Episode 34: NEW CHALLENGERS HAVE APPEARED

Hey, everybody. So some slightly unfortunate news. During the recording of this week's episode, I ran into some technical difficulties. John's recording was all totally fine. But for whatever reason, some of the screen recordings that I put up didn't record properly. So we've made the decision to make this week's episode audio only. So if you're an audio listener will not affect you whatsoever. But this episode will not be making it to YouTube and any Spotify recordings and uploads will be strictly audio. So with that being said, please enjoy this week's episode. 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 john orgel. And this week, we're going to go through a time capsule continuing our trend going over some 2010 decks ahead of that side event at NAIC this year. And we're going to briefly touch on the results from the bologna special event they have this weekend, as well as some very, very high level result reviews from the full grip games tournament that happened this weekend in the destined rivals format. And then we will hit up our Blaine's quiz show before closing things out with some of the new decks on the block from TCG pocket. If you're looking for primarily NAIC driven or focus content, that will be next week's episode in particular, but we do hope you stick around for what we've got going on this week. But before we jump into everything, john, what were you up to this week? This weekend was pretty fun. So I did. I went to a league challenge on Saturday, or not league challenge League Cup, I apologize. For the first time in a while, this was like the fourth time I think I'd played in a league cup all year. And this is the last possible day to do a league cup this season. So I was like, Alright, if I'm gonna win a playmat, if I win this, I get a playmat and 50 points, and I'll get that 200 threshold, and that'll be great. So I go in there, I'm playing dragapult, because I haven't really had time to consider anything else, let alone test it. And I get paired against probably one of the better players in the room, Nick, who is playing Garty, he's been playing Garty basically, the whole season. So I already knew he was playing Garty. And I knew that every time I played him the last few tournaments, he's either beat me or like, we've tied. So I knew my chances weren't going to be fantastic. But it's like, you know, it happened. Like you said, I'd be can be Garty, they can fumble or, you know, overextend on something and you can bring up energy and you can do things. So it's not like a truly unwinnable matchup. But I go first, I lose the coin flip, I go first, and then I open like, something pretty bad. I think it was just like one drippy. And like maybe a pheasant deputy or something like that. And then to boss, a couple energies, like no Pokemon search, no anything for next turn. So I just put dripping the active and pass and he goes and gets a full bench setup and then I take my next turn and do very little and you know, it just I was I was I was doing enough not to lose the game but like he got turned to like I retreated the drippy into bloodmoon or saloon or something like that, where he couldn't knock it out. Yeah, well, that was where we were at. I think it wasn't it wasn't as it wasn't it wasn't a pheasant deputy because I would have been too nice. It was a blood moon or saloon. And I'm like, Well, I can't lose the game. So I have the bench blood moon and retreat into it. And he got the turn to Garty. Scream tail knockout on my loan drippy on my loan drag cloak at that point, I think I because I had like a turn to Jacques or something like that. So that felt pretty bad. But yeah, so like, I was on the back for the whole game. And I, you know, I had the next turn that he knocked that drag cloak out. I'm like, Okay, cool. I have unfair stand by top deck there for him somewhere, or something. And I had boss or a countercatcher, one of the other, like a countercatcher. Then he had like one energy psychic energy in the discard pile. And like a guardian on the bench with no energy on it. So I'm like, bring up the Garty. Maybe I can buy a turn set up my bench. And I didn't have a buddy or anything to stall with. But I'm like, well, if I can unfair stamp, and maybe he will want to draw out of it. And sure enough, he gets like an earthen vessel or like our event or something like that. And just immediately counters that play. So I was like, well, I'm just not gonna win this game. And maybe I can go to one and still like, like get second or like maybe just math happens. And the there's no one defeated because we had to it was it was a tiny tournament. Yeah, it was eight total players. So six masters and two seniors, I think. Oh, wow. So like maybe one of the seniors runs hot, goes undefeated and chaos like I'm one of the masters early. And that master then beats the other undefeated players like there's a world where that like a two one still makes first place. Yeah. So I'll play out the next round. Because at that point, I'm like, it's three rounds, right? Like I'm not. You're not hurting for half an hour. No, you know, I got the tournament started at like 1115. At this point, it's like 1145. I'm like, I was planning to be here for a while because and now there's no top guy. So I'll stick it out for one more round. Round two. I have match into Joltik box and get completely destroyed. No, I go first again after losing the coin flip. And don't get a setup at all. Like no supporter for the next turn. Yeah, I just felt real bad. And then he had a boss every time he needed a boss and all that stuff. And, you know, you and I have both been playing long enough to the point where like, I was like, yeah, this sucks. But I just made a joke to the rest of the groups like, well, but I could donate my $20 to the prize pool for everybody. And I just like, I'm gonna drop go do something else, clear my head, like, walk this off kind of thing. Yeah, get out of there. I got my one prize pack for playing and went to a cool Pokemon. What is it called card show? Okay, I know that. Apparently, like, Richmond's like a hotspot for the trading card scene, like trading trading scene. Like there's almost a card show every weekend now. Oh, wow. Where if I wanted to, I think like there was one the weekend before at the Jewelry Plaza Hotel, which is like a, you know, embassy suites kind of thing. And they rent out the ballroom and have like, 20 vendors and this was like a giant one over at there's a convent like a large community kind of fairground room at the Richmond Raceway, like the NASCAR track, they have like a giant, almost a football field length room. And they had close to 40 vendors, I think of this one cow, and two thirds of that were almost three quarters of it was Pokemon. There was some sports card stuff, but the rest was Pokemon. So there was a lot to do. I so I went straight from that tournament to this card show. And thankfully, I know one of the sponsors for the show. So he helped me get a free ticket for it. So I got that way. It was like five bucks, but he was like he was at the door. He's like, Oh, come on it. Yeah, but he gave me the hookup. And that's, yeah, yeah, it's always like, that's always that's always tight. So shout outs to the card guys, I got to give the plug if you ever got if you're in Richmond, and you need anything new from this new set or any sealed or any, you know, cool cards, head over there. So plug over. But yeah, it was just me walking around with my friend, Ben, who's another professor. And he also like makes cubes and does retro stuff. And he's collecting like, trying to collect everything. So yes, he's trying to master set everything. So he did some of that. But him and I walked around, I got like some good deals on some stuff. You know, the nice thing about people that are rip packs is they really don't look at the prices of singles, especially if they're playable cards. And so they assume every a spec is $1. And they assume all the axes that are not full arts are $1. And so you get really good deals on pheasant nippity and secret box. If you get people that just have like dollar expense and just throw everything in there. And that's fair, like, you know, to them, it's not worth the hassle of trying to price out every x individually, they don't play. So they don't have anybody that can be a point of reference for that. And, you know, I don't want to say like, it's, I, it's not my job to correct it. Like, I mean, it's kind of like a weird, I don't want to steal all those and then resell them for my profit. But I definitely will take advantage of a good deal, you know, for sure. And, you know, he's in the in the mind of the dealer, he's like, well, I was gonna, I made my sale. Yeah, right. Like he, he's not hurting because of that. So normally, I would do trades on stuff like that was the fun thing for me. I brought like some cash, but primarily I brought a trade binder that I had loaded up with some cards I picked up from, you know, just here and there. And so I spent the better part of four hours just walking around and making deals and getting some cool stuff like some, I'm slowly getting into building retro decks, kicking and screaming, and I'm doing it like trying to be the cheapest person possible with it. Like, I don't want to have to spend a bunch of money on trying to get singles for stuff. Sure. What I've been doing is like making printed proxies for stuff. And then just filling out like, you know, the primes when I can find them or some of the easier stuff like, you know, trainers and basic Pokemon like Evie's and flarions and all that stuff from some different areas. So that's been fun. You know, I'm just doing it kind of at a very lackadaisical pace. And then I got some playables. I saw one of the guys that's actually me playing at worlds George Illage. He had a booth set up. He's like from Northern Virginia. He's, he's, I think he was playing roaring moon a lot earlier on in the season. I don't know if he's been playing quite as much lately, but he's, I think he's qualified pretty high in the world rankings. But he was selling stuff there. And I picked up some mutis from him. So he gave me a good deal on those. He traded I traded a pro a pre release gear it as dark Gyarados for three mutis. So that was a pretty good deal. So I was happy with that. But yeah, it was just a chill, you know, kind of walk around, meet some new friends, learn some like, ins and outs, like, apparently you got to pay when you trade something into a booth as opposed to just trading with a regular player. The booth will only take 80% of the value of the card. So that's one thing I learned, right? Yeah. Just because it doesn't make sense financially for them to, like sell or do equal terms for it. So I had to like, Oh, okay, come to terms with that. And then go from there. But that was fine. Wait, so does that only are you saying if you want to sell to them specifically, or with you, like if I trade like your Gyarados for the mutis, as an example, they only gave you 80% value of your Gyarados, but 100% value of their mutis, right? More or less. So that's kind of weird to me. Yeah, but the way that they look at it is I set up the booth, I have the inventory. If you bought this, you'd be buying it at that $6 price. If I buy it from you, I'm going to probably just pay 60% to 70% cash for singles, depending on, you know, if it's still product, then they can have a higher profit margin because that doesn't really, like, that's, it's easier sell than yeah, single. So I've been learning a lot because I've been working at this card stop shop a lot the last few months. But yeah, that's pretty standard. I feel like 80% is pretty actually okay for a trade rate. But yeah, like because if I was to sell it as a single and get cash, it would probably be closer to 70%. So 80% a little bit extra if I'm trading as a single for another card. So that worked out. And yeah, I made some cool trades. I got some stuff for my personal collection. I think nothing too crazy, like nothing over $30. I'd say maybe 40. I was looking at trying to get like a mega Venusaur full art because I have the Mega Charizard and Mega Blastoise from the, I think, is it Evolutions? Yeah, Evolutions. And they're like, they're really cool. The Venusaur I have, but it's in really, like not a good condition. Like I wouldn't, you know, I couldn't get a great it would grade is like a four, like a five or six, maybe. Like you don't want to display it. It's not I mean, it's not like roadkill tier. No, it's like just it looks fine in a sleeve in a binder. But like when we pull it out and look at the back, it's like, Oh, you're like, Oh, what happened? Yeah. So not not damaged, but definitely heavily played, which is okay. Like if I was building it with a deck, that'd be fine. Like I bought a $4 Pidgeot from Ruby Sapphire. Fire Red Leaf Green. Fire Red Leaf Green. Thank you. And that thing is beat to hell. I showed it before the cast. It's got like the hollow kind of stuff starting to peel up a little bit. And I'm just like, Okay, well, I guess this is gonna stay sleeve forever. As it should, as it should. Yeah, that bird deserves to be played. Yeah, yeah. So that's like, I don't have a lot of stuff from that format. And that stuff is particularly expensive. So I probably won't. Yeah, I probably that'll be like one of the last formats I build. Realistically, what I might do is like build paper proxies and put them in front of basic energies. So that's one cheap way to build retro. So but anyway, so that was my Saturday, Sunday, I wanted to do Sunday. I tested for the Professor Cup with my friend Ben, him and I, he changed his fight to play at the Professor Cup. So we're still trying to figure out what decks to bring to that. We I don't want to leak all my sauce, but we've come up with like a counterpick to the what we presume to be the best taken format essentially is the hops zation deck, because you're only allowed to attach one energy per turn from your energy zone. And I can post will post like the rules set, I guess in the in the description of the episode, for those that are interested, but it's like a TCG pocket simulation. So you have you draw five to start your turn. Sorry if I'm just rambling here. But this is kind of this is what I've been doing for the last few weeks that y'all are I have to put with me going over it. You basically draw your hand to five. You can play a supporter turn one going first, but you can't attach an energy. You don't flip over your energy deck. You shuffle 10 basic energies. I think you get to choose what your 10 energies are. It's not entirely random, but most decks, like the hops deck I've been playing, plays only basic dark because you don't really need metal. You flip over one energy. You don't flip over an energy if you go first, and you don't get to attach, but you get to play a supporter. The cool thing about hops is I don't think you can attack going first like you can in pocket if you get around the conditions, but you can go in second. You get a really strong start if you get the choice ban on the hops turn one. A lot of times, we run Latias on a lot of decks, so you have a lot of pivot options, just a lot of different things. We started with Iron Valiant to do some ping damage, but we've kind of shifted away from that to just focus more on consistency and disruption for the mirror match, I'd say. It's a good deck. It's probably not what I'll play. I'm going to keep my pick close to my chest. Aaron helped with it, so I'm going to give him a shout out if I do well. If I don't do well, well, you'll probably never hear me talk about it again. Yeah, no, it's fine, but I'm having fun with that deck, and then yeah, I've got a couple other decks we're going to test out this week. I played a Mill deck last week. Yeah, but Mill's not a win condition, right? It is as far as I know, so if you can't draw a card to start your turn in this format, it's not explicitly stated. It gave us all the rule set. It's like anything that references the prize cards has no effect. You can play it, but it doesn't do anything, so I can play Giant. I can play Luxurious Cape, but when I attach to my Pokemon, it doesn't do anything. Wait, it wouldn't provide the plus 100 HP, but to just not give up the extra prize card? Right, so it doesn't provide the extra HP because it says in order to give the 100 HP, it gives up an extra prize card, and since it references prize cards, it has no effect, so like the only way that we got, I think you can use an attack. See, I don't know if this is 100%, but I think you can use an attack that references prize cards if it doesn't factor into the damage calculation specifically, so like you can use, you can't use Charizard GX or Charizard EX because it references prize cards to calculate the damage, but you can use like Chi-Yu, which references accelerating fire energy from your deck, and since you can't do that thing, you can do as much as you can in that situation and still do damage, but then, you know, just fail the acceleration of fire energy because, yeah, anyway, but yeah, we did a mill deck. It's okay. It's just, I don't know. It's not as consistent with what we wanted. Yeah, so I don't know about that, but I mean, it's still a viable strategy. I think it could still work if, the fact is, the problem is that everything has like a bunch of switch cards, presumably, so like stalling stuff doesn't really work all that well with what we have, but you never know. And because there are no prize cards, like, it's not, you don't, you can't bank on your opponent prizing something important to get out of whatever lock you're trying to set up. And you can't use Counter Catcher. You can't use Iono, so like that kind of hurts the strategy of a disruption. You're stuck using like Pokemon Catcher and Crushing Hammer, and those don't feel that well because they don't feel as good as what we've had in the past, so. But yeah, we've been testing a lot of that, so that'll probably be what I'm doing Wednesday, assuming everything goes well with my flight in the morning. I'm going to be flying in that morning, and then the Professor Cup starts at one, so, you know, knock on wood that everything goes smoothly with a morning flight. It should, but you never know. Yeah, so we'll see. Yeah, that's, that's been my weekend. I spent, you know, 20 minutes talking about it. Hopefully nobody clicked off during that, and you know, hopefully you guys are very invested in the Professor Cup. But enough about me, Aaron. How was, how was your weekend? It was pretty good. Before I go over like anything for me totally personally, I wanted to give a shout out to Nate Hinksman for the comment that he left on our episode this week. It says, hey y'all, don't comment here often, but just wanted to let y'all know that I really appreciate the content you guys put out. I don't really have any criticisms, just wanted to toss out some engagement and hopefully help keep this pod going. Thanks, guys. And Nate, you know, we want to say thank you. Thanks, Nate. It's, we don't necessarily need criticisms, but we do appreciate them if you do have them, so please feel free to send them our way. But just knowing that we have people out there appreciating the episode definitely means a lot. So that was a really cool thing to see this weekend. But otherwise, I honestly don't remember what I did on Saturday. I know I did not go to a League Cup. I specifically did not go to a League Cup, mostly because I felt like it didn't matter. I don't think that 10 points is going to be the make or break, and that was the most that I could earn from getting a first place. That wasn't going to be the make or break thing for my Worlds invite. I'm kind of in a position where, because I have an open best finish limit, top 512 puts me in like contention for an invite, and top 256 or higher should lock me in pretty securely. Okay. So as long as I just make day two, I should be in pretty good shape for making it to Worlds. As long as you don't bomb out at day two. Exactly. Well, well, okay. Fine. Fair enough. Fair. But even then, even then, if 512 is still competitive, then I did also learn there's actually, there is a tiebreaker for people who have the same championship point total. Oh. And I learned this via- We tried to figure it out, so go ahead. I learned this via a tweet from a VGC player that in the rules document, and it's something you can very easily skip over, the tiebreaker for championship point ties is play point total, which sucks because I have not gone to nearly as many tournaments as most of the other people that are up in the Worlds invite race. But that just means I need to be, you know, out of the tie contention bracket. And there are like a couple of clusters of players, like I'm in one right now at 620. There's another one up at like 700. There's a cluster, but that's still within, like right now the total is top 141 if you include all the pass downs. And hopefully we'll get a couple more of those at NAIC to make the like bracket you need to be in ever so slightly lower. But at the end of the day, it's all just going to come down to performance at NAIC, which probably should for a lot of people. Like you should probably have to perform decently well at at least one IEC if you don't win a regional, that is. I think if we're trying to make Worlds more exclusive, which is the direction Pokemon has indicated that they want to go. Yeah. Yeah, it makes sense. I think you need to at least make day two at like all the regionals that you place at. If not, like get points from every regional that you go to. And then yeah, finish your local as well. I think that's pretty, pretty like, like what do you like? So like, yeah, if the philosophy is let's have the best players in the world duke it out and crown a world champion based on that. And we want to make it to where it feels more exclusive. Because like Worlds the last few years has just gotten to the point where it was a little bloated. Like especially it felt weird with having like a two tier system to where like the top players get around by and that by counts as like an 80 or went over like I think 80% of opponent or something crazy. I think it was 100. Honestly. Yeah. Which is awful, even more daunting to be. So like that's you can just never overcome that resistance gap. I think Wolfie got screwed by that in his VG run. Oh yeah. Yeah. He got paired into ASIM as opposed to automatically through to like a top eight as opposed to. So anyway. But yeah. So like, I think it makes sense that, you know, we want to have all the players on an equal footing, so to speak. If you're a world champ, if you're a world's competitor, there's not, there shouldn't be like a second tier of world's competitors. It should all be theoretically the same level of competition. Yeah. And you've earned that spot. And that goes back to like the reason that we don't have day two invites anymore. Yeah. You know, yes, it's nice to reward people, but we already do that via travel awards and travel stipends. That should be good enough reason to compete for those higher tier leaderboard spots. You shouldn't necessarily need to have an advantage in the tournament on top of that. Yeah. Yeah. It is a bummer that there's not a whole lot of incentives. I mean, we've started to see Pokemon make an effort with their promo card that they're giving out for 200 championship points, but there's really not a lot. And I will say like, I have had two or three of my locals specifically come out to my last few cups and challenges of the season in an effort to try to get that championship promo. So it is making an impact, the impact we had hoped it would. But yeah, the fact that you have, we need to have other things to compete for besides the world championship. We're moving in the direction of having that. So I think if you have, as long as you have like that, the other part of worlds being more exclusive doesn't sting as bad. Right. And I'd like to see that program obviously evolve and expand a little bit next year, like maybe have another tier of awards because right now the gap between 200 and worlds invite, which is going to be sitting somewhere in the range of like 700, 720 points is the barrier to entry. Like that 500 point gap feels awful to be in. As far as, I mean, obviously most people play the game because they enjoy the game, but people who are up, especially when you get up to like the upper 600 points, or maybe even just 600 points as a baseline people, those people were trying to get to worlds specifically. And so when they get the same reward as someone who just squeaked in at 200 on the ace trainer rewards, it doesn't feel like they earned necessarily the same thing. But I mean, I guess you can't please everybody. Everybody's getting like, you have to lose at some point if you're not going to be qualified. It is what it is. But yeah, that I've done some kind of exploration and everything of that within the past week. I do know on Sunday took my son to a birthday party and then I went to a trade thing at a local shop, a little bit away from my house to try to get my hands on some of the Destined Rivals EXs in particular ahead of NAIC just to try to, you know, product is still somewhat scarce and not wanting to necessarily pay the somewhat inflated pre-release prices as they were slowly starting to descend following the release of the Southern Friday. And got my hands on a good number of cards, including some other like non-Destined Rivals stuff. I know I picked up like an extra Garchomp C, extra 1-1 Garchomp C line for our 2010 stuff we're going to talk about in a minute. Did a trade involving some very flashy SIRs that I need to now make the difficult decision of, do I want to play them or sell them? Including like Pikachu, Clefairy, Fezendipity, and even Flareon from Prismatic Evolutions. That one is going to be really tough for me because I really like the Eevee deck, but it's like, if I don't get a second one, which I don't necessarily want to spend cash on, do I really want to put it in the deck? That's a decision I have to grapple with at some point. No, I definitely don't. I hate doing that. It's the worst thing in the world. So that was Sunday. Other than that, it's been like, I did some playtesting last Friday night and last night and just trying to nail down deck choices and made some progress. Like I know that I want to play something. I've got it narrowed down to like, I think like four decks now, which is still probably not thin enough of a margin. I probably want to get down to two by within the next day or two. And then just by this weekend be like, okay, this is the deck I'm playing and know that going ahead of time, because I know I'm flying out on Tuesday night. We've got some stuff going on Wednesday, which I will be able to talk about more next week. So stay tuned for that, but cannot fully share all the info about that at present. But I think we've kind of dilly dally long enough. We can go ahead and jump into our time capsule here. And like we said, we're going to continue to do everything 2010 related. So the deck I wanted to talk about this week is in fact Gyarados. And so this is a deck that initially popped up as kind of a rogue or surprise deck at Worlds in 2009 that piloted by, oh goodness, I should have that prepared. I know a player from France and kind of took the stage by storm before being knocked up by the eventual tournament winner, Steven Silvestro in top cut at that event. And just really continued to be a powerhouse all throughout the 2010 season with just the ability to pretty easily get Magikarps into your discard pile through a multitude of methods. Power up your Gyarados' Tail Revenge attack, which, true to the Diamond and Pearl era, a lot of free attacks here. So you'll notice when we go back to the list as a whole, the deck does not play very many energy and does not play any water energy. Instead, just solely using Gyarados for its Tail Revenge that does 30 damage for each Magikarp in your discard pile. So you're pretty easily able to get up to three Magikarps in your discard pile. There were some lists of this deck that played a way to get around even needing Magikarp on your bench and just being able to attack with Gyarados via other methods. That was a bit more of a gimmick. It didn't really pan out very well in a sense. Typically you would be doing Tail Revenge for 90. You're able to augment this damage with some of the other cards we've talked about, like the Crobat G doing Flash Bite, doing 10 every time you place it down, similar to Galarian Zigzagoon, or even the Sneaky Bite from the new Rocket Skull Bat, just coming into play doing a damage counter on something, or Expert Belt to further modulate your damage. And Gyarados being a single price Pokemon with 130 HP on a Stage 1 is pretty beefy, especially when it only had a plus 30 weakness rather than a times two. So even though Luxray level X was an extremely popular card, especially an extremely popular attacker in that Luxchomp deck, it would not be able to one-hit KO Gyarados unless you had a Lucario GL, which granted everything double weakness and did a Flash Bite from a Crobat, and that's assuming that that Gyarados didn't have an Expert Belt attached. Now, granted, if you used the Trash Belt from the Luxray, it was a little bit different story, but the big thing was just making your Gyarados big, beefy, hard to take down, and even when it did get taken down, it was one price, and you would just have to recycle your Gyarados by getting a Magikarp out of your discard pile via Pokemon Rescue, which was simply retrieve a basic Pokemon from your discard pile, or retrieve A Pokemon from your discard pile, and put it into your hand. Basically, Night Stretcher just only got Pokemon. Let's say you'd grab a Magikarp back out, you'd have another Gyarados in hand, or you could Pokemon Rescue for a Gyarados as well in a broken time space, which we've talked about previously, allowed you to put Magikarp down, immediately evolve it into Gyarados, and get it right back active and swinging for Tail Revenge even further. And so, some of the ways that we would kind of speed Magikarps into the discard pile would be via the Sableye from Stormfront that we talked about when we did the Sable Lock review a couple of weeks ago. Sableye could use its Impersonate attack to discard a Felicity's drawing, that allowed you to discard two cards from your hand, you would discard two Magikarps often if you were able to get them into your hand, and so you would very frequently play something like in combo of Collector to go get three Magikarps, or two Magikarps and a Regice, which could discard them with Regimove, and just everything is kind of set up to try to push you towards get three Magikarps in the discard pile, get your fourth one out, use Tail Revenge. Notably, one of the big difficulties with this deck could be Prize Cards, kind of similar to the Ethan's Typhlosion deck that we just got from Destined Rivals, where if you Prize a copy of Ethan's Adventure, your damage output is somewhat depleted. Same thing here, if we Prize a Magikarp, the Time Walk from Azelf was your way of getting around Prizing those Magikarps. When you played Azelf from your hand onto your bench, you'd be able to look at your Prize Cards. If you do, you could choose a Pokemon you find there, show it to your opponent, put it in your hand, then you choose a card from your hand and replace that face-down Prize Card. So, think of it like a Heavy Ball, more or less, but attached as an ability on a Pokemon rather than being an item card you would play. One of the other advantages, because we had the ever-present Uxie in this deck as well as a form of draw support with the setup PokePower, this decklist in particular also opted to play the Psychic-Bind Mesprit, which was an on-play, one-turn ability lock for your opponent. And because you had Uxie and Mesprit in the deck, it also played a downer material, Azelf, which read, if you have Uxie and Mesprit in play, the attacks of each of your opponent's basic Pokemon cost one colorless more. And then you can't have more than one downer material active at a time. And so what this would do in the SP matchups in particular, because like we've talked about previously, leveling up does not change the stage of the Pokemon. So all of the SP Pokemon, even if they are leveled up, are still considered basics. So things like Luxray or Garchomp C would have to pay an additional energy to utilize their attack, even if they were trying to lower that attack cost via the Energy Gain Poke Tool. So you've got some kind of tools to combat those very popular SP decks, and just hope to run over other decks by being a difficult-to-knock-out high HP Stage 1. Gardevoir could still kind of give this deck trouble sometimes, just not having access to abilities like Regimove to discard Magikarps or Flash Bite to get over those damage thresholds or maybe Setup to just draw into your Gyarados or other pieces that you need to could make things a little bit difficult. But you do have some raw draw supporters in the form of those four Felicities. You had a Looker's Investigation, which allows you to look at your opponent's hand and then choose to shuffle either their hand into their deck or your hand into your deck, and whoever shuffles their hand in draws five cards, a way to either refresh your hand or to potentially disrupt your opponent's hand in a format with fairly limited disruption. We had Judge as the other potential option, and Gyarados isn't a deck that utilizes Judge very well. And then the final draw supporter is Synthia's Feelings, which reads, shuffle your hand into your deck and draw four cards, then if any of your Pokemon were knocked out during your opponent's last turn, you draw an additional four cards. So just a way to raw draw as many cards as possible to make the combo happen to get a Gyarados into play as frequently as possible. And then we have some scoop-up cards in the form of Team Galactic's Pokey Turn to reutilize that Crobat or potentially the Bright Look from Luxray to either gust up key Pokemon that we want to knock out or to Flash Bite cards to let us get over damage thresholds and take knockouts where we otherwise wouldn't be able to. And Super Scoop-Up, which can let us reutilize, you know, we could Time Walk multiple times to retrieve multiple Magikarps if we need to. You can Psychic Bind to just keep your opponent's ability locked out of the game. You can reutilize Setup to draw additional cards. You can Flash Bite more, you can Bright Look more. And then kind of one of the other potentially overlooked means of using this is to just Recycle a Gyarados. So you can pick up a Gyarados that's got some damage on it, maybe it was going to be planned to be two-hit KO'd by your opponent, and instead suddenly it's off the board back in your hand, you return all attached cards, so if you do have an Expert Belt attached, you get a fresh 150 HP Gyarados that's back swinging for 110. This deck was played Pokey Drawer Plus, so some of these Plus cards were a gimmick that popped up in the Diamond and Pearl era that allowed you to play two copies of a card at a time, similar to something, like, I think it was Custom Catcher, if I remember correctly? Or Puzzle of Time, where the card would do one thing if you played one. Pokey Blower, I think? Pokey Blower is one of the other Plus cards. So the three Plus cards are Pokey Drawer Plus, Pokey Blower Plus, and Pokey Healer Plus. And they all did one thing if you played one, and then a more powerful thing if you play two of them at the same time. And so for Pokey Drawer, if you play one of them, you draw a card. If you play two, you search your deck for two cards and put them into your hand. And so very frequently, unless your hand was totally dead, you would try to hold onto that Pokey Drawer to see if you could not double quick search on a given turn with an item card, which realistically is just an extremely strong thing to do with any card. We already talked about Pokemon Rescue, we have Luxury Ball, which is just kind of an auto-include in pretty much every deck to just go find a Pokemon for free. And then the ways to kind of utilize our Luxury more effectively, because to level up our Luxury does have to be active, the deck played three Warp Energy, which allowed you to move that Garros to the bench so you could Bright Look something if you needed to. It also allowed you to move your Regice more effectively, because Regice was a pretty necessary way of discarding Magikarps, given that you won't always have Felicity's drawing and there were very limited other discard options. There were no Ultra Balls in this format or anything like that. So you needed that Regi move, which allowed you to discard two cards, and then if your opponent's active was a basic, they would have to switch it with one of your bench. But the key thing there was just discarding their Magikarps, or filtering other dead cards out of your hand so you could set up for more cards. But Regice has a three retreat cost, is a pretty hefty Pokemon, can often become the target of a Bright Look and then Snipe Around It strategy from your opponent. So this list opted to play Warp Energy as a means of attaching to Regice and switching it back to the bench. And then the last thing is Special Dark, because a lot of decks in this format that utilize Sableye wanted to have a means of donking their opponent if that option became available to them. Yeah, and this could be a donk deck for sure. So many pokey turns and super scoop-ups, you can ping two, three times in a turn with Crobat. And then yeah, just follow that up with Overconfident for a knockout on your opponent's only Pokemon. And it felt really bad if you own Lopunthalone Magikarp and your opponent did that to you. Oh, for sure. So it was definitely in your best interest to start Sableye as much as possible, or yeah, not have that happen to you. Yeah, definitely. And honestly, if you do take that donk approach, if you have the hand that's set up for it, even if you fail at it, you're not too worried about it because you only need one bench spot to get your Gyarados out. It's not like you need to have a board with multiple Magikarps on it. Your ideal strategy is three of my Magikarps are hitting the discard pile as soon as I can get them over there. So it's a relatively straightforward deck, but it's just a big beat stick that can be difficult for things to answer sometimes. Yeah, yeah. And when you say beat stick, you know, 90 doesn't seem like much, but it definitely is if you're able to consistently do it, especially 110 with Expert Belt and then ping damage adds up. So like 130. I mean, how much does Luxray G level X have? 110. So yeah, you're swinging for 110. You're doing enough. And it's hard to knock out Gyarados back. For sure. And then not needing energy either. Yeah. The main counter was item lock, I feel like, was pretty tough because you had no real easy way to recover Pokemon without the use of items. So like Dialga was pretty tough. And then some other mashups, yeah, like you said, Gardevoir was pretty tough with Psychic lock. If they got an early Psychic lock before you got your Magikarps in the discard pile and you hadn't had an easy way to get rid of them, you know, it gets a lot more challenging from there. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. So yeah, this is cool. So we've talked about a couple decks now, and if you guys have any suggestions for decks you want us to cover next week, just ping us in the comments and we'll try to get to that. If you have one that you are thinking about playing or want to play at this 2010 event, we can definitely go over that for you guys. Yeah, we've got one more week, so definitely get those suggestions in if you have them. Yeah, that's going to close up the time capsule for the week. We're going to take a brief detour over to Bologna just to talk about the very last major from the Journey Together format. Roaring Moon won, which I don't think was anybody's bingo card, but we did have a Gardevoir in finals. It's not really worth, in my opinion, looking at the deck list from this event because we're in a totally different format now, and even though these lists could form a baseline, I think we've had plenty of samplings of that from other events in the Journey Together format. There's nothing truly superbly innovative in any of these deck lists, unfortunately. So we see Roaring Moon wins the event, Gardevoir makes the finals, Tarabox and Gardevoir in top 4, Joltikbox, another Gardevoir, a Straight Pult, and a Dragonbolt Dusknoir rounding out top 8. Overall, there was some pretty good gameplay throughout the weekend. There were unfortunately also some examples of some potentially subpar gameplay, but stream nerfs can get the best of anybody, especially in tense situations. So I think at one point to make, I know that there was some discussion about a particular stream misplay in the top cut of this event. I would say just be kind to people. Be a nice PSA. Yeah, if you've not made it to a top cut of a regionals, or even just a deep run into day 2, or even top cut at a League Cup, I've seen players at top cut at League Cups make terrible, it's so easy to judge a player for the actions that they do with a very limited scope of knowledge, or from the comfort of your own couch when you have no pressures on whether you win or lose this game, whether you haven't played for the last, you know, 12 hours, day 1, and 8 and a half, 9 hours, day 2, before you get to cut. And you have perfect knowledge at both players' hands. Yeah, that too. And you have the announcers coaching you through all the different plays that could possibly be made. And you have a full card pool, like knowledge, card knowledge. You can look up any card in that player's deck and read it without the pain of a timer or a clock that's forcing you to make a decision in 15 seconds, you know. Or judges staring you down watching, you know, all that stuff, and the audience lights on. It's a totally different world, man. I've done stream judging. I haven't been on stream for regionals in the modern era. I had a couple of times played on stream back in the day, but like not at where Pokemon's at now. But even like as a stream judge, I'm aware of the added pressure of, you know, everything I do is being watched. And that can be pretty daunting and pretty just overwhelming for a lot of players. And I'm not saying that that's what happened with this player. I mean, it could just be a simple lapse of concentration, you know, over the course of a tournament, and that happens. And I mean, we've seen the best players in the world make mistakes like that. I mean, no one's immune to this kind of thing, but the best players are able to recover from it. But like sometimes you just make misplays. You just do things that you shouldn't do. And that's the game of Pokemon. I mean, even, you know, the best chess masters in the world make blunders once in a while or like we're not, we're all humans. And going back to your original point, it just pays to be respectful because everybody's human and makes errors and that's okay. Yeah, yeah, definitely. And be kind. Yeah. Yeah. But that's, that's about all I wanted to say about Bologna. We also had the Fulbright Games event, the release weekend 3k. Unfortunately, we don't have a ton of data from that. Like I've got the top cut composition and the final placement breakdown, but we don't have very many deck lists to look at, so we're not going to really be able to dive fully into that. The noteworthy stuff is that Grimmsnarl won the event over Raging Bolt in the finals. Top four consisted of a Poltzard and another Raging Bolt and top eight was rounded up by another Raging Bolt, two Gardevoirs and a Charizard Noctowl. Okay, Charizard Noctowl is interesting. Do with that information what you will, but we'll have a better idea of the format and some more opinions on it as we've been able to do some more personal testing and see some more online results as the week unfolds this week. So yeah, I think that that about covers the tournament results from this past weekend. So why don't we go ahead and jump into this week's Blaine's Quiz Show. All right, Aaron. So this week's Blaine's Quiz Show, for those that haven't joined us for the quiz segment of this show, the rules are pretty simple. Aaron will be given three multiple choice questions. If he is truly stumped, he will have one hint he can use at any time, which will just kind of narrow it down or give him a little bit more information to help him make a decision. But if he answers all three questions without the use of a hint, a bonus point will be awarded. So I was able to catch up a little bit to Aaron's lead last week. So I think it's pretty close now, right? Yeah, as of last week, you had 24 and I have 26. I'm hoping to not get another zero this week. It's kind of my goal. Like even one point will suffice. I made it a little challenging, but I think you'll be able to get some points here. Well, you know, it's fun. You're going to have to ask me some nonsense question. How much is this going to be based on the card show you went to? How much is this PSA 3 upside down Korean Mew worth? Yeah, I guess I got to change my questions now. Thanks for spoiling that. You've been studying after last week. That's true. It's worth $6, by the way. True. All right. Well. With that out of the way the question the category this week is NAIC. So just okay general NAIC questions and Just specifically about the North American international championships. All right the first question What was the most popular variant ever? Played at its respective NAIC and this is as grouped by the limitless statistics page so What deck had the largest meta share in its respective tournament? Was it Garbodor from 2017? Arceus from 2022 Picarom from 2019 or Buzzwole from 2018 That's a tough one Arceus is gonna encompass a lot of things Including Inteleon or the like Pikachu counter decks Picarom would also be pretty popular Garbodor is gonna be like Espeon Garb, Drampa Garb The other Garbs 2017 or is that that might be the Zoro Garb year too then Buzzwole Which should be mostly Buzzrock I'm guessing Unfortunately, John is once again exploiting the weakness of my Sun and Moon knowledge I'm gonna say I'm gonna go with Garbodor. It seems like it would it would be up there Garbodor from said Yeah, 2017. Correct. All right, and the correct answer is Buzzwole from 2018 So this was a hard counter to what was in going into this tournament the most popular deck and Zoroark GX So Buzzwole kind of was seen as like the Roaring Moon if you will of this format or not We're raging bolts of this format Let me just pull up the meta share real quick. What did I say 2017? Yeah 2018 for Buzzwole Okay, so 2017 just to give you your answer you said It was Garbodor. Garbodor was popular. It was popular and I'm looking at just what was on the limitless page that was provided So I think this is just the day two statistics Because there's only 32 players that made day two. Oh, well, hold on Okay, we're competing with incomplete information I guess no, you're fine. You're fine. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Sorry. Sorry But Garbodor had 32% at that tournament. So a really big meta share But going into NAIC 2018 Buzzwole had a total meta share, I should have wrote this down. I apologize, of 34% So very very close between the two of them With 22 players and Zoroark was in second in that same tournament with 21 players And this groups a lot of different variants So we had Buzzwole Lycanroc, Buzzwole Garb, Straight Buzzwole and Buzzwole, one Buzzwole Lucario Lycanroc. So Most popular was Buzzwole Lycanroc And I think this is where Andrew Mahone No, I didn't do well on this one But yeah, Stefan won with, there was a lot of Zoroark at the top, but a lot of Buzzwole below, further down. So Yeah, so that was that one. So Should I give partial credit because I left out the fact that it was all Zoroark Should I give partial credit because I left out the fact that it was all Day 2 stuff? Nope, we only do whole points here. I'm gonna take my lumps and we'll move on to the next question All right. Well, hopefully you get the next one or you know, maybe you don't Next question, which of the following players has not been a repeat finalist in two different age divisions at NAIC? So is it Isaiah Bradner? So this is, they got first or second in two different age divisions Right. So is it Isaiah Bradner, Nathan Osterkatz, Benny Billinger, or Daniel Magda? So this is just, has been in the final, which player has not been in the final twice? Not which player has not been in the final twice in like consecutive years, right? Right. So the question is asking which player has been in the finals on two different occasions In two different age divisions And each of those occasions, if not more, like some, one of these players might've been in the finals But like one player might've been in the finals in the junior year, in the senior year One player might've been in the finals in the senior year, in the master year, something like that Sure, sure, sure, sure So, I'm trying to remember how old each of these players are to be honest with you It's a pretty wide range Has Nathan Osterkatz even, like how long did he play in juniors is a good, is my question John's drinking his water so he doesn't give me a visual hint Oh man, are you asking for a hint? No, I'm not, I'm not Okay, then I can't help you Unfortunately, I don't think a hint would help me very much here I'm gonna, I'm trying to remember actually also now if Isaiah Bradner has gotten finals at NAIC specifically And my gut is telling me no So I'm gonna, I'm gonna go with Isaiah Bradner Okay, and while it is a good guess, it is incorrect So Isaiah has gotten finals, I think most recently, let me pull it up Had all the tabs open and I closed them all of course before He got second to Azul Garcia Griego in the finals of Columbus 2022 When Azul won Pika, so he lost in the finals But playing Palkia versus playing Pikachu And when was he in it for seniors? He was also in it for seniors going and I think it was Second place with Buzzwole and I think he Yeah, he got second place at Jackson Ford playing Buzzwole like in ROK in 2018 Okay The only player that in this list hasn't done this accomplishment Daniel Magda got third place as a senior one year and then first place I think as a junior So, you know, but he's had quite the season this year So I feel like that was a good one to put in there Yeah, definitely, I mean you stumped me I figured, I knew specifically that Benny, Nathan and Daniel had done a lot of stuff In seniors I had presumed juniors as well as seniors Since Daniel and Benny are both first year masters this year So I figured their tenure within seniors was long enough for them to have made it there And I guess presumably juniors would have been also as well Especially since that division at the time would have likely been a little bit smaller Yeah, I think because Daniel's from the Czech Republic He might not have traveled to NAIC as a junior It wasn't as in vogue to like travel to international championships before COVID Yeah, that's fair Or like the early parts after COVID even So I think like, yeah, that would make sense for me from that perspective Because all the other players are American, well Benny's I think Canadian Yeah But North American, all the other players are from North American rating zone That might have been a hint maybe But that would have been too easy Alright, so 0 for 2 But I really like this last question and I think you might be able to pull it out I hope so, I am doing horrible recently But are you having fun? No Oh, too bad Okay, final question And I'm going to give you a hint in this one because I felt like this was a little bit too difficult To just know off the top of your head So it is the same archetype as 4th place finisher Igor Kosta that year Was it Decidueye Ninetales, Drampa Garb, Greninja, or Volcanion? So, since you've already granted me an in-question hint I'm going to go ahead and exercise my right for an additional hint Alright, I will eliminate 2 from this one I'm going to get rid of Greninja and Volcanion Okay, that maybe kind of helped Not really You know what, I'm just going to quicklock Drampa Garb I'm not going to overthink this Drampa Garb seems like a deck Igor would play I'm not sure if I specifically would attribute it to Stefan But, yeah, we're going to go with that And I'm sure I'm 0 for 6 now You are... Incorrect It is Decidueye Ninetales, unfortunately I overthought it Yep, it's okay Drampa Garb was a good guess That was a deck that won that year from Tord Rekklev Sure But, yeah, it was definitely not the most popular way to play Garboder Going into this tournament I think Espeon Garb was the most popular If you look at, like, playrate Yeah, so Decidueye Ninetales was definitely, like, a very popular deck You had, I think, Broken Vinespace You know, Forged to Giant Plants going on And, yeah, it was just a consistently cool, fun deck His list was really interesting, too I was looking at his list, like, the difference between Igor and Stefan Igor had more of a consistency focus While Stefan had more of, like, a long-game focus Where he had Mewtwo for, I'm guessing, like, a Buzzwole counter I don't know Or maybe Espeon counter as a hit for Psychic Weakness And then, yeah, you had He had Max Potions in his list And some other cool inclusions But, yeah, I liked this This was fun I'm sorry you didn't do well But I feel like I had a good time making the questions I'm going to pat myself on the back, at the very least Even if we can't pat you on the back So, better luck next time, Aaron The things I've learned from what you have displayed The last two times that you've been asking questions Really shine a spotlight on the differences In what you and I pay attention to within Pokémon Yeah In my mind Because, like, the prices of cards are something that I almost literally never consider And, like, being someone who has done stuff with card shops Or has gone to card shows Even though maybe you've only done that, I believe, this one time this past weekend Yeah, right You know, somebody who has been more involved More involved in the collecting space, I would say, than I am I think that you're more apprised or more up-to-date with what the value of those cards would potentially be And then, looking at tournament results Especially for an era that I haven't been involved in And an era that I wasn't really even playing online during Is something, like, I don't necessarily feel like I, I don't know It's just something that, it's a gap in my knowledge, I guess And maybe that's a weakness that, at some point, I will need to find the free time to shore up But, at present, I have not yet done so And I am feeling very much so exploited But that's the cool thing I feel like that speaks to the strength of this podcast And our relationship is that I can pull from, you know, the last Whatever, ten years And you can pull from the previous ten years, fifteen years or so And between the two of us, like, we pretty much get Most of Pokemon history And then, we're both, thankfully, caught up on current events And current stuff So, I feel like it works well But it definitely, like, as it's gone on, I've learned, like, your weakness Your weak areas You can definitely pick at those a little bit You just keep going back to it My ego, man My ego's too big I have to keep that in check So, I know you will Next time we do Blaine's Quiz Show You'll pull out, I don't know Some Ruby, Sapphire, Delta Species Even before Delta Species, HeartGold, SoulSilver Or, not HeartGold, SoulSilver What is it? Yeah, Gold and Silver era stuff That I will have no clue Neo-Destiny Oh, we could We could, that would be an interesting thing What was the name of the company responsible for providing judges At major tournaments during Gold and Silver? Oh, yeah I wouldn't And as a judge, I don't know the answer to that That's an extra embarrassing, right? So, I don't know Yeah So, our scores at the end of today Stay at 26 for myself And 24 for John And John will have, I believe His first opportunity in Like a dozen episodes or so To actually overtake me on next week's episode Probably more than that Yeah It's been a long time But I am prepared We have some trivia We're going to be participating in At NAIC So, hopefully this will all help My end goal of that Yeah But, yeah Shout out to Zander Would love to report back being successful there Yeah So, we're both getting ready for Zander's trivia Coming up Thursday and Saturday If y'all are going to be there At NAIC Just look him up on socials He'll be posting about it, I'm sure Yeah He's running that multiple nights While he's there And if you want kind of a preview Of what that's going to be like Feel free to go back And check out the episode That we did with Zander Where we go over All sorts of Pokemon trivia And he basically Asked the trivia From the World Championships That he did So, if you guys Want a preview Of exactly what the format will be There you go Free cheat sheet Yep And who knows Maybe he'll repeat a question I doubt it But maybe No He's always He's pretty Yeah It'll be good It'll be good And then The last thing We were going to talk about today Were some of the Kind of developments Following the release Of the extra dimensional Crisis expansion In Pokemon Pocket And I know We get this Kind of wishy-washy Feeling about Do we want to cover Pocket Do we not want to cover Pocket While John and I Are pretty well Determined that We don't want to Just do full on Set reviews Because it doesn't Feel like it has The same impact As something like A main TCG set Although there are Definitely some similarities Where a lot of The cards in the set Are terrible Only a select few Are actually going to Make their way Into competitive decks There is still A thriving tournament Scene for Pokemon Pocket Especially being Provided within The space of limitless And so As a result of that We expect To see some Development meta And expect some Continued evolution Of that to happen And so That's why We are Going to Continue to Work on The rest Of the Tournament Meta And Expect Some Continued Evolution Of that To happen And So We are Going to Continue To work what John and I thought we would do is highlight some of the new deck archetypes that have arisen or maybe potentially deck archetypes that existed previously but have been updated by the inclusion of individual cards from this newest extra dimensional crisis expansion. Yeah we're just going to do two different ones each from this tournament that are the this is the limitless statistics page that lists all the different decks that are popular and doing well so we're just going to look at that and kind of just go over some of the thoughts and inclusions and stuff like that some of the cards that are making a big impact from the new set. So don't click off I know pocket is not everybody's favorite subject but you know who knows maybe two years from now when you're prepping for your pocket finals in the regional circuit we will be the voice in your ear telling you exactly what you needed to know so it could be could be useful information down the road. And for someone who is interested in pocket from a tournament perspective there will also be side events for pocket at NAIC this year so you could maybe utilize some of these deck lists as a preview of what to either expect to play or what maybe you should bring to that event. Yeah so the first deck we have so this whole set is centered around the ultra beasts and this deck in particular utilizes all ultra beasts as attackers and as a support pokemon. We have buzzwell gx which is probably one of the most powerful cards coming out of the set I'd say. The first attack's okay just punch for two colorless for 30 but the more powerful attack is big beast which does 120 and it says during your next turn this pokemon can't use bug beast so that's a pretty big downside but you get around that fairly easily with celesteela which is just a non-ex basic pokemon with a really strong ability in ultra thrusters which says during your turn you may switch your active ultra beast with one of your benched ultra beasts and so if you get two of these out you're able to switch you know the act buzzwell with the celesteela and then use another celesteela to switch the buzzwell back into the actives and to reset the effect of the attack. Anytime in pokemon pocket or in pokemon a pokemon goes from the active to the bench it resets all effects of attacks unless it says specifically otherwise like in the case of a sylveon ex but that's not related here and then the other attacker you have is pheromosa so pheromosa is your early game attacker with jump blues it does 20 damage and then does 20 damage to one of your opponent's benched pokemon which it has 78 points so it's a little bit squishier but that's okay and yeah this is just a squishy you know you can get some ping damage setup ko is a lot better for buzzwall and this deck can get into pheromosa turn one consistently with celesteela you start with buzzwall you can just pivot into it with the celesteela so that's pretty nice cyrus we've already gone over it just makes a lot of sense in this deck if you're pinging stuff on the bench you can bring it up with cyrus professor oak's not gonna go over that erika's lets you heal grass pokemon same thing with leaf cape i believe or no actually leaf cape gives your grass pokemon more hit points correct um mars i don't remember the exact math on my head mars and red card are kind of perennial inclusions now within the tournament format especially since the um arrival of rare candy to the game so just giving yourself the ability to disrupt your opponent's hand potentially mars in particular can be pretty punishing if your opponent gets down to if they've taken two prize points rather and they only need one more to win mars puts them to one card in hand which is definitely worth your supporter slot at the end of the day um i know a lot of people have been kind of haters on the cards and said oh they don't matter your opponent's just going to draw into stuff anywhere they can send their deck out enough that mars doesn't matter and if they can you know kudos to them but that's not always the case right um and then we see the addition of two new supporters for the from the set uh lusamine which has the text you can only use this card if your opponent has given uh has gotten is it reading the word you got in yep wow that's not my favorite grammar uh has gotten at least one point um so if your opponent if your opponent's taking a knockout you can use this and then it says choose one of your ultra beasts and attach two random energy from your discard pile to that pokemon so the thought being you can just accelerate to buzzwolf from a knocked out pheromosa um and get big bug or big bite sorry bug bite what is it that's not bugged dude this is so if it helps if it helps you all of the ultra beasts have attacks that are named after music john that's fair um big beat sure big beat i feel like it's just to be bug beat like my brain is just trying to get that wouldn't be music that would not be music uh anyway um so yeah you can power up your much more faster using this than any other form of energy acceleration we've seen i'd say we just around the deck out we have guzma um which it's just tool removal so really important in some matchups um to remove like basically probably hp modifying stuff is the main thing so your puzzle is taking knockouts more effectively after getting stuff softened up with pheromosa yep and then obviously pokeball perennial inclusion pretty much every deck like you want to find your basics uh the next thing we're going to talk about is cell valley rampartos and so rampartos has been a pretty competitive card since its release just being a 150 hp single prize stage shoe that does 130 damage per one energy and the only drawback is that it evolves from a fossil but some decks have been able to take advantage of this fact by saying okay that means i know exactly what pokemon i'm going to start with every single game and since pokemon pocket doesn't have a mulligan rule you're fine only running two basics in your deck and so for this deck the newest pairing as a result of the set is type null and cell valley so type null is a basic with uh 80 hp colorless basic has a one energy attack that does 20 damage you flip a coin if you get heads you do 20 additional damage which is fine like farfetched has been around forever 40 like 20 for one is not great 40 for one it's pretty serviceable but the big draw to the card is cell valley so so valley is 110 hp stage one for two energy does brave buddies which does 50 damage but if you play the supporter this turn it does 100 instead and so you kind of get this one two punch especially when you go second where you could be doing 20 on turn one into 100 on turn two which knocks out a lot of things 40 on turn one plus 100 on turn two knocks out a lot of ex's notably darkrai gets knocked out buzzwill gets knocked out so a lot of basic ex's can be knocked out as long as they don't have an hp modifier attached to them uh craniatus rampartos just again exists because it's a big i'm gonna knock you out one prizer uh then gladion was released in this set as a cell valley specific supporter which reads put one random type null or civ ally from your deck into your hand and so interestingly this is kind of one of the first cards that we've had released that specifically goes to find a stage one so you can get that added consistency available to civ ally that other cards don't necessarily have and gladion serves as a supporter for the brave buddies attack so you kind of get that tandem combo with gladion with his signature pokemon from the video game being able to enable that 100 damage swing and again we have two copies of professor's research like we do in every deck um because we don't have bench pinging here sabrina is seen as the gusting option of toys rather than cyrus mars again we talked about why that was so good during the buzzwold deck and iono is something that goes in and out of decks um i think it typically gets seen more in these fossil decks because you just need a way to refresh your hand and try to find those fossils if you don't see them early uh and it just allows you to do that by sort of shuffling your hand in your deck and drawing the same number of cards that you shuffled in uh red is here to hit break points for things that do have hp modifiers so it allows you to do a brave buddies from sylvalli for 120 to an ex or a rampartos can head smash for 150 to be able to knock out garatina or hit those 140 hp exes for knockouts for a single energy as well then rare candy just gives you that added boost of consistency and speed that lets rampartos kind of match up with some of those ex or big basic decks as well yep it's a it's a cool deck it's low to the ground guaranteed to get type null to start and then yeah just having the you're not using any exes so that your opponent has to go through three different pokemon um the fossils is a downside but this deck tries to utilize it as an upside um in some different ways and so yeah this is a cool deck kind of a counter deck to a lot of uh some of what we've seen fighting's a good type right now um it's been a good type because there's you know some electric decks that are doing well stuff that's weak to fighting some type some normal stuff um but it's mostly just doesn't have a i mean what's the weakness it's grass now it's weak to grass so prior to the release that is surprising yeah grass grass was not a bad weakness to have but notably you do live a big beat from a buzzwool as long as you don't get pinged by a pheromosa ahead of time sure um that's harder to do i think uh well no you can just ping the fossil does the does the fossil have any abilities just you can discard it yeah it's still a prize point and it doesn't have any bench protection it's just a 40 hp thing um but if you want to look at the last two decks we talked about in kind of terms of card archetypes i would say that that buzzwool or that ultra beast deck really saw feels pretty pretty solidly like an aggro deck to me in terms of other card games where you want to get in there with the pheromosa you have the consistency to get into the pheromosa early on and just go 20 20 20 20 20 20 put around your opponent and come in big b big b big b big b and repeatedly ko things with buzzwool and close the game out pressure your opponent out of the gate and stop them from setting up something like this feels much more like a mid-range deck like if you were going to use traditional card game terms like we've got a two energy stage one attacker we have to evolve into all of our guys but we're not necessarily trying to slow the game down to like a control pace you know something like a you know a darkrai giratina potentially or like a greninja or a coreo you know cards cards that came out in the last expansion yeah for sure but we can go ahead and move on to the next deck on the docket so one of the last decks i wanted to look at was the sole galeo deck um so i really like sole galeo coming out of the last set um and one of the things i had the probably the biggest issue the deck had was consistently getting your sole galeo out um yeah it's just a refresher for those that haven't read so clearly in a bit it's 180 hp stage two which is i think the largest hp we've seen right um so definitely a big beefy pokemon um it has a nice ability which uh says you can just move it into your active and then soul breaker uh it does 120 damage and does 10 damage to itself which you know it's a downside but it's not too bad so 120 for two though is really really strong um but yeah like i was saying the hardest thing to do was to get just this pokemon into play and we get a support pokemon in the form of shinotic so shinotic it's a stage one psychic with 90 hit points so that's not too bad for this uh format um and the two retreat cost isn't really a factor because you can just bright road into sole galeo um but the ability is the really cool thing about shinotic it says once during your turn you may put a random pokemon from your deck into your hand um so we haven't really seen something like this before you know and it just it it's a really nice um and it it doesn't you know if you get two out you can just keep going and thin your deck out to just not pokemon um pretty quickly um so yeah by by turn two you should be able to get your soul galeo out and you can get just attach the energy turn one to cosmog and then shinotic you know you have you have more outs to soul galeo in the sense um and then the rest of this is just kind of uh setting up and hitting for big numbers yeah the rest of this is just a consistency focus there's really not a whole lot of tricks this deck has um mainly because so galeo is so powerful and so strong i mean if you're able to get two so galeo out pretty consistently um you can take a hit like get get a lot of damage in with the first one and then just move on and get a lot of damage with the second one kind of play a little in the pocket you know play the little the game of just the game of just your opponent having to take out two big giant ex pokemon can be really really tough um and yeah fire is relevant as a weakness but it's not like the most popular deck right now so it's a pretty good type coverage yeah um and soul breaker two shots everything if not one shots you know so you got that going for you yeah definitely and then being able like so galeo like you said having so much hp is able to leverage lily as a supporter to keep itself alive so even some things that were two shot so galeo like darkrai attaching and using its ability to ping for 20 and then hitting for 80 then pinging for 20 and hitting for 80 would normally knock out so galeo by doing 200 damage over the course of two turns but so galeo gets to come in and say nah that ain't happening and you play a lily you get your so galeo down you know 60 additional hp and they're just not able to do anything about it yep so yeah just uh i like this deck a lot i like so galeo he's a cool guy um so yeah just just another like load of load of the ground well not load of the ground but like mid-range i guess or like yeah definitely this is more of a tank deck kind of feel in my mind um if you want to talk about this is this is one of the decks that makes me feel like i wish the game had a couple more deck slots for to be able to like customize things a little bit or like shenotic as a card like so galeo seems like probably the best partner for it because it does have the two retreat costs to play a card like leaf to be able to do it out of the active spot and also like adding consistency to your stage two is really good and then the one downside is oh well i needed to play you know nine pokemon plus two rare candy plus two pokeball plus two research well now i've only got room for five other supporters yeah and yet i've kind of pigeonholed into what your deck list looks like there's not a lot of variability to be found here no yeah you need the gusts you need the you know extra reach with red you need some yeah more gust with sabrina and then yeah mars and lily are kind of your only two tech slots i'm sure exactly exactly um and those all three of these decks were are within the top four of the current meta game the fourth one being darkrai giratina just continuing to stick around two expansions after its arrival the last one we're going to talk about is not within the top or it's not even really within the top 10 of the metagame, but it features more new cards from the new set, and I think it's just kind of cool. So this is another Ultra Beast-focused deck, so we do see that Celesteela popping in again with its Ultra Thunder's ability to help us move our Pokémon around, but this deck focuses instead on Nihilego and Guzzlord EX. And so Nihilega has the More Poison ability that reads, your opponent's active Pokémon takes plus 10 damage from being poisoned, and so notably this ability stacks, so if you do have two Nihilego out, your opponent is taking plus 20 damage from poison in between turns, going into their turn, and coming back to yours. And of course, you know, we need a way to apply that poison, so one of those ways is the New Wave attack from Nihilego, which does 30 damage and poisons your opponent's active Pokémon. One of the other ways the deck can apply poison is through the use of the Poison Barb tool card that just anything is attached to, if it takes damage, poisons your opponent's active. And this just, you know, with Nihilego in play in particular, poison builds up very quickly in a lot of these circumstances, unless your opponent is an Ultra Beast deck that can Ultra Thrusters their active out every turn to remove that poison. You know, Switch isn't a card. We did get Big Molasada last set, which has a Full Heal kind of attached to it as an effect, but still that hasn't seen a ton of play. And then the other big attack... Arceus has kind of fallen off. Oh, that's true, yes. Arceus definitely cannot be affected by special conditions, but doesn't see a ton of play here. And one of the reasons this deck would actually be pretty good into Arceus to begin with is Guzzlord EX. With its Grind Core attack for two colorless, Guzzlord does 30 damage, and you get the Team Rocket's Grunt supporter, but as an effect of this attack. So you flip a coin until you get tails, and for each heads you discard a random energy from your opponent's active Pokémon, and for three dark and a colorless you do Tyrannical Hole for 200 damage. And Guzzlord has 170 HP on a basic, so he's typically not going to go down in one hit. And he gets to stick around. And then similar to what the Buzzwold deck was able to do, this deck does play Lusamine. So if you go in and you soften things up with Nihilego, you can Lusamine to either a Celesteela or a Guzzlord, and kind of continue the onslaught from there. We didn't really talk about it before. Celesteela does have an attack, Moonbaton. It is not very good, but if you flip a coin and you get heads, you do 100 damage. If you get tails, do nothing. But it is definitely like a last ditch. I can Lusamine to this. If I need to do 100 damage to win the game, I can Lusamine to it, attach an energy, go for that coin flip, and try to win. Is it going to work out? Probably not, but it might. And then the last new card in this deck would be the Beastite tool card that says attacks used by the Ultra Beasts this card is attached to do plus 10 damage to your opponent's active for each price point you have taken. So if once you've gotten one price point, you can snowball that into an additional one, and if you have this card attached to something after you've taken two, you almost assuredly are going to take your third. You know, it becomes a red on a tool card while you also get to take advantage of whatever supporter you're playing for turn. Yeah, it's a very, very strong late game, and yeah, this is a load of the ground deck, kind of like the Buzzwole Pheromosa, just a little bit different of a strategy, more of a status condition afflicting deck. So it's like softening out Pokemon that way. Yep. But yeah, I mean, it's cool. It's cool to see some special conditions get some love. Those are always fun for Pokemon decks, but good luck on your pulls if you're listening, and you've made it this far. You've unlocked a prize pack from the two of us in your heart, if you will. Not real redemption in Pokemon TC Pocket. We're free-to-play players at this point. We've been burned a little bit by our pulls, I feel like, so we haven't really been able to play too much of this format, but we still have an eye on Pocket. We still enjoy playing it from time to time. I think after NAIC, I'll probably play a lot more Pocket. I'm just kind of getting ready for NAIC at this point, so I feel like that's taking up a lot of time. But Pocket's still kind of in the background for the both of us. We're still definitely opening packs and sharing what we've pulled and all that kind of fun stuff. Yeah, it does stink that trading doesn't really... you can't really trade for what you need when a new set comes out, so that makes it really difficult to make competitive decks pretty quick, but that's okay. You just gotta be a little patient and just take your lumps and hope that by the end of the day you'll be able to get the one or two cards you'll need, and you get lucky. And usually you can make like one or two meta decks by the time, like two weeks after said drop, is my experience. Yeah, the only way that you run into problems are if you are one of these hardcore, I'm going to play in the weekly Earthy Day event every weekend, and you want to do that on release weekend. Well, without spending money, you are not going to have an easy time doing so, but that's fine. You don't necessarily have to. You can like hoard up all the prize points, I guess, from if you got a bunch of packs earlier on, like say you won a tournament or something like that, and you got the code card, like the hourglasses from that, and you could save some of those. And then, I don't know, like the... definitely be doing the solo battles. Those will help get prize points up. Save your hourglass tokens or whatever for whatever, like the shop when it's the best price range for all that kind of stuff. I don't know, but... Or just save your money. Yeah, or just... I mean, and we shouldn't shame people. Like, it's perfectly fine to spend money on this, too. Yeah, I mean... Just bet 20 bucks and get, you know, however many packs I think you get for that. I think it's probably close to, what, 20 packs or something? Something like that. I mean, I will say, if you are going to spend money, you should really just... the first purchase you should make should be the, like, premium subscription. Yeah. Like, if that's the best packs per dollar value you get, period. Like, I think it's even better than the most expensive bundle available, just being like $30 for 10 packs. Or no, sorry, I have that inverted. $10 for 30 packs over the course of a month. You kind of get gypped in February, but, like, who's counting? Yeah, and you get some cool, like, exclusives, I think. Yeah, there's, like, promo cards and, you know, extra missions to get exclusive play mats and other cosmetics and accessories. But the big advantage is you just get an additional pack every day. Yep, that definitely makes a difference. But yeah, we're excited to see that. If you've been playing Pocket, you know, share what decks you've been playing and doing well with on your time. Yep, like Aaron said at the beginning, NAIC will have a couple... I think they'll have a Pocket tournament at least every day of the tournament, if not two. So definitely look at the side event schedule if you're, you know, that's the cool thing I like about Pocket is I don't need to bring, like, a bunch of stuff for Pocket. I can just bring my phone and show up. You know, I don't have to have my Switch or have cards or whatever for that kind of tournament. And it's pretty quick and it goes by pretty fun. So yeah, let us know your experience if you guys do do that. We definitely want to hear kind of what the scene is like competitively. You know, is it all just a joke at this point? Or are people actually, like, competing it for high level stuff, you know, in your sphere or whatever? We don't have quite enough engagement with Pocket, but we definitely want to. So yeah, let us know if you've been playing and if you have any interest in more Pocket content. We'll definitely be getting more into it, I'm sure, in the next couple months. Yeah, for sure. Like what John just said, absolutely. And then if you want to engage more with John or I, you can find us on socials on bluesky4john at johnoriginal.bluesky.social and myself over on Twitter at at underscore Aaron underscore Curry. We do have a show page as well that's at BFTCGpod. Unfortunately, couldn't get a better handle, but it is there. And so we'll be we'll be planning to be back next week with a more in-depth look at the Destined Rival format in particular, and how we see things shaping up heading into NAIC. So stay tuned for that. And from John and myself, we will see you guys on the battlefront.