Episode 35: THE NAIC 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 is my co-host Jon Orgel. Hopefully this time you'll be able to see our beautiful faces with the hopeful lack of technical difficulties this week. Again, apologies for that last time. But this week we're going to do a quick recap. We are recording things early this week so we're going to cut some of our usual segments out. We will not unfortunately be doing a time capsule but we will still be doing Blaine's Quiz Show. We're also going to go over an event coming up this week that is not NAIC and then diving into our expectations of decks at NAIC via a tier list and Jon and I's personal rankings for the best of the best top six decks in terms of popularity or what we would expect to see on a metagraphic. But before we dive into everything, Jon, how was your shortened week? That was good. Did a lot of Pokemon the last few days. Got two of my locals, one's a master, one's a senior, that are going to NAIC and explicitly wanted help testing matchups, learning different routes for all the new decks that came out. So that's basically every moment I'm not working I'm doing that. And then I've been play testing for the Professor Cup. So I have my deck picked out. I feel pretty good about it. And then Aaron of course in Aaron fashion was like have you thought about this right before we started the podcast tonight? So now I'm like debating whether I need to pivot but I don't think I think I'm pretty set on what I'm playing but it's a lot of fun. The format's fun. I think we've talked about it a little bit. It's a Pokemon TCG pocket kind of I guess made physical. Yeah that's a word. So it's a lot of fun. It's pretty fast-paced. It's definitely like some cool strategies that you can implement. So I'm excited to play in that. And then yeah I'm just looking forward to NAIC pretty much getting stuff ready. Started doing laundry and packing and all that stuff. So wrapping stuff up. But yeah I'm counting the days down. Only let's see I got you know two more two more nights basically three more nights before I get get over there. But anyways yeah so how about you? I know you've you're coming I'm coming in from a judge perspective so a little less pressure on me to perform. This is like your make or break event. How are you? How are you doing? How are you? How are you feeling? It is crunch time. Yeah but going back I think so for anyone who doesn't know which I'm assuming is most people I was have been involved in some successful decks in Professor Cup formats back in the day. They were at the time events that only happened once a year and they would happen at a given country's national tournament for whatever year it was. So in 2008 I ended up getting second place with like Wormadam Donphan which for whatever reason was apparently an unknown deck to a lot of people at the time. And I think that these like hyper altered formats are far more interesting than something like the Magikarp thing that we talked about like a month or so ago. And so yeah once I finally had a chance to sit down and look at it I think that the other idea and I don't know maybe if you don't mind me telling people I can go ahead and spoil what other idea X was just to see if anyone else might find it interesting. If you're building pocket things that is. Yeah I don't know. I think it's healthy to have a level of competition and I guess deck building is a big part of this format so let's hold off till next week and then we can well you can bring it up. I don't think it's that important. The one professor that listens. Exactly. If you are a die-hard person that's trying to metagame John his current potential backup and we don't even know if this is a good idea to be honest. No yeah I haven't tested it or anything. Like what you told me the format is pretty fast and you've heard talk that some people are still going to try to bring things like Dragapult and whatnot and just traditionally strong cards from the standard format over but they're unlikely to be successful from what you've told me about the format. So one of the other ideas is well let's take something that isn't as successful in standard because it does have to worry about going longer in games versus things like that and bring in Palafin. And so Palafin's got a lot of advantages you know you're only trying having to take three prize points so Palafin typically ideally would only need to take two knockouts because you can pair it up with the Weavile from... I don't even know what set that's from. Is it Temporal Forces? Paldeia Evolved. So whenever you switch that Weavile in it gets to Gusta Basic up off the bench. So just creating free prize cards for your Palafin and Palafin's got a ton of HP is really difficult to knock out for a lot of the basics which make up some of the stronger decks in the format. But little quick PSA on that. The other thing that I wanted to plug the event that I briefly mentioned in the intro to the show is the Masters Cup that I'll actually be participating in from a casting perspective not as a player. For anyone who is familiar with the Top Cut Invitational from back in the day this tournament carries a very similar vibe to it. So the goal was to bring kind of the best of the best or a lot of very high level players from every region around the world all of the TPCI regions and Japan bring them all together and see what type of competition we can produce when you put that caliber of player playing against that caliber of player every single round of an event. And so that's being put on with some cooperation from Robin and the people over at Limitless. We'll be streaming it on their official Twitch page. For casters it's myself, Frosted Caribou, Jeremy Jallin, and Kyle Sablehouse. So all-star cast and me. So really, really super stoked to be able to participate in something like this. If you want to hear a little bit more of a breakdown about the event itself, friend of the show Hunter Butler who was the one who conceptualized this event and put everything together pretty much almost single handedly did a great interview with it or great did a great interview about it over on the Shift Gear last week with Kira and Farah. So I would totally go give that episode a listen. It should still be up there I assume. But if you're looking forward to something to look at it will be in the Deaths and Rivals format and we will have that event going live on Twitch like I said on Wednesday. So last minute high level gameplay right before the main event is something that a lot of people were hoping will be interested in seeing. And we'll be able to get more details kind of about the future of this event series after this one has concluded. I'm excited man. I caught myself bored at work one day and like watching YouTube videos and I flipped on the Top Cut Invitational which was a tournament that Michael Bramwatt, Puka, Cukovic, and I think Drew and Jose Crimzorjano like the top the original Top Cut crew hosted at the World Championships right after I think the World Championships. And it was straight up a similar format similar idea maybe like 16 players or something like that. And you had two different groups and kind of a round-robin format like three rounds or something. Yeah it was those events were a lot of fun and that was kind of the grassroots entryway into the streamed broadcasts that we have for modern tournaments. Yeah yeah it was yeah right early days I mean those happened I think 2010 or 2011. The first I think the first one was 2011 if I remember correctly. Yeah okay. Because I know Harrison Levin was in it right after he got second at Worlds or Nats or something. It was like and they had Yamato in there so it was like a really star-studded crew. So it'll definitely be I'm excited to see you up there Kasten. I'll have to tune in for a little bit if I can when I'm not you know playing in the Professor Cup or whatever. Yeah I know we are we are hosting it live at a local venue in New Orleans so we more details for that will hopefully be available and I will repost those to social media as I have all of them. I don't actually currently know where our venue is so I'm hoping to find that out when I fly in on Tuesday. Is it going to be open to the public? We are planning to set up a watch party station outside of the venue. So we'll have flat screen TVs mounted to the wall of the venue for people to come hang out outside to watch and participate in that manner. Otherwise I believe it is strictly streaming. Gotcha. But all right we've also got still pretty cool. We've got cooperation as well from the owner of the venue where there are going to be food trucks outside like it's going to be a whole thing if you want to have a full spectator experience live in person. Hopefully. Great. That is the atmosphere we're attempting to build at least. That's awesome. Other than that like we had my son had baseball tryouts for his team this weekend and we're trying to fill a few slots and just confirm that all of the players that we had previously were still interested in playing and were still up to the level that we're expecting as they move on into like player pitch baseball which is just kind of one of those hurdles that a lot of the kids have to overcome I guess if they really want to continue to play the sport. So those went pretty well though at least from my perspective for him. So kudos to him. You were nervous dad? My wife definitely was more so than myself. I was kind of like you know he's pretty good like he's not you know I'm not saying he's full MLB level or anything but he's pretty good. So we just have to keep plugging away at it and that he'll keep making progress and then I tried to make some progress myself. I've been doing a still a lot of testing for this format and I've got things narrowed down to three decks. I think last week I said four so I've eliminated one deck and I'm not unfortunately still at the point where I want to be as of like we're recording this Sunday. So still you know a few days early earlier than we normally would but the three decks I've kind of narrowed it down to right now are Grim Snarl, EV Box, and Raging Bolt. And saying Raging Bolt kind of makes me want to throw up a little bit but again like we've acknowledged a couple times in the past in the cast Raging Bolt is not the same deck it used to be. It has a lot of added consistency. There's a lot of benefit of it being a knock towel deck. I've obviously been a fan of EV Box in the past and have talked about it multiple times on here and then Grim Snarl kind of hits close to home as far as being the type of deck that I resonate very heavily with and I will have to convince myself very heavily for that not to just be the deck that I end up going with. Yeah yeah I like all those choices for you. I mean Raging Bolt probably the least of those but I get it like it is the power levels there it's still really powerful deck really good deck. Well there's a bit of a story behind that one so. Oh really okay go ahead. The Raging Bolt in particular was the what is the deck I'm not Raging Bolt is my I'm not trying to win the event I'm just trying to get my invite deck and I hate that and that approach to an event is not the approach that I like to take personally but it's a switch that I potentially could have taken at a you know like you know far past different event different format different decks available and I think I have had similar choices available to me in the past and I've chosen not to take them so if like should I do it this time just kind of take the quote-unquote cowards way out the easy way out the deck that is very very consistent very likely to set up and play basically every game in that can that carry you through to a reasonable day two even if it's not necessarily a top eight. Yeah yeah and I mean we'll get into all the whole our predictions for the meta and all that stuff and kind of breaking down decks in a minute but it definitely has that ability yeah there's no way to deny that at this point so I can understand where you're coming from and yeah I get like quote-unquote the coward ways out like but I get it man like at this point you're not trying to win the event necessarily like sure I would love to at the back of your mind stretch goal like you dream about it when you go to bed you know wake up in the morning when you're like looking in the mirror like I'm gonna play in the NAIC and this thing you know that's obviously like and the more like if you have a good run that's where your mind goes you don't think about you have a good run and you're just like well I can make worlds like no at that point you're like I'm in it to win it let's go right so I get it and it's one of those things that I mean obviously the deck has the potential to win events Christian Labella won a regional with it and we've seen it make deep runs before but it just still has that kind of feeling that it's strong but it's missing something even if it then that may be totally off base because I'm sure that there will be plenty of strong players that bring the deck but before we get too bogged down in the details of individual decks I think that I will push us to a quick detour into Blaine's quiz show to see if John can go into trivia night with Xander this week ahead or behind me in points let's go let's see about it and so here we are with Blaine's quiz show and the rules as always John will have three multiple choice questions each correct answer will award John with one point he has one hint available for the week but if he is able to answer all three questions without utilizing that hint he will earn an additional fourth bonus point and so the scores as they stand before we head into the questions for this week are myself with 26 points and John with 24 so if John can get three all three questions with his hint he'll pass me if he can take that bonus point then he'll have the same point gap that I have currently but reversed so John are you ready for this final trivia challenge before NAIC? I sure hope so. I think I'm a little bit nicer than you in some of these but the topic for this week will be owner's Pokemon and so your first question which of the following Pokemon has not been a Team Rocket's Pokemon in more than one Pokemon TCG expansion and your choices are Hippunchan, Sneasel, Tyranitar, and Articuno. I know Articuno I think Rocket's Articuno comes to mind and Ttar has to be in more than one like I don't know Dark Ttar I'm trying to remember the Dark T or the Dark ones specifically Rocket ones in the older set like or are they just Dark I don't think they're that I guess they're not because they're not ownered they're not owned by I don't know if you're going by that or not are you going by That like are the dark Pokemon owned by a team rocket and the are you asking for a hint? Maybe I mean hit my chance the one that I'm like stuck on like I think that's out of all these three I Think that's the one I feel the most Strongly about like everything else is like that makes sense as a team rocket Pokemon and Articuno Maybe it doesn't make sense, but I specifically remember a team Rockets Articuno in the past But like I know you and I know that there's not a hitmonchan in the destined rival set But there's probably like two hitmonchans in like past sets So I think I'll take a hint here. Yeah, okay for the purpose of this question dark Pokemon are not owners Pokemon Okay, so dark Ttar might be the answer then okay Let's go Ttar then I think that's probably wrong, but like let's just go out swinging No with the utilization of that hint, and I probably gave you too big of a hint It is in fact Ttar and I was hoping that exactly that conundrum would trip you up The the other one that potentially could have been confusing was Sneasel, so you did correctly identify hitmonchan There is the team Rockets hitmonchan from gym challenge I believe or the original gym leader sets as well as team Rockets hitmonchan EX from team rocket returns Sneasel was obviously in destined rivals, and then there is a promo card that was Released I don't even know when the card came out yeah, and I think the pick the owner slot picture is like the dude from one of the Pokemon movies and But the card was available in English I do not have any idea how it was released and then Articuno like you said destined rivals And then team Rockets Articuno EX was also present in team rocket returns. I remember that one So your second question in the Japanese only versus series Which Pokemon did Lance have that he did not have in the video games I don't know why Aerodactyl has a question mark, but that is a choice your choices are Ampharos Aerodactyl Kingdra and Charizard Okay, so Lance is a dragon guy So Aerodactyl and Ampharos don't make much sense in that regard So Kingdra or Charizard Uh Well Charizard wasn't dragon until later So I'm just gonna go Kingdra because that's the only one that's a dragon type in the video game, but I don't know if he See like the versus series. Is that the TV show? No versus versus series Where's a this versus series where's a series of half decks that were released in Japan that highlighted? Gym leaders and their Pokemon it was kind of the second gym leader set But we never really we've never received them in the West Okay Lance was Diamond and Pearl era, right? Yeah Ampharos doesn't make sense. Like there's other gym leaders that have Ampharos Aerodactyl, maybe Kingdra but like he might have Kingdra in the video game. I don't think he does. I don't I haven't played Diamond and Pearl I think Kingdra is what I was leaning towards It's probably wrong But we'll just go Kingdra. Okay, Kingdra is a good guess. Kingdra is in fact, not the answer. The answer is Ampharos Why does he have an Ampharos in the card game makes no sense. He does not have one in the video game he'd actually had Aerodactyl and Charizard dating all the way back to red blue and yellow and Kingdra was I believe in Gold silver when he reappeared But yeah, he did not ever have an Ampharos. I don't know why he's got one here Maybe they just ran out of Pokemon to give him because at one point when you fight him in red and blue He has three Dragonites and they can't give him three Dragonite cards. Yeah That's funny. But yeah, I finally stopped your steamroll. I know Hopefully one more question to stump you to maintain my lead here I think I think we need to have a nice tie going into it. That would be that would be very like fitting All right, sure, let's see then last question which modern Pokemon owner has an additional Pokemon that has not been released in English And your choices are Hop, Iono, N, and Lillie This is tough, I wish we had more N Pokemon I Think it's Iono or a Lillie if I had to guess I'm just gonna go Iono. Japanese people love Iono They do love Iono and Iono does have several promo cards, but they are alternate arts of existing cards The answer is in fact Hop! Hop has the Pincurchin EX that was released as a gym promo I would never have got that. I have no idea what this card does Fair enough, but it exists and Is the reason that John will trail by one point? Heading into NAIC with the final scores at the end of this week's Blaine's Quiz show being 25 to 26 I knew it wasn't an N Pokemon because oh for sure people would freak out We would have heard about it. Yeah, if N had another Pokemon, absolutely absolutely Cool Yeah, but you know Lance's famous Ampharos and Hop's famous Pincurchin. Exactly Saying you're being nice to me. Okay. Okay. I'll remember this for next week. Don't you worry? Well, I'm scared folks. So we're gonna take we're gonna take a quick break here, but we will be right back And we are back here with a list of the top deck archetypes from Limitless online events since the beginning of the Destin Rivals format and these are grouped by archetypes so this will be all variants of Dragapult all variants of Just insert card just everything is grouped by archetype the big thing the big difference there rather is that it ups the Meta-percentage of Dragapult by quite a large margin and makes it the most popular archetype This is the same way you would see the data on the metagraphic at a regional or international So it's probably the best way to present it here So looking at that the top 10 decks in terms of popularity and Limitless online events have been Dragapult Marnie's Grimmsnarl Gardevoir, Raging Bolt, Ethan's Typhlosion, Joltik Box, Goldengo, Team Rockets, Other, and Cynthia's Garchomp. So looking at this, I think you can kind of tell there's a lot of new toy syndrome in The Limitless online events and I feel like that's not necessarily going to translate to what we are going to see at NAIC Yeah for some of these I think that's true Marnie's Grimmsnarl is kind of the outlier. I think people have access to the pre-constructed deck They have so they should have the ability to get the cards ahead of time Yeah, but like for Joltik's or not Joltik's for Ethan's Typhlosion and Rocket's Mewtwo I don't expect them to be quite so high up in the order But I definitely could see like Marnie's Grimmsnarl Did you want to I think we before we started this we talked about what we thought would be the ranking of decks going into this tournament So I can list out mine if you want and then you can do yours. Yeah, sounds good All right. So for me my order from the deck I think will be the most played at NAIC to the sixth spot. I have Dragapult, Marnie, Raging Bolt, Grimmsnarl, Joltik box, and then Golden Goat So you said Marnie and Grimmsnarl as separate entries? Oh, I did do that, didn't I? Did you say Gardevoir? Yeah, that's what I meant. So instead of Grimmsnarl I meant Gardevoir. Okay. Okay. I'll do another take Sorry about that I wrote it. Yeah, my brain's all over the place. I'm too focused on Palafin here All right, focus focus focus, okay, so my order Going from the deck that I think will be at the most played to NAIC to the sixth spot I have Dragapult and then I have Marnie's Grimmsnarl Raging Bolt Gardevoir EX Joltik and then Golden Goat And so I would say it's like my top six are probably the same same decks just in a different order I do think Dragapult with all of its variants is still undoubtedly going to be the most popular deck in the room My number two though is actually going to be Raging Bolt here. I think that it's still gonna be Pretty heavily played a lot of people think that it's got a very very strong Grimmsnarl matchup And so that's gonna kind of bring it out in numbers especially if they feel that the Grimmsnarls are pushing the Gardevoirs away and with that Grimmsnarl will come in at number three and Gardevoir at number four and then we've seen a lot of online success from Golden Goat and I think that that'll translate into people being More likely to bring it again and we'll see that come in as number five with Joltik Rounding things out at number six Like we said with these initial online results with this Typhlosion sitting here this rocket deck sitting here These decks are unlikely to be in the top six I honestly think that they're pretty unlikely to even be in the best of the rest graphic at the end of the day. Yeah, and I'm not necessarily certain what's gonna make that up, but I don't think that those two are gonna be it But that gives us a nice transition into if we think those decks are bad Where do we think they fit on a tier list? There we go. And so just a good place to start with this Why don't we just start with those two decks? So Ethan's Typhlosion What are your thoughts on this John and where do you think it would rank in terms of the deck you would want to bring To an event and so the way that we've looked at these tiers in the past We've said S tier would be just undoubtedly Best deck this deck is the most likely to win the event and I know we've shied away from having an S tier deck in The past I think that we should give one deck that honor this time. Okay, so we'll have our one S tier deck this will be the deck archetype that we think is the most likely to win the event and Then a tier would be just solid deck very likely to make top cut B tier Decent deck has a high chance or a good chance of making day two C tier is So so deck pretty unlikely to make day two and D tier is do not bring this deck. Please save yourself sure For Ethan's Typhlosion. I am full disclosure. I haven't played all of these decks I've played probably about half of them at this point or I've watched like people play them and like have a decent Understanding of how they operate and how they pair into some other the stuff There's only so many hours in the day air and there's a lot of decks. It is so For Ethan's Typhlosion, I would probably put it in C tier. It's a functional deck. It has good power level I don't know enough to put it in a B tier. I think I'm comfortable putting it in C tier for now I'm sure somebody might feel differently about it. I don't know how you feel about it I think that it's got some good matchups But then it's got a lot of very very bad matchups, too Okay, and it's not like not all dragapult variants are bad But like the dust snorer in particular is really difficult for the deck to deal with Gardevoir can be really difficult to deal with because you're often trading one prisers for one prisers the thing that the deck has a lot of Or has a good time into rather are a lot of the noctowl decks because they're primarily stage two focus or not stage two Two prizer focus and those two prizers have 280 or less HP and that's right in Typhlosion's wheelhouse of the matchup that it's looking to hit So functional deck and it's funny like I've been thinking about These owners Pokemon expansions and I think that all of these archetypes will be extremely powerful next rotation Once okay, and so they're just waited. They're just sitting there biding their time They're gonna be hanging out in the c-tier and they'll rise up once some of these other big brother decks are kind of gone And out of the way And that's assuming like we don't get anything broken. Well, yeah mega Pokemon are probably gonna just like push everything down. Yeah Look, we'll cross that bridge when we come across. Yeah, exactly Okay, so next thing up would be Rockets Mewtwo and I've seen this deck played I've played a handful of games with it and it really did the engine for this deck is so so powerful on paper but it is just like a lemon when you're playing it and I do not think this deck could be higher than c-tier in addition to having issues of matchups like a lot of the lists that I've seen and played with are Restrictive in the sense that most of the Rockets cards synergize only with other rocket cards and it becomes kind of this parasitic archetype where You don't want to have non Rockets Pokemon in your deck So you don't want to have Mew or Fezzendipity or Clefairy things that would help shore up either your consistency or specific matchups that you may have trouble into and instead you're hoping that you're just drawing into things in the right sequence and there are a lot of times where you can do the Ariana to draw up to eight and then Rockets factor to draw two additional cards and you just drew six Supporters and you can't do anything for the next for not only the rest of this turn But also your next turn and you're just praying for your opponent to knock one of your Rockets guys out So you can play an archer to shuffle your own hand away because it's so terrible Yeah, that's tough I mean, I have some of my locals that are really big on the deck and I haven't played a lot with Rockets I've haven't built but I haven't actually played a single game with it But yeah, I've heard echoed from other players the sentiment like it's a really powerful deck when it sets up and runs well Yeah, it does really well You know the Spide Ops Is a really powerful attacker in its own, right? You know grass is a great weakness right now to have a lot of the format But yeah I think you bring up the valid point that it just doesn't it bricks sometimes like if you unfair stamp Don't necessarily have a way to recover from that. Sure late game. So But yeah, I think that's C tier. So the next one I want to talk about Is probably one that you're thinking about a lot is flaring on knock towel. Okay I really like this deck, but I Don't know if I want to put it in a tier B tier, I think I'm thinking B tier. I think it's really good and you could sway me to a tier if you really feel strongly about it but like what did we say B tier was where it it gives you a chance to make day two. like very likely to make day two. yeah i feel like that's perfect for flarion. like it has such a good... like it's a toolbox deck so you can pull it out for any occasion and tech it for different matchups. and we've seen flarion start putting in leafeon and some it lists umbreon to counter guardi. i think that might come down a little bit if guardi doesn't get quite the play it did at the end of the last format. but flarion just any noctile deck you know consistently can do what it wants to do relatively every time. yeah um and flarion has a really good attack. powers up stuff on the bench. you can checkmate stuff pretty well. um sylveon's got a good attack. but i think that there's just it's just missing something or just it feels like it comes up short a lot of times. like you're you're missing one piece of the puzzle or like the fact that it's a stage one kind of feels weird sometimes when you're trying to get two or three pieces in play. when you're trying to evolve to flarion and then evolve to sylveon at the same turn and you only have the one you know counter catcher in your deck and you played it earlier and now you're now you're missing it later on. you know you're having to cut a lot of like tech cards that you would run in tera box because you just don't have space. because you're running like so many stage one pokemon um and noctile and in the flarion line and all the other evolutions. um but i mean i've said my piece i'm gonna leave it to you who's played it a lot more and thought about this deck a lot more um to kind of bring it home. i i do think that you're pretty solid in your assessment and the the reasoning for that is that you either make these choices to have the deck beat these specific matchups or you make no decision towards specific matchups. don't tech it out at all. just play like the standard sylveon flarion and accept that you're probably going to have a worse grim snarl matchup. you'll have a better dragapult matchup. your gardevoir matchup is still probably going to suck and there's not really a way to fix that. even the umbreon doesn't really do it for you. there's a lot of other a few other things that we've tried and that matchup's just tough. like you're you're kind of just praying that either the gardevoir player doesn't know what they're doing or that they brick. and i have to imagine most people that are that do choose to bring gardevoir to this tournament know how to play the deck. they're more than likely this point they're more than likely going to be higher tier players because i think a lot of people that are weaker gardevoir players will be scared off of playing the deck here. but with that being said if you're in day two and you're playing flarion and you're playing against a strong gardevoir player which there will probably still be some of them hanging out there you're not necessarily that's going to be the thing that stops this deck from making it to top cut i think. because i do think that it has a really strong dragapult matchup that's always kind of been the cornerstone of why flarion noctowl has been a successful deck is that it's got good matchups into raging bolt and dragapult. but the gardevoir matchup is the thing that just kind of jammed it out of the picture for most of last format and made it to why it only had sporadic top cut placements. the grim snarl matchup can kind of go either way because you can only fit you can only tech so much you can put the the leafeon in and that does definitely help that matchup it doesn't make it an auto win but it does help and is that enough or like you're making then your other matchups marginally worse to hopefully make that one marginally better does that sway everything enough for it to be like the big winner at the end of the day maybe maybe not it's it's kind of a matchup roulette thing more or less sure and then i mean i love leafeon's second attack oh yeah in that matchup it's really really good it's really good um the healing is clutch that the one the one downside allows you to use like opalite too oh for sure for sure yeah without having to use your crystal the one downside for leafeon and the card would probably well maybe not the card feels like it might be too powerful if it did to this but the attack doesn't heal itself which is kind of how the grim snarl player ends up attacking the ev deck if they are able to set up a leafeon using moss agate is you're just trying to stop it from being able to or you're trying to slowly whittle away at the leafeon itself before you kind of mount this offensive with an iono to a low hand size and whatnot at the end of the game but still solid deck will probably make day two any deck that can like abuse the just knock out your hoot hoots fairly easily it just feels really bad to like try to counter that when they you go okay knock on hoot hoots and then i don't know and you're just hoping you top deck something sure and that feels pretty bad all right another knock towel deck that i think has actually gotten a fair bit worse coming into this format is tarabox and i don't know if this is quite a d tier deck like shaman probably doesn't fully kill it but it's just it doesn't necessarily feel like it's in the best spot because those matchups where the shaman is going to be the most effective in this format were potentially shaky if you didn't come kind of exploding out of the gate and run your opponent off the board in the last format but i still think the deck is too powerful to necessarily just put all the way down in d tier so i think somewhere in c tier probably still a better play than either of these two decks at the end of the day but it's definitely weakened compared to its former self yeah i agree with that i mean just the raw power level of that deck like being able to you know hit 240 consistently with terrapagos and abuse all the different cool terra pokemon that you have access to and you can cover different types advantage and all that kind of stuff it can't be that bad but yeah it definitely loses a lot in this format um where um yeah if grim snarl just kind of has his way with it a lot of times i feel like knocking out noctowls and you know just not really caring about like if you if you run the shaman and grim snarl i don't really see a way to beat that deck at all yeah um that's gonna be pretty tough um but still raw power level i i don't think you put a lower than c it's still not like i wouldn't be like surprised if it did better than we were talking about right now yeah saying all this i could see somebody like cracking it breaking it like saying like no one's gonna play shaman and like realistically you can make that bet and if you win that bet and you hit matchups that don't have shaman in it you know it's that it's that whole uh bench barrier kind of chicken game right where you're saying i'm not i'm you're you're not gonna play shaman it's a bad card and you know you're not wrong it's not perfect yeah yeah exactly until you show me the shaman i don't have to respect it and there there might be somebody who picks up tarot box or another sniping deck and goes on a huge run because they hit a bunch of people that don't play shaman for sure definitely possible so so it's still fringe but not like it's still power level is pretty good and i think like i agree with that putting it above ethans and rockets like it's a more proven deck at this point sure why don't we continue with some deaths and rival stuff how do you feel about cynthia's garchomp i think this is the first d tier deck i don't think that i mean it it's a cool deck we love we love our mock cut the top cut mantra of like using the gav gabbite to or yeah gabbite to search out your evolutions and there's some cool stuff you can do with it but i just don't it's too linear uh it's a stage two attacking deck and we've seen some stage two attacking decks do well and this one has like the dragapult like you have the consistency of the stage one line but it's a it's not as good as uh recon at all um yeah i don't see it i mean granted i haven't played a single game with cynthia's either so if i'm wrong i'm wrong but like would you say do you feel that this year cynthia's garchomp is kind of in the same spot that dragapult was going into naic last year like big stage two has a consistency stage one released in the expansion right before the tournament and is just not gonna perform very well yeah maybe i don't what is i don't even know what garchomp's attacks are if i'm honest it's one fighting for like corkscrew dive or corkscrew drive it does 100 and you draw until you have six and then two fighting for 260 discard all energy from cynthia's garchomp yeah i mean 260 is just not enough anymore right i mean the whole gimmick is you have two roserades in place so you hit three so you hit 320 okay which is pretty good there's that but then you have no energy on your garchomp and you're taking a turn off or you have to play power glass or like yeah if they knock that out somehow it doesn't feel very good is it weak to grass yeah i picked up a bad incidental weakness i mean the the one advantage or like the draw to it is that you can give it up to 400 hp sure is that enough i i really don't think so yeah i don't know i don't i don't love it um if i'm honest i think dragapult we saw a lot more results coming out of japan that it was doing really well sure um and this one we just haven't yeah we don't even have that yeah and that in that case like so there was like at least proof concept that dragapult was an inherently strong card and it took a long time you know basically it took till after rotation for dragapult to really show its dominance but it did and it proved itself eventually so yeah i don't think it's quite the same position and there were some players that played dragapult that did well like pram i think made day two with dragapult charizard and yeah i think towards like tor did as well like i think he was just outside of top 32 but it was not it was not as dominant as people were expecting it to be so in that regard maybe synthia's guard jump is even worse than dragapult was last year yeah i'd be surprised if we even see more than like two or three of these make day two sure the tournament okay so uh next deck we could talk about is another destined rivals deck yan mega and this one's kind of been picking up steam the past couple of days i personally don't see all the hype for it to me it feels like joltik box with extra steps and you're really you're just praying that it's got the same gimmick to where you're playing like four boss you got you do 210 damage which is a good number to hit like you hit the ogre pawn you hit the grim snarl because you're a grass type you hit pheasant dippity squawk ability clefairy you know there's a bunch of things that you can one hit ko and then you shoot the energy back to iron hands on your bench to for some of these stage two matchups now so instead of jolting charge on turn one i have to set up a yanma get a yan mega evolve my yanma get yanma active use the attack to then put it to my hand so now i'm not using ampu very much until turn three at the earliest whereas joltik box can at least do it on turn two and the trade-off for that is that instead of joltik i have a 280 hp stage one i mean it's got a good weakness i think lightning is actually a really good weakness to have coming into this event there's not very many lightning types that don't do infinite damage already so it's good weakness yeah like i don't you already knocked you out i don't know if it's quite d tier but it's just kind of there yeah i don't know why you would pick this over joltik box at this point sure you know what i mean like sure it's cooler in the fact that it's not joltik box if you want to go that route but i don't think it's i feel like there's just a system there's just as much thought being put into it too or maybe even less honestly because you have fewer card you have fewer attackers yeah i mean joltik box you can power up two attackers does all the energy have to go to one pokemon when you use yan mega's attack that's a good question i am actually i honestly don't know i'm actually not that that makes me feel a lot less like good about this deck if you can't spread your energy out that's the one of the huge things with joltik boxes you can threaten two different attackers let me check depending on the board state when you use nope goes to one of your bench pokemon see and that that makes me feel a little less because then all they have to do is boss and knock it out and you're back where you started um yeah i don't know i don't know it's it's joltik box with more steps and it's a stage one instead of joltik and one of the perks of joltik is it's a single prizer and you're putting it and you get it and you get it in play with the right on so it's like yeah you're setting up all your stuff at the same time i mean we talked about like with that comparison do you want to go ahead and place joltik box yeah let's go throw joltik box um i like this deck a lot uh if i was a new player well i i think it could be considered top of b tier bottom of a tier like i'm i'm leaning towards top of so like i'll give you i'll give you top of top of bt i think that it's got a lot of things going for it so yeah coming into this format it doesn't really lose anything um you weren't really trying to like bench snipe or anything like that um you're you're if you're like trying like this would be the deck if you talked about raging bolt being the deck that you would play if you wanted to make day two of a tournament this would probably be the deck if i'm a new player or like somebody less confident my ability i'd say play joltik box like don't don't overthink it like just play this because there's only so much your opponent could do once you get a board state set up where you have iron hands and pikachu and you're able to like just take one take two the first two prizes and if they're unable to respond you can just snowball from there um it has really cool tech options um for the dragon bolt mirror like you you run the you know lily's clefairy and stuff like that um so you you have an answer for that um i don't know i i like it a lot i think um it's probably my favorite like outside of the top four decks if i were you know like out of the top four that i listed this is probably the one i would put right there on the on the door knocking trying to get into that group um so that's where i put it probably top of bt yeah i think i can agree with that i think that you know like you said it didn't lose a ton and i feel like it actually gained a pretty good matchup with grim snarl hitting the scene You know, you have like the Galvantula from Shrouded Fable can one-hit KO Grimmsnarl. It gives you a reason to put Iron Leaves back in the deck to one-hit KO Grimmsnarl. I mean, but by the same token, Joltec Box does have a tendency to put a lot of junk on its board. So you are prone to corner stalling. So maybe that's not... I haven't played that matchup a ton per se. So maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it is a little bit closer than I'm giving it credit for. But I feel like the tools are available for you to potentially just run them over. Like if they try to fall back on their one-prize board, you have hands to just go in with Ampu very much. And if you can just kind of play around things appropriately, you're more than likely going to be in a pretty good spot. Yeah, yeah. And I mean, it matches into the top four decks okay. Like, I think, yeah, you could play this. I mean, maybe Raging Bolt's not that fun. No, that's probably still an auto-loss. Yeah, with... yeah, that's fair. So you still have that matchup that just feels pretty abysmal, which I think probably keeps it from A-tier, if I'm honest. Sure. But yeah, other than that, rather than Raging Bolt, if you hit Dragapult and Garde and Grimmsnarl all day, you're feasting. You're having a decent time of it. And as long as you manage your bench accordingly, manage your energy, your Joltix accordingly, you should be alright. So, sure. Before we get into some of these other, like, Stage 2 decks, why don't we finish out the Roaring Moon and N'Zor Arc? Sure. So, starting with N's here, I think. I think this one's gotta be D-tier for me. This is... well, it's weird. So I saw... I'm not sure if you saw this. I saw a list earlier this week that goes away, does not have this Darmanitan present whatsoever. And the focus instead is on a big, tanky Zor Arc with Hero's Cape. And using the Team Rocket's Venture Bomb to hopefully flip tails and put damage on yourself. Or you either flip heads and put enough damage on your opponent that you can utilize just the 170 Righteous Flame from Reshiram and take KOs on things like Fez or Ogre Pawn or what have you. And then if you get tails, you could potentially add some damage based on what your opponent hit you for previously. And use that Rage-based attack to one-hit KO something bigger. And 380's a pretty big number. And I feel like Hero's Cape is an A-spec that I thought would be interesting in N's Zor Arc for a long time. But, if you look at the way the deck has traditionally been built, the Darmanitan focus, I'm gonna Flame Body Cannon and snipe things off the bench. That deck's dead. Like, dead as a doornail. It is not coming back. And, you know, we talked about what deck probably... Like, we talked with Tarabox, like, hey, you know, you gotta run the risk of our people playing Shaman. N's Zor Arc, like, it's a higher-maintenance Wellspring Mask, Ogre Pawn, in my mind. Like, the fact that you have to have two Stage 1s in play, and like... And the problem is, that's your, like, primary game plan. Whereas with Tarabox, you have other attackers you can fall back on. And it's just, like you said, because you're doing it with basics, it's a little bit lower maintenance. With N's Zor Arc, I mean, if you just think about games in the previous format with the N's deck, and they struggle to find Darmanitan, all they're doing is hitting you for 170. And that is never gonna win you a game. No, not most of the time. No, there's not a lot of decks that really fold to that kind of pressure. Right. Yep. And, you know, being weak to grass, still not great. Not great. Not a great weakness right now. And that's your main attacker. That's your draw engine. So, it's tough. Like, there's not a lot going for it, in my mind. The new tactic you talked about, it sounds interesting. I haven't really seen it, or tested it, or thought about it at all. But it sounds kind of gimmicky, if I'm honest. Probably. Yeah, I couldn't get behind it. I mean, but you can draw through your deck with trade fairly well. So you can find the pieces to combo it together, I could see. So there might be something to it. Yeah, I think D-tier, you know... I don't think it... Like, what are you matching up against that you're saying, I'm gonna have a great matchup against at this point? You know what I mean? Right. Yeah, I mean, because even if you do run into, like, this Ethan's Typhlosion, 1-hit-KO's your Zoroark. And probably play Shaman. Rocket's Mewtwo, you 1-hit-KO the Mewtwo, they kill you back with Spydops. And it just becomes like a Spydops vs. Darmanitan game, where you're praying that you can outpace them. And that doesn't seem great. You even probably lose to Yanmega. And that's where... When you're losing to all of the C-tier decks, I think it's really hard... I think it's really hard to say that this is a deck you should bring to the event. And, like, the two decks that you had a good matchup into, Gardevoir and Dragapult, like, those are the two decks that... If they're gonna play Shaman, they will play Shaman. Yeah. They gained a tool to counteract you, make you basically impossible to win versus them and stuff. And so, like I said, last deck here, before we get into the Stage 2s, would be the deck that won the last major event from Journey Together. And so this will be Roaring Moon, as in Roaring Moon EX, Poison Package Roaring Moon, whatever you want to call it. And... I think this deck's done. I really do. I think it had its chance in a very... At the tail end of a very, very Gardevoir-dominated format. Where... And, again, Grass Week... Well, okay, hold on. Maybe it's not fully D-tier. It's probably still better than these three decks. Yeah. So I think we can settle on that as kind of a placement for it. You know, it's something where, again, if you show up and you only hit Gardevoir repeatedly, you're gonna have a great day. But I think if you have some other matchups, like the newer decks that came on that are gonna be successful, like Grimmsnarl... Are probably not very good matchups for you at the end of the day. Like, yes, you can get around Corner Stall. But if you ever have to use Frenzied Gouging, they can Countercatcher and take multiple prizes with the Shadow Bullet. And just kind of cause havoc for you on your bench. And Dragapult Duskgnarl just feels pretty bad. Sure. As long as they set up, yeah. As long as they set up, you're not really doing much. You're relying upon Poison Donking against that. And that's not a really good strategy, to be honest. I mean, it worked at EUIC, so who knows? You know, we might see a repeat of that. Can't ever rule it out. But yeah, I feel C-tier is probably accurate. I mean, there's times where it's a B-tier deck. But I don't think it's beyond that right now. Right. And I think going into NAIC specifically is just not. Yeah. Nope. Alright, so we've talked about kind of the best of the rest. Let's get into the heart of the decks. Let's just go... Let's start with Dragapult. Straight Dragapult. Okay. So, these are probably... I think... We'll just go ahead and do Dragapult and Dragapult Duskgnarl and group them together. Like, at least talking point-wise. Sure. I'd put Dragapult A-tier and then Dragapult Duskgnarl would be the one S-tier deck that I feel like coming in. Like, coming into NAIC. So, Dragapult... I mean... To me... I honestly don't know why you'd run Dragapult over Dragapult Duskgnarl right now. I mean, that's just my personal opinion. Okay. So, you can make the argument to put Dragapult lower, but... I still think of the power levels there. Like, you can still abuse Monkey Door really well and against Marnie. So, that's nice. But... Realistically, like, Dragapult Duskgnarl... It's the deck to beat, in my mind, going into this tournament. It has answers for basically every other deck that you're going to play against it. If a good player is playing it and they set up, you know, they're probably going to win. Like, that's how I feel right now. So... That's how I felt, you know, testing it, going into this format. And I haven't really been dissuaded from that, to be honest with you. Like, I like this deck a lot. I think it allows agency. Like, you can be behind the whole game and then all it takes is, like, one or two turns. And you've got a board state that you can't counteract. You know, you're not... You have really nice disruption and Unfair Stamp and Iona. You have countercatchers. You have, like, everything you could possibly want in Pokemon right now. You have one of the best attacks in Dragapult that I don't think you can deny at that point. You know, we were talking, like, last format. I think Garde proved that it was the best deck in format. You know, Dragapult... I mean, maybe we're kind of... Maybe I'm just biased because I like the deck a lot. So there might be that. But I don't see any other deck here that I feel, like, beats this deck convincingly. You know what I mean? I can see why you would feel that way. Yeah, sure. I do think that Dragapult Dusknoir is far and away the best Dragapult variant. I would also agree with you that I think Straight Dragapult has gotten significantly worse. And I think it's bumped down to a B tier slot in particular. I think without Dusknoir you do not beat Grimmsnarl ever. Like, it is just, like, a no contest. Because Straight Dragapult's whole gimmick is that it wants to stay back and play the long game. And that's kind of where Grimmsnarl lives. Or where it thrives, rather. And if you give it the opportunity to build up a board with three or... Some lists even play four Monkey Dory. And they can set up their Frostlass. They can potentially counterstall something. You don't have a ton of outs to that. They can just do Shadow Bullets. So they're doing almost as much damage as you. Because typically in these matchups, the damage to the front Pokemon is not relevant. It's the bench damage that ends up winning the game. And when you have the Adrena Brains that are moving things around... And they just have access to more monkeys than you do. More efficiently than you do. You end up in a rough spot. And the Dusknoir is kind of the X-factor that can help Dragapult get over the line... By just one hit KOing a Gyarados. Not Gyarados. Wow. One hit KOing a Grimmsnarl. Or full clearing a Frostlass off the bench so it's not pinging your bench anymore. And alleviating pressure that way. And without that relief valve... Dragapult just feels like it's in a really, really rough spot... When it's playing against Grimmsnarl in particular. I agree. I think Grimmsnarl you bring up is probably one of the harder matchups. But I still think it's closer than it might feel. If you play it well... If you're able to, as a Dragapult Dusknoir player, set up your Dusknoirs... You're okay. The Grimmsnarl player... If they don't get the two Marnies that turn that they evolve into Marnies... If they don't clear the opponent's board really quickly... It just kind of snowballs. But you can do a lot to just annoy the Marnies player a lot. It's tough. I'm interested to see how my theories and all my conjecture holds up. But I'm willing to ride Dragapult Dusknoir, I guess. To the hopeful finish that I think it will get to. Sure. And I think the other advantage is... A lot of the targets right now that people are placing on the backs of different decks... People are either trying to find something to play Watchtower with. So they're targeting the Noctowl decks. Or they're playing Grimmsnarl, targeting the Gardevoir deck. Or they're playing Grass Pokémon to target the Grimmsnarl deck. And people have just kind of forgotten about Dragapult in a lot of ways. So it just gets to kind of bide its time in the background... And do its thing. And kind of evade the pressure that some of these other decks are having focused on them. The last Dragapult variant... Because it's Goldango Dragapult, so it's a Goldango deck. But the Dragapult Charizard... And again, unfortunately I still have not done my due diligence on this. I do not know how strong this deck directly is. I know that there are some people that are huge fans of it. Like Oscar Madsen. Oh my gosh, I'm totally blanking. I just had... There you go. And there are admittedly people that have made some either interesting decks... Or have been big proponents of Charizard or Dragapult Charizard in particular in the past as well. They think the deck isn't... Or they did in the last format think that the deck was in a pretty good spot. I think the deck is actually a little bit weaker than it would have been at the end of that final format. Because I do think the numbers for Gardevoir are going to be a little bit lower. I think that Grimmsnarl... Again, if you don't have Dusknoir in your Dragapult deck, you have a hard... Or maybe even just unwinnable Grimmsnarl matchup outside of the Grimmsnarl player not playing the game. I do still think that this deck boasts a lot of positives going into the format though. And I think that having the tandem power of Dragapult and Charizard... Are still probably two of the best Stage 2 attacking Pokemon in the game. And if you can get everything set up and you're firing on all cylinders... A lot of decks have a very hard time taking you down. So I would be hard pressed to say that this deck is not a B tier deck. I think I would put it low B tier. And actually, honestly, I think that straight Dragapult is probably also right next to it. But it's still probably Day 2 worthy. Yeah, I think that's fair. I think if you're playing Dragapult Charizard, I'd play a Mist Energy. The Devo play seems really brutal against you. If I'm honest. I don't see how you recover from that as well as some of the other decks that are Stage 2s. So yeah, Mist Energy seems pretty good. Sure. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know, man. I've never really felt like this deck... There's something to be said. Using Charizard early game. Having an Energy Acceleration. Seems pretty good. But yeah, I don't know. I think... I haven't seen enough to really have an opinion about the deck all that well. But I follow what you're saying. I feel like I'm just missing something when it comes to that deck. Yeah. I don't know why you would choose this necessarily. But maybe you just love Charizard. Maybe. And you love Dragapult. And that's enough. I want to bridge the gap here with the Charizard. So if somebody did love Charizard. But they didn't want to play Dragapult. They just wanted to play Charizard with Pidgeot. How would that person perform this weekend? Um... You know, I don't really know why... That's so weird to say. But this one definitely runs a missed energy at this point, right? Oh, for sure. I'm trying to think. Yeah, yeah. I feel like if you're not running in the Dragon Pool Charizard, you're running into this. I actually played against the list the other day that ran to. Yeah, that makes sense. Diva's devious. I don't know. I don't think that like you get bodied by like the grass hate for Grimmsnarl and for for everything else. And, you know, there's just not a lot going for you. You lost Radiant Zard, so you don't have a way to counter grass Pokemon right now other than another Charizard. You got Chi-Yu. True. OK, OK. You do have Chi-Yu, the revenge Chi-Yu, right? So you've got that going for you. I don't know if that's really anything to write home about, but you have the option. I mean, so I wish Pidgeot decks were better right now because I really love the engine. I think it's a really good engine. It's underutilized right now, for sure. In a format where we are using like Ionos and in researches to get through our decks to try to get all our like to find our Kama pieces and stuff like that. We've moved away from Pidgeot and from some of the slower plays that we had earlier on in the format. Right now that we've got stronger and faster Pokemon again, we're seeing kind of a research and Iona focus. So Pidgeot doesn't feel as good because of that, like finding one piece versus researching and finding two or three pieces doesn't feel as good. And then like, yeah, using like we put Noctowl decks kind of. Over Pidgeot, I think this goes. I think C tier, if I had to put it somewhere probably up above Roaring Moon, I still think it's the power level is still there. Like, there's still going to be some people playing this that. Oh, for sure. The Charizard is still an inherently strong card. Yeah, I think the question becomes, is it good enough to be the primary focus of the deck? And that's where it can. Can falter. Yeah, you do like that. That one I played against, I told you a couple of days ago that had two missed energies in it, still was able to. So even with two missed energies in the deck, somehow still fit. Dusknoir, Briar, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Had the full, full whammy, full shebang. It was when I was trying to play Rockets, play Rockets Me Too. I archered them to three cards and they managed to go secret box. Secret box plus quick search led them to like Briar, Candy, Dusknoir, Candy, Charizard. Oh, OK. Well, you know, you're you're him. You get you get the game. Yeah, you got it. And that's something like something Charizard can do that other stage twos can't. Like you put your opponent down to two prize cards or down to one prize card and Charizard KO's whatever is active, unless it's a Pikachu. It's very low maintenance. Yeah, you just need Charizard and then it just takes care of everything else. You know, having that really powerful attack, you know, once you get down to two or three prizes left or whatever. Just kind of blows through everything right now. Yeah, it's still good. Like, I don't I don't think Charizard, you know, the power level when it came out, the power level is super high. It's still pretty powerful. I don't I don't know if it's, you know, strong enough. Right. Well, it's one of those things where it's like we've hit a point in the format where it feels like a lot of the decks that are powerful have options and you get to look at a problem, a multifaceted problem. And Charizard wants to be a bulldozer that just comes through and flattens it all. And maybe it doesn't have enough finesse to get it over the finish line is kind of what it boils down to. But, you know, you said she use another attacker. I just don't see you really ever using that successfully. Sure. And not have a Charizard in play. And then they just bring up Charizard and knock it. You know, it's yeah, it's tough. It's very tough. Not great. But it's still cool. Like, we still love Charizard. We still we still stand him, if you will. Another. All right. They got another bulldozer of the format would be Goldengo trying to make it rain on its opponents. Yeah. And this is something definitely been picking up steam online. I know it's a one. I believe either one or got finals in four of the bigger tournaments. Yeah. Yeah, it's a I was kind of surprised to see this deck still holding on and doing well. I don't think it lost too much. Like, you're not really trying to do a whole lot more than just knock out what's ever in the active. And you can, you know, play that whole. Prize game like you can put a one prize in the active turn, one turn to start evolving, start knocking stuff out. I think it's probably a tier at the bottom of a tier if I had to put it somewhere like that or the top of B tier. But right now it's the only tier. Yeah. Yeah. There you go. Soon to be joined by some others, perhaps. But I think this is a good play for this tournament. Like, if you look at what we're going to put in a tier spoilers, it's the last three decks remaining in my mind, at least. Yeah, no, fully, fully agree on any play. And I mean, I think we can go ahead and throw them up there, but it's just a matter of yeah, we can sort sort it out. Um, but I think you can match up into everything. Maybe other than Dragapult Dusknoir, that might seem a little tough. If they set up efficiently, I don't see how you really. Combat that very well, but like everything else, you know, I don't know about Grimmsnarl, but I feel like. Well, we've seen some people. It's still good. Some people have started putting things like picnic basket. You have monkey Dory. Some of them play picnic basket to kind of offset, and that makes your Dragapult matchup inherently better as well. So it's a kind of a two birds, one stone thing to look at. Two of the kind of titans or pillars of the format and being able to combat them effectively. I mean, realistically, the thing that stops Goldengo from just being the best deck is the fact that it has problems with a lot of the B tier decks. Sure. You can't you can't one hit KO the Pikachu. So Joltikbox still has the opportunity to just give you tons of headaches. And Flareon Noctowl has always been a bad matchup. Yeah. Yeah. There's no way around it. That's true. Yeah. And yeah, I think that might be what holds it from S tier. And I think that in the Dragapult Dusknoir matchup make it a little bit lower on A tier in my mind. Sure. So I think that's fair. So then the so I mentioned two of these two of these three decks or two of the decks that I was considering for the event. I'm going to start with Raging Bolt, I think. It's something that obviously was strong flask format. And we saw that power level kind of come and go, but was still consistently getting, you know, at least asymmetrical top cut placements. And I think that like a lot of other decks, if we see Gardevoir go down, that's a matchup that could be iffy. Like you could sometimes still get to the baby bolt. But that play is kind of out of style now that Shaman's in the format. It makes a little bit more difficult to pull that off. And instead, you're just trying to brute force your way through that matchup. Which makes it much more of a losing matchup, much more difficult to pull off. But you also gain the Grimmsnarl matchup, which inherently you're favored in. I wouldn't say it's super favorite. It's not an auto win by any means, but you're definitely favored. Like you can very easily naturally power up an Ogre Pawn. If you really, really hate Grimmsnarl, you can play in Iron Leaves. Spoiler, you do not need Iron Leaves to beat Grimmsnarl with this deck. So I would definitely say, like I guess you could technically argue that the inclusion of Iron Leaves gives you some Maractus proofing. But I personally think that there are better ways to go about doing that. So having a favorable matchup into Grimmsnarl is great. Having a bad matchup into Gardevoir that is hopefully less popular is also a good thing. And then you just kind of end up in this position where you're hoping that you're just more consistent than a lot of these other A and B tier decks. And that's what gets you over the line to make it into day two or into a deep run. Yeah, I think it's probably it's definitely A tier. And it's just figuring out your matchups per se. I think I don't expect a lot of Team Rocket's Watchtower to really shut down Noctowl's all that much. It doesn't seem like I've seen a lot of it coming into this tournament online. So I'm pretty confident. Yeah, like it's not going to get nerfed by that. And then yeah, the rest of it, your matchup spread is not too bad. And the raw power level and just consistency of it are really speak volumes of it. Like I played some games with it today into Dragapult. And yeah, every game it felt like I started like Fan Rotom, Ditto, switch, move into the Teal Mask Ogre Pawn, and then turn to go do my combo stuff. And it just felt, you know, the main thing was whenever you got unfair stamped after you take the first knockout, then it's like, how do I really recover from there? Yep. You know, trying to find that second Noctowl or try to find, maybe you have to put Fez down or Mew down to try to recover your hand from there. But that can be challenging sometimes if you don't get the stadium out or you don't get like one of the pieces that you need for all that. Right. So it's a really good deck. It's a really strong deck. I think can definitely make some deep runs. We'll see some in the top cut. I'd imagine one or two. So I probably put it above Goldengo Dragapult in this time for now. Okay. On A tier. So we got two left. What do you want to tackle first? Let's do Grimmsnarl. I really like this deck. I think, I wish I had more time. If I were playing, I would love to just play the heck out of this deck. It's one of those decks that kind of scratches that itch on my brain. Like Buddy Frostlast, Monkey Dory, and then you have a nice, the fact like Marnie's, what's the stadium? Spikemouth Stadium. Spikemouth's broken, dude. Like the fact that you can search out a stage two. Like I was playing against a Dragapult deck that didn't run a counter stadium. And it just felt like so nice to just like throw down your stadium and just have no fear of like, if I get Ionoid, I'm going to get my pieces to whatever I need for next turn. Like getting that Grimmsnarl EX when I need it. Felt so nice. Yeah, I really like this deck. I think it rewards good players sufficiently to make it like a good pick. You know what I mean? Like it gives you a lot of agency. It gives you a lot of counterplay. It gives you a lot of, I think it's consistent enough. Like realistically, that might be some sticking points for some people is that it doesn't do what it wants to do every turn. But like you have time with this deck. You have a lot of time. You have, you know, ways to stall your opponent. You have Badoo. You have just a lot of different things you can do. So I think I like it more than Ranger Boltog or Pawn. Do I like it more than Gardevoir? Let's let's figure that out in just a minute. Well, I want to hear your thoughts on Grimmsnarl. I love this deck. Even if I don't choose to play it, it is by far, in my opinion, the most fun deck to play in this format. Sure. I do think, like you said, Spikemyth, Broken Card. The fact that you can Secret Box, you can Arven for Secret Box and it guarantees you a Grimmsnarl in play. Which is something that no other deck can say. Because if you, you can have just an Arven. You can have a, well, you have to have enough cards to discard for Secret Box, obviously. But if you have Arven and three Dark Energy in your hand, you have a Grimmsnarl in play. As long as you have Spikemyth and Rare Candy in your deck. And, you know, for most other Stage 2 decks, you have to go find an Ultra Ball to get that Stage 2. And so now all, like, not only do you have to have Secret Box, you have to discard five total cards from your hand. And you have to hope you have the Rare Candy in hand already. And so it's just one less piece you have to get. And it's a Stadium that you can put in play that, for the most part, unless you're playing a Mirror Match, only benefits you. Which is a huge advantage to have over a lot of other decks. Where if it's an Artisan-based Stage 2 deck, oh, I can still use that. I can go grab this guy, this guy, this guy, and that's fine. The one weird thing, especially in how the deck is constructed, is that, you know, it is a, from every list I've seen so far, is a four Stadium deck. And because of that is light on actual Ball Search cards. And that's one of the things that can make it a little bit less consistent. You don't have an onboard draw engine, because you don't want those liabilities on the field. So you end up, again, being a little bit less consistent. And you try to make up for that by just playing raw 14, or not 14, wow, four each of Iono... Well, some people only play two or three Research. I've been playing four Iono, four Research, four Arvin, because I want to have a supporter in my opening hand every single game. And even then, sometimes it doesn't. I mean, I played a series earlier today against Raging Bolt, and two of the three games, I didn't have a supporter for three turns. And some of that's variance, some of that's card games. It's a deck, though, where if you get into the game, it feels extremely oppressive against a lot of matchups. Yeah. Yeah, when you get that turn one, Arvin for Buddy Poffin, TM Evo into Frost Slash, and Grimmsnarl... Or not Grimmsnarl, Morgrim. Morgrim, yep. Nothing better. Not much can really do. And if you go, like, God forbid, you get the Artisan, too, and get the Monkey with the Energy Attachment. Like, you're just, like, not Energy Attachment. But you could Monkey in the Active. Yeah, you could open Monkey, attach to it, and get the TM Evo. Because you run four Monkey or three Monkey, you know, you're probably going to start it a decent amount of time. And you can get into it fairly easily. But yeah, it's just one of those decks that I was playing today, like, the games where you set up, you just feel like you're having a great time. You're just chilling. You're just waiting for your opponent to, like, realize they're cooked, and kind of scoop from there. Yep. The biggest thing I'm going to be stressing about as a judge this weekend is Frost Slash damage between turns. Absolutely. Like, straight up. It's going to be the bane of my existence this week. I'm not going to lie. If you are listening, if you're playing Frost Slash, Grimmsnarl, or Frost Slash, Monkey, Dory even, it's your responsibility as the Frost Slash player to make sure your opponent is putting their damage on. If you are playing against Frost Slash, it is your responsibility to make sure both players are putting Frost Slash on. So it's not just one person or the other. Everybody is responsible for maintaining the board state, and just do your best to make it as easy for everybody as possible. Yeah, and I mean, thankfully. The good thing is, it happens between turns, and it has to happen, so it's easy to fix. It's pretty easy to track, too. The big thing is just trying to figure out what turn the players are on and how long that Frostlass has been in play. But it's just going to eat you up. The little 10 pings add up quick. I will say that. Just being able to put two pings on something between turns, and then you move Mucky over to something. Just the ability of board control is insane. The endgame board states where you finally decide to step on the gas. If you can ever get to a point where it is correct to get a second Frostlass into play, the board explodes, more or less. It doesn't happen a ton of times, though. A lot of times, that's incorrect to do, just because it makes your Grimmsnarl so much frailer. If you need to accelerate that clock, that is definitely a way to do it. Yeah, it definitely has some reach with that, where you can start moving 30 over instead of just the 20 on the Mucky. It's a cool deck. It's just a cool deck. We love cool decks here. That's kind of our bias. We're going to probably favor Grimmsnarl over Raging Bolt, even if Raging Bolt's better. I've always been a sucker for spread decks. Anything that does damage to all of your opponent's Pokemon, I will look at that card seriously. And hope that it is good. Yeah, I remember. Did you play the Sand Slammer Flygon back in the day with a Selgore? That deck scratched an itch, for sure. This definitely does the same kind of thing. You like Frost Slash Monkey Dory with Badoob, Forgrimmsnarl, and this deck's just, the stocks went way up. For sure. We're big on the deck here. And I expect it to be A tier. It could almost be put in S tier at this point. I wouldn't hate that if you wanted to put it there. I do think the minor inconsistency and the fact that I feel, after its strong start, including the winning of the Fulgrip event, it's won a few other Asian League events, and just a lot of the representation that it's had in online events, I think the deck will have a fairly large target on its back going into this weekend. And we have seen an uptick in Raging Bolt in the online stuff, so I can see that. Either decks that have favorable matchups, or some of these other decks, including things like Picnic Basket, which don't auto-win, but sometimes do provide you that one turn that might let you steal a game, which can really just put a damper on the final success of the deck. I do expect at least one of them to make top cut, though. Oh, for sure. And then the last deck, we've avoided talking about it for long enough, John. The last deck to talk about here is, in fact, the dominating force from the Journey Together format, Gardevoir EX. And I don't know how to feel about this deck. It's in a really weird spot. I haven't tried anything similar to Brent Tonneson's list from the previous format, but I've seen a lot of people, and myself included, have done kind of a play on what Henry Chao and Michael Davidson brought to Portland, and it's good. It's still strong. It just is not this dominant deck that you would anticipate it being based on previous results. I think that the Grimmsnarl matchup is definitely unfavored, and pretty largely unfavored in my mind, too. The one big advantage you have is you are probably a slightly more consistent deck because you have Mew, you have Fezendipity, on top of also having your eight draw supporters. Sure. Yeah, you definitely, and it's a more proven deck at this point. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. I mean, Gardevoir was, we didn't put it there in our last tier list. We did at the end of the format, but you can make the argument it was an S-tier deck. Or did we put it there? No, we did not have an S-tier deck before. We did not. Okay. But that being said, I think it loses a lot. You didn't talk about the other thing, Shaymin shutting off your Screamtail. Yeah, absolutely. It's a thing. Sure, you can monkey the damage over to it, but that takes three monkeys to do that. Well, right. To knock it out. You can still Screamtail something like a Mew or a Fez, though. Oh, true. True. I forgot about that. That's a good point. So I guess it's not as disruptive, but it definitely, you know, against a Dragapult, you can't target down something, or in the mirror match, or, you know, against some Grimmsnarls all around it. These Garde mirrors sound miserable now. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's still good. We kind of wrote Garde off. We've written it off many a time, and many a time we've been proven wrong, and I'm sure Henry Chow and, you know, all the other Garde heads out there will still prove us wrong. I don't think it's better than Grimmsnarl right now, especially in this metagame, where Grimmsnarl's a new deck that people are still trying to figure out how to play against. Yeah, I mean, if we see somebody show up with a fully refined and kind of primo Grimmsnarl list, Gardevoir doesn't have a chance. I agree. Do I think it's better than Raging Bolt? Yeah, I think it allows for skill expression at a higher level. I think that's fair to say. So I think that's... I'm comfortable where that's at. Yeah, I think Garde's right back in the middle of A. Still good deck, still, you know, dominant when it's coming from behind and disrupting your opponent and controlling the board state with Monkey Dory. Dragapult Dusknoir is still... It's not the most fun thing to play against as a Garde player, but you have answers for all of their stuff going on. You know, if you're able to kind of KO the Duskulls before they're able to evolve up and all that kind of stuff, it can be really tough for the Dragapult player. So yeah, I think that's a good tier list to me. Any other closing thoughts before we go into predictions? No, I think like you said, we're in a pretty good spot. The one other thing that kind of pushes that Dragapult matchup a little bit worse for Gardevoir is, like you said, the Shaman. The Shaman protecting the Duskull specifically is a pretty big deal. Obviously protecting Dragcloak is a really big deal because you want to protect your energy attachments and you want to make it possible to get Dragapult into play to begin with. But having Duskull be safe on your bench for a turn, outside of multiple Monkey Dory being available, is like, if I Poffin for two Duskull, you can't go double Adrena Brain, snipe the other one anymore. And so that makes it to where a Dusknoir is far more likely to hit the board at some point, which can really swing that matchup. Yeah, I think that's going to close out that tier list here. And final thing we are going to leave everybody with today are some predictions for this event. Yep, so we have five questions total. We talked about these kind of in our break from after Blaine's quiz show, but I'll just go through the first one real quick. Aaron, do you think we'll have over or under 3.5 Bidou in asymmetrical topcut? And for this, we've seen a trend, obviously. The number of Bidou is significantly smaller than it was at the start of the Journey Together format. A lot of decks then had two that were successful. I think here, we're now seeing decks that have one or even zero in a lot of cases. But I think the answer to this, I'm going to go with under, because I think we're going to hit kind of right at that three mark. Well, no, no, sorry, sorry, sorry. For asymmetrical, I'm going to go with over, over. I think that there's enough space there. I'm going to call a 13-person asymmetrical cut, and those five extra slots are going to push us over that 3.5, and we'll hit four or five of them overall. We'll see four or five copies of Grimmsnarl slash Dragapult in topcut. Hmm. See, I was going to go over as well, but I was thinking, okay, if I change it to top eight, would you change it back to under? Absolutely. I do. All right. I'll counterpick on top eight, if we do that. I was going to say, I will absolutely say that there will be three Biddew in top eight, is my call. Okay. I'll take the over in that, because I think you get one Grimmsnarl that runs two Biddew, and one Dragapult that runs two Biddew, and you're covered. You know what I mean? Yeah. I mean, I can see that. I just think the ones that make it are going to run one, because I think it's better, but sure. Okay. So I think we'll change it to top eight, and then you'll take the under on that. Sounds good. I'll take the over. All right. Next one. Where do you think the highest placing Team Rocket's deck will be? Top two. Hmm. Is 256 too mean? That's a pretty big gap. Yeah. Okay. But no, I think that that's accurate. I think the deck will be unpopular. I think a small handful of them will make it into day two, and they will not perform astoundingly well. So I'm going to go with top 256. Okay. I don't think it's that bad. I think there's matchups that you hit into that are pretty good. I wrote down top 32. Whoa. So I think somebody's going to cash. I think somebody's going to cash. I think they're going to hit... I think it's underutilized in some ways. I'm willing to be proven wrong. So hopefully I don't get bodied by that prediction. I think that's a big swing, but more power to you. It is. Yep. All right. Next question was the region outside of the North America that will finish with the highest placement in NAIC. Why don't you go first on this one? Sure. I took the cop-out answer, I think, with Europe. Okay. I mean, Stefan has been so dominant in the past towards 1-1. I think if you look at the past, who's done well coming over, nine times out of 10, it's been like Europe that does really well. So I expect that trend to continue. There's some really good European players right now. The Finns are doing really well. Daniel Magda from Czech Republic, I think, and all of that. There's a whole group. We've just seen a lot of good European players right now. But yeah, I think that's a safe pick. But where are you picking from? I am leaning toward exactly what happened at last year's NAIC. And I'm going to go with Australia or Oceania. I wrote down Australia and then crossed it out because I was like... If you remember, I believe that we had... Was it three or was it four Australians in Top 8 last year? That sounds about right. That's a... We had a lot of Guardia players. That's roughly half of Top 8. Gardevoir's still a strong deck. They've all been performing very well. Brent Tonneson, I believe, is coming. He's... Yeah, definitely. Natalie Miller. Yeah. I'm going to put Australia up there, at least one member of Top 8. That's obligatory. Tim Franklin mentioned. Heck yeah. Tim Franklin, he's going to bring over his 64 Feraligatr friends. They're all going to fly on his private jet. He's going to parade himself into Top Cut on their backs. I love his YouTube videos. They're so great. They're great. No, he's doing a really good job of kind of becoming or filling a similar space to what Wolfgluck does. Just not necessarily having the same resume to go along with it. No, but you got to start somewhere. For sure. I think that's fine. For sure. Yeah, he's a character. We love good-spirited, goofy guys. I think we can all appreciate that here. All right, so next one we wanted to do... Maybe you'll pick this Tim Franklin guy to be here, but pick a player you think will do well in AIC. Who do I think is going to do well in this format? Who has been doing well? I am going to go with... Well you know, I'm just going to go Henry Chow. I'm going to take the easy way out, the coward's way out. He's won three regionals this year. He almost won a fourth one. Gardevoir's still a strong deck again. Henry Chow will probably have another deep run as long as he continues to play Gardevoir. If he plays Goldango again, you can't help him, but if he's playing Gardevoir, he'll be on the ball. I don't think he'll play Goldango again. Very unlikely. Yeah, so I thought about this a little bit. I was leaning towards maybe somebody that is a more proven top player at the moment, but I thought about it and I'm like, well, if Barney's Grimmsnarl seems really good, he would be a player that plays that really well. So I'm going with Kieran Fara, who played a lot of Frostlass, Badu, Monkey Dory. I think he's going to take up Grimmsnarl and he'll be the one that finds that 60 that we talked about that'll just have that good Garde matchup and figure out all the lines for everything. I think he's had like that coaching class before NAIC, if I'm not mistaken, it was later, but he's repping Canada really well. I want to see, you know, a shout out to a fellow podcaster, that'd be pretty cool to see him. He had some good runs at the beginning of the season, it'd be cool to have some bookend, you know, from Baltimore to here. So that'd be cool storyline, I'd say. Very nice. And I think we've got one more question. We had, what A-spec do you expect to win NAIC? So Slam Dunk choice, the answer is Secret Box. There is no doubt in my mind that the winning deck in this tournament will either be Gardevoir or Grimmsnarl. I disagree. I think if we're going with the S-tier pick, I would have to put Unfair Stamp. It just is the dominant A-spec for Dusknoir Dragapult right now. For sure. And it's such a good, powerful mid-game. After your opponent's taken a knockout, it shuts down Gardevoir. Well, maybe not Gardevoir as much as Grimmsnarl, but it shuts stuff down. It does what you want it to do. Sometimes it's a lie, but when your deck's still like 30-40 cards, it does a lot. So I think that'll be my pick. But we'll hopefully be able to go into more depth and analysis of all of our woefully inadequate predictions next week. And I am so looking forward to NAIC year. I'm excited to hang out with you a little bit at Trivia on Thursday and play in the Professor Cup. And then definitely hit the ground running Friday and make sure this tournament's awesome. And I know it will be. It's going to be one of the largest tournaments I've ever been a part of. It is the largest tournament I've ever been a part of. I believe so. I think it's the largest tournament ever. It'll be over 3,000. Yeah. Largest out of sight of APAC. Sure. So, yeah, it'll definitely be insanely large. Almost uncomprehensibly large. But it'll be a lot of fun. It'll be pretty chaotic, but I'm excited to see how it all shakes out and definitely excited to see how you do. I'm cheering for you as much as I can in my limited capacity as a judge for TCG Masters. I cannot interact with you, at least from a rulings perspective, but I will be cheering quietly to myself respectfully, professionally. There you go. In every way. I appreciate it, man. I do. Real quick, before we head out, what is one thing not Pokemon related that you're looking forward to or wanting to do while you're in New Orleans? Sure. So me and my brother, my brother's coming and, you know, we're going to be hanging out a good bit. And he lives in Massachusetts and I live in Richmond, Virginia. So it's a little bit like we don't hang out as much as we used to. So I'm definitely looking forward to hanging with him one night. He's scoped out like a tiki bar that's in the area that I think we're going to try to hit up and just have a nice drink and catch up and hang out and decompress a little bit. So looking forward to that. Nice. Very nice. How about you? Food. So there's a spot that's actually I cannot for the life of me remember what the name of it is, but it's on the same street as the venue. And last year, I had never had them prior to going, but they I had some really good grilled frog legs when I was there last year. And it's something that's definitely like traditional Louisiana food. But you go in and they had grilled gator tail and grilled frog legs and was in there with my wife and son last year. I'm definitely going to be hitting up that restaurant again, because it's, you know, it was relatively inexpensive and it was honestly really good. They take they do, in fact, taste just like chicken. There you go. Well, I am a little more brave than I am when it comes to that. But thank you all for listening. Hope you if you're playing at any, I see, you know, feel free to stop by and say hi to us. We'd love to have some interaction. Absolutely. I might not be in the best capacity to do a lot, but I will make every effort to be warm and outgoing as far as I can be as a floor judge. But I'm definitely looking forward to meetings, seeing friends we haven't seen in a long time. And if you are playing, hope you do well. And let us know how you did in the comments after this is posted. Hopefully everybody has all of our listeners are like the best players in the world. And we all have great. Yeah, everybody makes day two, right? Yeah, exactly. There's room for everybody, right? Yeah. So as we shut the show down, you can find the show myself and John on socials. You'll find links to all of those in the description of the episode. Again, if you are not traveling on Wednesday, or if you do have Internet access, or if you're in person in Louisiana at the time, please be sure to check out the Masters Cup. We would definitely appreciate support for that event as well, because it is something that we do plan to continue beyond this one isolated event. So any support for that would be absolutely amazing. And we appreciate everybody checking out not only the show, but I know I personally also appreciate anybody checking out that event. And that being said, we will see you guys on the other side of NAIC on the Battle Frontier. Have a good week. Have a good week.