with an energy in the active spot on turn one going first is a very scary thing to look at yeah yeah definitely if you're playing dragapult or cardivore and you're staring that down you're just like i mean even a knock like zoroark or noctowl deck true you're losing a zurua you're losing a hoot hoot i mean and if you go jump through all the hoops and ko it you get one prize right and guardi is playing rare candy but like dragapult has moved off for our candy entirely so there's really not a quick response to it so it's sticking around for like two even three turns and i mean that's just it's it's a dang you know there's just a lot of because like the moment you start putting a candy bag in your deck well then all the badu's gang up on you and yeah you know beat you over the head with itchy pollen and you're just like i can't win man um so it it took advantage of a soft spot in the meta um and definitely you know played masterfully by christian here um so cool to see yeah yeah especially while we don't have any sort of bench barrier in the format i'm still a i'm still gonna say it like 99 of raging bull players um i don't think take down this tournament uh i think this is just a skill def player like kind of like we saw with uh caleb gettermer yeah um earlier uh in this season or last season i forget no it was this season and he definitely i feel like he made a lot of decisions at that event where he was piloting the more simplistic raging bolt i don't like he didn't just vomit all of his basics onto his bench and so you see these players that are playing with intention and that's a quality that a lot of times is lacking in some of these decks that people would consider simpler for sure like just thinking about what energy to discard and where to like where to get how to pivot like either putting down ladios or trying to manually retreat or dig for that counter catcher like all those things like preventing yourself from putting liabilities in play or clearing it with uh area zero and then playing another stadium to bump that and get rid of some of your liabilities all that kind of stuff really i mean this it seems simple but like just playing playing really strong um pokemon at the end of the day is what it's all about i mean that's why we play the tournaments we do it's cool that he went completely undefeated to 14 0 and 2 so and i think his only like one of those was an id um so yeah i assume this last round was an id so tied round two and then i did once dang dude that's probably one of the most dominant tournament runs i can i can't i can't think of anything almost i can't think of anything more dominant than that that's right and played against you've got yeah four four of these other people that made a sim oh it's unreal yeah uh props to him for sure uh the next deck we were going to talk about is julio's draggable dust of our deck and the big thing i wanted to highlight here so we talked about kind of the adaptability of dragapult and that includes some of these tech stadiums or tech cards that the deck can include and even though this dust nor base list is a little bit tighter um you know it's a little bit easier to justify including rare candy into this deck just because you've got the dust or line already i'm not sure why it looks like we're missing cards here because oh there's a luminous nevermind it's like we've got a monkey dory but i didn't see the luminous for something we don't have dark what's going on but so taking a note out of the straight bolt decks we're putting the monkey dory into here but the big thing here and a card that i think could see more play as long as you expect raging bolt to go up in popularity is the pokemon league headquarters which just makes all of the basic pokemon in the fields attacks cost one colorless more so your opponent's late game blood moon or saloon it costs an extra energy raging bolt after they clear all of their energy off of their big raging bolt cannot produce a follow-up attack from that pokemon unless they also have a stadium bump in addition to the sada so just requiring another answer on top of everything makes it a little bit more difficult for people yeah this deck has everything which is impressive like yeah in a good way i'm not saying that as a like you know it's not like a cheesecake factory where there's the menu's super long and not if it's very good like this is all good things this is more akin to a good cheesecake factory i don't know um so yeah i mean the only the only thing the only thing we're missing here is like the genesect or turo like we've only got the switch isn't out for the blood moon but still pretty interesting um you know a little bit lighter on kind of the search pokemon search supporters from what we've seen as the other evolution of dragapult only including the two jock but still relatively consistent at the end of the day you know we still have all of our ball cards a little bit so okay so that's where we make the room we trim down an ultra ball we're only running two pokemon search supporters and that's how we're fitting in everything but i do think it just takes advantage of the fact monkey dory is still just incredibly strong in this deck allowing your draggable especially mirror you know saying okay i'll move three counters and ko you jack cloak and i'll curse blast a different one and then i only you did like two cards or something and your go yeah i mean this makes it incredibly difficult for your opponent i think i think this is probably my favorite way to play dust nor if i are draggable if i had to play like this deck tomorrow so i might try to get some games in with this because it definitely has like the best of both worlds kind of um sure where you get to run unfair stamp you get to run monkey dory but you still have dust nor you still have a rare candy if you need to get that out like you can still respond to an early ko if you have to um it might be difficult but like you still run uh to arvin to like dig for the tools that you need so like yeah still running exp share is a way to ensure that if one of your draggable gets like you can go okay dreepy dreepy energy xp share and then that way if one of them gets knocked out you can still wear candy uh attach energy attached with drag cloak or draggable sorry um so that's good like in that kind of a situation um yeah i think this is really cool and i love i mean i love draggable but yeah it's definitely it's like what is the best way to play uh draggable is kind of the question that most players that are playing draggable they're trying to still figure out sure so we still haven't like settled on an optimal 60 like we haven't found the you know andrew hendrick lugia list or something like that equivalent so yeah i'm a straight bolt fan personally but i can definitely see that the dust nor version is more has more power potential or power play potential uh moving on next deck we'll talk about is ian rob's flarion list and again nothing super crazy here the big kind of call out and it's still not a new inclusion is playing sparkling crystal as the a spec as opposed to unfair stamp and then kind of the evolution of noctowl decks in general we see a copy of rock scouting making its way into the list and otherwise still just super strong deck angelite is a broken attack um this is a deck in general that's really capable of giving up a single prize to your opponent or being okay with taking a single prize rather and then finishing up the game with briar at the end of the day and you can one-hit ko a lot of things by either just doing 280 to them or being able to take advantage of weakness in some way to finish them off yeah i mean cliff fairy and sylveon um are really good combo um you know just hitting knocking out of dragobolt with the first attack you don't get the uh damage prevention buff that you would get if you had it stay in the active but it's still really strong that's fine yeah i think that's fine it can be pretty hard to respond to that so and angelite in particular is really strong against dragobolt oh yeah yeah i mean yeah the if you get an early angelite off against the dragobolt and then just alternate between that and like um literally anything else i mean you're pretty good like as long as you can keep bossing up and koing whatever they're trying to put energy on you're pretty safe the one thing i do want to walk back from what i said last week i i mentioned that this deck had a bad joltik box matchup and i want to publicly apologize and rescind that comment i actually think that matchup is much closer than i thought it was and one of the big things is just the fact that you can magical charm a pikachu and suddenly it cannot one-hit ko your sylveon and that's that's a pretty big deal. And then on once your opponent has kind of started once the game has progressed past the first jolting charge, angel light has the potential to be more impactful the later in the game you are. Sure. That makes sense. Because yeah, they don't want to take turns off and repower stuff up with jolt. Right. And then just have you boss up stuff and knock it out or whatever. Especially once like your I owners are more impactful to it just becomes increasingly difficult for them to do what they want to do. Yeah, that's a fair point. Still cool deck. Like, I think I played a couple of games with it at league. And yeah, running Kirin is a really cool inclusion right now. It kind of frees up some spots so you don't have to run like Turo and what is it black belt. So you can run that as a kind of weaker version of both of those cards, I guess. But still applies. I guess you still run Turo but like it's another switch out which is important when you're running so many Pokemon like you don't really want to manually retreat from flurry on you want to keep that energy on there. So it's nice to have switch outs. So yeah, sure, sure. Definitely a strong deck and I would not be surprised to see it continue seeing success moving forward. Next up, we've got Lucas sings and Zurark deck and I told john before the cast this list looks very familiar to me because I'm pretty sure I played against either this exact 60 if not maybe like one card different in Atlanta, including the bombardier power glass combo and four copies of Cyrano Cyrano notably extremely strong with ends or arc being able to just go buddy Puffin for multiple Xerox and then Cyrano to get them all out of your deck on turn two, super strong. You can do some crazy power plays if you coincidentally open up with like Badoo or Cleffa, you can Cyrano for bombardier and two Xerox and then use fast carrier to go get two Zeruas and a Darmanitan or Darumaka rather. And then you've got your Xerox in your hand unless your opponent I owners them away, in which case you probably will redraw into Cyrano and use it again anyway. And then trade can just dump the extra copies of that card as the game progresses. It makes it really easy to filter that kind excess bloated waste of space out of your deck once you've gotten the consistency effect out of it. Yeah, definitely a strong card, I think underutilized in this meta. And it's cool to see somebody kind of figure out how to best take take advantage of it. Sure. Yeah, definitely like a bit of a throwback to like when Zeruark ran. Bridget was it? Yeah. Yep. So similar to that vibe where you want to see it turn one like a Cyrano turn one and then beyond that, it's great fodder for just getting rid of. I mean, this deck can do that. Same with buddy buddy Poffin like after turn one. Yeah, turn two. Once you grab two Zerua with it like one time. So this is a it's a cool deck. And this tries to like modify your damage output with black belts training and defiance best or defiance belt. Sorry. But it can still be really difficult if your opponent knows how to play around stuff to take knockouts and close games out. So yep, this is definitely more skill intensive than you think it is. And then once you play it, you're like, you know, this is this is a lot harder to just close games out. Because it gets kind of grindy. Oh, definitely. Definitely. Yeah, you play a lot of games with this deck and feel like you're losing for a lot of the game until you're finally piece it together. Like two or three turns before you win. Yeah. I don't know. Bucky Dory is really cool. You can run the energy switch to like power that up in one turn with a PPO. So yeah, nothing, nothing too revolutionary here. But still like Bombardier and Cyrano I think are pretty interesting inclusions that yeah, we haven't really seen at the top top of a tournament. So that's no and I wouldn't be surprised to see the bomb Bombardier come out of the deck. You know, it's sort of the big the main purpose it serves is as a cornerstone answer. Because you push it, you push it up, you put power glass on it, you put a dark on it, it absorbs a dark from your discard pile. Assuming that they swing into you because what else are they going to do just sit there, you can then move damage off of your Bombardier with Monkey Dory to their cornerstone. And then black belt allows you to use what is this attack called shadowy wind for one. So no, that's still not a one hit KO. I thought that there was a way for this to pick up a one hit KO on cornerstone. Maybe Defiance Band. Yeah, I would have to involve the Defiance Band and the black belt. Yeah. And Monkey Dory. But but then you're not powering it up in one turn. I don't know there was something I can't remember how how somebody it's like the guy that I played against attempted to explain it to me. But now it doesn't make sense because it involves two tool cards on your EX and that's just not possible. The other big notable thing from the deck though is Secret Box being in here as the A spec of choice, which I think is really fitting allows you to go get your Cyrano on turn one along with a Buddy Buddy Poffin and Artisan. So you know, being able to reasonably search out your Daru Makas is pretty useful. And I think overall seeing Cyrano as the main supporter instead of something like Arvin is pretty telling. I've seen a lot of other belts of this deck that run for Arvin and TM Ivo as their attempt to set up ends your army of Zoroarks on your bench really early. And being able to instead say no, I'm gonna go about this a little bit differently. Because Cyrano is a more flexible card and really just a stronger card right now want as long as Badu continues to be in the format. Yeah, and it does mostly what you want TM Ivo to do without it being your attack for turn which is huge. It allows you to get like a Cleffa get a get a Badu like the strength of those cards. We didn't really get to talk about in this deck. But like we saw Cleffa kind of come to popularity in this deck in Seville, I think. Yep. And then yeah, this is kind of a continuation of that where if you don't get Bombardier, but you get like two Poffin and you can just go okay, Cleffa, double Zoroark and then Daru Maka and then just... Well, no, no, you can't Poffin for that guy, unfortunately. Oh, yeah, true. I guess Artisan would be one of the other things like if you get a secret box, you can pull that guy out. But yeah, it's a it's a cool deck. And it's cool to see like, good players latch on to it. Sure. Not just give up on it. So that's kind of cool. No, and I think it's, it's neat. It's got play into most of the top decks. You know, Gardevoir is a really good matchup just because you're a high HP dark type you and then you have play into Goldengo and Dragonbolt as well. I think Joltik box is like an auto loss. I don't know if it's even possible to win that one. But everything, like we say all the time, everything's got to lose to something. Yeah, and that's like, okay, over loss like... Sure. Well, I don't know as those meta percentages creep up. Maybe that's... It could be less of an okay. After this weekend, it might be harder and harder to justify as taking a loss too. But for now, yeah. Yeah, for now still might be okay. Next one up is Karas Jones at 31st place with another interesting take on Dragonbolt. You know, we saw Karas take top eight in Atlanta, and she's continuing to see success with a straight bolt variant, this time including a 1-1-1 Pidgeot line, fitting in that copy of Rare Candy, which I think is really cool, along with Crispin in the deck. So we've got the Candy-Crispin combo for the Dragonbolt. Pidgeot helps you kind of glue all of that together and make it more consistent. And we're still including a lot of the other straight bolt techs that we see like Defiance Band. The Monkey Dory is still in here. We have Turo. We've got five Pokemon Search supporters. And just maintaining that added consistency that you can fit into the deck when you're not shoehorning the Dusknoir line in. Yeah, it looks interesting. Definitely more focused on a slower game where you just build up a really dominant board state. Like getting Pidgeot EX into play can just sure up the fact that like, at any point, you know, you get whatever you need. And that's kind of sometimes the problem with Dragapult is you whiff energy or you whiff that one piece like a Dragapult or, you know, the setup for the next Dragapult or something like that. And so now we're running Jock and Rock Scouting, pretty much make sure that Badoo's Itchy Pond doesn't slow your setup down. Right. Which is important in a Mirror and in Guardian matchup and all that stuff. And then yeah, this is other than the 1-1-1 and the extra search is pretty similar to a lot of straight pull lists we've seen. Running a Dark Energy is kind of cool. Allows you to like get it back with recovery, which is nice. That was one issue I guess. Being able to, like you can Crispin for it too. Yep. Yeah, a little bit. You can say you can search it out a little more effectively. It doesn't run Earthen Vessel or anything like that. So being able to Crispin for it, it's pretty good. Oh, just the one Luminous. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So still seven energy total. Just decided to have an extra copy of Psychic, which I guess is just added consistency for Crispin. Well, that too. To tackle that potentially. One thing I'm almost, and it's probably not good just because you can't control prizes the same way that other decks can with Briar, but when you have Pidgeot in the deck, I wonder if Briar is ever worth considering in here. Could be. Just because you can guarantee that you can find it. Yeah. I don't know. Just just a thought. Yeah. Hard to say. It's just like what do you cut or like so many one of. Right. And then the last deck we're going to talk about here is, you know, kind of an interesting shout out since we just previewed one of his other decks on a time capsule a couple of weeks ago, and that is John Roberts II coming out of retirement, I guess to play in the Milwaukee Regional with this very interesting take on Charizard Dusknoir. Yeah. So this was I saw the Twitter post. I think this was his first tournament in seven years he's played. Oh wow. So definitely like a deep pull. I think the first time since like 2017 Nats or something like that when we still had Nats. Yeah, right. So it's been a minute to say the least. And yeah, this list feels like old school Pokemon. Just a weird list, man, to be honest with you, like 2 Chi-Yu, 2 Rare Candy with your 4-4-2 and then 4-3-3 Evolution lines. Like I don't know. This feels just kind of and then no recovery, I think is one thing that blows my mind. Like, especially with Dusknoir, you feel like you just want to get it. Like it's it's okay to just throw it in the discard pile and put it right back, you know, with a rescue stretcher or something. But I'm going to execute my game plan every turn and if I can do that, I'm going to win games. And we saw like Bundle, I think, came up big in one of his stream games. Yeah, Chi-Yu definitely getting a good shot out here. Definitely should read that, I think. Yeah, it's got a revenge style attack. Mega Fire of Envy. Yeah, so interesting. Knocked out. Does 140 damage, yep, for 2 Fire. Yep. So, pretty good counter to some of the like that should knock out Golden Goat in one hit, which is good. I don't know if that was a bad matchup for this deck necessarily. But it definitely, yeah, this is this is kind of my my mind like it's somebody made a homebrew and he's a good enough player to like go deep in the tournament with it. This the list is crazy to me in that just you you're committing to the idea of I'm going to draw well this event. Just no onboard draw, no onboard search. I'm only putting threats on my board and you have to deal with them. Yeah, I guess the idea at the end of the day. The crazy thing to me though is just no super rod and seven fire. Like there had to have been at least one game where John was just like, well, I can't attack anymore. Yeah. Yeah, and then running one energy search is interesting to me. I guess you're an Arvin deck, which is interesting in this meta. You're saying, alright, I'm going to get go second, get Arvin versus Charlie TM Evo every game. I guess that's why you're an energy search is so you can Arvin for it early game so you can TM Evo. Makes sense. But like, yeah, you you're pretty bad if you don't draw Arvin turn one. Which is, I mean, to be fair, to be fair, that's often the case with trolley decks. I mean, that just so so that's not totally surprising. But I mean, this is this is a good example of a like if you're like this is a consistent deck that if you're going to play it well, like you can do well in a tournament. This would be a good deck. I feel like for a newer player maybe to maybe I don't know. I I feel like I've got to put some time into this to fully evaluate it because it feels like it does not conform to any of the current deck building standards that I have. But cool to see John Roberts right after we give him his Nats shout out, you know, come back and do well at a tournament. So right props to him. Yeah, I hope he keeps playing for sure. And so yeah, now that we've gone through all the decks that we're going to talk about from this event, we can go ahead and recap our predictions. And so let's see what we've got here. John, our first one was an over under on the number of Badoo in top eight. So only our top eight decks here. So notably, we've got a couple of predictions on top eight. So we've got a Gardevoir, Dragapult, Flareon, Dragdesnoir, Dragapult Desnoir, Joltikbox, Straightpult, and Ragingbolt to round things out. And so over under 4.5 Badoo in top eight. I said under, John said over. And the actual number, well, it shouldn't be really surprising when we've got Gardevoir and four Dragapults. There were nine Badoos in top eight. And so John comes out a big winner there. Maybe I set the number a little bit too low on that prediction. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, Badoo's still good. That's not, that shouldn't be a surprise to anybody at this point. No. No, not at all. Dragapult's still good. Gardevoir's still good. And then those both. run Badoo, and multiple copies in a lot of cases. All the straight pults run two copies. Yeah. For now. For now. Yeah. We're going to see the Cleffa Revolution is going to happen if that number's going to come down. I think, did we see it in any other decks? I'm trying to remember. No, I think that was it. The Ends decks played it as well, but none of them made Top 8. Yeah, it's right outside Top 8. Yeah. Yeah. So the next one would be the number of Monkey Dory in Top 8, and the over-under we set for that was 7.5. And once again, I took the under, John took the over, and to be fair to John, he did want to take the under here, but he said he would take the over just to be the opposite of me. And there were a total of six Monkey Dory in Top 8, which gives me the nod on that prediction. Next one was a bit more on the money, just call your shot, what is going to be the highest placing Noctowl deck at this event? And I chose Raging Bolt, John chose Tarabox, and thanks to Christian taking the event down with a Noctowl-based Raging Bolt, I will gladly claim the victory for that prediction. And notably, the next highest placing Noctowl deck was Ian Robb's Flareon box. So I feel like, where did Tarabox even end up at? 33rd. 33rd, yeah. So just right outside the money already. Lucky Robb getting right outside the money once again. If we look at inside of that Top 32, I see a whole lot more Raging Bolts in here than any other Noctowl deck. Yeah, this was definitely a Raging Bolts tournament in a lot of ways. Definitely, it established itself as an actual, you know, good deck. A meta contender, apparently. I'm going to have to eat crow here for a little bit, yeah. All my Raging Bolt hate just gets strained out of me here. Just get it out, just get it out now, let it go. I'm good, I'll be all right. And then the last prediction we had was pick a player to win the event. And I chose Tanner Hurley, John chose Ian Robb. Clearly, Ian Robb is the winner of that prediction. Tanner did make Day 2, unfortunately ended up down here at, I think, like 127th or 128th place. 128, on the dot, Tanner Hurley, still playing that straight Dragapult. Yep. It's still a decent showing, but yeah, definitely pitch my horse. I picked the right horse in this one, you know, if we're going to make a Kentucky Derby comparison. And John, we once again have highlighted the fact that we really need to get better at planning these types of things. So we tied 2 for 2, 2 and 2 on our predictions. We need to have a tiebreaker of some sort next time. I guess maybe, I don't know, it's weird because I could say the tiebreaker could be whose player placed higher or whose deck placed higher on the Noctowl thing, but then we both won one of those. Yeah, but I also was going to choose under, on the Monkey Dory. Like, there's no world. That's fine. Okay, fine. You win. You win. I had to choose over because you chose under, and there's no world in which I actually think, because 7.5 is a pretty large number for Monkey Dory. I don't know. We can agree on these things. Like, we don't have to choose two different predictions or two different decks. Yeah, all right. No, that's fine. I'll still give it to you. I need a moral victory after trivia, so. That's fair. That's fair. But yeah, that's going to close out everything that we had to discuss about Milwaukee, I think. Did you have any, you know, maybe some final thoughts before we move on to our last segment? I think Joltik Box is definitely going to be more and more popular in our chat. It's pretty much off the map at this point. I don't know. I think players are moving off that pretty effectively. It'll be interesting to see if Joltik Box continues its success, if players start teching for that, if anybody ever starts teching for Dragapult, any of those kind of things. Sure. I think Raging Bolt will probably get a certain popularity, too. Unfortunately. Yeah, I mean, or fortunately, if you're, you know, just can farm it for whatever. Like, if you run, what is the, is there a Firigirath that prevents, but that's just basic EXs, right? Yeah, yeah. When I put my 8 or 9 energy on my Baby Bolt, I'll one-shot your Firigirath. I'll just run Noctowl EX. Wait, Noctowl EX? Yeah, the one that prevents basics from attacking. There's a Noctowl EX? Yeah. I have no idea what set that is from. I've never heard of this card. Go look it up. I'm going to do this right now. Yeah, you're good. Oh, no, not Noctowl. Oh, my God. Noivre, Noivre, Noivre. Oh! My bad. Okay. I misspoke. Noivre does exist. I do. Noivre does exist. Fair enough. No, we're not. I'm just going to be an idiot. That's fine. Oh, yeah. I think that that's, like, we'll talk more about the standard format a bit next week as we head into another regional, maybe look at some, maybe some online results and how things have kind of evolved. But even though this format is not fully solved, I think that we're going to start seeing people put in a little bit less effort as we kind of head towards NAIC and the release of the upcoming Rocket expansion that we're going to talk about next week. And then the last segment that we have for this week is a time capsule. And this week, I want to highlight a deck that in a lot of ways is very similar to Raging Bolt while also kind of being interesting to talk about right now, because one of the cards is getting a reprint coming up here in late July. And so this is the Electric Rayquaza deck that was piloted by John Bristow to take eighth place at Worlds in 2013, or yeah, 2013 in Vancouver that year. And so we see the Electric with its dynomotor attack or ability, gosh, Electric with its dynomotor ability, that same thing as Flaffy that recently rotated allows you to attach a lightning energy from your Disco Pile to one of your bench Pokemon. This card, this exact card with a different picture, is coming back in a set that was just revealed that is based on Black and White here in late July, right before Worlds. So stock up on your E-Electrics now. But we use that dynomotor ability to put a lot of lightning energy onto our bench, specifically under our Rayquaza EXs, who has the Dragon Burst attack that in a lot of ways is very similar to Bellowing Thunder from Raging Bolt. So with the Rayquaza, you can either discard all basic fire energy from it or all basic lightning energy from it, and for each energy that you discard, you do 60 damage. So very similar to Bellowing Thunder, you'll often be able to load a lot of lightning energy onto a Rayquaza and then dump them off to take a one-hit KO on an EX. And typically the threshold for that is three. And so once you get a fire on it, you dynomotor to it twice, you attach to it once, you get it into your active spot, and you blow up your opponent's active. And then you just have to rinse and repeat. And the way that this deck is able to leverage that is with Keldeo, with its Russian ability, similar to that Solgaleo EX from Pokemon Pocket that we talked about earlier, that allows you to, once during your turn, if Keldeo is on your bench, you can just make it your active Pokemon. Just switch it up there for free. And we pair that ability with the Float Stone tool card that just gives it, whenever it's attached to you, free retreat to, one, get out of retreat-locked situations, like we saw the electric did have a retreat cost of two, Keldeo is able to kind of get around that with that Float Stone card to be able to just rush in, dynomotor all the energy to our Rayquazas, retreat back to the Rayquaza, blow up your opponent's active. And you kind of just rinse and repeat that cycle throughout the course of the game. And for situations where you want to do something a little bit different, maybe some specific matchups called for it, we did have the Raikou EX from Dark Explorers that had the Volt bolt attack that was discard all lightning attached to this Pokemon, and then do 100 damage to any of your opponent's Pokemon. Very powerful attack, very easy to set up thanks to that dynomotor, and just could really take advantage of situations where maybe you didn't want to Dragon Burst your opponent's active. Maybe you wanted to use a Catcher and pull your opponent's active up, because this was back when Catcher was not a coin flip. So just boss on an item card. Bring up a heavy retreat Pokemon from your opponent's bench, Volt bolt something back there, take a prize card, and you can still take advantage of that rush in and Float Stone combo to reset your Raikou each turn to sit there and pick apart your opponent's bench while they have something stuck active as well. And then kind of the old school Pokemon style that we have talked about the past couple of weeks, we've got 4 Juniper, which is the same card as Research, 4 N, which is extremely similar to Iono, you just shuffle the cards in rather than putting them on the bottom of your deck. And then we also have 3 cups of Kolriss, so just an additional draw support, your Kolriss was shuffle your hand into your deck, draw one card for each bench Pokemon, yours and your opponent's. So a lot of times this card would be a shuffle draw 8, you know, at minimum, it was typically like shuffle draw 7. And you know, best case, it would be shuffle draw 10. And then we've got just consistency cards kind of out the wazoo here, the max copy of ball cards that you really could run reasonably for this deck. We had heavy ball at the time too, but it didn't really do anything. So just 4 Ultra Ball, which helps fuel the lightning energy to your discard pile for your Dyna Motor to go find all of your EX Pokemon. Metal Ball is able to search out both Tynemo and Electric because they have 90 HP or less. We have the Catcher to pull up prime knockout targets for Rayquaza or to stall something to take those Volt Bolt KOs. Super Rod to recycle our Pokemon and our fire energy specifically. Energy Search to go find those fire or sometimes lightning energy. Max Potion, which we can leverage really well to heal one of our damaged EXs because we're often discarding all or almost all of the energy off of them. And then we saw Ace Specs in this format. So one of the marquee Ace Specs from back in the black and white era was Computer Search. Discard two cards from your hand, search your deck for any card. Very powerful card. Really glad it did not get reprinted when Ace Specs came back. And then to kind of round things out, we have the most infamous Worlds promo of all time in the form of Tropical Beach, which was a stadium card that was released for Worlds in 2011 and 2012, which just said once during each player's turn that that player may draw cards until he or she has seven cards in his or her hand. If he or she does that, that player's turn ends. And so a lot of times on turn one, you're not really doing anything. You can kind of dump your hand, do all sorts of tricks to get your board set up for turn two, and then essentially grasping draw up to seven and pass to your opponent. And with a lot of other decks in this format that were potentially less capable of taking advantage of that stadium, you also really just wanted to be able to get something like Verbank City out of play so that your opponent's Darkrai wasn't really able to kind of wreak havoc on you. And just getting yourself as set up as consistently as possible, getting as many electric on board on turn two as possible to be able to hopefully get this Rayquaza up there, use that Dragon Burst, take your big one-hit KOs. Yeah, that's thick. Yeah, go ahead. Sorry. I was just going to say, so we've got the Dragon Burst, we've got our Bellowing Thunder, we've got our Volt Bolt, which is a lot like Thunder Burst Storm from the Baby Bolt. We don't really have a Slytherwing equivalent, but that's fine. You have a Baby Rayquaza you could point at for a safeguard counter. Oh, yeah, definitely. It's a shred, so it can go through any effect on the opponent's Pokemon, so it's a good kind of secondary attacker. And notably, this is actually a really good card in the mirror as well, because if you could get it in the active on turn one, you could, thanks to a Float Stone, you could use Dragon Pulse and one-hit KO your opponent's lone Tynemo, potentially. Yeah, for sure. So yeah, this is just like the fast-hitting, powerful deck that as early as turn two is taking knockouts. Not quite turn one, blow stuff up, because you do need to set up turns from eels. But definitely just straight consistency, focused on that easy, straightforward attack plan. So very similar to Raging Bolt in that spiritual style. Yeah, I think it's always interesting to see Beach in a deck and it not be like a joke or something like that, because it's like $100 for... I think the price of it was like $100 on there, and that's probably for like a damaged one or one of the world's promos, maybe. Yeah, it doesn't really have a lot of price history. Yeah, I'm not sure. It doesn't get sold too much. But yeah, it's $300 around there. Pretty crazy. That's for like a Japanese one, maybe. Yeah, I'm not sure. Anyway. Yeah, but it's still cool, still relevant, still good to see. This is... What did it place? Top four? This was eighth. Oh, eighth. No, he was eighth place. So if we come back in, look at the event. This was the year that Jason Kulczynski won his third world championship with that Dark Rye Garbodor deck, or sorry, Sableye Dark Rye. And then we had Plasma deck at second place, Blastoise Keldeo third, Hover Toxin, Dustin Zimmerman's Sableye Garbodor deck in fourth, Dark Rye Garbodor fifth, Plasma Plasma, and then Ray Eels rounding out top eight. Yep. Yeah. So some cool names there for me. I'm friends. James Goodes. Didn't really have a long tenure in the game, but definitely memorable one for me as a friend. And then Johnny Ravis is like a local that still shows up to my league once in a while. So that's kind of cool to see. But yeah, definitely Jason's last worlds, right? That's right. Yeah. Yep. So his last and final world championship win with arguably like a best deck and format kind of thing. I guess Plasma could be considered that, but had a lot of answers for that for sure. But yeah. This is a really fun format in my mind. I didn't actually get to play in world this year. I punted my opportunity to do so. I was at Nats and just literally, I don't know, I'd either got frustrated or just tired or something and promoted like playing in top 16 and promoted the wrong Pokemon. So my opponent was able to like play a laser and KO something that had 30 HP left, where if I had literally promoted anything else, I would have been fine. Oh no. Yeah. Yeah. That's a bummer. I don't know. Inexcusable player. Yeah, for sure. But you live and you learn, I guess. For sure. Hopefully. For sure. Yeah. I think that that covers all the segments that we had for this week. And like we said, we don't have any events coming up next week. So our plan for next week's episode is to kind of go over all the cards from the Rocket set because we will have pre-releases starting up for that. Not this weekend, but next weekend, right? Yep. And other than that, you know, we've got Portland coming up that week as well. So we can, again, look at how things have developed and maybe do a follow-up tier list. You know, we had our opening tier list for the format, maybe kind of a closing tier list for the format as that will be the last event in the Journey Together format. And then after that, it's going to be, you know, hard and heavy hit the ground running for NAIC coming up very shortly, just over a month away. Yeah. And we're getting closer and closer to New Orleans, so hopefully you guys will stick around and have our opinions to hear in the next few weeks in the lead up to that. And we look forward to any feedback you guys have, any things you want to hear or anything that you want us to cover. Definitely provide some feedback in the comment section or I'm still on Blue Sky and I think Aaron's on Twitter. So if you want to reach out to us there, that's always appreciated. But otherwise, yeah, thanks for watching or listening, whatever platform you're on. And I'll let Aaron close it out. Perfect. So yeah, like Jon said, you can find us on socials. All those will be in the description of the episode, either on Spotify or on YouTube. If you are on a podcasting platform, if you can follow the show, give it a like, give it a review or rating that helps other people find the show makes it a little bit more visible. If you're on YouTube, consider subscribing to the show or leave some comments that again helps other people find the show helps us continue to do what we're doing. And, you know, we definitely enjoy doing it. So we appreciate any feedback, any assistance from y'all. And other than that, I think that that kind of just does it for this week. So we will see you all on the other side of this weekend. Have a good week. Transcribed by https://otter.ai