Episode 32: COUNTDOWN TO THE FINAL NA REGIONAL

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 with my co-host Jon Orgel and this week we're going to go through a time capsule of a deck from a very specific era and we'll talk a little bit more about why we chose that era when we get to it before we jump into the multitude of tournaments that happened over this past weekend and highlight some decks from those events before we hit up our Blaine's quiz show for the week and close things out with a not post-mortem tier list because we do still have a couple more events in this format but a more experienced tier list I guess one could say heading into Portland regionals this coming weekend as the last North American regionals before NAIC. So with all that being said before we get into our time capsule I want to know what were you up to this weekend Jon? I had a really really busy weekend judging tournaments. I judged a League Cup Saturday, I judged a League Cup Sunday and then I judged my pre-release at my store on Monday and Saturday was pretty uneventful. Sunday though I got like on my way over to the store I got a call from the store owner and he basically said we don't have power so I had to figure out one am I still going to run this event and I said all right we'll just be delayed a little bit because it'll take some extra time to get everybody in the computer and get the store situated but we were able to thankfully the store has like nice big bay windows well not bay windows but big windows and we were able to play with just the natural sunlight coming in from the windows. We only had I think 12 players total so that helped yeah I don't I don't think we'd be able to do it because I wasn't able to print anything out so I had to basically go from table to table as soon as I saw the matches finishing up and get them to report their match before they had like picked up their cards. Sure. Write it all down enter it in the computer and then like okay here everybody come gather on my computer and see where you're sitting for or I just read off I think where people are sitting for the next round and that worked out pretty well and people were really nice I gave out extra prize packs to just kind of ease the pain yeah so it was fine other than I still had enough for a top four so I stayed the power came back on right before the round three ended out of the four rounds of Swiss so we were able to finish and the kitchen it's a like board game cafe so that we were able to get the kitchen fired up and like get people some lunch so that was nice that helped a lot too yeah and thankfully it wasn't like too hot out yet in Virginia where it's still like 65 70 most days I was gonna say I can't imagine going to a tournament with no power I dude yeah in Florida no yeah you guys would have to reschedule unless it was like February or something right but no it was pretty it was pretty like the vibes were kind of chill it's like the quietest I've ever had a tournament be because there was no music playing usually there's music playing because it's a restaurant okay but this one was just like and there was no other patrons because the restaurant was closed right since they couldn't didn't have a kitchen open so it was literally just the lead cup the 12 players playing in the cup and so like once the round started and everybody's just playing their game it's like super quiet and I'm just like this is like a library this is crazy so that was kind of fun but yeah I didn't do too much otherwise we me and Sydney had some friends over for dinner one night and just kind of hung out and stayed in Richmond so kind of nice relaxing weekend other than having to run a bunch of Pokemon events how'd your pre-release go was it did it sell out uh we initially sold out of pre-registration slots but then we had like six people not show up last minute okay so but we still had like yeah 26 out of the 32 registered came in play so yeah pretty good and it worked out because for whatever reason we had 32 pre-registration slots and only 30 kits like 30 building battles so we would have had it we had a contingency plan for if we did have everybody show up but thankfully it didn't come to that so we were able to you know not worry about that too much yeah it was it was good how about you how did you do do you go any pre-releases or go to any more tournaments or just do baseball stuff all weekend definitely the baseball stuff all weekend yeah i went to two different tournaments so one for pokemon one for not pokemon on friday went to a league cup that unfortunately we had eight people which is one below the threshold needed for top four and so just a three round basically a league challenge for league cup points and played um the same ev list i wanted to make a couple swaps but this turn the tournament started at 5 p.m on friday so i barely had time to get there after work and had forgotten to i know i know i had forgotten to change the like two cards that i wanted to for my list from last weekend and just ended up rocking the same same 60 um started out 20 and then in round three played against dragapult and you know it to anybody that understands pokemon you would know that i had the game totally locked up and realistically i i didn't want obviously not i'm not going to pressure my opponent to give me the win but my opponent was dead to by by all measures you know two dreepies were in the disco pile um he had no recovery cards left no poffins left had already used his rare candy and his sparkling crystal he's got one dreepy on board and i've got a sylveon that's able to either ko that dreepy that turn or just send it back to the deck and he has no way to get it out so but he's just like okay well we'll just take the tie and i'm like okay well that is what it is and i lost on opponents opponents resistance it was a really weird circumstance so both of my previous opponents were playing each other at table two both of my round three opponents previous opponents were playing each other at table three so all four of those individuals going into round three were one and one and playing each other so the outcome of the event depended entirely upon the fourth table of players who neither of us at table one had played against and it was i lost on opponents opponents resistance by like 0.2 percent or 0.02 or something really silly and so unfortunately i walked away second place from that event did the guy you tied with in the last round get first yeah yeah it was just so there was there was no one of the two of us was going to win and i feel like if i'd had i mean maybe at some point that's kind of on me like i probably could have made my decisions a little bit faster i don't know how many more turns i would have needed to really seal things up but you know i was just trying to be cautious and maybe i could have been a little bit more aggressive and it would have been okay so you know you kind of live and learn it puts me at that 620 bracket which is yeah i think i'm tied with like six other people like right outside of what is currently the bottom of top quote-unquote 125 so naic is going to be a really big deal for a lot of people and i'm sure that everyone really has a lot riding on that you're all set for naic at this point um i think if so if if my goal is just to qualify for worlds then my goal at naic is just to make day two okay like make day two and i should solidly be qualified for worlds okay um but i would really love to make top 32 minimum at naic is what i would like it's like yeah um yeah and so after that um a little little disappointed going home friday night but it is what it is nothing i can do to change about it so i had to change my mindset and everything and head into saturday and sunday doing a baseball tournament for my son's travel team and we went and played two games saturday and the 95 plus degree florida sun and our games were at like noon and two on saturday and so that was pretty miserable no clouds in the sky you know florida humidity this is may dude like it was i don't know why anybody lives in four i mean it's actually pretty decent baseball weather all things considered other than it being a little hot i mean the kids were definitely the kids the kids were dead by the end of game two of course by the end of the second we went one and one on that like we won our first game i think like 13 to 6 and then lost our second game 0 to 4 and so headed into that still qualified us i think that there were 10 or no eight teams in that tournament as well and so that qualified us for the gold bracket because we were fourth seed going into the second day of games and so we had to show up bright and early again at um 9 a.m for our first game on sunday and unfortunately we lost both of our games sunday and ended up coming solidly in fourth place but the kids you could just tell they were just totally totally shot i mean so our our team for anybody listening is a bunch of seven and eight year olds so asking them to play four baseball games over the course of a weekend in 90 plus degree weather is it's a lot and that's why you know going into the fall and everything our current head coach is the idea that we're going to start having the kids do a little bit of strength and conditioning to be more able to handle tournament series as we go forward and just getting them all prepped for that and it's something that you know if you're a serious competitor you've got to do the prep work you need to do the same thing for sports pokemon whatever it is that you're trying to compete in you need to have yourself prepared to go all the way and whatever you're trying to do yeah that's tough though like trying to i can't imagine being a seven year old and just trying to like run around in the florida heat like it's got it because you don't really sweat like an adult where your body really cools off as well as effective yeah i don't know i mean we we had we had like four dewalt fans like hung up in the dugout and we had cooling towels for all the kids and everything but enough about this you can enough about baseball no after that we um we're on other sweaty topics for real um so yeah one of the other sweaty things that happened was yesterday store registration for the naic pokemon center opened up and it was kind of a weird circumstance i don't think anybody knew that it was happening yesterday until suddenly everyone just ran you got an email and you don't even know when the email was coming because it didn't come to everyone at the same time and they said okay go sign up and so as a part of that um i was able to get a store slot for friday at like 10 i think or 10 15 somewhere around there and i'm pretty sure for competitors they're gonna allow us some flexibility because obviously that's in the middle of day one for naic and or probably like round two or three honestly yeah i i feel like we'd have to you know have some amount of leeway where we could either come a little early or be late up to a point and kind of hopefully be fast tracked in as over not to say that we're better than spectators but our time is a little bit more limited right than someone competing in an event right so it's different hopefully it's some small allowances can be made for competitors to ease the process otherwise i just don't know if i'm going to be able to go right unfortunately sure yeah and the nice thing about being a professor like a judge for this event um we do get a reservoir reserve spot for the pokemon center so that's that makes you feel good like the fact that i don't have to sit in that queue um and stress out about it they email us with just hey you're going at this time on this day it's ongoing wednesday at like 1 p.m so pretty early on which is nice too yeah so you'll actually have a shot at the exclusive stuff too which ideally yeah for any good amount oh yeah i got a good amount for uh at euic sure like i got um i had a friend who wanted a bunch of stuff so i got him like a backpack and i got whatever else i don't know you got all your set the psyduck stuff too right yeah i got the hat and i think that's about all i really got because there's a sweater but i didn't get that sure um yeah i got a couple things um but yeah i'm excited to see what they have uh i got like a really cool backpack i think that was eu exclusive for i don't think it was exclusive for euic i think it was just pokemon center eu exclusive oh okay so that's been probably that's like my gym bag now so nice um you know it gets used twice a year so that's like that's one thing i almost didn't want to even sign up for a star slot to begin with because the naic specific merchandise the cornerstone ogre pawn stuff is something that i care next to nothing about i hate cornerstone ogre pawn you know it's probably my least favorite ogre pawn i was talking about this before we started recording where i don't have a favorite ogre pawn so i can't and honestly i probably couldn't rank the other three relative to each other but i know that cornerstone is number four yeah i think the the competitor kit comes with a hat with cornerstone okay matt has a cornerstone on it but i think that's about the bulk of the cornerstone stuff i don't like most of the stuff for the store that's event exclusive is teal mask themed oh um i thought the deck box had the mask on it or whichever like event exclusive do i still have one let me see if i have one real quick sure this was i think the competitor deck box so this one does have okay well yeah for europe yeah i guess it will be we're gonna get a crappy cornerstone yeah you'll get the for your competitor kit i'm so displeased i am so disappointed but i don't know i don't know somebody out there loves cornerstone ogre pawn for sure this will be a great experience for them they are not me but there are some other cool things happening at naic that got announced this week including a full list of side events and we saw that you know scanning through there are things including expanded glc pokemon pocket um A couple of the various Professor Cup formats that have been featured, I believe, are included. And one of the other really highlight ones is there is an official retro side event happening at NAIC this year, and specifically it is the 2010 or Diamond Pearl through HeartGoldSilSilverUnleashed format. No. Yeah, it is Diamond Pearl. Okay. Okay. Is it HeartGoldSilSilverUnleashed all the way up to that? Yep. Yeah. It is HeartGoldSilverUnleashed format from 2010. And unfortunately, well, fortunately, unfortunately, I do not believe they're allowing proxies for this event, but I think, I'd have to go back and look at it, but I think World Championship cards might be okay. So it's not, it's going to be something where there might be a little bit of an accessibility issue for some people, but if you have been collecting retro cards or are interested in retro formats, I would definitely take the time to sign up for this if it is something you're interested in. This event is happening on Sunday at, I believe we said it was 10 a.m. or 11 a.m. So if, you know, specifically, if you are not in the finals of whatever category of event you are participating in, you should be able to sign up for this if you are at all interested. It's not going to be crazy. It's a three-round event for prize tickets, but I assume afterwards people who are participating would be more than willing to stick around and continue to play games in that format, and there will more than likely be some other unofficial retro events that get kind of coordinated. But that's as good of a segue as I have as any to jump into the time capsule this week. So John and I agreed that in the time between now and NAIC, we're going to feature exclusively 2010 decks on our time capsule segment to coincide with that retro event. And so the first one I'm going to bring up here is a deck that is somewhat near and dear to my heart. It's Sabalok, and this is a deck, not this list in particular. This list belongs to Conley, who won Nationals and I believe also made Top 16 at Worlds that year with very similar lists. But this is a concept that was originally premiered by myself and Steven Silvestro at Florida States in this same year. So a few cards got added to the format after that, but for the most part, the concept stayed relatively similar. So some of the most important things about this deck, the kind of namesake of the deck, you've got Sableye from Stormfront here. Well, that didn't work. Sableye with its Overeager Pokébody that says, if Sableye is your active Pokémon at the beginning of the game, you go first. But if both players open with Sableye with Overeager, then the power does nothing and you rely instead on the die roll slash coin flip to decide who goes first. And in the Diamond and Pearl format is where we were first introduced to these energyless attacks, and Sableye possessed one of them in the form of Impersonate that allowed you to search your deck for a supporter and discard it, shuffle your deck afterward, and then use the effect of the supporter as the effect of this attack. And so there are a few combos for this in this deck, but before we get off of Sableye, it also... one of the most well-known portions of this card and the reason that it eventually ended up getting banned was the Overconfident... well, really, it's kind of a combination of Overeager and Overconfident, but Overconfident was an attack for one dark energy, did ten damage, and if the defending Pokémon had fewer remaining HP than Sableye, the attack base damage is 40. And so the reason that this is important is there were a number of HP modifiers for your opponent's side of the board, or ways to do damage outside of your attack. One of the big ones being Crobat G, though we can go back and look at the deck, was an SP-based deck, so we had access to Crobat G with its Flash Bite Poké Power. Every time you put it down you could put a damage counter on one of your opponent's Pokémon. So if you open with Sableye and your opponent opened with a Pokémon that had a number of HP that you could get down to 50, your Overconfident would go up to a base damage of 40, and with a special dark on your Sableye, you would do 50 damage and knock it out in one turn. So you did have a Donk capability in the deck, or a Donk mode, per se, but one of the scary combos of the deck was utilizing Cyrus' Initiative going first while using Sableye. And so this was a format where you could play supporters going first, so really, I'll take one step back real quick and we'll come back to Cyrus' Initiative. One of the big mean combos and the way that you would lock people out of games was go first due to your overeager Poké Body, slap a judge down on the table to put both players at four cards, and then impersonate Cyrus' Initiative, which is a card that outside of this deck saw zero play whatsoever. But when used in conjunction with Sableye and other means of controlling your opponent's hand, this was a very powerful supporter. So Cyrus' Initiative had you flip two coins, and if either of them is heads, you would look at your opponent's hand and choose one card from it and put it on the bottom of their deck for each heads you flipped. So you could judge your opponent to four, play Cyrus' Initiative. If you flip at least one heads, there's a decent chance that you were just totally debilitating your opponent. If you ever got two heads, the game was very likely over. Because at worst, even if you judged yourself into a totally abysmal and unplayable hand, you could always go impersonate another supporter on your next turn and continue to set up from there. And for matchups where your opponent was able to kind of set up outside of that, you still had some other long-term game plans to go along with it, including one of the most powerful attackers that ever existed in these SP formats, in the form of Garchomp's C-Level X, with its Dragon Rush attack for three colorless, but there is a tool card called Energy Gain, which is effectively countergain that is just always turned on for SP Pokemon. So really, Dragon Rush only ever costs two colorless, and we also had double colorless in the format. For Dragon Rush, for three quote-unquote colorless energy would have you discard two energy from Garchomp's C, choose one of your opponent's Pokemon, and do 80 damage to that Pokemon. But Garchomp could not use Dragon Rush during your next turn. And Healing Breath, as a PokéPower, existed on Garchomp. You almost never actually utilized it, because a lot of times the SP-based decks would either one-hit KO each other kind of back and forth, you know, most of the time you just did not have an SP Pokemon that had damage on it that you cared about removing damage from. Garchomp's C itself is kind of a serviceable attacker, particularly in SP-based mirror matches, because the Garchomp's C is weak to itself. So you would a lot of times be able to also donk opposing Garchomp's C's with Claw Swipe. So for a double colorless, you would do 30 or 60 to an opposing Garchomp's C, and with two Flash Bites from Crobat, take a knockout there. Earthquake was actually also a serviceable way to knock out several things, being able to do 50 damage for a double colorless, in conjunction with that Energy Gain tool. So then some of the other kind of like marquee, just standard setup and included tech cards in the format, we had a 2-1 Uxie, Uxie level X line, with that setup PokéPower to draw until we had 7 cards, and then Uxie has Trade-Off, which is Recon Directive from Dracloak, except at the time, this ability was considered so powerful, you could only use it once a turn. So I don't know how we got so off the rails from that, but Uxie also had a Zen Blade attack that for double colorless would do 60 damage, and Uxie could not use Zen Blade during your next turn. And so the big thing there is that Uxies are able to knock out other Uxies. You can also notably hit Gallade for 120 damage, or no, sorry, you would only do 90 because Gallade had a plus 30 weakness. But you would be able to do a serviceable amount of damage to a Gallade, and kind of try to set it up for a knockout somewhere down the line. And then one of the big developments that Conle in particular put into this deck that we had not initially included was the Honchkir from Supreme Victors. With its Darkness Restore PokéPower, Honchkir was able to, if it was your active Pokémon and your opponent's bench wasn't full, select a basic from their discard pile and put it onto their bench. And there were a couple of matchups where this was just notably extremely powerful. One of the big ones that comes to mind is the Gyarados matchup, where you could just pull multiple Magikarps out of your opponent's discard pile and plop them onto the bench. And then the follow-up to that is Honchkir had this attack, Riot, that did 30 damage, plus 10 more damage for each Pokémon in play that was not an evolved Pokémon, yours and your opponent's. So, you know, you have to remember at the time, HP numbers are notably much lower than they are in the modern game, so reasonably you could control the fact that even if it was just your side of the board, Riot would do a minimum of 80 damage, which could very likely knock something out, and then your opponent is likely to have at least a couple of basics on their board as well. So being able to reach for knockouts on things like Luxray level X or Garchomp level X in particular made Honchkir a pretty reasonable thing to swing in with. You had some other tech attackers in the deck. Go ahead. Just a reminder, the level Xs, they're not evolved Pokémon, right? Correct. They're considered leveled up, as opposed to... Correct. So they're still basics. Yep. That's an important thing to keep in mind. Yes. Very true. The other big thing was that Murkrow had an attached tool at the time, the Dusk Stone, that allowed you to evolve Murkrow the same turn that you put it into play. So you could keep your Murkrow safe from something like a Dragon Rush from Garchomp C, or from being gusted up with a Bright Look from a Luxray GL level X. Some other options, just because we are still a dark deck and an SP-based deck, we have Honchkrow G, that for 0 energy could use Honcho's Command to search your deck for 2 in any combination of Stadium or Trainer cards that had Team Galactic's Invention in its name. So this could go grab you any of the following. You could get a Power Spray, a Poké Turn, an SP Radar, an Energy Gain, and there were a couple of Stadiums that were just never really all that good, but we'll go into a little bit more detail on what these cards do when we get down to them. Just want to finish off the Pokémon here really quick. The last one is Toxicroak G, and this is really just the Luxray killer. This is a card, for a while, Luxray kind of had run free in the format prior to the introduction of this card, because it was a promo card that was released in... It wasn't a blister pack, it came with some sort of booklet, and I can't remember for the life of me what that product was. But... My brother might know. Yeah. It's not super relevant, but Toxicroak G had the ability, or Poké Power, Leap Away that was once during your turn. If Toxicroak G is your active Pokémon, you may flip a coin. If you get heads, return Toxicroak G and all attached cards to your hand. So this kind of gets around the fact that Toxicroak's actually a pretty poor starter, and not necessarily something that you would want to waste one of your Poké Turns on picking it up. But the big reason that this was included was for the Poison Revenge attack, that for a Psychic and a Colorless, or again, with that Energy Gain, just a Psychic Energy would do 20 damage, and if any of your Pokémon were knocked up by damage from an opponent's attack during their last turn, the attack does 20 plus 40 more, and they're now poisoned. So notably, you would do 120 damage to something like Luxray GL Lv. X that was Fighting Weak, which would have one-hit KO'd that Luxray GL Lv. X. So really big in that Mirror match, not super relevant in a lot of other games. And then getting into the trainers, SP decks always ran four copies of Thyrsus's Conspiracy. Super powerful supporter card at the time allowed you to search your deck for another supporter card, a basic Energy, and a Team Galactic Invention Trainer card. So really just setting up your hand to continue your game plan next turn, as well as advancing what you're currently doing on your board at the time, and just giving you easy access to your Energy cards. We already talked about Thyrsus's Initiative, Pokémon Collector was just search your deck for three basics that have 100 HP or less, no, sorry, this is just three basics. I think the 100 HP or less is what, the Professor Elm's training or something like that? Yeah, that's a little later. Gosh, I'm mixing up all my search cards. Judge literally has the same text as Modern Judge. We've talked about Baby's Search before, but it was a supporter card that allowed you to put a card from your hand on top of your deck, then search your deck for a Pokémon. So notably if you were under an item lock from something, you would be able to, yeah, from Def and from Dialga, you'd be able to still go find some of your Pokémon. Felicity's Drawing really was just in here as a draw card, because there were not a lot of solid draw supporters in this format. Most things were drawing cards with either Uxie or Claydol. So instead we had Felicity's Drawing that was just discard up to two cards from your hand. If you discard one, you draw three. If you discard two, you draw four. So you could filter some kind of dead cards out of your hand if they weren't relevant for a particular matchup, like pieces of this Honchkrow line, or the Toxicrow G, or just excess other cards that are in your hand, excess copies of Sableye as an example, and just being able to filter out cards that way. Another SP-based card in the supporter category would be Aaron's Collection. So you search your discard pile for two in any combination of Pokémon SP and basic energy cards, show them to your opponent, put them into your hand. So very similar to something like Klara or Lana's Aid in terms of recovery. And then we get into the Team Galactic's Inventions. So the first one, and one of the kind of main reasons to play SP Pokémon, was Team Galactic's Power Spray. This is the only card you've ever been able to play from your hand during your opponent's turn, and effectively was a Yu-Gi-Oh! Trap card, where if your opponent attempted to use a Poké Power, you just get to play this card from your hand and say no. But you could only do it if you had at least three Pokémon SP in play. Which again, notably, not super hard to do when you have something like Pokémon Collector available to you to go find those basic Pokémon. Team Galactic's Poké Turn was kind of like Scoop Up Net, where you just selected one of your Pokémon SP and put it and all cards attached to it back into your hand. So you get to recycle your energy gained Pokémon tools, you get to reuse the Flash Bite ability, you could get Toxicroak G out of play if you failed on the Leap Away Poké Power. Or you could recycle a Garchomp so that you could utilize that Dragon Rush turn after turn after turn if you're really trying to keep your opponent out of the game. One of the later-released SP Trainer cards was SP Radar, that was kind of like Bebe Search but in item form, but only for Pokémon SP. So you would put a card from your hand on top of your deck, find a Pokémon SP from your deck, show it to your opponent, put it into your hand, and shuffle your deck afterward. Then we had Premier Ball. That was search your deck or discard pile for a Pokémon level X and put it into your hand. So the nice thing there, you could go find either your Uxie or your Garchomp really easily. Or this would be the reason that sometimes you would see decks that would run a 3-1 Garchomp line, because notably at the time, Pokémon level X are considered to have the same name as the Pokémon that they level up from, so you could only have four total between Garchomp C level X and Garchomp C in your deck, so you would have to choose between either running a 2-2 or a 3-1 if you wanted to include four copies of that card. Then we had Versus Seeker, which is half of a Miracle headset, but not an A-Spec. Extremely powerful. Extremely powerful card. Powerful enough that they decided to make a slightly better version of it in A-Spec. And, you know, at the time we were able to play four, and at certain formats when this card was legal, you could and would want to play four. You know, probably wildly underplayed, honestly. That's what I'm thinking. A lot of older formats. And then I've alluded to it a lot, but we have Energy Gain as the final trainer card. And it's just a tool card specifically for Pokémon SP that you could actually only attach to Pokémon SP. If somehow this card became not attached to a Pokémon SP, you would immediately discard it. But as long as it is attached to a Pokémon, the attack cost of that Pokémon is one colorless less. So again, making your Dragon Rush 2 energy, makes your Claw Swipe 1 energy, makes Earthquake 2 energy, lets your Honchkrow G use its sniping attack for one dark, lets Toxicook attack for one psychic, and then we just run the energies to complement all of those attacks as necessary. You have four basic energy that you can search for with Cyrus's Conspiracy, while also fulfilling your attack costs, four special dark to combo with Honchkrow, Honchkrow G, and Sableye, and then four double colorless to really kind of round things out and let you attack with things like Uxie or Garchomp C relatively easily. And so this was a pretty powerful deck that early on in its development, we really had the idea of, what if I just didn't let my opponent play the game? And that was really, like, the initial version of this deck played, like, Super Scoop Up and played the Let Loose Giratina from Platinum, because Judge hadn't come out yet. And so you're just looking at, oh no, Judge was legal. But the whole point was just, what if I just don't let them play the game? And so you would try to let loose potentially multiple times a game, and really just try to lock your opponent out of things before you just pick apart their board. And between the combination of lowering and limiting their hand size between Judge and Initiative, and then using Power Spray in conjunction with Dragon Rush to remove things like Claydol from the board, the deck was very much so capable of just locking your opponent out of the game. Pretty reasonably. And that was how Khan was able to take the deck all the way to first place in Nationals that year. Yeah, it seems like a menace, dude. Like, this seems like it would probably not be that fun to play against. Yeah, there are some decks that just don't care. Like, I know, I think notably Eric Nance's Steelix deck probably does not care about this deck in the slightest. And the Gardevoir matchup is also, it's interesting and a little intricate, because if you try to go all-in on the Initiative strategy on turn one, if they're able to candy into a Gardevoir, there's a chance that you just get Initiated every turn, and never get to play the game beyond that. That's pretty bad. So there's definitely counterplay to it, but there are also games that you play with the deck or play against the deck where it just feels like it's going to win no matter what the opponent does. Yeah, I can see a world where Gardevoir also just gets early Psychic lock, and your deck just doesn't do anything anymore. For sure. Or they are able to get their own Sableye in the active and basically still set up, and it doesn't matter. I played Garde a lot in this format when I played it. I played in another retro event last year for NAIC and played Garde, and that definitely had a lot of good counterplay against a lot of decks. And then it has the Machamp line, which kind of runs through a lot of SPs. Yeah, notably Khan opted not to play an unknown G. I guess that's one of the other reasons to run the Honchkrow is as a Machamp counter, just because it is resistant to fighting and is an evolved Pokemon. Yep. But yeah, everything else in the deck gets taken out, quite literally, with takeout, just for that one fighting energy. But yeah, so this is going to kick off our 2010 Time Capsule decks, and we will be back next week with another one. So moving on, we are going to jump immediately into some tournaments here. So the first of three that we're going to talk about is the Melbourne Regional Championship that happened over in Australia. And looking at the metagame percentages with our variant grouping turned on here on Limitless Labs, we can see that still Dragapult is the number one most played deck, or was the number one most played deck overall, with Gardevoir following it up at number two, which shouldn't be a surprise to us at this point, Raging Bolt coming in at number three, Joltik Box at four, Goldengo at five, and Tarabox rounding out the best of the best at number six at 5.7%. So Dragapult and Gardevoir are still sitting at almost 20% and just over 15% respectively. They've got to just still be considered to kind of be the two best decks in the room, and that seemed to be the story as we translate over to the final standings of the event as well. Well, actually, I shouldn't say that, because Dragapult was nowhere to be seen in the asymmetrical top cut for this event, right? Yeah. Let me see. Did you know that at Limitless Labs you can group tournaments together and look at all three metagames? I did not. If you go to metagame at the top, you can just add all three and then go from there, and that'll group them all. Let me see. That might be a good way to talk about it. Hmm. If you go to metagame at the top. Right, right, right, right. No, this is all three events. Okay. It still just looks very similar. Well, then there you go. I don't know. I think that means because this is just Melbourne. Okay. I wasn't sure if you knew that, like if that might help us talk about it. I mean, it looks very similar. There's a little bit of flip-flopping here. Yeah. But for the most part, it looks pretty similar. I just made a bad segue into the standings because I initially thought Dragapult had also made cut for some reason. Okay. Sorry, man. No, you're good. You're good. You're good. I'm the one that screwed it up. You're good. You're good. You want to start over? Sure. I'll just figure it out. I'll just figure out a way to make it work. So we've got – and then Tarabox rounding up things at number six at 5.7%. So we still have Dragapult at roughly 20% at this first event. Gardevoir has risen up to be that 15% meta percentage. And kind of as has become standard in a lot of events so far, the deck that – or actually what I should say is if we look over here at the top cut standings, this is a very Australia event. And so when you look at the top eight, we did have an asymmetrical cut at top 11, and we'll get through all of those decks momentarily. But if you look at the top eight in particular, we see a lot of homogeneity in that we have five Gardevoirs in the top eight. And of note, the winner of the event is none other than Australia native Brent Tonneson taking down his second event of the year and second event of this format with Gardevoir with the same exact list that he took down his other event with. We have Jeremy Long in second place also with Gardevoir. Daichi Shimada coming over from Japan with Tarabox. Angus Johnson with Gardevoir. Callum Walker with Gardevoir. Natalie Millar with Gardevoir. And notably the last three players that I mentioned are all also playing Brent's same 60. Nigel Tan with Tarabox. Soda Kasai with Raging Bolt. Riku Nakajima and Ethan Liu also with Raging Bolt. And Maiko Bayou rounding out our—and being the lone American in this asymmetrical cut, but rounding out that asymmetrical with a flarion box of all things. And so there's not a ton to look at here list-wise. A lot of these lists are kind of more of the same from what we've seen, but we did pull out one deck list in particular to look at. So like I said, four of these five Gardevoir lists are Brent's 60, but the one list that I wanted to look at in particular was Daichi Shimada's Tarabox list. So what stands out to you about this deck, John? The green guy in the middle with 30 hit points playing Badoo and a Tarabox. I haven't seen that yet. Sure. That's kind of interesting. It buys you a turn sometimes. You run a countercatcher so you can still do the whole countercatcher up, Badoo play, and Jamming Tower to prevent the Rescue Board from being able to be used. I mean, you have your own, but you can play Jamming Tower down, mop your own liabilities, which is nice. That's a nice thing to have in a Tarabox deck. For sure. Not every Tarabox plays a Jamming Tower, so that's kind of cool. But yeah, I think everything else, all the attackers make sense. I don't think I see anything outside of the Badoo that makes me stop what I'm doing and talk about it. But those are the two big things, I think. Yeah, the one thing we saw a little bit that had popped up in Milwaukee was the inclusion of Volcanion, and we notably do not see that here. Although now that I think about it, maybe I'm thinking about some Tarabagos-based decks rather than being full Tarabox. But we see the trend again. I know when the format started, people were on two Teal Mask Ogre Pawns and five Grass Energy. And so we've seen those numbers be continuously slimmed down in favor of adding extra copies of cards like Crispin or adding those extra Stadium Bumps. Like you mentioned, that Rescue Board is the inclusion that we saw come in following a couple of other early events. The one thing that's missing that had been another pretty consistent inclusion was that Brock Scouting to maybe help find a Noctowl or some of your basics in the midgame or potentially under a Badoo lock. And I guess Daichi just decided that — I'm still struggling to figure out which magic in particular Badoo is super strong against. But I guess he just decided, hey, this card is good. I'm going to put it in my deck. You definitely catch your opponent off guard if they're not expecting you to have Badoo. You can just go, okay, turn two Buddy Poffin for Badoo. And maybe they built their hand up on a turn two Candy or something like that with Gardevoir. And now they're forced to just kind of figure it out from there. So it could catch your opponent off guard in a couple different scenarios. But yeah, definitely less traditional in that sense for sure. Yeah, but that was really about all we wanted to talk about. The other kind of interesting thing — I'm not going to pull up the whole list here because the list is more or less the same to Ian Robb's EV box list. But Michael did opt to play an Umbreon EX in his deck just to have an option to one-hit KO a Gardevoir. I'm still not sold on that being the way to solve that matchup. That matchup feels pretty rough even though it is winnable in some particular scenarios. But I guess it must have worked out a little bit for him. I think that he did play against a number of Gardevoirs, and we see a tie here and a win here. And it's Daichi, yeah. Well, different Daichi. Oh, sorry. Stuff from Japan, but different Daichi. Fair enough. Fair enough. So yeah, that's going to close out Australia. Congrats to Brent and Australia continuing to be Australia with their multiple copies of the same deck in Top 8 of their event. Next up on the docket is Utrecht. And I know you tuned into a bit more of this than I had time to. Did you want to talk about this one, John? I just watched a lot of Day 2 coverage. It seems similar. I mean, all the events we're going to talk about, I don't think any of the metagames were super surprising. We've reached the point where it's pretty established at this point where the top two decks are. And then Raging Bolt, I guess, is up pretty high too. But I feel like Raging Bolt and Jilted Box are the decks of the week for newer players. And they're going to see a lot of play. And Jilted Box in particular gives you the ability to convert to Day 2 with a minimal amount of testing or in-depth game knowledge and matchup knowledge. You can just wrap stuff kind of on the fly and go from there. And it's still competitive. And it does well enough to make Day 2 but then kind of falls off from there in my opinion. Sure. Yeah, I just tuned in for the last few rounds of Day 2. And there was a lot of Dragapult in this one. And some really good Dragapult matches. A lot of interplay between – I mean, I don't know. Sometimes it's hard to be super excited about Badoo, hitting into Badoo and then Monkey Math and all that kind of stuff. It gets pretty tiring, to be honest, to try to really decipher it. But it does encourage high-level gameplay and allow the skill difference to come to the top. And we saw some cool Dragapult lists throughout the day. I don't know if there was any surprise decks or anything that really stood out, to be honest, to me. I don't know. Was there anything that you saw that you thought was notable outside of just the metagame percentages? I know some people were excited about – and I think he made Day 2. It might be in the other – nope. There was an Okidoki deck that had made its way onto stream on Day 1. I wasn't initially going to bring this up, but it's just for the sake of it being something different. And actually I played against this on ladder earlier today. Okay. Definitely, yeah. It reminds me they had an Okidoki deck in Baltimore. It exists, is what I will say about it. My friend Santiago was very excited about this, particularly just because – I think in his mind it was just because it was something different. I just don't see how this deck wins games. Like your game plan is hope your opponent can't deal with your onslaught of back-to-back-to-back-to-back 230 HP basics, which admittedly could be pretty difficult to do because they are one-prizers. But just consistently finding a Luminous to put on it along with a Fighting Energy and taking multiple turns to power each one up, or hoping that they walk into either Dedun Sparse or Scizor and really set you up from there. It's just not something that I really expect a seasoned player to do at the end of the day. That's fair. It's interesting that he chose not to play EXP share at all. We saw that in the build in Baltimore. I feel like that would be a good card in here. But yeah, the Luminous gets a lot of use. Okie Dokie is pretty fun. It's an inherently really really strong card. Like in a different metagame, slightly different, we would see a lot more Okie Dokie being played in my opinion. Like if we had Rainbow Energy, or, I mean even then, I think that would probably be enough. But like Luminous, it's like good but not the best. I don't know, it's interesting. I think it's still pretty good. I feel like the card that Okie Dokie is looking for is Twin Energy. But I just, I don't know if that would be a healthy interaction. Like Counter Energy? Or, sorry, that's what I was thinking of, yes, yes, yes. Because that very much seems like a card that would work very well with Okie Dokie. I'm surprised, I think the one in Baltimore also ran Monkey Dory as well. I don't know if that makes sense. It didn't. Yeah, so like that seems weird to me. Because then you're able to heal your Okie Dokie a little bit more so you don't just get sniped by Dragapult. Oh no, he did, he did. I'm sorry. I missed both. Yeah, I don't know. I think there's some counter plays with Monkey Dory. It can get there. I feel like the Dragapult matchup's not the worst. I mean he did make top 32, admittedly. Like top 32 at a 1200 player event. But that was not enough to make an asymmetrical top cut, or non-asymmetrical I should say, because Utrecht did have a clean top 8 cut. And kind of conversely to what we saw in Melbourne, we saw 5 Dragapults show up in the top 8 of this event. So we have Joa, and I'm going to butcher his last name, but Wiegner, Wiegner? Wiegner, yeah, it's a V since it's German. With straight Dragapult, Alberto Conti showing up in another top cut of an event with a finals appearance with straight Dragapult, Johan Barzaszak with Raging Bolt, Noah Sakadijan with Dragapult Dusknoir, Jan Schaefer with Enzo Zorak, Gino Pili with, whoops, with Dragapult Charizard, and Brian Morehouse with Gardevoir and Camille Colatosti with straight Dragapult. Gosh, I've got to learn how to pronounce these names before we come on to these episodes, man. But the couple of decks that we did want to highlight from this tournament in particular were Joa's straight Dragapult deck, and in particular the one real standout card from all of the times that Joa was on stream this weekend was Maractus. I know you had a lot of feelings about this card in this deck in particular, John, so why don't you go through them? Yeah, Maractus allowed for so many amazing comebacks throughout this weekend watching this event. There were times where the announcers, and I watched Azul's restream, so Azul was like, I don't see how this guy wins. You know, he would have a whole board get wiped out by Baby Raging Bolt and not have anything going for him, not have any, and then he would get a Brock Scouting and get, you know, a Maractus, or just like an Arvan and get Maractus out and like countercatcher and then just lock the game down from there. And it allowed for, and with that paired with Genesect, like shutting off a lot of the times Prime Catcher or Unfair Stamp in the mirror match, if you will, it just locked the opponent out of the game entirely. We saw it, and I will say this, like Maractus is one of those inclusions that, and like so many other times where we've seen it with Maulwile back in the last format before rotation, it's a card that, if you're prepared for it, it has no effect, but if you're unprepared for it, it can completely wreck you and just bring up something like a Latias or Fezendipity that can just, you know, it can't do anything. It's just stuck in the active and 20 damage might not seem a lot, but, and it's not, granted, but like if you can get the time to just dig through your deck with Reconder active and set up more Dragapults and just soften stuff up and it gets to the point where you just go, okay, Monkey, put that down to like the last 60 remaining on it, bring something else up and then take six prizes. It's not that, that's, it's not on harder. It's not that hard to do. No. Um, no. And so go for it. Just honestly, like you said, 20 damage is not a lot. And in a lot of ways, I think that that is kind of to the benefit of the Dragapult deck. Like you said, it does give you that time factor where you get, you know, an additional, like if you, the ideal scenario against Raging Bolt, you lock down their Latias and you suddenly have 10 turns to set up Dragapults, attach energy cards, get your hand set up to the point that you can kind of Iona be able to do some sort of countercatcher plus Iono or countercatcher to take five or six prizes with a Phantom Dive at the end of the game and just like shut the door on your opponent being able to do anything to come back. Because if they, you know, the, even if you have a board, like you said, I think it was top four in particular where Joa played against Raging Bolt and had a board with zero Dreepies on it and still managed to come back and win the game. Yeah. It was, it was a crazy, I'd definitely recommend going back and watching that again. He won 2-0, not to spoil it, I guess, but it's still just like an amazing, like both of those games, it felt like he had no right winning. Maractus just did Maractus things and prevented his opponent from having enough energy and having enough, like his opponent did do some things that probably weren't to his benefit, but it's still just like after, like, I think, I think once Joa realized this is like the Brent 60 or not the Brent 60, sorry, the Labela 60, correct. Yeah. And his only out was Prime Catcher. The game was basically over once that was sussed out. There wasn't a whole, like once he realized that he's just like, okay, cool. Now I win. I just get Genesect up, just start cornering. And there's some other cool inclusions in this list. I like the Latias. We've seen it a couple of times and the straight, like the quote unquote straight bolt. But just having, having played Blood Moon, it feels really bad when you start them. So like having an, having an out to, as a Pokemon that you can search out and not as a switch card. Cause like item lock stinks. So you can go Brock Scout and get Latias and get the, the Blood Moon out there and get your own Badoo up there or whatever. It's just really nice. And then also for like Maractus. Yeah. Maractus is pretty thick for, as useful as it can be. But then, so even though we don't, it's not featured in this list and we don't have another Dragapult list pulled up that does feature it. But the other kind of inclusion that we saw as a response to the Raging Bolt decks is just a more standard inclusion of Luxurious Cape as a means of, so the line with that is you attach it to a Dracloak because then you become immune essentially to being one hit KO'd on the bench by a baby Raging Bolt and you force a different play from your opponent if they're trying to keep you on the back foot or keep a Dragapult out of your deck or off of your field rather. I think the Maractus in particular is going to force some deck building changes from people and we'll have to start seeing some respect in the form of either increased copies of Turo or Kirin or even just Switch in general in decks like Raging Bolt. I think that they'll almost be forced to have at least one additional Switch out on top of Primecatcher. Yeah. Agreed. I think that's just the kind of cycle we go through. Yeah, exactly. Literally at the Cup I judged on Sunday, I had a player after watching Utrecht put in a Switch in his Raging Bolt and it won him a different matchup. It wasn't Maractus, it was something else. It was a Tapu Koko EX. So paralysis from that. Yeah, kind of a random Maraudon build where I ran that. But yeah, he ran that Switch for Maractus but it paid off because of a similar strategy. And I think we'll just see that kind of pivot happen again. For sure. It's like the song is old as time, basically. Whenever a new tech comes out, people tech for it and then they tech for it so it falls out of favor and then people stop teching for it and then people re-include the tech card. Yeah. You guys get the point. Yeah. Well, and it's similar to the relationship that we've seen decks have with Bidu in this format where coming into the format, a lot of decks were way more so item-based and you would see Dragapult decks that played like 4 Poffin, 4 Ultra Ball, 2 Nest Ball, and now we've come to lists that play 5 search supporters to go find your basics and evolutions as opposed to some of those item-based search cards. And that's just kind of the respect on the card, and Dragapult in particular is kind of a weird example because it's a little bit more able to handle doing that than a lot of other decks because you have such a powerful ability like Recon Directive to compensate for the fact that you're not playing a draw supporter for turn. But it still is just kind of demonstrative of the fact that Bidu has had an impact on the format and I expect that Maractus will as well. Yep. I mean, you can make the same argument like, this doesn't run a counter stadium, so you could run neutralizations and this would have no answer for that. So it's just the kind of whole trying to outsmart your opponent game, and we'd love to see it. Like, that's what makes Pokemon Pokemon, is that you have to run the same 60. You can't sideboard, you can't switch stuff out between games or anything like that. You have to play the same list throughout the whole tournament. So you're really stuck kind of with what you brought, and you live and die by that. Exactly. Other deck lists that we wanted to talk about here was the, kind of, this is more or less the Europe special at this point, because I know that it was first popularized in Europe by Oscar Madsen, and I think Jesper Eriksson was also a big proponent of this deck because I think the two of them test together quite frequently. But Dragapult Charizard hitting the scene again, and even though Oscar was not the one who played this deck to the 6th place finish, that was Geno, I do believe that this is Oscar's exact 60. So we have a 4-4-2 Dragapult line, a 2-0-2 Charizard, 2 Bidoo, a 1-1 Rabska, Monkey Dory, Chi-Yu, and Pheasant Dippity. And the Rabska in particular is really interesting to me, and I guess it's kind of going down the path of, everyone has always said, Charizard-based decks have bad Dragapult matchups. And the answer to that, I suppose, would be, if I'm going to lose to Straitpult, well, if I can TM Evo into Rabska, suddenly I at least have a shot in that matchup, and I'm taking advantage of the fact that Straitpult tends to do better at events than Dusknoir-based Dragapult decks. Yeah, definitely. And 70's a nice number because it prevents them from doing two Monkeys and knocking it out. You're able to just run your own Monkey here, and kind of counter any little damage placement that they can play. I think it's the point where you're able to basically make your bench immune to Dragapult. And that nerfs Dragapult a lot. If you're doing a straight fight, Charizard really will win that if it's a straight fight. But yeah, it's cool to see the evolution of this list account for the rise in Dragapult, or I guess the continued dominance of Dragapult. Chi-Yu's an interesting inclusion. I guess it's just a non-EX attacker here, and has a nice charging up ability, or attack, first attack, for one fire attached to basic fire from your discard pile to win your Pokemon. So that's a nice thing to have, if you have to retreat and you can attack with it, and then if your opponent can't do anything, you can power up a Charizard again. So that's nice. That's really the big thing. It is interesting. Sorry. But it is really interesting that there's no psychic energy in this deck. It's completely dependent upon luminous energy. So that shows the meta where we're at, where there's not a lot of threatening going on to... Even though we have Enhanced Hammer, no one's played Enhanced Hammer at all in this format. There's not a lot of special energy hate right now. So that might be something we see, I don't know, going into NAIC or Portland, maybe somebody starts checking for all the luminous energy at some point. But interesting to see meta trends and developments for decklists as it's gone on. Yeah. I'll be interested to see if this deck picks up moving forward. I think that there are a lot of cool combos. We saw the Chi-Yu win John Roberts' Charizard deck in Milwaukee, and then we see it again here. And that's kind of... The Charizard kind of shores up the Gardevoir matchup theoretically for Dragapult a bit more than other cards that you include in the deck, and then the Chi-Yu is the natural answer to when your Charizard gets mind-bended by your opponent's Monkey Dory. Like you mentioned, you just retreat the Charizard to the Chi-Yu, get the two fire back on the Charizard, and suddenly you have a threat sitting on your bench, and your Chi-Yu is ready to kind of do some damage as well in the meantime. But yeah, interesting deck. Not one that I'm personally a huge fan of, but admittedly also haven't played a ton with it. It has always seemed to be more popular in Europe, so I'm not sure if we'll see a ton of it this coming weekend in Portland. Yeah, we might see a few Brave Souls venture play it, but yeah, I would expect that it doesn't really ever get more popular than our regular Dragapult, or even the Dragapult Dusknoir. Right. Yeah. And then, final event we're going to talk about. And before we talk about Masters here in Santiago, it's worth mentioning that the Seniors Division was taken down by none other than Gabriel Fernandez. Undefeated. Undefeated, and has won every single Latin American Regional possible, I believe. Yeah. Yep. Every single one. And both ICs he's played at this year, so we were talking about it before the podcast. If he wins NAIC, it will be statistically a perfect season, where he's capped out every single Regionals with a first. possible IC with a first. He has played I think in six or seven regionals at this point and got first at all but one and in that one he was at San Antonio he got sixth or seventh. So definitely otherworldly behavior like we've seen dominant seniors in the past but this is a new era. This is a new like force that I he ages up next year it'll be like we were talking it would be really interesting to see how he does next year. I don't imagine he slows down. No no especially so it's one of the things you notice like the kids that are in this younger age group especially the recently aged up seniors seem to have the free time necessary to really put the time and effort in into testing and learning these matchups and talking about the game with other people and getting their head wrapped around understanding everything they need to to take an event down. Before we move back to Masters I think it's really interesting to see an asymmetrical cut with seven people in it so it looked like it was a what should have been a top four but it's weird because there's 41 people. I don't understand why this was the case unless maybe there was a top eight and somebody got DQ'd after it got posted. Uh that that might be the case. I don't know. I'm not going to speculate too much. Sure sure. That would make the most sense logically. Somebody got disqualified after Top Cut started. It just looks really interesting on a standing sheet. Yeah I haven't seen that before for sure. But to go back to the Masters division and we'll look at just the metagame as a whole. Interestingly Raging Bolt pops up as the number one deck as opposed to Dragapult and Gardevoir and notably Dragapult is half of the meta percentage of what it was at the other two events. Interesting. So we have those. Joltikbox got a little bit of a bump. Oh sorry this is very off. I messed up. Dragapult is still the most popular. Everyone hold your horses. But yeah so Dragapult, Raging Bolt, Gardevoir are still the top three. I honestly I think the top six are still identical to what they've been at all of these events and with no real surprise I guess the one surprise is somehow Archialadon is more popular than Eevee's. But yeah that's not within the top six in any in any case. So if we come over here and look at the standings we get to see that William Azevedo took the event down with Gardevoir and we're going to look at William's list in a little bit because it is notably different from Brent Tonneson's 60. Then we have a Julian Gorkberry with Raging Bolt. Chen Shijun and I believe that this is a Chinese player that actually lives in Brazil but still is considered a Chinese representative with Joltikbox. Marco Garcia with Joltikbox. Vitor with Straight Dragapult. Matthias with Dragapult Charizard. Owen Dalgaard made the trip down from Washington to play Flareon box. Daniel Ramirez with Tropicus Noctowl. Carlos Sepulveda with Goldengo Dragapult. Victor Dragapult Dusknoir. Miguel with Straight Bolt. And Felipe with Gardevoir. But the real notable thing here I guess is we had two Joltikboxes making the cut. Both of them made it managed to make it to top four before being taken down by two of the titans of the format. And the thing that I wanted to pull up here is William's list in particular. Like I mentioned it is different from Brent's deck and is more reminiscent of what we've been seeing from Japan, right? Yeah, definitely a little bit slower than Brent's with the one candy and a TM Evo strategy. It's just a different approach. We went out slower but using TM Evo instead of candy to get the Gardevoir out. And it makes sense in a format where you can't find your evolutions as easily to get TM Evo involved. That was I think my biggest problem with Garde. I played a little bit with it on Monday. I was just trying to find the candy Garde combo or like get all the pieces in play. It can be really tough and you run the secret box that helps a lot for sure. But the Evo at least allows you to make sure that you can get that going turn one turn two. But other than that pretty standard list we've seen. Only running the two bravery charm instead of three so maybe more of an emphasis on attacking with Gardevoir EX. And then three monkeys I think is pretty standard at this point. I think that's the correct line. Oh yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I played a list with two and it just felt miserable. Like getting monkeys down early and it can be a challenge because your main search is artisan to get those out. And getting those out early is such a key important piece in Gardevoir now. Definitely. Yeah. So notably like lacking the clef up from Brent's deck and I guess that that you know you have some credence to that with the inclusion of TM Evo and knowing that that's something that you're going to lean on early game in most games. Including the Mew where Brent has continuously chosen to exclude it. We know Henry's winning list also featured Mew all the way back in Atlanta. And it's a card that I feel it feels really strong. And I'm interested in Brent's logic as to why he's continued to exclude it from the deck. I guess maybe the reasoning I could get behind is just the lack of bench space for it. Yeah, that maybe feels like it's a liability in some matchups. Sure, sure. But yeah just having an extra draw power so much in this format especially where you don't have... I mean Gardevoir has pivoted away from solely an Arven build to beefing up with a lot more draw supporters and recovery. Like especially more research. We've seen that come back a lot in the last few weeks. But yeah this this I don't know it's yeah you don't run as many poffins so you're just more focused on getting that like one or two Ralts out turn one or two. You have more time to get set up with this build than I think some of the other builds. That's probably the same amount of time but just you have with Gardevoir in general you have a long time to make your comeback. And it does feel nice when you can like trap something active Screamtail around it and just load up a bunch of Monkey Dory damage and come back. I think this and that is what makes Dragapulting already so good is that they're unrivaled in the ability to come back. Currently. There are some cards from Deaths and Rivals that I think can also fit in that category. Something like Grimmsnarl in particular which also serves serves as a candidate of something that's likely to knock this deck down a peg. I think before we move off of this list in particular I think that the Nightstretcher count is something that's really interesting to me. I know we've seen most successful Gardevoir lists. Henry's I think only ran two but also ran a Super Rod which kind of is like more than one Nightstretcher in a way. And then Brent has notably been running four since Atlanta. So only seeing three here is really interesting and I guess instead William and some of the other folks that he playtests with decided that some things like the third raw copy of Kirlia were a little bit more important to include to maybe make sure that your TM Ivo found two Kirlias more often than not. But I know I played a few games with this list earlier today and I've got to say I'm definitely a fan of this more so than the straight kind of what I would consider to be kind of a gambling Garde where like you're just praying to draw into Kirlia and or Rare Candy Gardevoir. But and that's something that I just haven't been a fan of despite the massive success that Brent's list has had and admittedly being one of the most successful deck lists ever. It's like if you go pull up the limitless page for that 60 cards it's got dozens of names going down across multiple age divisions multiple events. Just playing it on TCG live at least it feels like okay well I hope my research hits Candy Garde this turn. Yeah it does feel very more variance based than this one where you're like able to guarantee that setup. I mean you run Cleffa but it definitely feels like a liability in a lot of matchups with just 30 hit points. Yeah. Yeah I like this a little better too I think but that's the cool thing about Garde it's really flexible you can kind of for sure make a build that suits how you want to play it and I don't think there's like one I don't know somebody might argue this otherwise but I don't think there's like one best answer right now I think it's more just like best for meta best for your specific where you want to go with it kind of ability to operate the deck. Sure. Yeah. Yeah and honestly that's any final thoughts before we close out on this past weekend's tournaments? I think it's more of the same more Garde more Dragapult but I still think there's a lot of like people might have checked out on the format if I've seen pretty low attendance numbers at the league cups I've been to and judged so I think a lot of players are hopefully getting ready for Destined Rivals or you know a lot of for a lot of local players the competitive season's winding down we're getting into the summer months so Pokemon's about to take a break for a while other than NAIC we don't have anything about Worlds after Portland so it'll be those two big things and then a bunch of figuring out stuff but I still think all that to say this format still has a lot of depth to it still a lot of thought and skill and skill expression that it's really fun to see and really fun to play I think you know people might complain about Badoo mirrors and all that stuff and I'm guilty of that too when I was judging and I had like players just heading into each other with Badoo for like five or six turns it definitely wears on you a little bit I'm not gonna lie but there's a lot of thought that goes into it right like right you're not you're just jockeying for position you're trying to get that one turn where you're able to pop off and really dominate your opponent but not allow them to you know counter all that with their own play like the moment you break trainer lock is a huge part of the game yeah you're able you know you're able to take multiple knockouts a lot of times take three prizes but we saw a lot on stream at Gdansk just a lot of oh sorry get all my European cities mixed up Utrecht this is Santiago but yeah Utrecht we saw a lot of times that the player that took the first three prizes wasn't always the one that won the game sure that it's not that hard to just play unfair stamp countercatcher and then just monkey a bunch of damage on the other side of the field and take over the game so it's cool it's cool to see that we have comeback potential this was kind of the end goal for Pokemon at the start of the Scarlet and Violet era to have that comeback potential and we're seeing that and that's really cool and that's really exciting for me as a player and as a fan of Pokemon in general yep definitely and so the next thing on the docket would be a tier list of what we expect things to be like going into Portland but before we do that we're going to take a little break and head over into Blaine's quiz show for the week so why don't you John why don't you walk us through Blaine's quiz show how it works and what we're playing for okay so this week similar to what we've done in the past I'll just to go over the show for the first time listeners I'm going to give Aaron three questions there will be multiple choice questions and Aaron implemented a new thing last week and I think I didn't put the rule up on my side but I'll add it in here so you're going to be able to get one hint to help with some of the questions and you can use it at any time for any question but if you complete all three questions perfect you'll get four points so you'll get three points for one point for each correct answer and then an extra point if you don't use the hint this week's category is Pokemart so similar to how I quizzed Hunter and Aaron on card values I'm bringing that back baby okay so I'm going to show you the value of three different cards I pulled out of bulk this week or this week and last week and you're going to tell me the value all right starting with a Roserade from Dragons Exalted this is the reverse holo version of it so I don't have a good picture of it but just imagine this is reverse holo and all the prices will be for near mint copies of this card is this card worth eight dollars eighteen dollars twenty four dollars or one dollar this is a non-holo rare from Dragons Exalted right but the fact that it's reverse holo in particular like how crazy is that I think this card sees play in GLC sometimes so maybe that influences the value I mean I figure it's either got to be one or eight there's no way it's twenty four dollars that's absurd and if anyone's paying twenty four dollars for this I think I might have multiple copies of this in a box somewhere and I need to go make some money so I'm gonna go I'm gonna go with this feels so wrong dude I'm gonna go with eight I don't like this category already you're gonna I know you don't that's why I picked it Aaron you gotta go find that shoe box because they are worth twenty four dollars each this is uh this is miserable so this card if you're a visual uh listener at home um so you are oh for one so no perfect score this week but there's plenty of time for you to get a couple points to salvage your uh I don't know your point total all right next question I have a Raikou Amazing Rare okay from Vivid Voltage this is a newer card um is this card worth three dollars six dollars twelve dollars or eighteen dollars see I have no idea how much this card was worth when it was played in either Lugia or when it was still legal for GLC I know it's banned in GLC now there's also a lost box too I believe sure sure sure sure um I don't know, but let's, we're going to go... This feels terrible. I have nowhere to go with this. I'm going to go with... Actually, so this would probably be in hint territory. So I didn't open any cards or any packs from sets that had Amazingers in them, so I don't know how rare they actually are. But I don't want to ask you. Well, fine. Fine, fine, fine, fine, fine. So when opening packs of sets that had Amazing Rares in them, were they... What rarity category is an Amazing Rare? Like, how rare are they? Is this a hint? Sure. I will accept that as my hint for the week. Okay. I believe they were holo rare. Like, maybe the V level? I don't think they were beyond that. Like, they weren't secret rares. Okay. This is 50 out of 185. Sure. Right, right. That didn't help. And the fact that you're not certain about it makes me a little shaky on whether or not that hint counts, but I'm going to go with... I'll go with $6, I guess. So close. It was $3. It's tanked quite a bit. It was up pretty high. I think it was at $12 at one point. But yeah, since it has been banned from GLC, it's come down quite a bit. Yeah. Let's see. The price of it has, at one point, let's go look at the last six months. Well, I guess it wasn't all that much more. But yeah, it was up to $4 at one point. Geez. So never super crazy. All right. Before we get into question three, to save face, I'm going to tell you now, I'm going to cut this from the show. No, you're not. Just to preserve my dignity. Oh my goodness. No, that's fine. Let's head into question three. All right. Question three. This might be one you're more familiar with. Meganium Prime, HGSS 15. So this is the beginning of the HeartGoldSoulSilver era, the beginning of primes. Really nice card. Is it worth $9, $16, $23, or $40? So I know a lot of these prime cards have gone pretty far up in value in fairly recent history, probably within the last three or so years. I don't know if Meganium is one of them, but just for the sake of it, I'm just going to quick lock in $40 because no amount of thinking is going to help me here. Fair enough. Okay. Well, you are right to think it is worth a good bit, but it's not quite $40. It is $23. So most of the primes are around the 20-something dollar range, other than I think Magnezones might be a little bit more expensive because it was the most playable out of them. As you said, I feel like Magnezone, Gengar, Yonmega, Mew. Gengar is definitely way up there. Mew is up there for sure too. Mew is way up there as well. Yeah. Yeah. I have a Mew that I have signed by Jason Glezinski. Nice. Yeah. It's nice, but it's also like, oh, I probably shouldn't just... I should have signed something other than a Mew primes. I wonder if you could get that graded though, like authenticated with the signature? Possibly, yeah. I could send it off. I could try that. I don't know if they have a signature of his to compare it with. I'm not sure they do. We'll have to see. I think my card shop I sort of bulk at sent something off that was signed by him. So it might be possible. It'd be kind of a cool thing. Worst case, they could compare it to the signature on one of his World Championship deck cards. That's true. He does have a couple of those. All right. Well, this helped my spirits out quite a bit, but I'm sorry. It can't all be perfect score weeks, Aaron, but thanks for playing Blaine's Quiz Show. If I ever need a moral victory or a clean sweep, I'll just quiz you on card prices once again. So I'll have to keep this in my back pocket for whenever I'm falling behind on the leaderboard, and you'll just pull out Ruby Sapphire flavor text or something like that, and I'll just crumble. I'm just going to pull up a card. I'm going to obscure the bottom and ask you what number card it is next week. Tell me what set it's from. I'm going to pull up Spoink from Dragon. I'm not going to tell you it's from Dragon, and you're going to tell me what set it's from and what card number it is. Yeah, right. All right. Maybe I made it a little too hard for this one. No, no, no. You're fine. I think that there's a balance. Yeah, there's a balance to card value. Yeah. It's tough. It shows you where the market's at, where we don't really have an idea of where anything is valuable anymore. I mean, collecting has always been like that, I feel like, where it's nebulous what actually holds a value and what doesn't. There's some of the cards that I think are the coolest. I mean, the Primes are worth a good bit, but some of the full arts from the EX era, which is a while ago, almost 10 years ago. I got a Volcanion EX the other day, and I'm like, oh, this must be a $20 card. I look it up, and it's like $3. And it's so wild to see just what is considered valuable. But I think that's the cool thing, and that's what makes it a lot of fun to collect, is value is subjective at the end of the day. It makes you happy to hold it when you put it in your collection, that kind of stuff. That's what we play Pokemon for, or that's why we collect a lot of the times. It's not because we want to see the little number get bigger. We want to see stuff that we care about and have an emotional attachment to on display and in our lives. We all love Pokemon, so even if we don't know the prices on stuff, we can still appreciate it for what it is. Yeah. If it makes you feel better, too, I think that Heatran and, not Heatran, Volcanion, and other XY era cards are going to have their time sometime soon-ish. Oh, yeah. I definitely stocked up a lot on stuff like that. They just likely haven't aged enough yet. Oh, yeah. It's like a fine wine. So instead of a wine cellar, you've got your binder for things to sit in. I bought a lot of these Gardeas from the Radiant collection, and then this is the Volcanions I'm talking about, the dual-type ones. Definitely something that I can see being pretty cool, and they are cool right now, too. Anyway, not to show and tell too much. So yeah, last thing here. We opened this format with a tier list and figured, you know, why not do another one heading into the last event of the year? And so the decks that we're going to rate here are Dragonstrike Bolt, Gardevoir, Raging Bolt, Joltik Box, Dragobolt Dusknoir, Terra Box, Goldango Dragapult, Straight Goldango, if I can drag that over. Oh, no. It's down here. I can drag it over. Straight Goldango, where'd you go? Flareon Box, Froslass Monkey Dory, Enzorark, Dragapult Charizard, Poisonarch Aladdon, Blissey, and Rory Moon to Dunsparce. And so notably, this is the, you know, neutralization zone special. And why don't we start off... So what we did last time, how did we categorize these things last time, actually? So I think S was a clear best deck in format. I'm trying to remember. We did, like, A was like Broken Lugia-esque kind of era. A was like a very dominant deck, but not necessarily an elite of its own. Not the only deck that you could... Like, S would be considered, like, you couldn't play anything else reasonably in my mind. Okay, so, like, S is this deck will win the event no matter who plays it, basically. I think so. A would be... S is, like, a step above, because, like, A in my mind is, like, the top, and then S is, like, you can't reasonably be expected to play anything else. Okay, so... So I think S gets overused a lot, but that's my kind of philosophy. Yeah, that's fair. So we'll say A would be likely to make... Well, no, not necessarily likely to make a symmetrical... Maybe trying to rank them in terms of, like, how they would perform in a tournament. A would be, like, most likely to win. B would be, like, can make a cut. C would be make day two. And D is we wouldn't play it. Does that make sense? Yeah, that'll work. That'll work. So that being said, like, so, with that in mind, one of the decks on this list that I think firmly falls into D tier in particular is Poison Archelodon. Sure. And it's a deck we've seen continue to fall off in terms of both success and play rate as this format has gone on, and this kind of encompasses all archetypes of Archelodon. Begrudgingly, I was a huge fan of Archelodon's Zerlark going into the format, and I think that it just kind of missed its time to shine, particularly with the introduction of Joltik Box to the format and the rise of Raging Bolt and Gardevoir as dominant archetypes. It just made it so Archelodon does not really have a chance to really get out of the gate, despite the fact that it is relatively strong into Dragapult in particular. Yeah, just too many things that can one-shot it. And then Poison has a nice early tempo game, but then kind of falls off pretty hard after the first few turns. I guess we'll go from the bottom to the top. Is that the way you want to go? I just, you know, pick a deck, put it where you think it goes. We can just, we don't have to do these in any particular order. Okay, I'll bounce around. I think Blissey is C tier. It might be higher in a different metagame. Like, I think it could make top cut pretty easily if there wasn't Gardevoir as a number two deck right now. But because Gardevoir is so popular, and because Raging Bolt's done really well, I don't see a world where Blissey, although it has a phenomenal Dragapult matchup, really stands a chance at taking a tournament down in this current metagame. So I'll put it in C tier. I can get behind that. I mean, I can almost actually say, in the current landscape of the game, I could almost see Blissey going into D as well. Sure. Interestingly, there was a list that popped up this past weekend that utilized Centiskorch from Surging, I think it's Surging Sparks. For one fire, it does 130 and then does 30 to all of your own bench Pokemon. And so the whole thing, you have a one-hit KO on Teal Mask, Ogre Pawn, and Goldengo in particular, while also simultaneously fueling your bench with Monkey Dory damage to throw into your opponent's face. I don't know how successful that would end up being at the end of the day, but it's cute. It's an option. Yeah, definitely a new way to play, for sure. Yeah. Next deck up on the list would be something that I feel pretty strongly about. I'm going to talk about Eevee Box here. And I legitimately, it's, this one is a, it's a weird one, I think, because it largely depends, it is super metagame dependent. It is super metagame dependent. And I say that meaning that I feel like it's really good against two of the top three decks, and is pretty bad into the third one. So Eevee Box has continued to be really strong into both Raging Bolt and Dragapult, with nice one-hit KO options into both of those things, and nice prize maps into both of those things, or ways to control the board via Sylveon's Angelite. However, you struggle pretty heavily into Gardevoir. You know, when the Gardevoir player gets a triple Ralts board down, and is able to set up something like Kirlia, Kirlia, Gardevoir, or even just Ralts, Kirlia, Gardevoir oftentimes, and then being able to do like a mind bend onto whichever Eevee evolution you have active, you've only got so many switch outs in the deck to really reasonably play around that before you end up having to retreat, and losing some of your really precious and limited energy resources because you don't have a ton of recursion in the deck. It's weird, I'm going to put Flareon in B, I think, because my assumption going into Portland is that Gardevoir is actually going to be number two, but it's also going to be a very high number two. I do still think Dragapult is going to be the overall number one, because it's Dragapult, but I do think Gardevoir is going to hit that 15% to 17% mark more than likely. Okay, interesting. I could see a world where that happens, but I would almost lead towards Raging Bolt still being number two, just because, for whatever reason, we've seen players that, I guess, they're like, oh, I can't play Garde, which to me, it's interesting, because I feel like Garde is easier to play than Raging Bolt at the moment. Sequencing wise, I think, I don't know, maybe I'm coping, but I think they're pretty comparable on level of difficulty. I could see where, yeah, Gardevoir, if people actually start picking it up and playing it, and realize, oh, I can play this, and start taking that on a little bit more, it does get up to that higher percentage. I guess we'll get it out of the way. Gardevoir has been really, really popular, really, really powerful this time. I almost want to put it in S tier, but I think I'm going to keep it in A tier for now. Okay, I think you can almost put it in S tier, but I don't think, like, I think there's enough parity to where we don't quite have a true S tier deck right now between those three decks. So I'm going to keep it in A tier, but it's at the very top of it. Sure, I can agree with that. And realistically, I think that those top three most played decks, just, we can discuss them individually, but I would say that we can both probably agree that these three are the three A tier decks, and it's not really an argument as to why they are or are, like, why they would be. I think the interesting thing is that I would call out that straight Dragapult in particular is, in my opinion, the A tier variant of Dragapult. And honestly, I feel like if everyone exclusively, well, maybe that's not the correct thing to say, because Dragapult Dusknoir specifically is better into Gardevoir, even though Straitpult can win that matchup, and we have seen it win that matchup, the Dusknoir variant is better into Gardevoir in particular. But Straitpult, you get the extra deck space, you get the flexibility to play things like Genesect and Monkey Dory and Maractus, potentially, like we've seen, or just extra supporters to make yourself more consistent. I don't know, but personally, that's why I'm a fan of that variant of the deck. I think I'm a fan of Dragapult Dusknoir more than Straitpult, and I can see all the logic you've described, and I agree with all of that. But I think Dusknoir allows it just to have an extra dimension, in a sense. It allows it to match up into things, like have that trick in the back pocket, and you can run Badoo, and if you get the setup turn, we get one turn where you have a Duskull down, the whole game can just flip on its head the same way, if you get that one turn with Corner. I'm not saying, I almost want to keep it in A tier, and I could see a world where it slides down to B. I think I'd keep it in A for now, I don't think it's fallen off enough. I think we've seen it still make cut at every single one of these past regionals we've talked about. It might be losing a little edge, meta percentage-wise, if you break it down between, let's see if we go back to that aggregate, yeah, it slid down further. So Dragapult was 9.7 between those three tournaments, and then now Dragapult Dusknoir is 6.7. But the win rate percentage, it's significant enough, it's like 6 or 7 points different. I guess you could make the argument that it'll make top 8, but it won't win, so I can side with that. I want to put it at the top of A tier, or B tier, on top of that, I think that's a fair place to put it. It's a lot closer than I think people want to believe it is. You might be saying Dragapult Dusknoir is over, and that straight Dragapult's the only real way to play it. I don't know if I agree with that, but I can see, yeah, there's advantages to Dragapult, the straight Dragapult. You definitely brought up a lot of good points. Yeah, well we can continue talking about Dragapult decks. This Dragapult Charizard, do you have any strong opinions about this one? I honestly don't, I've kind of written it off. I think it's C tier, in my opinion. It still does well. We saw it get a top 8, but I think more often than not, I mean, I guess it helps in your Gardevoir matchup, and that's the best selling point of it, for sure. You could do C tier or low B tier. I think I agree with this, because in my mind, the power plays that Charizard opens up for you are different from the power plays that Dusknoir opens up, and I feel like the matchups where Charizard is good, I just don't see how, like Dusknoir seems like it should theoretically be better. I don't know, maybe, again, I have not played much with this deck, but I just don't see what Charizard in particular is bringing to the table that you don't, that you can't handle with the other two, what I would consider to be better variants of the deck, to begin with. Sure. Alright, going down, oh, go ahead. Yeah, rounding that out, the last Dragapult deck, even though it's not really a Dragapult deck. Yeah, Goldengo Dragapult. Goldengo Dragapult. This is something, I feel like Goldengo's kind of fallen off, you know? Yeah, I agree. It was the number 2 deck going into Atlanta, in terms of popularity, but it's just steadily kind of declined, even though it still remains in that top 6, and it's normally, I think, number 5 after Joltec Box. With Goldengo Dragapult being the most popular and most successful variant of the deck. But I still feel like, currently, as far as positioning goes, I almost feel like Goldengo's C. Yeah. Yeah, I think it goes there. I think it's a better partner for Dragapult than Charizard, but I don't think that... I don't know. It doesn't really feel like it has anything special that... Maybe I just haven't... I'm not really too familiar with the deck, just to be clear, but I don't feel like it's done enough to really make me believe in it quite yet. I've seen good players play it, so that gives me a lot of reassurance that it is good, but I haven't seen them do well with it, so that's been part of it, at least not lately. So that's, I think, kind of just keeping it from being A tier. Well, if we set the Dragapult aside, how do you feel about other Goldengo variants in general, whether it is... I like it more than Dragapult, I think. Okay. But do you still think it's probably C tier, just in general? I still think it's C tier. Yeah, I do. Again, C is like, I can make Day 2 with it and do well. And we've seen the undefeated streak with the Goldengo deck, and it matches up really well into a lot of these things. But notably, Raging Bolt, I think, feels like a bad matchup, if I'm not mistaken. What was the meta for Undefeated? That largely depends. So that is variant-dependent, and there's, I know, I didn't pull up his list, but Yella this weekend in Utrecht played a version of Goldengo that was somewhat similar to the list that we took to Atlanta, where it played the Pidgeot, it played the Sarah Ledge, you played Breyer. Okay. And so that version in particular, I actually think is strong into Raging Bolt, because you have the capability to go 1-2-3, or you have the ability to set the one-prize board, and if they, depending on what your opponent, what your Raging Bolt opponent opts into, you have the opportunity to go 1-2-3 or 2-2-2, depending on how they open. Whereas with these other variants, whether it's the Dunsparce, Dragapult, whatever it is, you very often are forced to go 1-2-2-2 or 1-1-2-2, and they can typically do that better than you can. Yeah. Like, they can take four KOs better than the Goldengo deck can. Yeah. Yeah, again, I don't think it, like, if you look at the decks above it, I don't feel like it has, other than maybe the Dragapult, the Straight Dragapult, like, it has quite the matchup spread going against others. And then the Dragapult decks have, like, the Straightpult decks have Genesect, you're really bad into Flareon, Gardevoir has never been a super great matchup. Yeah, it's bad. Yeah. And then the other thing that we haven't even talked about yet, and we could probably get to it now, is Joltikbox showed up, and Goldengo does not do well into Pikachu. No, it does not. You know, Pikachu, with its Resolute Heart ability, prevents you from being able to one-shot it clean, so you have to get really, like, cheeky with, you know, Vengeful Punch or, like, a Rocky Helmet or something like that, and that feels pretty bad. So I think Joltikbox has come on the scene really hard, really fast, it did really well in the last few regionals, I mean, it had to make top cut at, was it Brazil, or? Yeah, well, Chile. I keep saying Brazil, sorry, Chile, South America. But I'm not a believer in this deck. Nope. It feels like Raging Bolt 2.0 for this format, like, Raging Bolt, now it's more a sophisticated deck, it went to college, it got a good paying job, it settled down, it had a family. But the offspring it produced was Joltikbox, and it's got a wild child for a son here, and I think, I don't know, man, it's, honestly, you can't deny that it has power, it has the capability to do really well at a tournament, to make top 8s, but I think it stalls out hard after you get into day 2, you really have to, like, pray that you get good matchups, and that you have players that play into your strategies, because if you get somebody that's like, well, okay, I see that you're going for this strategy, let me just, you know, feed you one-prizers, and then unfair stamp you, and lock you down, or, like, bring up something, and, but do it, and if you don't have a way to, or, what is it called? Maractus. Maractus it, thank you. And if you don't have a way to, like, retreat with Latias and play, and I just Maractus you, you know, good luck, you're not doing much, or you just, you know, you get unfair stamped or Iona to 2, and you don't have any draw power, you don't have any on-board draw other than Mew, and that's a real big liability right now. I think it's bottom of B tier, maybe above Flareon, but go ahead. I was actually going to put it in C, because I have zero faith in this deck whatsoever. Now, I would still- This is like Raging Bolt all over again. Well, it is, in a way, in a way. Like you said, Raging Bolt has become a thinking man's deck nowadays, more or less. Like, it's got, it's got decisions points, and you can actually make impactful choices throughout a game. You can't do that with Jolting Box. You said, okay, did I open with a way to get Maride on? Cool. I can go get Jolting and an attacker. Okay, do I have an energy? Cool. I can use Jolting Charge. Do I have a Crispin for next turn? Cool. Do I have a boss for the turn after that? Cool. Oh, my hand went away. What do I do now? And because you don't have access to something like Noctowl, you don't have Forest Sealstone anymore, you're just praying that you have, that you draw your resources in the correct order to maintain a game or board state to shut your opponent out of the game. And I think every single deck above it handles that very well, and makes it to where I would not want to play this deck into a room that has any of these five decks in it. And you know, the other thing that people don't actually talk about with Jolting Box is even though you play a good number of energy, there are a number of games where you go second and you can't Jolting Charge on turn one. And that feels horrible. There. Yeah, it can be a really, really, it just feels like a luck-based deck. Like early Maraadon, where you had to run so many energies and stuff, I feel similar to that, where you're basically relying upon your draws. I mean, C makes sense from an empirical standpoint. I just think the only thing to counter, just to play Devil's Advocate, if you look at the conversion rates for all these decks, it's still at the very top of conversion. And I think the raw power level, like the floor for Jolting Box, if you will, is a lot higher than a lot of these other decks, like Dragapult. I feel like if you're a newer player and you're playing Dragapult, you're going to get punished way more than if you were playing Jolting Box, if that makes sense. If you make a display. Yeah, I could see that. I guess looking at, like, if you're looking at the ability to do well with this deck, I don't know. I think B is you're going to make top cut. C is you're going to make Day 2. So it is fair to say, you put it all the way at the top, it has the highest conversion rate of all these decks in C tier. That makes sense too. With that in mind, should Blissey actually go down to D tier? You don't think you'll make Day 2 with it? Correct. Yeah, I think that's fair. I like the deck, but yeah, I don't think right now, if you hit, like, one or two bad matchups, I don't know, like, maybe me as a Dragapult player, I'm just scared to face into it. Yeah, that's fair. But anybody else is probably just like, oh, great, free win. Right. Let's close out the top six decks here with Tarabox. So we saw some, we've seen some developments in the deck since the format first started. The format started off and the deck seemed like it was kind of fraudulent compared to what everyone expected coming into the Journey Together format. People have adjusted their deck lists. Other archetypes have had to adjust their deck lists, and Tarabox has been able to get itself to a point where it's started to see some success. We're seeing top cuts at events from it, and we're seeing multiple top cuts at events from it, including wins in admittedly some smaller scale events. But if you go look at, like, Wancho was able to take down an event with Tarabox. And so where do you think this deck falls in the current landscape? I think it could still make top cut at a lot of events. So I think I'd put it probably below Flareon Noctowl in my mind. I think it's better than Joltec Box. And I think it can still be consistently good. It's come back around. People have stopped teching for it, essentially, or trying to tech for it. And it has a lot of good tricks right now into all these different matchups, but I don't know. I think it's still really strong. I think if you're a player that's skilled with it, you're able to allow for skill expression. I think Wallspring can be a trap a lot of times, but if you're able to avoid early Wallsprings and actually set up a good board state and have good checkmate scenarios, this deck definitely checkmates with the best of them. Yeah. I think that's where I'd put it. Yeah. I don't really have anything to add, I think, but I agree. I think the nice thing is that you don't have to include things like Cornerstone anymore. Everyone's kind of pretty widely gotten off the Cornerstone train, so all these decks aren't having to jam in a Cornerstone and a Fighting Energy to compensate for that. Probably we don't have Walls on our tier list, if you will, so that's part of that. I would put Walls in D tier. I still think it's bad. Yeah, me too. We saw a couple that made top 32 in Melbourne, but the deck can't beat Gardevoir. It literally cannot beat Gardevoir, so why are you playing it? Yeah. Maybe next format, if Marnie's Grimmsnarl... drives away the Gardevoir, maybe it'll make a comeback, but until then, it's definitely a hard sell. I'm pretty sure Walsh loses to Marnie's Grimmsnarl for what it's worth. Oh, really? I just don't see how, how does it win? Uh, yeah, I guess, like you can't hit with Cornerstone, but you just moved, you just set up three Monkey Dories on your bench, and you can Monkey Dory better than your opponent can. And you can also do the Frost Blast, so you always have the Frost Blast map to KO their Monkey Dory when they put it down. That's fair. Yeah, maybe, I don't know, I'd have to think it through and test it, but definitely, speaking of Frost Blast, Monkey Dory, and Marnie's, we're getting into the next format, but we're still talking about this format. We don't have Marnie's Grimmsnarl quite yet, but we still have this deck, except minus the Marnie's Grimmsnarl, if you will. I like this deck a lot, I still think it has a lot of, like, play potential, skill expression, but I don't think it's quite where it needs to be in order to be a force in the metagame. I'd probably keep it in C tier for now. Probably right around the Golden Goat, Dragon Pulse, Golden Goat, like, right around there. Like, yeah, probably right there. See, I'd argue, I can get behind C tier, even though I think that the biggest thing holding this deck back is play rate, and the fact that it is... I think the floor for this deck is lower than what you talked about before. I think that this deck, the floor for this deck is lower than the floor for Joltec Box. I think the ceiling for this deck is significantly higher than the ceiling for Joltec Box. And you have a lot of the best cards in the game, or the most annoying cards to deal with in the game, in the form of Monkey Dory, Maractus, you have Blood Moon, you have a lot of Ionos, you've got a lot of Badoo going on. And a lot of times that can either cause your opponent to misplay into something, or cause your opponent to just not necessarily know. People probably don't practice this matchup very much, if at all. And having to come up with that game plan on the fly is something that a lot of people are, you know, not necessarily the best at doing. And so I would almost want to put this above Joltec Box, but, you know, it's kind of splitting hairs probably at the end of the day. Yeah, I think if you gave a really, really talented player both of those decks, and made them play a whole regionals with it, I think the really, really talented player, given enough time to playtest and be comfortable with the deck, I agree. They would do better 90% of the time with Frostlass Monkey Dory than with Joltec Box. But then if you gave a less experienced player both of those decks, yeah, they would bomb out with Frostlass, but then potentially slow the ability to make Day 2. It's really, I think, if you're looking at it like an aggregate data-wise, like Frostlass Monkey Dory is going to have a lower win percentage than Joltec Box, but like, if you look at like which one's going to go deeper in a tournament, and potentially win, it probably is Frostlass Monkey Dory. So I guess if we're going to go like... Like strength of play of the deck into Portland specifically. Okay. I mean, I think, yeah, Frostlass Monkey Dory is a stronger player than Joltec Box. If you are saying, I've tested with both of these decks enough to feel really confident going into this tournament, and feel like I have an advantage over my players playing both of these decks, I think that player playing Frostlass Monkey Dory is going to feel much more confident than the player playing Joltec Box, for sure. I won't deny that. Another low meta percentage play, then, would be this Roaring Moon to Dunsparce deck, or Neutralization Zone dot deck. And where do you think this stacks up this week? Because I have some, I have an inkling that it's not very high. I mean, if we see Dragapult starting to cut his stadiums, if we see, but like, the problem with that, if Dragapult cuts his stadiums, that's only one piece of the puzzle. You still have to account for all the other matchups. It's only like, two decks out of the nine that you might see, if that. You know, Gardevoir still runs two Artisan, Raging Bolt definitely still runs the Tool Jammer with the, what is it called? Yeah, Bolt plays three stadiums, and has the ability to attack with non-EXs anyway. Yeah, I don't, I don't know. I don't love the deck. I feel like, maybe, I honestly haven't played a single game with it. I don't really have a lot of any, like, I haven't even seen somebody play a game with it, if I'm honest, so I don't really have a strong opinion about it. I'd probably put it in D or C tier, just to, I think it's okay, but like, it fundamentally sounds like using a one-prizer to attack and do a decent amount of damage into two-prizers has always been a good strategy in Pokemon, but beyond that, I don't really have a strong opinion. So, I'd probably put it in D tier right now, below Blissey, if I had to even, I think, maybe above Blissey. I think, yeah, it probably is a little bit better than Blissey. I think, notably, like we mentioned, in Dragapult, even if they are cutting the stadiums, one, Neutralization Zone does not prevent the damage counter placement on the bench for Phantom Dive, and Genesect also stops you from being able to play the stadium to begin with. Ah, true. That's a good point. So, Straight Pult, you may have issues anyway, and Dusknoir Pult may be able to pull off a big enough combo turn that they could still close out the game at the end of the day. But yeah, so, last deck we have to talk about here would be N'Zurark, and I think, interestingly, at the beginning of the format, we had a conversation about how the owner's decks were notably weaker, or we did not expect them to perform very well going into things, and that was very true for the very beginning of the format. But similarly to how we've seen Gardevoir rise up, how we've seen decks like Tarabox have to adapt their gameplan and their decklists accordingly, I think N'Zurark has also kind of done a pretty good job of reinventing itself and finding a foothold in the metagame. Now, I'm not going to claim that this is some super high tier, like just outside of A tier deck, but I do think that it's good, notably, into Gardevoir, and is reasonably playable into Dragapult and Raging Bolt as well. And for that reason, I would say that I think this deck belongs in B tier. Okay. Yeah, I could agree with that. I think we've seen enough success from it. It has a good matchup, like you said, into some of the top decks. It's really limited by, if you pry something like your Darmanitan and then can't find that other Darmanitan, it gets really tricky to set up and do damage like you want to do. And using a 2-2 line as you're attacking, it gets tough. Like I don't know. Well, I mean, that logic can be applied to a lot of Dragapult decks only play 2 Dragapult, a lot of Garde decks only play 2 Gardevoir. That's a good point. It can be just as debilitating for those decks to prize those things too. I guess I've just seen it to where N'Zoroark gets more punished than those other decks. That's fair. Maybe they have other ways to play around and take prizes, and then N'Zoroark just doesn't. You run a 4-4 N'Zoroark, but you can only attack with 3 Pokemon, essentially. So if you can't get access to those 3 Pokemon early enough, it really starts to fall apart. But I think just having trade, having access to so many things, being able to spread damage now before Shaman comes into format, I think it's definitely proven itself to be the strongest of the owner decks that we've seen so far. I don't think it'll, unfortunately, this is a bummer, I don't think it'll do super well next format and then moving on. So if you're going to play it, maybe this would be the tournament to do it. If it's your favorite deck, if you love N'Zoroark, and many people do, including myself, this would be the fun one to say, like, let's send it off into the sunset before Shaman comes in and ruins the party. Yeah. So, yeah, that's going to close out our tier list, I think. Did you... You happy with how everything landed here? Did you feel like you needed to move anything around? Yeah, it was fine. It's tough to say. I think this is my perception of it. And granted, like I said, I haven't played in a regionals in this format, and I've just been kind of a spectator for a lot of it. So I'm just basing this off of our opinions and some of our play, but not a whole lot. Not as much as some of the other people that might be making tier lists, but I'm happy with it. I think that it reflects a confidence that I can at least shove this out into the world and not hopefully not get ridiculed too hard about it. So I don't know. Yeah, I think, you know, if it was fully my personal opinions, I would probably move a couple of things around. Like, notably, again, I know you like this deck, this Dragapult Dusknoir. I'm not a huge fan of it, and I think that it honestly is probably a C tier deck where like, yes, you can play it and you could do okay with it, but I do not think that you should reasonably expect to do well with it. I also potentially would move Flareon up into A tier as well. This week in particular, because I do expect... I expect Raging Bolt to be popular. I think Dragapult is going to be very popular, and I think, like you mentioned, and Zurark has seen an uptick, I think that we could expect to see a good amount of play this weekend as well. The big question mark is obviously going to be the Gardevoir percentage. So if it's way up, obviously it's not an A tier play. If Gardevoir's not way up, the viability of this deck goes up significantly. Well, you were saying earlier, if I'll remind you, that you thought Gardevoir would be the number two deck. I know. I know. I know you're... But all the end... This is your pet deck. We're all just... We're all just cheering for our decks. All the end Zurarks are going to show up, and they're going to scare... They're going to push all the Gardevoirs down to the bottom tables. Smells like Cope to me. Just... Probably. You're probably right. You're probably right. Yeah. This is why it's nice to have somebody balance you out, you know? Otherwise your own echo chamber becomes just like a dangerous place to be. Yeah. Definitely. Yeah. That's the tier list. That's the last thing we had going for us for this episode, and I think we've just about overstayed our welcome once again, as we are very apt to do. With that, I think Jon and I are going to close out the show. If you are interested in following the show or either of us, you can find us on social media. I'll have the link to all of those channels in the description of the episode, both on Spotify and on YouTube. If you are not following the show on whatever platform you're listening on, please consider doing so. We would really appreciate either a subscription on YouTube or a follow on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, and leaving a rating or review would also be super appreciated because it helps other people find the show. We'll have some other news, maybe some first impressions for Destined Rivals games, or decks, rather, coming out next week, but we will definitely be coming at you with the results of the upcoming Portland Regionals and any other happenings that happen over the weekend. So, Jon, any other final thoughts before we say goodbye? Yeah, just good luck to those that are playing in Portland. Good luck to the judges. I hope everything runs smoothly. Portland's a cool city, and especially this time of year, it's a really nice place to be. So, I hope everybody gets to enjoy the nice Pacific Northwest vibes for the weekend. And yeah, we'll catch you all next week. Hopefully you have a good weekend, good Memorial Day weekend. Be safe, have fun, and we'll see you soon. Sounds great. We will see you guys next week. See ya.