Episode 34: IS TOEDSCRUEL THE ANSWER WE'VE BEEN LOOKING FOR?

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 gonna jump into a time capsule going over another 2010 deck ahead of that 2010 side event at NAIC in a couple of weeks. Then we will dive right into Blaine's Quiz Show before we hit up the results, including conversion rates and final standings, with some standout decks coming from those standings of the Portland Regional that happened this past weekend. It's a little bit light on content this week, but nevertheless we wanted to pump out an episode for y'all. And so, before we really get into the meat of that content though Jon, what were you up to this weekend? Oh yeah, I had a really nice weekend. My wife and I went to visit our friends out in Virginia Beach, and we just had a really chill like board game centered brewery, hopping, beer drinking, cookout having, Memorial Day weekend where we just kind of chilled out. Like Saturday we went around town, like got breakfast at like a nice bakery and coffee at a nice place, and then got lunch at a really good burger place, and then went to a brewery and played some games, played, what was it called, something like a little bit clever or a little clever. It's like a roll and write, just with a strategy element. Played that, and then went to a nice Italian restaurant Saturday, and then on Sunday we just had a cookout. Like we, I literally slept in a hammock for two hours, woke up, started drinking beer, and then had a lot of grilled meat, and yeah, had a nice chill time. Played Seven Wonders Duel versus my friend Matt, and that was a fun game, I hadn't played that before. Yeah, just lots of board games, and lots of great time, and just relaxed a lot, which was nice. Like I hadn't had a weekend where like we didn't have a bunch planned in a while. Not that I was doing a whole lot the last few weeks, but like it's still nice to like just like truly relax, like have nothing to do in a day. Yeah, well, you know, having the extra day as an excuse to kind of kick back definitely helps with that. I want to ask, so I've been having conversations with people about breweries. Like the atmosphere at this place, is it like a family environment? Do they, well first, do they allow kids? Yeah, I think most breweries do allow kids. This one, probably less so than other ones I've seen, but it definitely was more of a family friendly environment. Like there were people, like young couples with their new baby in like one part of the booth, like in another part of the brewery. And then yeah, like some just regular like dads and whatever hanging out at the bar. So they had a bar, they had a bunch of tables, and a bunch of people were like, we were playing board games all the time. So it was a nice, well lit, nice, safe environment. So yeah. Like they've converted this like culture of being more inviting and opening where it used to just be like, no, you're only going to go to the brewery, like a brewery is basically just a bar that had fresher beer. And now you get this instead thing where you can go with your friends, you can just go hang out and it's not kind of, I don't know, depressing is probably not the right word. But it's, you know, they're, they're typically livelier than what I figure people would have thought breweries were like a decade ago. Yeah, definitely. I mean, we go to breweries a good bit. I think millennials have really reinvented like drinking for their own generation and like breweries are a big part of that. And then, you know, you'll have live music there and you'll like just have a beer listening to something and have your dog or have your like newborn kid, usually if you're a millennial or like three or four year old. Yeah, I don't think I would be comfortable. Well, no, I'd probably be OK with like my brother like has a six year old. He'll bring her when we go to the brewery, me and him. So, I mean, it's not, you know, like there's stuff for them to do. And yeah, you know, some of them have a playground even. So I don't know. I think they're pretty family centered nowadays. But yeah, it is interesting. Breweries are definitely different culture than like hardcore drinking dive bars for sure. Right, right. No, it's not just like a pool table. Yeah. A jacked up dartboard and like a sticky floor. No, it's very different. But I like it. You know, it's a more I don't want to say it's like better, but it's just different. But I like it. I mean, it's it's fun to like and I like craft beer, but like I don't drink IPAs. So that's always tough. I can't man. They taste like soap to me. Yeah, it tastes like pine tar to me, like just straight up like you're sucking on like a ball of sap or something. I don't know. It's gross. But yeah, my favorite is like the European style cafe. If I had to pick like one place to go and drink at, it'd be like there's a beer cafe in Richmond. Shout out the Cask Cafe. If you guys ever go to Richmond and are of drinking age, don't, you know, push your luck there. But if you're of drinking age and enjoy beer, this place is like my favorite. It has one TV and it's either playing soccer or it's off and that's it. Oh, wow. And like they make their own like really good sandwiches, like they make their own salami and cured meats. And then the beer selection is about like 15 beers and they're all like just German or like, you know, specific craft beer styles. OK, it's just a good and like they have wine and they have seltzer and cider, but it's a beer focus for sure. But it's just it's a great like it's a converted old garage, essentially, like somebody used to repair cars in this building and then they took all that out and then put a nice bar and then but they kept the roll up windows. So like when the weather is not bad, sure, they just have those up and you just got like an open air vibe, like a very European feel, which is pretty nice. So shout outs. And then, yeah, if you guys ever come to Richmond, hit me up. We'll go to the gas cafe. Well, yeah, fair enough. But anyway, yeah, enough about me. How was your weekend, man? Pretty good. My wife and I actually had our 12th wedding anniversary on Saturday. So, you know, getting there is weird. It's like 10 felt like a big milestone, but this is still, you know, it's another year. It's definitely up there and it feels almost like an accomplishment in some ways. But so we did that. We went to a decent restaurant. I think it's a chain. It's called Cooper's Hawk. Yeah, they have some of those in Richmond, I think. It's pretty nice. It's nice. The food's good. They've got a good gluten free selection. They've got a nice wine selection. So we went there and we actually went for lunch and they had a brunch thing that they were doing that weekend. So we ended up with a pitcher of sangria and just had some good food and then went out, shopped a little bit and ended up coming home, played some board games over at my sister-in-law's house. We played a card game called a wizard, which is just a, you know, a standard trick taking game, except instead of like similar to spades kind of except, you know, well, maybe hearts is a better example, but you're only betting your hand. And there are some wild cards that are added into the mix to kind of spice it up a little bit. But yeah, did that. And then yesterday just got some like yard work stuff done, went and jumped in the pool because it is still hot in Florida. It was so cold up here. It's crazy. Like today when I woke up and like stepped out the door, it's 54 degrees out. That's crazy. My truck, my truck the other day told me that it was 105 degrees on its thermometer. Now granted, like that's that's a metal vehicle sitting in the sun all day, but in an oven, but still it was it's pretty, it's pretty hot. Yeah. Yeah, pretty. Other than that, pretty low key weekend. We went and saw the new Lilo and Stitch movie yesterday with our son and it was pretty good. It was basically one for one with the cartoon that they removed one of the characters, which felt a little weird to me. It just kind of felt like they must have run out of money in their CGI budget or not wanted to commit enough money into their CGI budget to animate that alien. It's like the big. Who was the alien? The John, John, whatever. No, the, oh God, what's his name? You're good, man. Gantoo, I think, like the big shark guy. Oh, OK. He was just not there. Sure. So the whole bad guy was just like the scientist that was trying to like get Stitch back. You know, it is pretty well animated, but most of the story beats and most of the stuff that happened was like one for one with the cartoon, but it's still enjoyable. Like, I think that's that's one of I would say it's one of my favorite Disney movies. And so it was cool to see it get a comeback. But yeah, I think that that is enough non-Pokemon talk for the week. You know, we're approaching 15 minutes in. So why don't we go ahead and jump into our time capsule for the week? And so, like we said, going into these, we're going to be doing exclusively 2010 decks as we approach this official 2010 side event, even though it's not going to be some crazy drawn out thing. It still feels like the right time to feature some of these decks as opposed to others. The deck this time around is Steelix from Eric Nance, who got 16th place with this. He just I think this was back when we had top 32. So he lost in the first round of Ace Im. Yep. Or not Ace Im, but top 32. It was a brutal top cut, too. He hit the only SP deck that had a fire card in it. Yeah. So it was like, who is it? Not Chase. Was it? I can't remember. It was somebody from, I believe, Hong Kong. OK, fair enough. But yeah, so but this still this deck, I think if you play this tournament again is one of the most well positioned decks in this meta in a heavy format where stuff doesn't really take one shots. You have what is considerably the most tanky Pokemon in this format. And it might not look like it now, but Steelix Prime with 140 HP is a metal Pokemon. He has a Pokey body that is perfect to metal. It says it can't be affected by any special conditions. Which is relevant, there's, you know, it's poison and. Some decks sought to use paralysis like Gliscor or something like that, but. It's really good for its attacks, energy stream for two colorless, it's a Surgery discard pile for an energy and attach it to Steelix and then Gaia Crush for two metal and three colorless just does a hundred and then you can discard any stadium card and play. So you would just basically set up one Steelix in the active and then use a bunch of things to heal it. Steelix had access to double colorless energy so you could easily power up energy stream doing 30 damage a lot, doing 30 damage repeatedly doesn't really seem that good. But this deck was all about like a war of attrition. You had a lot of things to increase its HP. Primarily you had Expert Belt, which allowed, gave all the Pokemon that this was attached to 20 more hit points and allows them to do 20 more damage. But your opponent gets to take an extra prize card when they knock out this Pokemon. So basically you would use double colorless energy early game and then you would put your special metal energy in the discard pile. This was a special energy at the time that says that all damage done to your Pokemon that have this attached to it, it's reduced by 10 damage if it's a metal Pokemon. And yeah, if it's not a metal Pokemon, it just provides a metal energy. It doesn't have the secondary effect. So you would basically just put as many special energy as you get. You put four on there and with an Expert Belt Steelix has an effective 200 hit points. And nothing came close in this format to getting 200 hit points, like doing that much damage. Maybe one of the legends, like Lugia legend, I think was in this format. I think that I'm pretty sure that card only did 150. I mean, I can pull it up, but I can look it up while you keep going. But relatively speaking, like nothing is really, not much is going to be able to one shot you. And even if they do, they're not going to be able to do it again. Like if they get that one hit KO or whatever, like I remember Gallade has like an attack that you flip over all your prize cards and you're able to like stretch and hit a decent amount. Yeah, the Gallade for sure fell short. The Gallade would only do 180 max. Yeah, but I mean, that was enough a lot of times, but that's still not enough to, you know, if you get it all fully powered up and everything going in your way, you can't quite get the knockout. And the main way that this deck sought to, like you would keep your Steelix alive by healing it with all the healing cards in this format. So you had, and they're not really particularly strong cards. They're very coin flip heavy. You had Life Herb, which said flip a coin of heads, you heal 60 damage, you remove all special conditions from one of your Pokemon. And then you had Moomoo Milk, which you choose one of your Pokemon and then flip two coins for each heads, heal 30 damage from that Pokemon. So it's like almost, it's like a theoretical potion that could potentially do a little bit better. And I think at this point, did potion only do heal 20 in this format? So this was better than potion if you want to go that route. So you would use these to keep your ultra tanky Steelix alive. Steelix had a particularly good weakness and a really, really good resistance in this meta, being resistant to Psychic. A lot of Psychic Pokemon could hit, like mainly a Cardivore is what I'm thinking of. But you had a couple others. But the fire weakness wasn't super relevant until it was, with SPs primarily didn't run a lot. There was a Fluky counter that Eric ran into. But just to go over the other aspects of it, you had to set up Pokemon and patch a Risu with Call for Family. That way you search your deck for three basic Pokemon, put them onto the bench. And then Smash Shorts, not a bad attack. If this Pokemon has, if the defending Pokemon has a tool attached to it, it does 10 plus 30. And then you look at your opponent's hand and you discard any Pokemon tool cards of the same name you find there. So not a bad attack for a 70 HP basic for one colorless energy. But you're primarily just using this for Call for Family. And you would get your Onix and get Chansey into play. And then you would also heal your Steelix with Nurse Call from Blissey. So once during your turn, you may discard a card from your hand. If you do, remove two damage counters from one of your Pokemon. You can't use more than one Nurse Call Pokepower each turn. And this power can't be used if Blissey is expected by a special condition. So this would just allow you to slowly heal your Steelix up. And kind of just go from there. And your opponent might be able to get through one of these, but Steelix is only worth one prize card. So you could honestly chain these fairly effectively. You don't run a whole lot of recovery, but you don't really need it. Yeah, I guess you don't run any, sorry. But once you do get these guys set up, if your opponent knocks out the Bench Sitters of Pachirisu and maybe the Blissey, they still got to deal with the behemoth of the Steelix. The rest of the deck's pretty straightforward from there. You just have some draw supporters and Pokemon's Professor Oak's new theory, which is shuffle draw six. Engineer's Adjustments, which is discard an energy from your hand, then draw four. Which was synergistic with Energy Stream. You had Valkner's Philosophy, you said you can discard a card from your hand, then draw until you have six cards in hand. And then you had Judge to just kind of, the only form of hand disruption that was supporter based in this format, as far as I know. The Pokemon Communication was just to help. And then you had a couple of things like plus power to buff your attacks. So with Expert Belt and a plus power, you could, I guess two plus power, but realistically, it was just for the couple of reaches, there was a couple of times of just math fixing where like 10 extra damage would be enough to one shot stuff that it would not be able to knock out normally. The big break points there are like Gardevoir level X has 130 HP, Dialga G level X, which could be a real thorn in the side for this deck just because it has the ability to send energy to the Lost Zone and can also take advantage of that special metal energy. So it becomes equally tanky and has the ability to remove your energy potentially faster than you can get them loaded up to really take a one shot. So if you do get the ability to get a five energy Gaia Crush set up, you want to be able to go over the top of whatever defenses that Dialga has built up and get it out of the way as quickly as possible. Yep. So the last thing is just that call energy, which we've talked about in the past, but it's basically gives your Pokemon an extra ability to where they can just use this energy. If it's attached to an active Pokemon, you can just search your deck for two basic Pokemon and then end your turn. It's two basic Pokemon, put them on your bench and then end your turn. So it's basically an essential or essentially another call for family, but you can put it on any Pokemon and then Oxy for setup, which is pretty common in a lot of decks. Yeah, Steelix. This deck, while it may seem simple, it takes a little bit of skill to pilot, a little bit of luck, if you will, to get some heads on your healing cards. When I played Eric, I did play Eric, not in this World Championships, obviously, it was a little bit before I started playing Pokemon, but we did have a retro event last year at NAIC and I played Eric in the finals and we had a really good back and forth game. And I think it was just one game, like we didn't get time to finish the best of three set. I think we just had one complete game and the time expired from what I remember. But basically he was getting unlucky on his head flips for the healing and I was able to like take the first knockout with a Gallade, I was playing Gardevoir. And I think I got like a Dusknoir KO, like I was able to use Dusknoir to like, like once a Steelix was in range to like bring down a Dusknoir that he had retreated and knock it out. Gotcha. Something like that. Does Dusknoir do that? It might be. No, the bring down is Gardevoir level X's attack. So I did use that. I remember using that. But I did use Dusknoir's attack because I think it... It places counters. That's what it is. So that was like getting around all the special metal energy by using the effect of the attack instead of attack damage. So, but this is like a really cool thing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, but this is like a really, I'd say if you're like new to this format, this would be a really good introductory deck. I don't feel like the strategy is overly complex to be honest. Once you get it up and running, this deck kind of takes care of itself. The main thing was just be, you know, managing your bench, making sure your opponent doesn't have like opportunities to win and then just not overextending too far early game. So you have resources to prevent your opponent from doing what they're trying to do. Yep. And then it becomes just like a, you know, a sequencing thing more or less with, you know, with discarding the correct energy with engineers adjustments. And the thing that I think that is kind of easy to overlook in the construction of this is just the fact that it doesn't play a basic search supporter, which most other decks in the format did. And so from the looks of things, Eric was really trying to take advantage of the Lux Chomp and Gardevoir matchups in particular, just because Lux Chomp's not going to be able to get through a Steelix. It just does not have an attacker that can hit hard enough, frequently enough to get through that thing and taking six prizes going around Steelix is just not going to be a viable strategy at the end of the day. No, eventually you get to a point where you have to go through Steelix. Like you just make sure you don't bench too many things and realistically you don't have enough stuff to bench. But once you get two Steelixes set up with a couple special metal energy and then maybe a Blissey healing, you're not really threatened by a whole lot. Nope. So. And then in that Gardevoir game, just like a couple of heads flips probably turns the game on its head. Oh yeah. 100%. I think I must've hit like five or six, seven or eight on like tails out of all the coin flips. It was very one-sided, but I mean, that's the risky run with running coin flips. There's like other things you could be doing. I think Blissey Prime is in this format, right? It should be, but that discards all your energy. It discards all energy, but like, that's not the worst thing ever. No. You know, you have ways to recover that. Yeah. If you're looking to innovate, maybe that's worth consideration. Yeah. I don't know. I'm not quite smart enough. I'm not smarter than Eric, but you know, that's the cool thing about if you go back and look at a lot of these decks, people were, they don't have the same resources we have now as far as like deck building goes. Like you don't have all of the deck looks from a tournament at the touch of your fingertips. We were really relying upon, you know, trying to figure stuff out on your own. And that's what Eric did here. I think that's why his deck, even though he got like a, you know, pretty relatively lower finish at this world championships. It still sticks out to a lot of people because it's so innovative and not like, you know, he's not breaking the molds on making Pokemon, but just nobody was playing Steelix at this time. Like nobody was thinking to play Steelix. No, I can pretty much guarantee that he was the only Steelix deck at this tournament. Right. And that's the way Eric's always been, where he's trying to take a deck that's been cast aside or not even thought of to really, and make it his own and surprise people by playing it. You know, I was talking with Aaron before the podcast. I worked with Eric last year. He hasn't been playing much this season, but he was playing a little bit last season and I played with him. I roomed with him at NAIC last year and he was working with another couple other people on a Synestia deck, which didn't have quite the same success, but he was adamant about it being good and about trying to make it work. And, you know, that's the thing is we don't really see a whole lot of players that try to go off the beaten path and figure it out on their own. So it's always cool when you see that happen. And I'm glad we got to talk about one of those players and one of his decks today. So for sure, definitely. So stay tuned next week, we'll come back with some more 2010 coverage, but just to keep things trekking along this week, we're going to jump straight into our Blaine's Quiz Show segment. And so as things go, John and I bounce back and forth asking each other multiple choice questions. So John will have three multiple choice questions to answer. Each correct answer will award him with one point. He will have one hint available throughout the duration of those three questions. And if he is able to answer all three questions without utilizing his hint, he will earn an additional point. So a bonus point, which would greatly aid him in catching up after my big ol' goose egg coming out of last week. But without further ado, we're going to jump in with the category this week of reprints. So John, you think you're ready for your first question? Ready as I'll ever be, let's go. Here we go. So Dunsparce from Sandstorm is a rather iconic card, but I want to know what sun and moon set was it reprinted in? And your options are Forbidden Light, Cosmic Eclipse, Celestial Storm, and Lost Thunder. I can picture the card in my head. It's got Strike and Run. I know it's not Forbidden Light or Lost Thunder, so I'm like between Celestial Storm and Cosmic Eclipse. I want to say Cosmic Eclipse. I think that's probably a little bit later. I think it was, yeah, just a little bit later in the sun and moon era. So lock in Cosmic Eclipse. Okay, that's a good guess. You had narrowed it down to the correct answer and one other, but unfortunately the answer to this one was Celestial Storm, and you are totally right. This was the Strike and Run Dunsparce. Its secondary attack being Sudden Flash, which for the longest time in the Ruby Sapphire based formats was a thorn in the side of players, paralyzing their actives repeatedly. Nice try on that first question. Let's go ahead and get into question number two. I want to know how many reprinted cards were part of the Classic Collection featured in the Celebrations Expansion, and your options are 25, 22, 27, and 30. Okay, I think this is deceptively easier than you might think on original guess. I think they did 25 because it was the 25th anniversary of Pokémon for this collection because we're reaching the 30th anniversary coming up next year. So I'm going to lock in 25. Great. Your logic's perfect, John. It was indeed 25 for exactly that reason. The weird thing is when I went back and looked at this list, it was kind of, it wasn't evenly spread throughout the different eras of Pokémon. No, they did a lot of black and white stuff too. There was a good number of black and white things. There weren't very many like early EX era cards like the whole Ruby Sapphire section. There were a lot of, I mean, it gets kind of skewed because they had Charizard, Blastoise, and Venusaur in it to really do the far, far back Wizards era cards. And then they had, I think like three or four more Wizards era cards as well to kind of round things out. But that took up a pretty big chunk of things, all things considered. Yeah, good job. Good logic. You're getting through these pretty quick this week though, so let's see if you can come out strong with a two out of three. That's awesome. So for our final question, how many times has Base Set Charizard been printed in English? Okay, so I already lost one point, so I think I'm going to have to use my hint here. Okay, so the answer to this is an odd number. Odd number, so five or seven. Okay, so you have Base, let's just go through it I guess in my head. You have Base Set one, Unlimited, and then you had Base Set two, you had the premium edition, luxury edition, or whatever it was, like the $300 MSRP card. And you had, I think the class, like we just talked about, the Celebrations. I think it's five, but there's like got to be two other chances, like two other times. I'm just trying to think through it. In English, so it's been like printed more in other languages, obviously. Yeah, in Japanese there was a CD promo that came that was another version of the Base Set one. But interestingly, there are also English printings of this card that did not exist in Japan. So there's a second hint for you. Huh. Okay, so I must be missing a couple if that's the case. So let's just err on the side of caution and choose seven here. Yeah, I probably made things a little bit too easy for you by giving you that second hint. It is indeed seven. And so the Base Set Charizard was obviously printed in Base Set, and that's shared between both the English and Japanese versions of this card. But we had a couple of English exclusive expansions, which are things that Wizards are kind of known for. So because since Wizards kind of dropped the game, we haven't really gotten these reprint sets. But we had Base Set 2, which obviously featured Charizard. We also had Legendary Collection, which featured two different printed versions. things of this same card because it was available as a regular card in the set as well as a box topper. It was literally still the same card, but it had a separate numbering for that card. I was then reprinted as a secret rare in Stormfront. And of course was featured in that celebrations expansion. And then the final printing would be the TCG classic collection that came out last year with the Charizard and Ho-Oh deck. See, like I said, Japan never got Base Set 2. They never got Legendary Collection. They've gotten every other version of this card, but they also got that CD promo. So the answer for the Japanese side of things would have been six. Yeah, good. Good job, John. We're gonna come out of this week with two points for you, and I will add our point totals right here. Because I did not do prepare that ahead of time. Is it two back? I honestly couldn't tell you. That's where my handy numbers that just dinged in above our heads are probably going to do some lifting here. Hopefully, hopefully we'll look a lot smarter next time we do Blaine's Quiz Show. I think you look plenty smart this week. Yeah, I was pretty confident Cosmic Eclipse and Celestial Storm are like super close CES versus CEC or whatever. So you get a mix of my head once in a while. So I guess that's where it was. That's what I'm going to blame at least. But yeah, hopefully. And I have to tell you that was entirely intentional. Ah, yeah. But I'm happy with it, like two out of three. I felt pretty good about that category. Yeah. But I thought that there were going to be some more interesting questions, like the Dunsparce thing is what kind of led me down that path. And I thought there were going to be other kind of cards that had been reprinted multiple times, and they just aren't. And not really a lot of the ones that come up, maybe. Yeah, exactly. Oh, that would have been a good question. I should have gone with that. Like, how many times has Potion been printed? Oh, God, it's got to be like close to 20 now. No, it's ridiculous. I'm pretty sure it's higher than that, because we used to get these those products. Like, you remember, we would get like the kind of intro decks for people that were like two 30 card products, trainer toolkits or whatever. And they both had individual printings of that, because there'd be like a Lucario set symbol and a Raichu set symbol. So that counts as two new versions of Potion. Dude, that'd be a fun fact, is like what trainer has been printed the most, like different versions of? It's got to be Potion. But it might be Professor's Research now. They've printed it a million times. With the Prismatic Evolutions, they printed it for all the generations, and they reprinted it in the newest set. They gave us two more copies of it a day, I think. Right. And I think we're getting our, I believe there's at least one more printing in Destined Rivals as well. Yeah, we're getting a Juniper. Oh, yeah. And for Black Bolt White Flavor, we're getting the Juniper one as well. And we've gotten Full Arts for half of them, too. So you might be right. But I don't know. It's Potion's probably still up there. It's been around since base set. Yeah. But cool. So that's enough dwelling on the past. We can go ahead and dwell on the much more recent past instead, and look at the results from our Portland Regionals this week. So the first thing we're going to look at here are just some of the kind of meta information statistics that we'd like to show to everybody here. And so our top six decks stay relatively similar, with Dragapult, Raging Bolt, and Gardevoir still being the top three, Joltik Box being number four. Flareon, kind of rising up through the ranks to make it onto the top six this week, along with Goldengo, still barely clutching onto that last spot on there, pushing Tarabox out as deck number seven. But I think the thing that I wanted to highlight, and the reason that I'm on conversion rates rather than just meta percentages this week, are the fact that the conversion rate for Joltik Box, as the Journey Together format kind of came to a close, has cooled off significantly. You know, when this deck first burst onto the scene, it was boasting conversion rates of 23, 24, 25% even, or almost always was over 20%, at least. And now we've dropped down to just under 17%. Yeah, it is interesting. Is that one of those things where people just, you know, figured out the play pattern of the deck and are able to exploit it because it is so linear? Or has the number of players just decreased enough that we're not seeing as many of them make it into day two? Yeah, it's a good question. I could also say like, maybe the number of top players playing Joltik Box has decreased a little bit. So they're really not able to, but like Joltik Box, I think, has been kind of the go to deck for players that haven't really put a lot of testing into the meta game. Sure. At least as a generalization, I wouldn't say that's the hard and fast rule. But overall, that might be the case. So that might be part of it. But I could also see a world where a lot of like Dragapult and Gardevoir players have figured out how to play that match up a lot more effectively. Now that they've seen it a couple times, maybe they figured it out a lot more effective, like saying, Okay, you can get the first two knockouts, take your first four prizes, but then it's gonna be really, really hard for you to close the game out from there. Sure. You know, I'm gonna Unfair Stamp you, or, you know, if you're Gardevoir, just countercatch or something up, like a Latias. Or if you knock out, I guess that's not necessarily the best example. But if you knock out the stuff with energy early, and they're not able to like recover from there, and draw the cards they need, like Boss or Crispin or whatever, it gets really hard for them to keep going. Yeah, and we saw a pretty good show of that on stream. I know Henry Chow was featured on stream playing against Joltikbox at one point over the weekend. And he pulled off the play of, okay, I'm gonna bring up your Iron Hands and KO it with Drifloon while I also Monkey Dory damage over and KO your Joltik on your bench. And then later in the game, being able to just move damage to a Pikachu to make it so Resolute Heart is no longer active, so it can get KOed. Or I think the exact line of play ended up being was hit a Fezendipity for 190, while also pinging the Pikachu for 30. And then being able to do the reverse of that on the following turn to take four prizes and just end the game. And Joltik doesn't really have a response to something like that. No, they have to, some of them have been running Gravity Mountain, but it's only like a one of, and it's not really particularly easy to find. Most of them, you're not running like Secret Box or something like that, where you're able to necessarily get it. A lot of them are running Prime Catcher, Joltikboxes. So they really have no way to search out a Stadium right now. So it can be really difficult to just find that when you need to knock out that Gardevoir, that one turn. For sure. And the Gardevoir can just heal itself with Monkey Dory, pretty much effectively negating that strategy. But yeah, it was a, I think Joltikbox is cooling down a little bit. It was kind of the hot deck for the second half of this format and then now people have figured it out. But that's not to say that there's still no further innovations that could be happening. And Azul was working on it before he, I guess, couldn't go to Portland. So there's still, like, some players have some faith in it. I don't think it's going to fully go off the face of the earth. Like one of the other decks we might talk about here with Golden Go, Archelodon even, kind of falling off. We've seen the trend for a while now of Archelodon converting pretty poorly. And I think the play rate of the deck has finally descended to kind of match that more or less. To where, you know, we were still seeing 50, 60 people bringing the deck to events and converting in single digit numbers at that time. And so now to have it drop to just over 30 copies, I think that that's pretty par for the course. The big kind of shocker for people might be that Golden Go has similarly kind of fallen off the face of the earth. Even though we talked about this a little bit last week when we did our tier list. And I think a large part of this shift further downward has to do with that top player play rate more or less. Where a lot of the day two converters of Golden Go that did maintain kind of that higher conversion rate that we were seeing. Or due to the, you know, John Angs and Caleb Rogersons of the world that were bringing that deck to events consistently. Instead opting to play different archetypes this week. Including, you know, Caleb was playing that Tarabox deck. And we can see Tarabox converted extremely well this week. Being easily the highest converting deck of, you know, over even 20 players. But let alone having over 100 copies of the deck in the room. And having almost a third of them make it into day two is pretty great. Like those are better than the Joltik box numbers that we were seeing when that deck first came out. Yeah, yeah. We talked a little bit about Tarabox thinking it's a better play for this weekend. It's getting better and better as like our Chaladon, you know, falls off. And Golden Go falls off. Tarabox has a much better matchup spread from there. With like Lily's Clefairy helping your Raging Bull matchup. And you're able to really bully the setup decks with Teal Mask. But I think other decks, you know, I think it's also in my mind it's a case of what decks are the top players playing. That's what that number shows me more than Tarabox. You know, it was a good call for the meta. We're not going to say otherwise. But I think the number of players that are consistently making day twos. I think the rule of thumb is a really well-seasoned, skilled player who's put the hours in. Who's put the work in. Understands the deck. Understands the matchups going into the tournament. Can basically make day two with any top meta deck. Like any of the top, you know, basically Zora or Arcanop in my opinion. Sure. Is where we're at right now. So the fact that like, sure, it's better positioned than it might have been at the start of the format. When people were expecting it. Now people aren't expecting Tarabox. Aren't teching for it. You know, now we can see it kind of have a resurgence in the last few tournaments of this format. Yeah. And then the other big kind of push that Tarabox got. And we've talked about this a little bit previously as well. Is that there's some more diversity coming in the A-spec slots of both the EV decks and the Dragapult decks. Where at the very beginning of this format, all of the successful lists for both of those decks were running Unfair Stamp. And that's a card that Noctowl-based decks just hate sitting across from. But now we've seen some pressure be put on these Dragapult lists that have forced them to find other options. And we've seen people still include Unfair Stamp a good percentage of the time. But we've also seen some people convert back to playing Sparkling Crystal. Or even some players opting to include Neo Upper Energy as their A-spec of choice. And then the EV decks have largely converted back to playing Sparkling Crystal as the primary. And I'm pretty sure only A-spec that anyone who's converting into Day 2 is running. Just because it's more efficient for them to be proactive in their gameplay. Rather than trying to rely primarily on a reactive strategy. And Tarabox is able to take advantage of that since it gets to maintain its hand size more effectively more often. Yeah, for sure. That's a good point, Aaron. Yeah, I think that's just about enough about our conversion rates. And we can go over here now and look at the standings from the event. And we get to see that Michael Davidson and Henry Chau faced off in a Gardevoir mirror. That was in fact a same-60 mirror match heading into the finals of this event. And we're going to take a look at that list a little bit later. But we'll first run through the rest of the asymmetrical top cut here. So we've got Raging Bolt from Christian Fontenot. Tarabox from Caleb Rogerson. Gardevoir from Paipa Lapine. Flareon Box from Taylor Whalen and Owen Dalgard. Joseph Mused with Straight Pult. Dominic Viola and John Ng with Dusk Pult. Connor Miller with Flareon Box. Ray Chen with Toad Skrull. Yep, you heard that right. That's a Toad Skrull. Callie White with Tarabox. And Sebastian Lashmet rounding things out with Dragapult Pidgeot of all things. And so the first deck we're going to take a look at here. Well, before we take a look at decks, what stands out to you here besides the Toad Skrull, John? I think the fact that, like what I was thinking as you were reading this is like I'm trying to remember the last time we had a same-60 mirror in the finals of a regionals. It's been a while. I think it was Portland last year. With John Ng? Yeah. Yeah, that's funny. Yeah. I think that's really cool is like, you know, Michael and Henry are really close friends, testing partners, all that. I think that was my takeaway is just like it's insane to me how well, you know, how successful a season Henry's having. But the fact that he's also buoying other players to top performances alongside of him. We've seen it with like, what was the player from Europe? I forget his name, but basically taking Henry's 60. And we saw it with Isaiah Bradner doing it, I think at one point. So Henry is definitely like not afraid to collaborate, not afraid to tell people exactly what he would be playing for a tournament. And like giving them the same list and all that kind of stuff. And I think that's really special and really cool. We don't really see it too much. We used to not see it ever. I feel like everything used to be a secret back then. Yeah, we did have play testing groups that would run the same 60 for tournaments. You know, I think primarily I'm thinking of like not even that long ago, Raul Bradner and Reagan Retzlaff and John Ng would kind of just run the same 60 for every tournament for a while. And before that we had like DDG and I don't know, all that kind of going on. There's still some smaller, probably more isolated cells of players that will definitely collaborate together and work on lists and bring those same 60s to events. Like we saw Christian Fontenot and Olat Blitzl brought the same Raging Bolt deck to Atlanta as an example. Or Sebastian Lashman has been working with Karis Jones for this entire format on various Dragapult lists. Or Rowan Stavano and Tanner Hurley have been collaborating on Dragapult for the Journey Together format. And so I think that it's a matter of... The thing that that highlights to me is that the players that are... consistently having more success are the ones that are collaborating with other people. And that demonstrates that, you know, two heads are better than one. And you're very frequently going to be able to get further in an event by having a sounding board or a testing group to bounce your ideas or bounce your ideas off of or play games with. So don't trying to lone wolf things is kind of a relic of the past in Pokemon. Yeah, it definitely is, you know, we talked about Eric in the time capsule, but there's like other than like, maybe the most like recent example would be john roberts, the second last tournament, sure walkie. He's kind of a lone wolf that comes to mind in the most recent format. But for the most part, the cool thing with Henry, though, I feel like is that I've seen him basically help anybody that's asked, or like, not anybody, but a large range of players is not the same testing group every time it's you know, Michael Davidson's maybe tested with him all season, but he's not afraid to help other people that just asked for help. You know, I think that's that's special. That's unique. Yeah, kudos to Henry for sure. And for that being said, the other things that kind of stand out to me are so we saw the uptick in the play rate of the EV box stack, and the conversion rate of the EV box stack, and we still see three, three of them make it into top cut on the asymmetrical side with two of them converting into the final top eight. But other than that, we've got a pretty nice spread of decks here. So we've got three Gardevoirs, three of which all converted into top eight proper, four Dragapult decks, but only two of or one of them making it into the top eight. And then the Tarabox making up a couple more of those slots with Raging Bolt really kind of falling off despite winning the last North American event. So yeah, with that being said, I think we can go ahead and jump into some deck lists. And first up is going to be that Gardevoir list, which is going to look very different from the last deck that we saw coming out of that Henry Chao camp. And there's a lot of ways, you know, we don't see the Zora Ark. We still see the what I would say is, you know, Henry Chao's trademark card in secret box has kind of proven itself as the premier A-spec four Gardevoir decks, but the real standout things are three copies of TM Evolution and this 1-1 Rapsca line. Yep. And let me go back down to two monkeys in this build. So that's a big departure I'd say, but yeah, this is a less turbo version compared to the Brentonison going back to TM Evo. And then yeah, you have probably the new technology of this format of this tournament rather in the Rapsca, which if you're not familiar with Rapsca, you know, don't be too ashamed just to read it real quick. Basically it's a 70 HP stage one Pokemon that evolves from Rallor and has the ability Spherical Shield says prevent all damage from and effects of attacks from your opponent's Pokemon done to your benched Pokemon. So this is primarily played as a Dragapult counter to prevent any bench damage being placed on your bench whenever this is in play, but it can also be used in a lot of other matchups. You know, it doesn't just prevent effects of attacks, it prevents attack damage. So it can prevent the Raging Bolt, the baby Raging Bolt. We've seen a lot of a huge uptick in that. And then we've seen, you know, we talked about Teal Mask Aggronpon, so it prevents that damage to just to your Curly as in Ralts early game. So yeah, definitely more of a TM Evo centered build than we've seen in the past few tournaments. I think Henry did run a TM Evo build with Zoroark, right? Yeah, yeah. And then that I'm not positive on, I'd have to go back and look at the list, but I know for this one in particular, like he called out or shouted out William Azevedo for inspiration on the deck with his TM Evo list that he won with last week down in the Latham Regional. But the Rapsca, in my mind, applies to almost every single top tier matchup that this deck would face. So you stop Screamtail damage in Mirror matches, you stop the Phantom Dive damage obviously against Dragapult, you stop the baby Raging Bolt like you said, but you're also stopping effects of attacks. So you actually prevent Angelite from coming into play against the Eevee based decks, which you know, when you think about a lot of people think about Rapsca and you're like, okay, it's a bench barrier. But when you're stopping something, like one of the only plays that the Eevee decks typically have against Gardevoir is, okay, if you get a Gardevoir out and you power up, you know, a 3-4 Energy Screamtail or a Mew or, you know, even a Drifloon, the big play is I'm going to get your Gardevoir back to the bench along with the thing with all the energy on it and put all your energy and your Gardevoir back in your deck. And if Rapsca just comes in and says, no, you can't do that, it makes the game a lot harder. For sure. And there's no real easy way to turn off Rapsca without knocking it out. And if that happens, you're taking one prize on this thing. Exactly. And then they're able to just, okay, super route it back in and Tiamiva if they want to go that route. But even then, you know, if they're just taking one prize, Gardevoir will take that trade most times. It could just go from there. But yeah, I mean, this is just a very consistent build. You only run the one buddy Poffin, which is interesting. So I guess you're still focusing on a heavy artisan build and just having a slower setup. But getting that Tiamiva, hopefully, you're still burning through your deck with Ionos and researches and then just getting set up by just drawing into your Pokemon primarily. But the Tiamiva just helps you get out the Pokemon a little bit faster. All you need is like one Poffin, I guess, turn one, and you can get your setup going. Exactly. Yeah. And Gardevoir is still, you know, it and Dragobolt are the best decks at making a comeback when they're down prizes. For sure. Very easily. Yeah. We can jump from the, you know, even though this was the winning deck, we had a couple other decks pop up in this event. And so Caleb Rodgerson did bring Terrabox to the event. And realistically, this list is pretty vanilla and almost exactly what I would expect somebody to bring to Atlanta this year. So it's just your 4-4 Noctowl, two Rotoms, two Wellspring Ogrepon, one Ditto, one Tealmass, one Pikachu, Terapagos, Clefairy, Bloodmoon, Latias, Mew, and Pheasantipode. So not taking the page out of Daichi's book and including the Bidu in the deck, instead opting to keep that Ursaluna around for that Raging Bolt matchup. I guess the one big difference in the pickup from Daichi's deck that was not a guaranteed inclusion in this deck initially would be the copy of Briar. Yeah. And being able to set up some interesting plays with something like Briar Countercatcher with Wellspring and taking three prizes with a Wellspring on, you know, some easily snipable Pokemon or if you softened up an EX, being able to take a four-prize turn with a Wellspring is a pretty cool play that you may be able to manage with the deck. But other than that, it just looks consistent and pretty straightforward, kind of par for the course in my book. Yeah, lots of one-ofs, which you're able to get to with Noctowl. I like the Jamming Tower a lot right now. You definitely feel like you need that going up against Raging Bolt. I guess Raging Bolt does run a couple, like one or two copies of Bravery Charm, but more for the Gardea matchup, I'd imagine. But yeah, it seems like a consistent strategy at this point. You're down to now one Teal Mask Ogre Pawn. I think that's a big change from Atlanta. Sure, sure. Yeah, so we've seen that cut down, way, way down, more of a focus on using the Pikachus and Clefairies than Teal Masks and Chirapagos, I'd say. And yeah, the Wellspring is probably one of your better attackers right now. Of course, yeah. You open almost every game with that thing, and like you said, we're primarily focused on Crispin as our form of energy acceleration, rather than Tealdance Energy Switch, and trying to do that over and over and over again. It's a lot easier to take my one card and make it effective, rather than having to do a two card combo every time. Still a strong deck, and I expect to see more play in the next format. That's fair, yeah. I think it doesn't really lose a whole lot, other than maybe you have to worry about Bench Barrier from Shaymin coming out. Realistically, we'll see a lot of setup decks still pervasive in the next format, so this will definitely be able to take advantage of that, and still have really good matchups read overall. And that's the nice thing about this deck, is you can innovate a lot with it. Like say you're struggling into a certain matchup, you can just say, okay, well I'm going to take out the Blood Moon, because it's not doing enough at this point, and put in something like a Volcarona, or whatever, something like that, just to help deal with certain matchups and certain situations that come up. Yeah, I think the interesting thing will be if we see any direct inclusions that are able to help with the guard of our matchup in particular, as that becomes increasingly more difficult. One, if they still opt to just go Evo-Rabska, because that seems really hard to deal with, or they can just play the Shaymin now. So it depends on which one isn't necessary, but I expect some form of Bench Barrier to be present in many more decks heading forward. Yeah, and if that's the case, it gets really difficult to deal with in some ways. But we'll see, I mean, that's the nice thing, is you can still innovate quite a bit with this deck. You can be a one-prize deck early game, and then switch up and be a two-prize deck. Well, maybe not so much this version, be a one-prize deck, because you do want the Terra Pokemon in play relatively soon, so you can use your Jewel Seekers. But yeah, I don't know. I haven't really spent a whole lot of time with this, but yeah, it'll be interesting to see where they go from here. Definitely. And you know, even with the Bench Barrier in play, people still have to get it out. And that is not always possible, or easy to do. And so you can take advantage of those slower starts by being a fast, aggressive, consistent turn 1, turn 2 deck, and just get out the gates and put your opponent on the back foot. Yeah, and Shaymin's a lot more limited than we've seen other Bench Barrier Pokemon. So you're only preventing basic Pokemon from being affected by attack damage, right? No, non-rulebox. Non-rulebox. Oh, is it? Okay. Yeah, you can still hit. You can hit evolutions, you just can't protect your, you know, your Pheasantipides and other EXs. Oh, your Terra guys are still safe, but you're not protecting the... Okay. Yeah, that's a given. Yeah. Yeah. I was just thinking... Okay. Nevermind. You're good. To look at another not-tower deck... Can we read all of that up? We'll read more, or we'll learn more about that Deaths in Rivals format next week, because I believe that we've got a small-ish tournament that we can talk about heading into next week with that Full Group Games event. But before we get there, we've got another not-tower deck to look at here with an Eevee box from Taylor Whalen, making it into top 8. And we see the inclusion of the Umbreon, like what we saw from Melbourne last week. And I guess, you know, I've been converted, John. I was not a fan of the Umbreon last week, but after putting some games in with it, you know, playing some Eevee box that I've tried to tailor a list going into what I expect the Deaths in Rivals format to look like, and just playing it on the current Journey Together format on Ladder, and the Umbreon has been more impactful than I thought it would be, in all honesty, at the end of the day. Yeah. That's interesting. Is it just Zagarty to counter? That's all it's really there for? That is literally all it's for, is being able to one-shot a Zagarty. I mean, that's huge right now. I mean, Gardevoir has proven that it is, you know, top 2, if not the number 1 deck in format right now. And I think that this weekend cemented that, in this format at least. Maybe it changes with Grimmsnarl coming out next format. But I think Gardevoir has finally taken its throne and wears the crown now, for sure, over Dragapult. But yeah, I like this list a lot. Just a lot of 1-0s, a lot of different types of energy. It's kind of cool, though. You know, we see just so much versatility. The Eevee deck takes a little bit more skill than the Terrap—well, maybe not different, but just different. You know, knowing when to use Sylveon, knowing when to pivot and start taking knockouts and doing more damage. Yeah, I think both decks are honestly pretty skill-testing. And Noctowl as a card is pretty skill-testing, and that's why it's added that kind of layer of depth into even Raging Bolt, of all things. But knowing exactly what combination of cards to take off of Fan Call is a little bit more of a decision in this deck than it is in the Terrabox, because you also have the option of potentially getting up to 2 Eevees out. And then knowing which energies you want to get with Crispin is a bit maybe more important here because half the time in the other deck, you don't care what you get because you're going to put them back in the deck with Torrential Pump anyway. Whereas here, you need to know specifically, okay, well I'm going to probably go get a fire and then another energy for Carnelian, but I need to figure out which one I have in deck remaining so when I Burning Charge, I can have it out to set up my secondary Eevee on my bench. If it's an Umbreon matchup, you're a little bit more flexible because Umbreon for the most part is just using Moon Mirage for a dark and 2 colorless. But you know, I've had a couple of games where I end up using Onyx to win the game, and you have the energy in your deck to fulfill that attack's requirements. I couldn't even tell you what Onyx does. You discard all your energy and you take one prize. And so just on a turn where you're down to one and you don't have access to a Gust, you can still just say, I win anyway. That's pretty cool. Yeah, no, it definitely takes a little more resource management and price checking in this deck than the other one. I've been curious, did you run Serrano before this tournament? Like, was that a new addition? I know Ian Rauh ran it in his list. Ian actually ran Brock's Scouting, and that was the one that I had taken to an event. But after the event that I played that in, I did make the swap for Serrano. I'm actually flip-flopping on whether or not I want the card in the deck, but I actually really like it in here for the most part. Just because it lets you go grab an Eevee Evolution and an Eevee EX, and then you could go grab Latias or Mew or Terapagos, or just something, like whatever you need, really. It's got a lot of versatility, whereas if you compare it to other decks, you're just grabbing three Arch-Haladons, as an example. It's not very useful. Whereas here, you've got enough versatility and enough... those one-of cards, that a card that can just go grab three of them in one go is pretty effective. Yeah, that's fair. And it helps you, I guess, build up a big bench for area zero to use Clefairy or something like that. You know, lots of different factors. Yeah, it definitely helps with like a turn two if you get like an energy attached to an EV turn one and then you can go, okay, Flareon and then get another EV on the bench and then power that up. It helps a lot with that. Yeah, that's kind of what the big Cyrano play is typically, is you can go Cyrano for Flareon, EV, EX, Latias, and retreat into your Flareon for free, get your second energy on your Flareon, use Burning Charge to put two energies on EV, and you're all set, ready to go. Probably took one prize and have two attackers staring your opponent down for their next turn. Yeah, it is super nice that you can go like get most pieces off of one Jewelseeker or other. Definitely if you get the one EV down turn one, you're feeling okay, even if you miss energy attachment. Energy attachment is key, no doubt, but if you miss it, you still have the backup of the crystal. And then depending on what you need, what pieces exactly, you can get Terror Orb for one of the EVs and then Crispin or something like that. So lots of different plays that open up with the access from Jewelseeker. Such a powerful ability right now. And again, this is a deck I expect to stick around in the next format, and it actually has the ability to kind of adapt to that format as it begins to emerge and evolve. So in terms of you can change your attackers, I mean I know I don't have it pulled up, but there was another list this weekend that actually didn't run Sylveon or Umbreon, and instead opted to just play two Flareons and a Leafeon. And so you're saying, okay, I'm going to be able to knock out Gardevoir with Kirin, and it played Kirin and Black Belt, and two countercatchers. So saying, okay, I'm going to be able to gust your Gardevoir up and KO it, or you have the Black Belt access to be able to Carnelian the Dragonbolt to one-shot it as well. But it's interesting. And something where when your opponent's sitting across from you, there's a chance that you could surprise them potentially, if depending on what they expect to be walking into. And that's the type of thing that I mean, I like to have that on my side going into a game. Yeah, you definitely like, you flip over Eevee, and they're like, okay, well what versions of Eevee are they running? And like that's the fun part, is you get to like tailor your deck to the specific metagame you expect. And yeah, we'll see a lot more of Leafeon, I'd say, in the next format. So it'll be fun to check out. Yeah, let's get into the most exciting deck of this tournament, for many people, myself included. And it's probably the simplest one. Yeah, true. Kind of a throwback in that way. We see Toad Skrull EX as an attacker, as the main attacker in this deck. And you'll be forgiven if you don't know what Toad Skrull does. We'll pull it up and read it. It has a really good ability and protective mycelium. It says it prevents all effects of attacks used by your opponent's Pokemon done to all your Pokemon that have any energy attached. So definitely a nice Dragapult counter. And it also prevents the Angelite we talked about a little bit ago. And it just has one attack here. For two grass, it has Colony Rush, 80 base damage. And this attack does 40 more damage for each of your benched Pokemon that has any grass energy attached. And so it's a 270 hit point stage one EX Pokemon. And the thing you pair it with is the Teal Mask Ogre Pawn, just allowing it to put energy on itself fairly easily. Yeah, you have a lot, like you can get this set up and running really, really quick, turn two, start swinging for a really large amount of damage. And it's not necessarily the easiest thing to knock out at 270 hit points. And there's a couple other things, like you're saying, okay, well, 270 is a lot, but it's not, you know, unreachable, you know, Golden Go and Raging Bolt can knock that out pretty easily. And this deck has a really, really nice built-in counter and the other Toad Skrull that has Slime Mold Colony as an ability. This is a stage one, 120 HP, just grass Pokemon. But Slime Mold Colony says cards in your opponent's discard pile can't be put into their hand by an effect of your opponent's abilities or trainers. So you can still get around it with SADA, but Golden Go basically just shuts down at the side of this thing. And Raging Bolt gets a lot more difficult when you don't have access to energy retrieval. It's not as dire as it was last format, but it's still pretty, pretty rough, I'd say. And then the rest of it's really just kind of positioning and drawing through your deck as fast as possible. You run, you know, what is it called? Iron Leaves EX, just as another attacker to potentially surprise your opponent, maybe early game or a turn where you don't have an attacker built up. You can use this to just put this in play and then bring it to the active and attack attack where like if you don't have a Toad Scroll set up, this would be able to do that, which is nice. And then, yeah, Squawks for early. I don't have to explain what Squawk does. But yeah, the rest of it's just a lot of four of a lot of consistency, a lot of draw through your deck. You run four Energy Switch, Prime Catcher, four Area Zero Underdeaths, just trying to build up your bench as fast as possible and keep it big. You just run two Super Rods. So you just want to bring back energy from the discard pile and kind of reestablish bench Pokemon after the if your stadium gets bumped. And then I think one of the more controversial cards in this deck, one of the more hated cards plus seen play is the Bug Catching set, which is a trainer that just says, look at the top seven cards of your deck and you can choose up to two and any combination of Energy and Pokemon, Grass Pokemon you find in this way. I think it's Grass Energy and Grass Pokemon. Right, right. That's correct. So when you run 12 Energy and let's see, 12, 14. So you have effectively, yeah, 26 outs. So almost close coming up on half of your deck. Whenever you play this card, you know, you have really good chance if you're looking at the top seven of getting an Energy and then a Grass Pokemon and you really want to see Teal Mask pretty early, pretty often just to reestablish and build up Grass Energy on your bench. With four Teal Mask on your bench and then a Toad Scroll powered up, you're doing, let's see, 280, right? I can't remember. Yeah, with five Energy on your bench, you do 280. Yeah. So that's a pretty good number right now. Yeah. And then with the sixth Energy, you get to that 320 threshold to one shot the Dragapult or Gardevoir. And then I think with like the Bug Catching set, because you have enough density in here, it fulfills kind of the same purpose that something like an Earthen Vessel would, in that it's not only able to find those Energies, but you're running a good number of Energies. So you should be able to select at least one most of the time that you Bug Catching set, but you also have the option to go get your Pokemon a good number of times. I think the interesting thing and kind of the surprising thing about this deck for me is that it runs, I feel like it runs too many items. You know, I know that Bidoo is kind of on the decline as the format has come to a close and people have more or less adapted their decks to it. So we've seen a lot of decks that have either gone down to one or even just cut the card entirely. Like if you go back and look at Henry Chow and Michael Davidson's Gardevoir deck, there's no baby Pokemon in there whatsoever, because they're so TM Evo focused. But, you know, maybe that's what made Ray's Toad Scroll deck such a good call is that they were able to get away with running 10 item-based search cards in their deck, as opposed to having to slim it down and running search supporters. That's a good point. You know, especially you're only running the Super Rauda's Recovery. So, you know, potentially there's a world where Bidoo just locks you out of the game, late game, if you're not able to get another attacker set up. But yeah, I definitely think we've moved away from the Bidoo wars. We still see them from time to time and still have them featured in a lot of matchups. But yeah, I don't know. It would be fun to look at, like, see how many Bidoo are in the top 8 of this one compared to Atlanta. It'd probably be a lot less. Oh, yeah. It'd be a tough thing to pull up right now. Yeah, yeah. We went off the board. We might be able to make it happen. Okay. So we had, well, we had the, was it the predictions from a couple weeks ago, but I think it's downstairs. Shoot. No, we covered those, didn't we? No, I'm saying we had one where we asked how many- Oh, oh, oh, for how many Bidoo there were. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I know early on, so if, like, as I, as I get through these lists early on, we had several that decks where two Bidoo were featured. You know, a lot of these Dragapult decks, I think all of these Dragapult decks are going to have two Bidoo's in them. Two. Two. Two. Come on. I know Taner had two. I know Hedrick had two. And then Henry only had one. So that's still 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13 in the top eight of Atlanta. And then if we come over to Portland, we've got two. Out of all- In top eight. All of top eight. So I didn't count the asymmetrical here. I mean, if I count the asymmetrical here, that's nine decks, but neither of these decks run Bidoo. And then if we go all the way down, we get, we do get to include a fair, admittedly, a fair few more Bidoo's probably because that's where all the Dragapult decks ended up falling. But it's, it's still pretty fair to say that if you look at what decks ended up rising to the top, Bidoo is just not present there. Yeah, yeah, definitely. And we- Lots of emphasis on Bidoo, for sure. And we've instead- I don't know, who did Ray lose to in the top bit? Seen these decks that have kind of adapted. Let's go find out. Caleb. Okay. And that seems, admittedly, like a pretty tough matchup. Like, you can't one-shot the Pikachu, so there's a chance that it gets to take one or two KOs on you. Yeah, Pikachu would be tough. Pikachu or the Wellspring could potentially torrential pump for multiple KOs and just potent- like, there's a chance that it just keeps Toad Scroll out of play for a good bit. Caleb also has the option to just sit there and have a Tarapagos kind of run basics over early game. Yeah. And then, because Ray's deck wanted to go wide anyway, that Lillie's Clefairy has the potential to come in and clean things up, too. So I could definitely see where that's a tougher matchup. You know, if we look at the rest of these games, the other loss was to Raging Bolt, of all things. Oh no, wait, wait, that's- sorry. I'm on Caleb's. Other loss was to Dragapult, which I imagine is something to do with Dusknoir itself. Because I feel, well, the Toad's Cool only has 60 HP. So if you can't get an energy stuck on it in time, there's a chance that all of your Toad's Cools can just be kept off the board as well. And there's definitely a chance that that ended up happening. But otherwise, definitely, it's a solid run, for sure. Yeah, definitely a deck where you want to set up as fast as possible. Yeah. But it is interesting, I mean, we were on the four Nest Ball and four Bug Catching, so we don't run any Poffin, which is interesting. I guess you just don't need it outside of, you know, Toad's Cool. Yeah, I mean, if all you're getting is the Toad's Cool, you're just probably hoping that these cards, these other search cards give you enough redundancy between those and Squawk and Research and Mew, and the draws from Teal Dance, that that should be able to get you over the line to close things out, or to set things up, rather, so you can just kind of slam the door on things down the road. I mean, we're talking through this enough that I should still mention that I do not expect this deck to see a ton of results moving forward. You know, it's one of those kind of interesting flash-in-the-pan things that we see pop up every once in a while, and, you know, kudos to Ray for going on the run that they did, but I do not know if this is indicative of the deck's strength as a whole. No, I'd be hard-pressed to think of. We might see it come back once in a while, and we always see Rogue decks do well from time to time. Right, right. That's why we like playing, you know, it's a fun part of Pokemon. But yeah, I don't know if the raw power of this is quite high enough, or like, if it's consistent enough. I mean, it's a pretty consistent deck, I won't deny that. But like, we were talking, the Gardea matchup seems like it might be a little bit more difficult. You know, most Gardeas are running a lot of Knight Stretchers, so you're able to shut that down, which is nice, but assuming they run like one Super Rod, which we saw in the winning list, it could be a lot harder to go from there. For sure. So we'll see how it fares moving forward. But we're pretty much done with this format, Aaron. Yeah, it's done. And we talked a little bit about our closing thoughts last week on our tier list video, but I want to hear your thoughts. Well, first off, I have a question. I want to play in a League Cup this weekend, but I'm woefully unprepared. I've been playing Dragapult primarily this format, but I'm questioning, do you think if I'm playing in a League Cup this weekend, can you honestly say, you know, is Dragapult still a good player? Should I look at playing something else? I mean, we're still seeing it make top cut at these major events. If it's something you're the most practiced on, that's probably my advice for anybody is on this last weekend of League Cups, because this is the last weekend of League Cups for the season. Just this Saturday, too. Yep. I would say go play. Go play whatever you're the most practiced with but if you have a decent amount of practice with everything in the format It I'd be hard-pressed to say, you know I'll admit we were probably wrong last week and Gardevoir is probably the s-tier deck in the format and you should just be playing it Okay. Yeah, I wish I was more, you know, well-versed with Gardevoir at this point but the truth of it is, you know, I I don't think it's impossible to learn in like a couple days But it would be hard hard to get all my matchups like back to like a level of confidence that I have a drag Holder right now. But yeah Definitely. I think we were a little bit hasty to Maybe drag it down after it didn't win the week before But I think yeah once we see Henry and we see top players come back with it every week and If not win get pretty close and the conversion rates held pretty strong and Lost a lot of tools. We've seen it being able to be innovated on More so than other decks. We've seen four different lists win events now Yeah, and Brent's 60 has been so dominant when it since it's come out as well You know coming on as one of the most featured that lists on limitless, you know with a Insanely long List of players playing it every week. So I'm sure that this weekend probably only added to that So yeah, it's been a it's been a fun format. I liked it a lot I'm excited to see some new stuff come from Destin rivals I don't have high hopes that the Rockets engine is gonna take off and do really well But I'm excited to be proven wrong and I hope I am truthfully, yeah, unfortunately, I feel like Well, well, we'll have to see but I it just does not seem like it's quite there unfortunately, which is really really sad because the trainer card seems so good and there's they just seem so powerful, but Unfortunately, we're not gonna get more cards to support the archetype like there aren't gonna be more rocket attackers They get produced before we start heading into these mega based sets in a couple of sets So we're gonna get we're getting Destin rivals this Friday There's we're gonna get black bolt white flare over the summer before worlds and then I'm pretty sure our fall set is gonna be The first mega set with the like the Lucario and the Gardevoir and whatnot So this will be the end of owners Pokemon as far as I'm aware Yeah Come up with some crazy addition between now and the Zna which I don't really see happening, but you never know They might although we could get we could get the fall special set could be like shining owners and it's You know every owners group gets like one or two additional cards You just fully revitalizes all of these archetypes misty suddenly becomes the most dominant archetype in the game Now I'd be crazy. Yeah misty's was Woefully bad at pre-releases and I don't think we'll be much better in this new format But hey, you never know, you know, I mean might do well with it I'm uh, I mean, I'm a little hopeful I guess but we'll get a chance to see that this weekend So, yeah, you know what they've been doing what they've been doing what they've been doing on release weekend full grip games up there in Akron, Ohio Wow up there in Akron, Ohio is doing their release event Release weekend event with I believe a three thousand dollar prize pool for their standard event on Saturday And then they're also doing a similar prize pool for a GLC event on Sunday So it'll be the first look that we get at this in a you know, at least somewhat competitive But it'll be a lot of people's rough drafts on lists Probably copying a lot of Champions League or City League concepts because we're only gonna have a couple of days to test things out On TCG live because I believe the set drops either tomorrow or Thursday Online, so we'll have some online results to kind of read off of going into this full grip event and then we'll get to see what are people able to get their hands on and put together ahead of that event and Then maybe use that to inform some decisions as we really kind of first take our steps into the desk and rivals format Yeah, and we'll cover it next week for sure. We should be getting a new pocket set this week, too At the end of this and then this week either tomorrow or Thursday, I think great. Yeah that one drops on Thursday and it is ultra beast based. Yeah, so all you buzz wall fans have something to feast on. Oh Yeah, and yeah, I think those are the big announcements so far I've been Playing the testing for the Professor Cup So maybe I'll go into that a little bit as we Get a little closer to NAIC just to fill some time as we don't have a whole lot of tournaments between now and NAIC So we'll talk about it. But yeah, I hope to hear you guys hear from you guys if you have anything you want to say to us or Comment on the podcast, please do we always love feedback, even if it's a little critical we could take it I promise I won't cry myself to sleep tonight Knowing that somebody doesn't like how many times I say, you know, um or ah or In a perfect world or something like that you know, I Listen to myself every week sometime or in every week, but from week to week and I like to think I'm doing okay But I always want to hear people's takes on what I'm how I'm saying stuff and if I'm mispronouncing something I want to be told that so we don't keep making a fool of ourselves But even if you have good feedback, we like that too. I'm on blue sky That's probably the easiest way to get ahold of me right now John dot original At blue sky or whatever, but just search John or Jill should pop up and then Aaron's still at X And then yeah, I just reach out to us through that Anything you want to say Aaron before we close up? No, we will have links to all of those socials in the description of the episode If you're following the show on YouTube beef, please give the show a subscription on that page Give a like to the episode Leave a comment down below help other people find the show and if you are on those podcasting platforms share it with people give it a follow and Leave comments there as well helps other people find the show We were just trying to spread that net as wide as possible so that we can reach more people with the content But thank you for listening if you made it to the end of this week and we will come at you next week on the battle frontier See you