Episode 36: CROSSING THE FINISH LINE

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, and we are joined this week by my friend and testing partner, and the founder of the Master's Cup series, Hunter Butler, who has a special friend with him, a potential trigger warning if you are afraid of reptiles, snakes in particular. Hunter is holding, I believe it is a boa constrictor? Yeah, this is a ball python. Ball python. Never... Okay. He is... She is a constrictor. Her name is Lola. She's about three feet long. But, yep. Hello to everybody. For those who don't know me, my name is Hunter Butler. This is my 17th competitive year playing. I always say shy of 20, because it sounds better, but this time we went mathematical. I played for most of this year, took a step back from my playing career, and mostly went for more goals in coaching, and same thing with the event. More as a... More on the business side of Pokemon, so it's been an interesting journey. So for those who don't know me, yeah, that is me. I'm also a regional champion, and I've been to quite a few world championships, and invited straight to the day two of the world championships in London 2022. Perfect. And yeah, so for longtime listeners, you'll remember Hunter from our episode specifically about coaching in the Pokemon TCG, and if you have not listened to that episode, I highly recommend you go back and check it out. Personally, it's my favorite one that we've done so far. But that being said, this week we are planning to go over that Masters Cup tournament that was held in New Orleans last week, before we tackle the Grimmsnarl deck that Hunter and myself piloted during the main event, and just kind of going over our tournament runs and everything. We'll tackle John's experience judging, specifically stream judging, or any other judging experiences that he had at the event. And then we'll go over the event as a whole, meta percentages, conversion rates, what did top cut look like, kind of the meat and potatoes that you should typically expect people to review when they look at these tournaments. But with that being said, we were all kind of in New Orleans last week, so I think we all know how everyone's week went last week. But I guess what I would ask is, what was the highlight of your experience at NAIC? And we'll start with you, Hunter, as the guest. My highlight, for sure, was my last student completing his goal. My coaching is goal-based, so he was the last person to not have obtained his world's invite. So we went 10 for 10 this year with the 10 students that I took for the full year, three of which I got just around Atlanta with only the last couple of events to actually complete the world's invite. So we had nine world's invitations and one top 16 goal. All of them, I felt like were, for a lighter word, some of them were unachievable, and I'm glad we were actually able to make it happen, because for me, it puts a lot of stress on the coaching relationship when the parents and the kids do not actually get the expectations that they want. So for me, that's way better than anything else that could have happened. I was more concerned with Corey getting his world's invite than I was with me, so it was a nice sigh of relief and monkey off my back, monkey dory off my back from having that happen. And I'm glad that I came home to all my pets being okay. Lola here has not been outside of her cage in five days, so I'm happy that she's feeling funny and wants to hang out. Perfect. Perfect. How about you, John? Yeah, the highlight for me was two, I think, stick out in my mind. The first one was stream judging with a local judge, Ben Haynes, who helped me prep for the Professor Cup. I think I gave him a shout out for that. He and I were stream judges for round nine, and I was a last minute addition to the stream judge team. I got there Thursday. I wasn't scheduled to do stream judge at all, and so me and Ben were, I think, just doing sides or something, like learning how to do a couple of different sides that we hadn't done before. And I get a phone call from the head judge, and he's like, hey, do you want to do stream? And I'm like, sure, yeah, that sounds pretty good. Yeah, we got put into what arguably is one of the more scrutinized rounds in round nine. He handled it well. I took over a lot of the stuff that might have been unfamiliar to him, and I left him with more of the table judging side of stuff, like something you might encounter at a League Cup or regionals at a higher level. And he did really well, pointing out a couple things to me that I might have missed. And yeah, it went okay. I think there was room for improvement on some things. I hate to say it, but he came up to me after the fact and was like, hey, we might have missed something. We did all right. I would say that it was a really good experience overall, and that I'm really hopeful to see how Ben develops. But just something really cool about somebody that, I'm sure Hunter is familiar with this, but somebody that you kind of invite into the community, invite into being a judge at a regional level, and kind of try to help their growth and development. And when they succeed, you feel like you've succeeded in a way. That leads to the other highlight for me was Omar Cortez, the second place finisher for senior division. He's a local of mine, and I've been playtesting with him a lot before regionals the last two years, getting him ready for Yokohama. And then after that, with the last two, every time there's a new format, like after rotation or whenever we have a new set come out, I'm usually trying to get a couple days of playtesting in with him. And that was definitely before NAIC, we met up Sunday just to get some in-person testing. I know he gets a lot of coaching from other people, and I'm sure I'm pretty low in that hierarchy of qualified individuals that he's getting testing from. But it definitely feels like I did my part where I could, where I'm not the best mind for the game, but I definitely know how to play Pokemon, and I know what it's like to play at a regional level, an IC level. So I was hopeful that some of that came across, and it looked like some of it did, if not. But that was really just so awesome, like, you know, meant so much to him and his family. Like he's been trying to, going into the tournament, his goals were like, beat Justin Templer, beat Gabriel Fernandez and win an IC, you know, and he knocked off one of those three. I think he came really close to getting all three at one sweep, which was really cool, but... He was very close. Dude, yeah, yeah. It was a good game in the finals. There was a couple of things that, you know, some great plays from Gabriel, not to take anything away from him. He definitely pulled it out in game one. There was a point in which, you know, he had to damage Fez in the active, and I'm like, oh, this could be over. And he quick searched Turo, and I'm like, oh, never mind. This is pretty brutal. So it went from, you know, we're so back to it's so over pretty quick. And yeah, it was a great finals and great experience for him. Just cool to see him up on the stage on Sunday. That's not many people get to say that they have done that in their Pokemon journey. No, that's awesome. Very cool. But anyway, yeah, Aaron, how was your NAIC experience? It was amazing, to be honest with you. I got to do some, what I feel were really amazing things for myself, both from like a professional perspective, from a Pokemon perspective, and from, I guess, what you could call a professional Pokemon perspective. So Hunter was, you know, we've known each other a long time. I've known Hunter since, you know, he was playing in juniors and seniors. And you know, he went through the whole process, organizing and setting up everything for this Masters Cup event, and was kind enough to allow me the opportunity to cast in that event. And so I got to go through and cast games with Jeremy Jallon, who I've, you know, known since the 2000s as well. Kyle Sablehouse, who I've known since we were both 12, 13 years old. And getting to sit on the couch in this, you know, it was a more relaxed environment that's not quite as, not uptight, but not as buttoned up as what you would expect the official stream at, you know, a regional or an IC to be. And being able to sit in that environment with, you know, people you know, and have a good time and feel good about the product that you're putting out was a really great experience, as well as also getting to watch a lot of, you know, amazing gameplay from a lot of amazing players in the process of doing all that. And then being able to turn right around from that and feel, I felt really locked in going into NAIC this year. And I've had a few other tournaments this season where I've been waffling on deck choice, not knowing what I wanted to play, not feeling super great about my list. And then as a result, not putting up super great results at some events. And some things have been, you know, a matter of what I feel were really bad variants, like starting Blood Moon eight or nine times in Baltimore, playing Palkia Dusnor. But for this list in particular, I don't know, it was a lot. It was a lot. I started Blood Moon a billion times. I might as well have started Blood Moon every game. But for this event, I, you know, was pretty set on playing Grimmsnarl as of, you know, a week and a half prior, maybe even longer. Like I started grinding Grimmsnarl games as soon as that Marnie deck was available on TCG Live. And the list was obviously nowhere near refined at that point. But slowly over time, making changes and getting closer and closer to what I felt was a pretty good list. And we obviously made some last minute changes that I think really put it, inched it closer to being perfect. I'm not quite set on saying that it was a perfect 60, but it was a very solid 60 going to this event. And I think that I was able to, you know, take it far, pretty far outside of two very unfortunate matchups that we'll get into a little bit later. And then one round where I just fully, totally dead, dead drew brick, didn't get to play a game in either game in the series. It went really well. And I was able to actually lock up a World's Invite for the first time since 2012. So the first full season I've played since that year, being able to put a World's Invite together, you know, showing myself that I'm not just some washed up old man, it feels really good. It was really cool. Lowell says you're not washed either, dude. Yeah. Oh, I know. We're both proud of you. It's been really special to see your journey and get to talk to you so, you know, week to week and see how it's going and see how you've progressed. And it's, it means a lot, you know, you know, you always cheer for your friends. If you can't do it, you know, you want them to do it. But it's especially the case like this season, you know, following you and just kind of seeing the highs and lows firsthand a lot of the time. Sure. You know, congrats, man. I know from the amount of events too that you played, like me and you both did a similar amount of events. Nobody else was playing the amount of events that me and you were playing and then actually getting close, like only playing sub eight events. Like I played, I played five total majors this season. That's yeah. That's so impressive, dude. You know, I mean, I'm fortunate enough, one of them was an SPE and there's a whole conversation going on around that right now. But still going to that SPE, I did manage to convert that to a top eight finish. And yes, there's, you could make an argument that maybe those points should be scaled down slightly, but you know, that's the system as it lies right now. Yeah. Don't be embarrassed. No, I'm not. I'm not going to say that I quote unquote took advantage of it. I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to go to that tournament, but it's not like I, you know, I didn't get the cash prizing that I would have gotten if I had gotten a similar result at a regional. So getting the points was kind of just the victory out of that whole scenario. Yeah. And I hate that argument too. I think it's such a poor argument because like for you to get opportunities to play Pokemon, you have to travel around the world and SPEs are just another event to travel to. There's, it's just no different than anything else. Right. I mean, you can make the same, a similar argument I feel to, well, I don't know, maybe that's a bad faith argument to make, but if somebody goes to has best, best finish limit entries from all three ICs, it's probably more egregious in my mind than someone that goes to three regionals and SPE and one IC. Yeah. I don't, again, in the same kind of thing, like Pokemon allows these, not only are they hard to get into because of the registration that, you know, the travel means Pokemon has always been a hobby that has catered to, especially when you're talking about juniors and seniors, to the families that are affluent enough to travel everywhere. So I don't know why everyone thinks that prestige and what's the word I'm looking for, prestige and privilege that I was looking for the other people, prestige and privilege are supposed to be like together. You know, if you have an opportunity to go to more events and make worlds, that doesn't make you any less good. And if you don't have an opportunity to go to as much events and you still make worlds, that doesn't make you better than the ones that go to more events. It's just, right. You still had to take advantage of the opportunities that you were, you know, you registered for and played in. And like, you did that. Like, I don't think you can take that away. Yeah. I know the one, the one big call out are obviously the two South African events that are, you know, largely cup size, but the players in that region do still have opportunities to earn worlds invites. So they still deserve the opportunity to play in an event that can earn them an equivalent amount of CP, you know, as hopefully that community grows, those events will either become larger or they'll be capped to a point where people who are not local to that area won't be able to play in them. And it will be kind of a moot discussion point anyway. And I think South Africa too, has been on the back of the world shirt for a long time. I know we've had several South African invites throughout like 2011 to now. Like I think if there was the support for a type of regional like that, I think people would go for sure, especially Europe. There would be some diehard Europeans that would go for sure, because that's their side of the world, you know? Yeah. I think that we've kind of blabbered a little bit here, here and there. The one, one last call, other cool thing that I got to do this weekend was the 2010 side event on Sunday. It was a lot of fun to revisit an old format, to be able to figure out that the Tyranitar list that I've been giving to people online has actually been incorrect for the past, however many. years. So I need to get with Alex Wilson and whoever else runs retro websites and let them know that that list is not supposed to have four judge in it. It's supposed to have to judge a night maintenance and an expert belt. And it'll be much better. Maybe people will stop thinking the deck is bad. Most certainly is not. No, I went through an hour, right? Yeah. But I mean, that was the sad thing. The event was capped at a three round thing. They said that was for prizing reasons because they would be required to provide additional prizing that they hadn't accounted for. If we ran longer, we had almost 100 people sign up for it, which was really cool to see, especially since everyone was playing with real cards. Like no proxies were allowed, you weren't allowed to use world's cards. So just having everybody sit down and the probably the coolest thing about this weekend from that perspective, is it bled really hard into the 2010 event where how many people who played in 2010, that were actually present for that event. So we got to see 2010 National Championship. Conley came out and he was playing. Alex Fresco was there. John Bristow. Jimmy Ballard was there. Yeah, Jimmy. Well, even though Jimmy was running, but still, and I see he was one of the organizers, but he was there hanging out. We had an odd number of players. So Jimmy jumped into that. Chip took a break from casting to come play even though I don't think he was actually playing in 2010. I know he is a big retro fan of retro. Yeah. Puka was walking around the event area actually stopped at one of my games and commented, you're still playing that thing. That's funny. So it was just a really good time. Hopefully, you know, they made it sound like there were going to be eyes on that event as if it could have some further capacity at a later date. So I'm hoping that that means that we'll get some support for it at some point. Because I think that it would be really cool. It's a really fun format. And I urge anyone who enjoys retro formats to definitely check out 2010 in particular. It's a good yeah, now we just need now we just need them to realize the MD call is better than 2010. I hope if they're gonna if they're gonna have more retro events, they need to do like a reprint set or start like print the old deck somehow and allow them for play like as much as I love retro, like having it, you have to have the legal cards like we were looking at the your deck just because you were like interested in buying it or whatever. And like, teach our prime is pushing the primes are egregious. Yeah, it's up there pretty bad. I think what was it? They're close to teachers are like 60. Yeah. Right now, the box, things like ooxy level x is like $120. Luxury is like 80 bucks now. Well, you can play the celebrations luxury. Okay, so that one's super cheap. So that was like maybe for the 30th anniversary, they'll do a lot of the reprints of like, older stuff. I think that's such a good idea. Like I hope they do something like reprinting Clayton Luxury x definitely helped 2010 format players 100% and Garchomp C level x. Exactly. So anyways, not to get off the drill. Talking about Yeah, we're, we're gonna be just spewing over here. We're gonna like run it up to five hours. Oh, geez. All right. It's fine. It's fine. The next thing we had on the docket, though, and I'm going to yield the floor to hunter here was just the meat and potatoes of the Masters Cup itself. And so I gave a brief overview during last week's episode about what the event was. But just I wanted to get your perspective and your words directly from you as the source for kind of how this idea came to be, how you felt everything went last week. And what plans if any you have for the future of this event in this event series? Yeah, so the main idea now that I have now that I've done so many speeches on it, I have such a better condensed version, you know, when you talk about something, the more times you talk about it, the easier it is to like sum it up. So the idea is that it's a series that will allow old to allow skill from older players, modern level players and up and coming players to mix it up on camera to essentially get what the what I believe the community wants, which is the best of the best playing it out, or duking it out on camera, which is what Pokemon tries to emulate with these nationals and regional stream, they try to get a competitive game every round. However, there's thousands of people in these tournaments. So it's hard to get the, you know, to gear towards the best of the best until you get to something like top eight. So the idea is that every round is a banger, every round is entertaining, and it kind of gives some prestige to the players are basically saying, hey, even though I'm from the older generation, and you might not know about me now that Pokemon has blown up socially, right? Like an Aaron Curry, like us, Steve Silvestro, like a Frank Diaz, some of these people that maybe only I know, or or like john ang and past generations, right? Kind of the seniors and juniors that are now into their 20 somethings might know, whereas like somebody like, you know, who's only been playing two or three years, has no idea who Frank Diaz or Israel Sosa, or Igor Costa or any of these people are right. So the idea is to not only bring forth old names to then show their skill with new games, but also to just have the ethos of Pokemon of like, the best of the best community, different countries playing together, it kind of had a summit feel to it where like, people were just discussing matchups. And the the games were very, they were high level, but they were casual. We also, we didn't do any penalties at the tournament, there was only a penalty for slow play. So it was a two prize penalty if you were caught slow playing in best of one or best of three, either or so any type of trying to steal the game by by slow playing, that was the only penalty you could get. So for instance, if a card got saw off top, we're not giving penalties for that. We're here for the top integrity of the game. And also to showcase one junior one senior per series that happens to let them give them a chance. Hey, I can make it with the big dogs when it's time for me to age up. So we had Jose Cruz, number one junior who is now passed by Annabelle Ono. And we also had Gabriel Fernandez, who was able to complete the full hat trick with all three ICS plus winning every regional and I pray that he wins world so it could just be Omar might have to say something about that. But yeah, yeah. So as far as the event goes, I think it went well. Um, you know, we had some problems. We had some weather issues. We had some AC issues. I was lucky enough to get this venue for free. So that's something I'll never complain about. I think all of the players had a good time until the weather stuff happened. We had a crazy storm that shut us down for power, but we only lost power for an hour. And so I think all things that could have gone wrong. I think that being the one thing that went wrong, something that's not in my control, I'm really happy about. The food was amazing. Shout out to Owen, who is a local restaurateur who came in and catered the event. His food was phenomenal. It was unbelievably good. Yeah, and I just appreciate everyone showing up and showing love. You know, I didn't do a whole lot of promo for this event, because that's not what I'm getting out of it. I'm not on social media. That's kind of not what matters to me. I wanted to give away some great prizes, get some good Pokemon on camera. And I think I guess the best thing or that really matters to me is that out of 23 players, 16 of them played the almost the exact same deck by if not a couple cards or the same 60 at national. So the event actually meant something to the meta, especially when talking about like Cynthia's Garchomp, like Garchomp was bought out of the venue on day one, there was not a single Garchomp you could buy because of Fabian. And obviously Rowan winning the event with Charizard, Dragapult, and then him, Jackson, Makani, all of them actually playing the exact same list and then doing well at nationals just proves that you don't have to sandbag in an event like this, where we don't release lists, which we will never do. I'm just going to put that out there. Now we will never release lists for these tournaments. If players want to post what they played to present hype or talk or sell their services or content or whatever, they're more than welcome to do that. But we here as a brand of the Masters Cup, we will never be releasing lists. So hopefully, all 23 players will play decks that they decide to play at the IC for the next one that we have. So really excited for the full series and the top four from this series will be invited to the final top 16 invitational at next year's worlds where there'll be double elimination till the finals. So yeah, it's going to be double elimination bracket to the finals for 16 players. So really, really excited to have gotten the first one in the books. And I think the, you know, from the people that I spoke to around just judge people, caster people, players, people who are just next to me in my rounds who saw my saw the merch or saw the tournament like speaking to me, really appreciate all the support. I mean, I really did not get any, like bad reviews. I think the AC things sucked. I mean, it's New Orleans, it was really hot. So there was there was some bad their main AC wasn't as good. Luckily, the players room was super cold. So everyone was in the room that everyone was playing in. It was fine. But outside it was it was hot. So it's fine, too, for what it's worth. We had a box fan next to it. Well, I appreciate you saying. I think I think Aaron's lying. It was a little warm, but I was fine. Great. We're from Florida. It might be a little a little different. I know. I know boo had a hand fan that she was using pretty much the entire day. I think they were a little hot, but that's something that we can it's it that's something that's easily fixable, right? Instead of like, some of these other problems. I also want to say that not one single match, except for the finals went to time, not one. So all the best of one rounds, which shouldn't be a surprise to these type of players. But in all the the ACM and top eight and top four never went to time. And it went to just I think Rowan was turn one, or he ended on turn one or ended on turn two, whatever it was. So we didn't even write full time. So the play pace was just chef's kiss from all the players. And I really appreciate that. So yeah, overall, started on time, ended only about an hour and a half late, even though for an hour, we didn't have power. I feel like the stream is going to get better. Obviously, we're going to upgrade some things. And I'm going to change how I do the food. I was trying to make it as lax as possible. So anyone can kind of eat when they want. But I think it's probably better to do like a set time so that everybody can have a break, eat, hang out, make it more of an experience and less of like a break, you know. So hopefully, for that, for Brazil, which will be the next one, we'll be able to do that. So yeah, very excited for the Brazilian one, which I'm happy to announce two will be half of Latin American players and then half of other players. So each region, nationals will always be or NAIC will always be split by several regions. But for EUIC and LAIC, the Europeans and the Latin Americans will take half of the actual picks out of the tournament. So it will be 12 Latin American players and 12 other players at Latin America. And then for EUIC, 12 Europeans and 12 other players. And then when we go back to NAIC and even split, or maybe even I'll give some extras to Americans and Canadians if I'm feeling good. We'll see how it goes, you know. And so just to clarify, like you said, the top four from this event are going to be invited to the final invitational. Yep, the presumably four as well from that LAIC event. And I guess that's going to be the structure moving forward. So we'll get four, the top four from each of these four successive events will become the pool of players for that final invitational at 2026 Worlds. Yep, that those 16 will be the final 16. Yep, that will play for the big prize. I'm hoping, you know, I don't want to, I really want to like say the ideas, but I don't want to get anybody super hyped. But I'm thinking of like a high value piece of jewelry or something, something very custom instead of cash for the final one. So I'm hoping I can make it happen. But at least for now, the high cash prizes are going to stay for the for the series as of right now. That's that's what we're budgeting for. And that's what we're shooting for. Perfect. Which for those who didn't know was 2000 for first 1000 for second and 500 for top four, and there was zero entry fee. Nobody paid anything. That's awesome. Yeah. And I also provided, like I said, I provided food for everyone that showed up, which also was not paid for. Nobody paid for any of that. So I'll make some shout outs at the end of the podcast for those. Cool. Yeah, and it was cool to see the judges you chose for the event. I know Bobby and Lucy are really, really, like phenomenal judges, had judges of Nash several nationals in several worlds. Luckily, luckily, you know, Bobby has known me since I was a kid. Yeah. And Lucy is a person who made the trophies, which I was dumb enough to forget to fly with. So I'll be shipping the trophy to Rowan and Fabrizio for first and second. And Lucy is super, super awesome. She was also my Japanese translator. So yeah, it was, it was very, I think we had a good staff for judging between myself almost a 20 year veteran, Lucy and Bobby who've been judging for way longer than a lot of people. I think it was the appropriate judges for this type of lineup. And Bobby will continually be working with me for the series. He will be he will me and him will be judging all of them. And hopefully Lucy too. Great. Yeah. Also shout outs to Lucy as our Japanese translator for the event. And friend of the pod and you know, personal friend of myself and hunter Santiago Rodriguez as our Spanish translator for the event. Which he did work, which was awesome. I'm glad we needed a translation from which is awesome. It was really dope. But just to give you know, a quick rundown of the final results for that event. The top four of the event were Rowan Stabenow with Pultzard, Fabrizio Silva with Raging Bolt, Ogre Pawn and second place Yoshiyuki Yamaguchi with Marnie's Grim Snarl and Fabian. I always say his last name wrong. Pujol. Okay. Yeah, I see. I never remember which one it is. But Fabian with Cynthia's Garchomp of all things. And like you said, I believe all four of those players played those same four archetypes into NAIC. They sure did. Which was super cool to see. Super cool. Yeah, I was sandbagging was something I was worried about for the pyramid. But I am like, so so incredibly happy that these players not only took the time or to take it seriously because of the money, right, but also because And this is just an opinion. This is not a fact. But I think some of them actually sat down and thought to themselves, well, I just played this tournament. I did really well. I played against the best players in the world. Why should I not be playing this tournament? Or why should I not be playing this deck for Nats? And I think if more people take that approach for the tournaments that I do, I think it will be effectively some of the best testing that any of them can come up with because egos get in the way with testing groups. And none of these people work together. So I hope that through networking and sharing food and drinks and hanging out, being in the same room, playing high-level Pokemon, that they could get across some respect for each other and maybe even work together. Some of them might – like I know Yoshiyuki and Tord work together. So I think them being there too and interacting, same thing with Rowan and Kieran. They work together. So them playing the tournament, I think it's just a nice networking event. And hopefully as we do more of them, we can do some different things like shoot content. Jesper and Kieran filmed all their games. I allowed any player that wanted to to film all of their games for content. And I will continue to do that for all of these to allow them to make a name for themselves or do whatever they want to do with it. I just want it to be – I want it to be based around community, multinational, high-level play in a relaxed setting where kind of the best of the best can just be celebrated basically. Yeah, and I think people want to see that. I do. So thanks for doing it, man. It's really something special in the community. And I'm looking forward to the next one. Absolutely. And I am as well. So the next thing we have up on the docket is to go ahead and in place of the time capsule this week, I'm going to be a little selfish, and I'm going to talk about the deck that I played at NAIC. And together Carter Barsh, who spent a good amount of time in Japan and then moved over Mike Wharton out of Georgia. Maize. Oh, Maize gave some input. He was there for – Maize was there for the conversations too. Like Maize, Jalen, Mike, Carter, myself, you, Bodhi as well. A lot of conversations with Bodhi about Grimmsnarl over the week's upcoming. There was definitely a lot of hands in the Grimmsnarl deck, not specifically this list, but just the Grimmsnarl deck as a whole. I wanted to make sure I brought up that little moment, even though Aaron got his world tonight with it, not me. And so we tested out a lot of combinations of a lot of cards in this deck. At one point we had no boss for countercatcher. You can see here we definitely shifted back the other way. And the big thing, like at one point this was two countercatcher, two boss, and an iron bundle. But the big kind of high-level things, to call it here, are that we landed on third boss over the iron bundle, specifically because we cut an artisan from the deck, so iron bundle was less searchable. And the boss gives you the target you want every single time proactively, specifically in Mirror and Gardevoir, whereas the iron bundle... Yeah, Dragapult too, yes. So, you know, you can target specifically things like Monkey Dory, or against Poltzard you can pull up a Charmander off the bench, and you get to isolate exactly the thing that you want to knock out. Whereas the iron bundle your opponent has the opportunity to put some level of counterplay into. Even though it does have a place in certain matchups at certain instances, and you could almost consider them relatively interchangeable, they will have small edge cases where they are stronger than each other. But, you know, the big thing, having the fifth Gust card felt extremely important this weekend. Yeah, I agree. And I kind of yapped everybody's ear off about kind of the Dragapult conversation, which is how we came... why I came to the point that three boss is so good. By the way, we didn't test any games with three boss. I just basically yapped with everyone and said that I would not be playing the deck unless everybody was going to play three boss. The idea was that when Dragapult Mirror first started, when Dragapult became a very, very strong deck post-Regidrago, right? When Dragapult started to become more of the rotation, right, with Dragapult, had high countercatcher count with low boss, and then people would play around that. And so what happened, what was the natural succession of that, for Mirror, you wanted that extra boss so that you could drag up their Dracloak or chase the energy faster, right, in the Mirror match, and also against stuff like Gardevoir, where you want to chase certain Pokemon like Monkeydory. So I basically said, you know what, why don't we just skip that altogether? We know we're going to want to play... we're going to want to be favored in Mirror. We already beat Gardevoir, but if we have three boss, we definitely beat them a lot harder as we can chase Monkeydory and Gardevoir a lot more aggressively. And then same thing with the Mirror. Any Mirror that only has two boss and two countercatcher, we're overthrowing because we have the third boss. One, because they'll be playing around that, and two, we can gust more monkeys than they can. So that was kind of the thought process behind the third boss, was that we were just going to jump the gun on the Mirror and say, well, everybody's going to be playing more CC, so we can play more boss, let them go ahead, use our CCs, and then have more boss in the late game, or be more aggressive in the early game to shut them out. So yeah, personally, I think third boss was the best card in the list, and it's the card that I use the most out of everything. Like the third boss, I would not have won some of the games that I won without the third copy. Absolutely. Other kind of big call-out inclusion is the fourth copy of Monkeydory, which I know you ran into a Mirror match at 1.100 that, in tandem, the third boss plus the fourth Monkeydory led to an eventual victory. You can make the argument there were some other high-level players, like Ian Robb and Charlie Lockyer, that only played three Monkeydory. The reason and the rationale that I went kind of down the path of including the fourth copy was you aren't running a ton of ways to search it. We had opted to cut an artisan in favor of that card. You want to open it as often as possible because it is just the de facto best starter in the deck. Hands down, your ideal opener is to have Monkeydory in the active, slap a Dark on it, use a TM Evo with it, and then you can Rescue Board it to the bench next turn and just kind of hide that energy away while maintaining a Monkeydory lead over your opponent in almost every matchup. The three most successful decks that are not named Raging Bolt all play Monkeydory in them right now, and being able to get out to a quicker Monkeydory chain lead over those decks is extremely important. Yeah, also, too, the difference with those lists, too, is they had the third stretcher, right? And we had the argument the night before, what was better, to have the third Monkey and a third stretcher or to have the fourth Monkey? The reason, again, like Aaron kind of described, is that not only do we want to open it, but we kind of came to the conclusion that Monkey is just the best card in the format, so why wouldn't you just want maximum copies of this card? It is the best card, so having four copies just makes sense, not in a sense that you're ever going to get to quad Monkey board state. However, I did get to it twice, and it was completely unbeatable. I played a Dragapult Zard guy when I got to four Monkey plus Grimmstar and the Active Borgam on the bench, and I could just sit there and pass and wait until I have boss because there's absolutely nothing they can do. They can attack me and give me 120 damage to mess with and allow me to make a 300 plus 30 snipe, or they can do nothing and wait for me to win the game either way. So it just puts them in such a bad position when you actually get to that, and I also find that it's not really something that's too hard to figure out, but when you have four Monkeys, you can get to a three Monkey board state a lot better than the three Monkey lists can because of prizes and resources and all of that and drawing into them as well, raw drawing them. With this deck not having a draw engine, having the fourth copy makes it very easy to get down two or three. So yeah, I was arguing back and forth with Aaron about not wanting a fourth Monkey because most of the time we could only get three up, and then as we were having that conversation, the epiphany of, well, if I want three up, then having four is the best thing to make it happen. So yeah, I'll give old man Aaron his props on the fourth Monkey because I was arguing pretty hard in favor of third Stretcher and or another card. So yeah, I will say there is a card that I think the deck could use. I don't know whether I go to third Arvin or third Research, but I think Morty's Conviction is actually really good in the deck to build upon a hand that you already have where you simply cannot research too many supporters away, and I found myself having some games where it's like I need a big combo, but I have to research away several supporters, which sometimes it doesn't hurt you. So I don't know if one to two copies of Morty, like going three Research, three Arvin, four Iono, two Morty's or four Arvin, three Research, four Iono, one Morty, something like that. I think Morty's could be a really strong supporter in the deck to just build upon a hand that already has a couple pieces, and the benches in this format are just so ridiculously fat. Everybody's bench is huge. So as far as cards to come in before Black Bolt comes out, I think that's one of them because when Black Bolt comes out, I think the Air Balloon and the Maractus, Air Balloon will come in, and that will make Maractus a lot better with the retreating problem. I think a Skateboard or Rescue Board or whatever is pretty much going to be gone for the Air Balloon as soon as that card comes out. For sure. Right. And then, so like you called out, right now we do have four Research in the deck. I know a lot of lists played three. I think I even saw some that only played two Research, which that's kind of mind-blowing to me. I can't imagine having fewer than, I mean, I personally can't imagine having fewer than eight draw supporters in the deck, but running fewer than seven is just asking for trouble. You're going to brick far more often. Eight felt like a really good number all weekend. I felt like, you know, like I said, I bricked one round, two games. Otherwise, I felt pretty consistent in having access to a draw supporter when I needed access to it throughout the weekend. It was really nice. The other big thing, the initial list that we saw come out of Japan from that Champions League only ran one copy of TM Evolution. You know, we figured out pretty early on that having the second copy is pretty important into getting your Stage 1s up as quickly as possible. You don't have a ton of Search cards. Spike Myth is absolutely a broken Stadium card. Might be one of, if not the best, single Stadium card in the format because it is only beneficial to you as a Grimmsnarl player, and the only time that it ever benefits your opponent is specifically in a Mirror matchup. I mean, you can make the edge case argument that when you Iono something important to the bottom of your opponent's deck, they can shuffle it so it's no longer trapped there. But the big thing is just it's not actually providing them value in terms of thinning their deck or searching out an important combo piece, which is why we did see, again, Ian Robb's group, Ian Charlie Locke here. I'm not sure who else was involved with it. They opted to run zero Artisan and run three Spike Myth instead, which is something that I guess might be worth testing, but it would require probably a modification of the list. I know that they had extra copies of Nest Ball. You'd have to kind of rework that whole search engine to make sure you could still get Monkey on the board consistently enough. Yeah, a hundred percent. I think without the extra copies of Nest Ball, you wouldn't reliably be able to get a Badoo and Shaman and Monkey. And I'm going to be honest, the Artisan was quite clutch. However, I played Charlie, which was, you know, we were close to like a 57, 58 card Mirror, but the stuff that you play in the Mirror, we had the same amount of boss and I had one more Monkey. And we kind of talked about it and he was just like, I don't want to give my opponents any Artisan ever. Like, I don't want them to find Basics. I don't want them to find Monkey to deal with my Monkeys. I just don't want them to ever have that. And I think there is some merit to that. However, I will say that Artisan was an insane card for me and there was a lot of like seriously gross hands where I would either top deck Artisan or open Artisan or Iona into Artisan and it's saving my board setup. Yeah, that's the other argument. It gets to the point where your opponent has four bench Pokemon and you have Artisan. And it's like, it doesn't really make a huge difference. Like against a Joltik box, it doesn't make a difference if they Artisan. Like you're going to get another Joltik? Nah. So yeah, definitely. Yeah, turns where you can pop it on the board when your opponent is already bench locked, you know, a Raging Bolt after turn one or something. It definitely feels good to be able to go grab Monkey, go grab Badoo, go grab Shaman, go get your second Snow Runt into play if your first one gets KO'd. Like there are definitely use cases for it and I would probably argue that it is still worth the spot. But I could also, you know, see the validity of the argument going in the opposite direction. But the big thing, you know, like we said before, Monkey is your absolutely best starter. You want to open it every possible game that you can. And you just are hoping that you can get into a TM Evo play on turn one. And depending on the matchup, sometimes you're getting double Frostlass, sometimes you're getting double Morgrem, sometimes you're getting one of each. And, you know, it also depends on which basics you're able to get down, obviously. But being able to identify which of those board states you want to arrive at is something that you just kind of come up with over time with experience. It also depends on, you know, what your opponent's board state looks like initially as well. The thing that I've learned throughout this weekend is that, you know, you don't need to rush Grimmsnarl into play against Raging Bolt. If you just open double Frostlass, a lot of times you can put a ton of pressure on your opponent and either force them off to keep Owls off the board. Sometimes you'll prevent them from benching a second Ogre Pawn, which relieves a lot of pressure on your Grimmsnarls. It makes your Ionos more powerful. When you're against Gardevoir, just getting two Morgrems out and just having them sit there on your bench can be a big threat to whatever the Gardevoir player is trying to do. Because at any point, you could just Evolve 1, punk up the two Energies, and go boss a Gardevoir and take prizes. Or get aggressive with Morgrem to save yourself from being confused by Monkey Dory. I think, too, I think a lot of the weaker Grimmsnarl players probably did get preyed on by stronger Gardevoir players who actually understand the confusing lines in the board states or playing extra copies of Monkey Dory like Bradner and them did. So I think there are probably a lot of Grimmsnarl players that thought that just sitting down against Gardevoir, it's a free matchup, you actually have to know what you're doing or else you get exploited pretty good. One of the games I played against Gardevoir, I prized some Morgrem and I had to set up the double Grimmsnarl board state, which is what you have to do. You have to Candy 1 and then set up the second one so that when you get confused, you can either Rescue Board Retreat or load up a bunch of Energy so you can switch between them and then Monkey off the one that gets confused. So it gets very sticky versus Gardevoir. People think you just sit down and get a win and that's just not the case at all. covers everything that really makes this list more, you know, unique, for lack of a better word. Is there anything else that you would want to call it, Hunter, before we kind of move on? Uh, no. I think, uh, 61st card, I would have liked 3rd Morgrem. I think that's 61st card. 2nd Nestfall would have been nice, too. I already talked about the Morty, but 2nd Westfall would be cool, too. 3rd Morgrem, specifically for the people, the better players in the game who are actually understanding about the confusion lines with Monkey Dory and Dragapult and with Monkey Dory in Gardevoir. Just, like, when people go lone Grimmsnarl plus multiple Monkey Dory, right? So, I think that 3rd Morgrem would have been my 61st card. Other than that, I felt like the 2 Candy also was broken. I would not go lower than that. Wouldn't go lower than 2 Evo. 1 Ultra Ball never hurt me. I never wished for a 2nd one. I think it's the worst card in the deck, so I'm glad that we only played 1 of it. I think playing 2 would have been just nonsense. I want to give some credit to Ian and Charlie, as I gotta believe that there's some upside to playing Fez with that amount of Nestfalls and that there are some games that you close out with it. I just fear that opening it in some games, it's just going to be the reason that you lose, and I just do not. I want to have control about how many prizes I put in board, especially with a spread deck. When you think about the history of spread decks, like Tapu Koko spread and Decidueye spread and Espeon GX with the Garbodor, those decks were strong because they could create single board states and then choose to put 2 prizes in play when they want, and they had a very minimal amount of 2 prizes that they could start. So, I think just spread as an archetype, you really don't want too many liabilities because you want as many prizes and as many turns as you can get for Frostlass and Monkey Dory to tick and your Shadow Bullets. So, yeah, I think just as a concept as spread, you don't want to have a lot of 2-prize liabilities. However, I gotta believe that Ian and Charlie, they're making a decent decision. So, I'm going to try it out, and before I hate on it, I'm going to see how it goes. Sure. Sure. John, I know you didn't play the deck or didn't play this weekend at all because you were judging, but did you have any thoughts or questions about it? I played a little bit. I didn't play Standard that much, but I played some of their stuff. I had a question. I was curious, how do y'all beat Joltik at all, like the Joltik box matchup? We talked about it a little bit when you ran Corner from Maractus, but I see you took that out. So, what's your game plan against that in Raging Bolt? Raging Bolt, like I said, double Frostlass early on is extremely powerful, and then you just kind of build up enough damage that you can use a Grimmsnarl, which they'll typically be at 4, maybe 3 prizes by the time you use your first one, and then you have the second one can typically just close the game out. Take 4 prizes with the second one. Yeah. That ends up being pretty straightforward, especially if you can get 2 Frostlass online on turn 1 or 2. Sometimes even just 1 can be enough, just because typically when you have the 1, if they have an Ogrepon in play, it takes 10 going to them, 2 coming back to you, so it's at 20. If you can countercatch it, Shadow Bullet it, it goes up to 200, gets KO'd by Frostlass, they don't even get access to Fez. By that point, they've probably got a Fan Rotom on their bench that's also going to be at 30, so if you wanted to, you could take 3 prizes there, or you're putting damage on a Hoothoot or a Noctowl on the bench, and the 1 prize knockouts on the Rotom and then at least one Hoothoot slash Noctowl end up being pretty important in terms of your prize exchange throughout the course of the game. That makes sense. Yeah, Raging Bolt is effectively, you are playing a Monkey Dory Frostlass deck, and you are trying to get a board state of Shaman plus Bidu plus Frostlasses and Monkey Dories, and Bidu them over and over and over and over and over again, and after they sweat for a couple Bidus as you're dragging up Noctowls and damaging things, then you can eventually start turning into a Grimmsnarl deck, right? You kind of play it like regular Frostlass Monkey Dory pre-Grimmsnarl coming out, and then similarly, you can do this against Joltik as well. It kind of helps, one, if they don't know what they're doing. If they get Latias down too soon, then the matchup is just completely chocked, but I actually managed to beat 120. However, he did hard brick one game, and then the other game, he opened Bloodmoon, and his only nest ball that he had, he used for Mariodon to then get the two Lightning types, so once I was able to start Bidu-ing the Bloodmoon, he can no longer find Latias, so that Bloodmoon is trapped. So the best game plan you can have is to try to trap a Pokemon before Latias gets put into play. If there's not enough ball cards to support getting Latias where they have to get Joltik or Mariodon or any of these other Pokemon, get something out of the active, do that, and then you kind of want to do a similar thing where you damage with Bidu several times, rack up damage with Frostlass, come in with the first Grimmsnarl, take two prizes, and then the second Grimmsnarl will have to take four prizes. I generally try to go for doing Bidu and getting some Frostlass ticks on my Monkey, and then going Monkey over to hands, drag up hands, Shadow Bullet that while knocking out Joltik for 30, because you really do not want the Grass Galvantula to come into play, and then leave a bunch of damage on hands, basically forcing them to have a Gust, right, so they can't play a draw supporter, so then they Gust, now they're at like three or four, they've taken three or four prizes, and then you just go Countercatch or grab up another two-prizer, Iono to whatever, and then kill the hands on the bench while attacking another, or while hitting another attacker. So it is very difficult, I don't think it's unwinnable though, and in my experience, not very many strong players that are choosing to play Joltik Maraedon, and so you kind of get to, as a Grimmsnarl pilot, you kind of get to farm a lot of the worst to average players who make a lot more mistakes, and that's kind of the reason that I really went towards this deck, is that I felt like this deck punishes, this and Gardevoir, Gardevoir for sure, second place, they punish misplays so hard. If you misplay versus Grimmsnarl, it's going to be very, very difficult to come back from it, especially skills like overbenching, or overextending, or not, you know, not properly clearing your bench with different stadiums, with the area zero decks, just not playing well against this deck, you know, is very difficult to win from the other side. And then like last note on the Joltik, if for whatever reason, if you're playing this at Locals between now and next season, since there aren't any other official events beyond Worlds until Black Bolt White Flare come out, another card that is very beneficial in that matchup, and was in my list for a decent amount of time prior to arriving at this finalist, was Defiance Band. Allows you to hit Iron Hands, in particular, for 210 and set up for that double shadow bullet without having to have Monkey Dory in play, or Monkey Dory involved in that KO. You can also hit a fresh Iron Leaves for 210 immediately after it enters the board, because the way that that matchup gets really hairy, is if they are playing two copies of Bravery Charm, and they manage to get one on both Hands and Iron Leaves. Yeah, I can see that. If that board state gets established, you can't win. It's basically... Or they get Galvantula in play, any of those things. Galvantula plus Leaves, Galvantula plus... It just gets really sticky if you let Galvantula come into play, for sure. Yeah. Got it. So you're really trying to avoid all of that, but Defiance Band can help you hit some numbers, and let you kind of claw your way back into that game. But the reason we ended up cutting it was that we felt... You know, Defiance Band is also relatively useful in Mirror, in particular, but it doesn't help too much in most of the other matchups. And therefore, if you're teching for Mirror, third boss, we felt was good enough to solidify that matchup. And against Galvantula, you're fine just having it be an unfavorable game. Yeah. Because it's a relatively low percentage deck, and you're hoping you can out-skill your way through that matchup. Sure. That makes sense. It's not a sound. Yeah, I was just curious, because I'm like, that doesn't seem like the best kind of matchup for this. Especially since we don't run Corner anymore. So I just wanted to see y'all's opinion on it. Sure. Yeah, it sounds good. But yeah, I think that might be quite enough of Monkey Dories and Buddies and all that. I'm sure we'll be talking about them for a while. I'm sorry, you said enough Monkey Dories? Were we at the same tournament? Yeah. Monkey Dories all the while. Well, we've seen a lot more of that in the tournament. That guy was everywhere. Everywhere. Before we get into NAIC proper, did you want to talk about your tournament in Round Hunter? I'll just be super light. I went 5-0-3. I had a tie that, you know, the guy was a nice guy. We both tried playing really fast Game 3. I won't name him because he's a nice dude, even though the interaction was weird. And he decked himself out because he thought he had game. And so I was like, oh, well, you don't have game. I have boss. You have no cards in deck. So we're good, right? We both sped through this game for a reason. I figured we didn't want a tie. He decided to take the tie anyways. That kind of sucks. It was what it was. It's not a big deal. He was a nice kid and we didn't make an agreement. We just both said, hey, let's try to play fast and finish. So there's no harm, no foul. He's a nice guy. And then, so I got paired to another, I got paired to three players that were basically in the same spot that I was just outside of the 130, I don't know, whatever it was. 137, 139, whatever it ended on. Right outside of there. I hit three of them in the tournament. Two of them I beat, one of them I tied with, and then one I lost to, which was my final round. I played against Ethan Riebel. We kind of sat down. Both of us were, I could definitely tell we were both nervous about our decision because it kind of seemed like we were both leaning towards, all right, time to play, but we neither, I didn't know what he was playing. I don't know if he knew what I was playing. However, it was a favorable matchup for him. So I think if he did know, I think he would have just slammed said play, but he didn't. So we yapped about it for, I don't know, a minute or two and we both just decided that it was too good to, we're at too good of a record, 5-0 and 3, 6-2, to just throw away winning the tournament, right? If one of us wins, we have a chance at winning the tournament, even though both of us would be, one of us would be not getting our world's invite. So yeah, I got practically donked game one and then 6-0'd game two. I never, I never attacked with a grim straw that was meaningful anyways. Like I attacked, but it didn't, it was for sport basically. So, and I did ask after I lost game one pretty quickly, I said, Hey, you know, I know you're probably not going to want to, but is there any way we could tie? He obviously said, no, there was no problems with that. So, you know yeah, no worlds came 20 points short. However, I'm still in the top 1%. I only, I played barely any events. I pulled out of three. I didn't go to EUIC Texas or Milwaukee, which two of which I was registered for and had trips for, but I pulled out for family stuff. So this year worlds wasn't my, my total accomplishment. So I'm really happy with how I did with the kids and the tournament. And that kind of means a bit more for me. It definitely still stings as a competitor. I definitely had my, my moment of emotion and kind of the culmination of all the stress from the running the tournament and then my world's run. And then my final kid getting his world's invite, it was very, very stressful for me. So like once it was all over, like tournament was over, Corey got his invite. I now miss my invite. It was just like all the emotion came, you know? So definitely had a good cry about it where, you know, had my warrior moment of, yeah, I'm still really good being in the 1% for the past six years. I looked at, I was my grandfather, I was sharing father's day with my grandfather and my dad. And my grandpa was like, yeah, doesn't Pokemon.com like tell you what percentage you are? Let's go like, look what percent you were for the last. Like four to five years and being in the top 1% for four or five years. And again, like being the difference between one 39th and like one 50th, that does not mean that I'm not good enough for worlds. I've been to plenty of worlds and being in the 1% matters more to me, especially when we're talking about, there's almost 250,000 us players with pop IDs. So for me to be a hundred and whatever out of 250k, I don't, there's nothing to be upset about, you know? And again, me and Ethan could have tied and both had a chance for our world's invite, right? Like we could have tied and said, all right, we'll both win two games tomorrow and get our invite. Right. But I wanted to win the tournament. I'm the only two goals I have left in my Pokemon career to win an IC in the top eight worlds. I've already gotten top 16 worlds and I've already top eight in an IC. So for me, it was just like, well, I think the world's invite means less than me winning this IC. And any IC for me is a big event considering I've had so many crazy decks and crazy runs at any IC. I feel like that's like, that's a Hunter Butler event for me personally, or, you know, that's how I feel about it. My friends made this analogy this weekend that, or Mike specifically said, he's like, you're the John Daly of Pokemon. We're like, you don't have to take it seriously all year long and you could still just clock in whenever you want and get an invite. So I'm not worried about when next year comes and I play 10 plus events and I have over a thousand points, I hope nobody's surprised when I go to the amount of the events that I go to. I'm excited to see it, man. I hope, yeah, I hope you do get some good deep runs coming up in the future. Yeah, man. I played some of the best. I mean, all of my wins, all five wins were two O's. This was some of the best Pokemon I played all year. And I played a lot of funky decks. I played Wet Bolt and I played, I played, what else did I play? The Palkia deck. And then, you know, we've played so many crazy decks this year to have 680 CP and only play 16 overall tournaments with cups, challenges, and majors included to only play 16 tournaments and make 680 points. Like I'm not, I'm not embarrassed by my run at all. So excited for next year that I'll be able to play in mostly everything, hopefully, following no more issues. Good. Yeah. I mean, I think that part of that just highlights how difficult this year it was to get an invite. You know, I mean, obviously, if you were a high quality player and you went to literally every single major that was available, you should have an invite. You know, there's just the raw volume of games available to you. Assuming that your testing process and your play is up to par, you shouldn't have a problem getting there. The difficulty comes in when you do have that smaller pool of events that you're attending. And really, you know, for me, the big thing was just having to grind out local events because I didn't necessarily have the time to head out. to do more than the five majors that I did attend. Yeah, 100%. I think if I would have went to EUIC, it would have been like completely, no way I missed. I missed by 20 points. So I'm not, yeah, just not. Very proud of my, I was upset then, but you know, my family and my friends and I got to remind myself too, this year was about the kids. It wasn't about, it was about the kids. 10 for 10 is more important for me. That's a great attitude to have. Just to kind of keep us on track, I'm gonna go ahead and just run through my tournament real quick, which was relatively mundane, but I had a couple of spikes of interest. So opened up the day with a Raging Bull game where I just both game one and two. I lost the coin flip. He opted to go first. He lost, opted to go first. Both games, I evoed into double frost last on turn one and just never let off the gas. So it was a pretty quick two-oh. And then had a nice long break to sit down and play against Ray Chen round two, where I'm pretty sure I know who this is. Sit down at the table and I go, yep, this is exactly who I thought it was. And so Ray wins the coin flip and they have me go first. I mulliganed three times. I opened lone monkey dory, didn't have a way to get a basic and passed and summarily had my monkey dory murdered by an army of grass Pokemon. Then went second game two, prize secret box, didn't really get to play the game. And I'm sure it's an unfavorable matchup anyway. I'm sure Ray farm- It's horrible. You weren't winning. Yeah. You weren't winning. I feel like I'm losing this. But feeling like I didn't get to play either game definitely did not help the situation. I will say Raz Wolf played against Toad Scrool. On straight round one, yeah. Yeah, and the only reason he didn't win is because he threw. He had bosses in hand for game. Oh, I did see that. I guess it's not completely unwinnable, but it's damn near pretty bad. Ray and I sat at the table for a little bit because our game finished so fast and talked about the matchup. And Ray said that the Toad Scrool player on stream round one misplayed heavily because they were just unnecessarily benching Pokemon and giving Raz extra turns of frost last pings and monkey dory targets to kind of play around with that he shouldn't have had access to. Yeah. So I firmly do believe, yes, it's a bad matchup. Should not have expected to win. It was just a very unfortunate thing to pair into given that I think there were seven total Toad Scrool decks in the event or something like that. Just a very, very low number. Yeah. Next round hit a, my first Grimmsnarl mirror of the day. And, you know, big shout out to Tyler. We actually ended up, we were tied in game three, tied on prizes, but I had three monkeys on board with Dark. He only had one. I only had one boss in my discard pile and I showed him I had a boss in hand and he asked, you know, well, okay, well that's one prize. Do you have another boss? And I said, yeah, if you don't mind, I can show it to you. It's in my deck. And he was like, okay, cool. I'll give you the win. Yeah, that's sick. And so big, big shout out to him for going through with that really nice guy. Next round was against a Typhlosion deck that played the poison package. Okay. And I was, you know, I luckily opened Impidimp game one. So I did not get donked because he did have turn one Squawk Carmine set up Petra Runt with Brute Bonnet in the back, poison your guy. And I'm like, cool. I ended up going down a couple of prizes but he had bench locked himself. I was able to counter catch with a Brute Bonnet with Bidoo. And he actually opted to poison my Bidoo with no Perilous Jungle in play. So I just got to freely ping Monkey Dory damage to the bench for a few turns before he finally just gave up the ghost and we moved on to game two. Oh my gosh. And in game two, he prized two Ethans and scooped on like turn three because he was not running the ticket. So that was pretty nice. Round five, just tied against Eli. We played two games, didn't have enough time to finish game three. You know, a lot of times it's really, really hard to finish three games at a time in this format. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty tough to get there. So that was kind of that. Like I said it better than him. Game one, I prized some stuff. Game two and game three, we didn't have enough time. Then I played against Jared Grimes and I had no idea what Jared was playing when we sat down. And then he flipped over a Grookey and I was extremely confused. Yeah. But Jared proceeded to basically not play that. Like he went second game one, didn't do anything, just opted to attach to a Grookey and pass. So I searched Badu on turn two and just itchy pollined until he scooped. Heading into game two, I prized secret box and didn't get to play the game. And game three, I actually misplayed in game three. I had Frostless out long enough with Monkey Dory to get two different Diplins up to 50 damage. And I panicked just trying to draw a prize card to see if it could bail me out. And I KO'd his active. But if I had KO'd, or no, sorry, sorry, sorry. I KO'd the one on the bench. And if I had KO'd his active, he would have promoted something that was not the damage Diplin, presumably. And that would have given me the opportunity. The prize card was an out to getting Grimmsnarl in play. And I would have been able to shadow bullet his only other Diplin out of play. And I ONO him to like two cards. And that might've let me come back. But, you know, so at the end of the day, if the deck's firing on all cylinders and they're managing their bench properly, not putting too many abilities in play, I'm gonna say Festival Elite is also probably not a super great matchup for Grimmsnarl. It's not good. It's bad, yeah. That's... Then hit another Grimmsnarl mirror where three boss just kind of put me over the edge. Both games, there wasn't really anything that I needed to do fancy outside of that. I set up all my monkeys. He set up all his monkeys. I had more gusts than he did. And the game kind of ended from there. Actually, no, one of these games also involved me just doing Badoo for a billion turns because my opponent was dead drawing. And at one point I ended up researching away all four of my Ionos because he did not have a supporter. I remember that. Oh my gosh. That was a sick sequence. What a flex on your opponent just to moralize them. No, they'll never get Andrew. I mean, just, and that started on turn two. Like I had two Iono in hand and I was like, I will, I'm just gonna itchy pollen and basically pass for the turn, even though I'm not making a ton of progress on my board, purely because your start is so bad and I don't want to give you access to anything. Next round was again, kind of a route, what I consider to be a routine Raging Bolt game, got double Frostless out turn one, both games, or actually it was turn two game two because Brianna made the wise decision to go second in game two after she lost game one. I think that that's actually, it opens up a lot of avenues for Raging Bolt in this matchup to potentially get a lead on board, get an early price card, put pressure on the opponent and maybe turn on the gas and not like really turn around. Yeah, I agree. Didn't work out for her though. Yeah, forcing Grimmsnall first and trying to go for a turn one knockout is probably a lot better, higher success rate than what people would think when they go bench Fan Ronam and then bench a bunch of hoots and then bench all this stuff, like just the over benching, right? So I definitely think going first is correct. And I closed out the day. Forcing Grimmsnall first. Correct, yeah, yeah. And then I closed out the day against Josh Mills. This is actually reported wrong. Josh was not playing Joltec Box. He was on Pulsar and that just felt super free. Both games, I went turn two, candy Grimmsnarl, boss Charmander, move four counters to your bench Charmander, KO both. And then Josh was trying to play with Dragapulse for the rest of the game and it just didn't work out. Round 10, double bricked against Chris. Nothing really to see here. Unfortunately meant that I was no longer in contention for cash and was just playing for a top 128 placement. But really at this point I had realized I just needed to win, I believe one game to get top 256 and firmly secure my world's invite. So, you know, no real pressure, just like I've got three rounds. I think I can win one game. But then paired into Ben Dauberstein, who Ben and I have a little bit of a history just because we actually played each other in Baltimore. And this was the round in Baltimore where I opened Blood Moon both games against his Maridon deck. Really nice guy, playing an archetype that I absolutely love and I wish it was better with Archzorro. But at the end of the day, Archaladon, you know, is a pretty easy game for Grimmsnarl as long as you manage your damage properly and don't give them access to a big one-hit KO turn. And Ben just was not able to really get anything out of it because I did just that. So 2-0 there. Next round was against Sam with Evie Box and unfortunately for Sam, I probably have more games into Evie Box, the Grimmsnarl, than any other person on the planet. I believe it. Because one of our friends, Santiago, was playing Evie's into this event and we played this matchup upwards of 50 plus times. And, you know, maybe it's an overstatement to say that I have more games than anyone else on the planet, but just being hyperbolic suits the narrative a little bit better. It was a lot though. And, you know, all that to say that I know how to play the matchup. And unfortunately for Sam, that meant that for him to win this matchup, he needed to be able to set up a second Leafeon after I KO the first one and he just couldn't make that happen. He tried to do something weird with Sylveon in game two and it just kind of didn't work out for him at the end of the day. I was able to just keep slowly chipping away at things on the bench, even though he was shuffling my last... I had discarded both candies and he was angel lighting my Morgrem back into my deck. And then I would artisan the Impidimp back out and sit there and try... Or no, I had Spikemuth in place. So I Spikemuth for Impidimp, next turn I Spikemuth for Morgrem and say, okay, if you don't angel light this, I'm gonna put Grimmsnarl in play and win the game. So he angel lights it back into the deck along with like a Monkey Dory with the dark on it. And, you know, we repeat that process like four times before I finally am able to just close things out because he's at such a low hand size at that point with the number of prizes that he had taken. And that was game two after I had won game one. So we went to time, but there was no chance of, I don't think of us tying the series and closed out the day with another Poltzard game, which honestly just felt like a free matchup every time I sat down against it. I'm sure that there are ways you can lose, especially if you get bricked off of unfair stamp, but it definitely felt favored every game that I played against it. Yeah, for anyone out there who's like, Poltzard is a really good deck. What beats Poltzard? Grimmsnarl absolutely dog walks Poltzard. I don't care what list, what any, you know, with proper play on both sides, Grimmsnarl should be winning a lot of time. A lot. And that was the thing, the confidence boost that I needed came at the Masters Cup event. When we did lose power, Kieran Farah and Rowan Savino sat down at the stream table and used their cell phones as their overhead lights to play a series of games of Grimmsnarl versus Poltzard. And I got to watch Kieran, I think five or six-oh Rowan in that matchup. And I said, okay, well, you know, I think we can do this. Yeah. Yeah, sick run, dude. Congrats again on getting your world's invite. Yeah, I mean, you beat some pretty good players, you know, lost to the fourth place player, undefeated day one player in Ray Chen. So no shame in that. And then, I mean, I do have to give you crap a little bit for losing the festival lead. Listen, I'm putting it out in a public forum. You're lost, you're old and lost. I lost the festival lead at this event. I know, it happened. Hey, you know, it's good content at least. So you got that going for you. Still got there at the end of it. Yeah, I was definitely like sweating it after the second loss, you know, just knowing how tense it is. Oh, believe me, I was too. Yeah. I was too. Me and Carter were winning all day and Aaron's just like, I'm not doing good. And we're just like, okay. We need you to, you know, figure it out. Yeah, clench up for me. I was super stressed for all three of these rounds. Once I was 4-0-1 and Barter was like 5-0 or 4-1 or whatever. And Aaron was like, yeah, I'm 3-1 or, I think it was where he's 3-1-1. Yeah, he was 3-1-1 and we're all 4-0-1, 5-0, 4-1, like, he was just like, man, dude, it's going to happen again. My luck is not going to be good, so. But he ended up being the luckiest out of both me and Carter. And Mike tied so much, tied so much, tied so many times. Don't play this deck if you guys are slow, man. No old men can play Grimmsnarl, you got to play fast. I mean, I'm old. We've established this week that I am old and I still clutched it up for sure. But the, yeah, we did a lot of other prep and one of the things that I learned going into this event is that I was at least severely inefficient in terms of price checking, both with the efficiency of doing it in terms of time and the efficiency of actually figuring out what cards are prized. So being able to identify that that was a weakness of myself and actively work on it in testing paid huge dividends throughout the course of this event. So I would encourage anybody who is not practicing these key skills that are not just gameplay. I mean, it is gameplay related, but it's not part of the pure gameplay loop. Make sure that you are identifying these things if you are not fully confident in your ability to do them. Obviously, simpler decks that are just like 4-4-4-4-4-4-4, things like Raging Bolt are really easy to price check with for the most part. But anything that runs a bunch of one-offs like this deck, Evie Box, just, it can be really, really easy to overlook things and not know when you have a key resource prized. Yeah, shout out to me for fixing Aaron's prizing problems. So. But yeah, I think that's enough yapping about our personal tournament runs. I think it's time to look at the tournament as a whole. And so the first thing to look at are just the meta percentages of things. And we correctly identified the top six decks in the room. I think anyone worth their salt knew what the top six most played deck archetypes were going to be coming into this. Obviously, the stream graphic was a little bit different. They did not have Dragapult grouped by variant. It was simply, you know, I believe Pult Zard and Pult Dusknoir, and so that lowered things in the rankings a little bit and also pushed Goldengo off the graph. But when you group things properly, like the way that we typically review things here on the show, you know, we've got Dragapult, we have Raging Bolt, Grimmsnarl, Gardevoir, Joltik, and Goldengo as the top six. And, you know, unsurprisingly to me, maybe it surprises some people, Eevee box was the seventh most played deck going into day one. And then when we pop over and look at day two, we maintain a lot of this trend except, like we've talked about previously, Joltik box is frequently piloted by less experienced, sometimes less skilled players, and that led to a drop-off for the deck. And we also see that the Eevee box deck is piloted typically by more experienced players, in my experience, and because of that, it saw a little bit of an uptick. And so it makes its way into the top six graphic. Other big call-out here are the Toad Scrool converted extremely well into day two, did not perform super well in day two, but converted very well into day two. And Synthia's Garchomp also did. Didn't she get top six? Ace or top eight, which one? She got one of them. Raychem was number one seed going into cut. But, you know, as a whole, in day two. But the problem is, when you look at these results, Ray is making up about half of the wins that Toad Scrool saw in day two. Well, for sure, because they created the deck. So that totally tracks for me. Like that, you know, that makes sense, personally. Yeah, and a lot of that does come down to match-up variance, of course. You know, just looking at these raw win percentages here on Limitless Labs gets a little bit wonky just because of the way ties are calculated. I believe that Robin has it fixed to where win or ties are one third of a win. And so that that ends up making a win percentage look really awkward and deflated compared to where it might truly be. But you still do have to account for those things in some way. But I don't think that any of these numbers, you know, does this surprise either of you in terms of what would be successful in the event and what would convert to being the top six most played archetypes by day two players? No, no, I literally, I, go ahead, John. Well, I was just about to probably say what you're about to say. No, it's not really that surprising. Like we were talking the whole time before. I think most, yeah, like all the top six for the top six and then Flareon right on the outside looking in makes 100% perfect sense to me. Yeah, I was just going to say, I'm looking right now at my Discord about what I predicted for both Junior, Seniors and Masters. And they're just all the same thing. So I think this format was for people who are paying attention to Atlanta and Up meta and actually combining all of those really simple deduction as to what this was going to be and just putting Grimmsnarl in there as such a ridiculously strong deck and then bumping EVs up because it took a decent Grimmsnarl matchup. Sure. It's pretty, I think this meta was, if anybody was having difficulty, like understanding this meta or trying to figure out what to counter and what to go for. I think you had to be like ridiculously lost, like really lost because this was very simple. I feel like personally, not trying to hurt anyone's feelings, but yeah, it definitely feels like this meta was not hard to figure out at all. Sure. And so last thing for the event before we get into the predictions that Jon and I had made on our last episode are the final standings. And we get to see that Isaiah Bradner, in addition to winning his first regional ever, also took down his first IC with a relatively interesting Gardevoir. Let's we'll look at that here in just a minute. I'm going to pull it up here in a second tab. But Isaiah was able to beat Riley McKay of Canada in a Gardevoir mirror in the finals toward Reklev at third place with Dragapult. George Minkley, kind of on a Cinderella run, you know, George was at 300 points, I believe coming into this weekend. And maybe it was a little bit more than that because I know that George... George went from being nowhere near an invite to not only ending up within the top 125, but also clutching up an auto invite by achieving top four in this event with Gardevoir. So same with Raj Patel. Raj Patel like is in the bottom of the 125, whatever. So he also snuck in for this giant placement. So then we do see Ray, like I had said a little bit ago, Ray was number one seed going into cut and finishing in fifth place. So losing in top eight to, I believe they played against Tord in top eight. Yeah. And just, I guess, an unfortunate series of games because I believe Ray had farmed a bunch of other Dragapults. Farmed them. And farmed Tord earlier in the day too, like destroyed Tord. Yeah, I spotted those games for the stream. Ray prized two Teal Masks Ogre Pawns in both games and like wasn't able to get a fast start at all. And couldn't take a knockout to save her life. So it was just really, just kind of, once you don't get the damage numbers and can't take one shots on Dragapult, they're like, okay, cool. I'll just pick your board apart. You know, if you can get two hits with a Dragapult, that's pretty bad. So yeah. Yeah. And just not being able to get the energy on board quickly. You can't take the one shot. It makes it harder to protect your bench because you can't spread the energy as quickly either. Yeah. Sounds unfortunate for sure. Next one is Piper Lapine being the highest placing Grimmsnarl on the day. So we can go ahead. I mean, I know we talked about this deck to death earlier, but we can just highlight the differences of Piper's list. Another thing that I'm interested in seeing is how in the world Cam Shannoy was able to make a top eight placement with Enz Zorark of all things. And then this was a relatively big Ace-In. We almost made it to a full top 16. So like you call that Hunter, Rosh Patel rounding out top eight with Straight Polt. Then Bodie Robinson with Dusk Polt. Ryan Antonucci with Polt Zard. John Ng with Dusk Polt. Makani Tram with Polt Zard. Nathan Ginsberg with Evie Box. Pedro Torre with Polt Zard and Yurko Valencia rounding things out in the Ace-In bracket with Raging Bolt. I want to point out too that looking at this Ace-In and even just this top 21, like when you look at all the other ICs, right? You're kind of like, oh, is that, is the people from that country going to do well? And if you just look at the massive amount of American flags here, and then you not only just look at the flags, but you look at the names, this really shows why, or proves that, why America is one of the best, one of the best scenes. Because when you put, when you take a massive IC like this and bring everybody from around the world, I mean, just look, John Ng, Makani, Ginsberg, Hedrick, Piper, you know, Bradner. Like this is like a really, really big collection of some of the best players in America that just absolutely smashed this tournament. So yeah, shout out to USA for taking a charge in our own IC, you know, not giving it up to another country. Almost did. You know, US first Canada titles. We almost did. Like the, uh... But I would have been fine with Canada winning. That's basically, it's personal. They're both great players to see do well. Exactly. The top four match, especially between Riley and Tord, I think was one that was really memorable for me. There was like a, it came down to Tord whiffing off of, I think, an Iona to three. And then Riley having the response the next turn on the final turn of the game. And it was Riley passed going into turns of time on like turn two, I think. Because Riley realized that if he attacked into Tord, Tord had a response angle, I think, with stuff in play. And so passing when they're both tied on prizes and then allowing Tord to just, like, have more chances to whiff a counter-attack. It's Tord's playing Dragapult, so they can take multiple knockouts a lot more easily than Riley can. Just allowed, you know, Riley to do a giant play with Lily's Clefairy coming back into, after plus three turns, you know, when they're still tied on prizes, taking that last knockout of the game. So just a huge, like, the audience was expecting the attack. So much. And just to see, like, the confusion in the audience was insane. Like, just as a, I don't expect it. I was, I was, I was done for the day. So I was just sitting around watching the final, the last match of the day. And just like, whenever Riley passed, the audience was like, you know, anticipating the knockout and then pass. Everybody just, I mean, I was asking people around me, like, did he just pass? That's crazy. Cause I didn't, I'm not smart enough. Like, I know I'm a good player, but I'm not like smart enough to like, in the quarterfinals of an IC or semis of an IC to like, think through that kind of like a big brain play. So shout out. Also interject too on that play is like me, I was telling Aaron this, and even at the Masters Cup, there are so many passing lines in this format where it's actually super correct to pass in a lot of spots. And again, I think this is something that kind of differentiates great players and average players is like, in this format, there are a ton of lines where you should not be attacking until you have a gust card or until you have better positioning to get around stuff like stamp or I don't know. Right. So I insane gameplay from Riley props to him. And yeah, the passing lines are real. So please practice the passing line. They do, they do exist. And there are plenty of them, especially when talking about stuff like early game, drag a pole and early game Grimstone and all stuff for sure. There are some passing lines that are really good. This one in particular to add a little bit of context, Riley had just had his only guard of our KO. I believe he did that turn of the turn prior and had a curly on bench that he had just evolved into that was going to likely could be knocked out. If he took a KO, the other Avenue that toward would have had was access to blood moon. If he took the KO with the bravery, charmed Clefairy, which would have left Riley with just nothing on board and no ability to take a KO into blood moon, which tort could freely retreat to drag a pole and take a KO with a drag up hold, likely on the following turn. So definitely heads up, especially in such a high pressure scenario in time of game three and top four of the biggest tournament ever. Big props to Riley and a little, a little sad at the end of the day after having that high of a high to not be able to finish out the tournament due to, I mean, Isaiah drew really hot in that mirror match. Now, you know, no shade to him from that regard. Congrats to him for winning the tournament. And a lot of that is card games. And again, you know, setting up more monkeys because you play more monkeys is an avenue that we absolutely pursued as well. So the deck construction thing, you know, I think that Bradner called out that Henry, this was Henry Chow's list. So no surprise to see Henry Chow's guard of our list being the highest placing guard of our list at the end of the day. We shouldn't be this. Yeah, not surprising at all. And just to look at that list really quick. So highlighted played for monkey played to go with this for monkey for copies of dark and the big tech card that goes along with that. And the, my understanding of this is that it's supposed to help accelerate those darks into play against grim snarl. Specifically is this copy of TM turbo energize. Otherwise, you know, it's a fairly standard guard of our deck with the notable exclusion of drift loop. Also the energy switch to help move off the dark energy whenever you do TM energize. Just an insane combo. Like I was a stream judging for the finals for the masters and it was just like reading over the list before the game starts. And I'm just like, TM energize, what? And I'm like, it took me until I realized there's an energy switch in there. And I'm like, oh, okay, okay. I also think there might be some applications with turbo energize, like to powering up something quick against maybe like powering up Clefairy against Dragapult in the early turns while you're being Badood. I think there can, obviously that's the main application, but I'm interested that if there are some sidelines where you can actually get use out of it, pulling psychics out of the deck to retreat. I'm not sure if any of that ever came up. So I'm gonna definitely ask some questions, do my due diligence and try to find out if there's any sidelines or even playing the deck myself, trying to figure out the sidelines. Cause I feel like it can't just be for shoving dark energy in play. There's gotta be some other things that can be applicated. And then we do also see up from one candy to two here in addition to the two copies of TM Evo. So really highlighting the importance of getting Cardivore into play. And the other big thing is actually going down to one counter catcher and adding that boss. Because again, proactive gust is super important in this format. Incredibly important, really cannot be understated how important that proactive gust option is. Yeah, I mean, that's a good list for sure. Four monkey is good. Someone who disagrees with that is Piper Lapine with her three copies of Monkey Dory in this Grimmsnarl deck. What other differences? She didn't even play third stretcher. She only had two stretcher and one rod, man. And yeah, wow. She was light on monkey for sure. Yeah, yeah. I mean, additional outs to search for it with the extra nest ball, pokey gear over research. I guess you could argue is okay. Maybe you have our Arvin or you have boss more often as a result of that. But I don't know. Personal preference is just the raw supporter, in my opinion. Yeah. A lot of this other stuff I don't disagree with. I like third spike with a lot. I just don't know how we would fit into Mars. Right, right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it doesn't surprise me. The deck is still strong at its core. And, you know, especially if you have a strong pilot like Piper behind it, not surprised to see a deep run here. W Piper. For sure. This deck surprised the heck out of me. I actually haven't looked at Cam's list yet, but it looks, you know, for the most part, relatively similar to the Liam Halliburton Zoroark archetype that we've expected a lot out of a lot of these Pacific Northwest folks. Slimmed down the Darmanitan line, added an extra monkey in, added the second Reshiram. And I guess just looking for what? A lot of rage lines here. You know, a lot of damage on the board with the two rigid. Yeah, I think also, again, like bad Grimmsnarl players are just going to attack in the Zoroark, get raged on, instead of you make turning and turning yourself into a Bado, a Bado monkey, monkey Dory deck. I'm curious what math rigid band actually fixes. And as you can see, there's a technical machine Devo, which also I'm quite. Yeah, that's interesting. These cards, I know Defiance Band has several math applications, but two Rigid Band, I have to feel like this is for something specific, and me not knowing the deck, I really can't comment on it. Devo, I've got to imagine, might be for maybe Dragapult or Grimmsnarl, where they use the Darmanitan or damage multiple threats, and then go Iono Devo with a one-prizer in the active, something like a monkey. So I'm very curious to hear about these inclusions, I'm sure Cam will put something out somewhere, so hopefully when he produces his content on this list, he can explain some of those things, because yeah, this has got some crazy techs like the Black Belt and the Rigid Bands and the Devo that seem very, very specific, and not having knowledge about that is probably hard to comment on this type of list when we don't understand. However, I will say that for those that don't find their Shaman, especially like Garden Warplayers and Dragapults, that cannot find their Shaman, probably just get waxed by a turn two Darmanitan attack from Zorak, and then following that up with more of them. So I can imagine that that's probably quite difficult. And also tanking a Phantom Dive and getting one shot back with multiple Monkey Dory in play is also not something. And you can see here we have the energy switch too, so he can also make multiple monkey plays off one energy, or even move an energy off Monkey Dory to attack with a Zorak that might not be pre-powered up, something like ends PPF plus E-switch off Monkey after you use Adrenaline Brain. So there are some cool, neat tricks in here. And also I think the Cyrano Cypher Maniac engine is an engine that's super, super sick in this deck, and maybe other Zorak decks from the future can use this. So I think that engine is really, really dope. That is definitely cool to see for Cyrano. I mean, that's a card that before this format, I mean, we saw Ienra play it a little bit, at the end of the last format, in his Zorak deck, but not one that has seen a lot of play outside of Zorak. It might be underutilized, I'd say, at this point. There's not a lot of decks that, you know, set up a bunch of EXs like this, but I mean, there is, but they don't need like stage one setup, I should say. Or they're relying on a supporter for energy, like if Raging Bolt didn't rely on a supporter for energy, Cyrano would be an insane card. Go grab Fez, Volt, and Ogre Pawn, that's an insane card. But obviously, it's not adding energy to the board, right? So that's the hard part. Right. I know we've got some predictions to get to, but before we do that, were there any other players or deck lists that either of you wanted to look at or talk about? Yeah, there's two that I wrote down. We didn't talk about Raishan's list. Is it pretty similar to what they did before? Yeah, I think it's almost the same list. It's one or two cards different. It's basically the same thing. There's two players, one finished right outside top 16, and Stefan Ivanov. I got to cast this match where, let me see, are you pulling it up? Yeah, this list blew my mind, dude, like, actually, I just spotted for this game. I didn't stream judge it, to correct myself, but like, the play where he did an end PPF energy switch to power up a Dragapult, like, unreal play, like just one of those things like I'm going to say with this deck too, this deck seems like an awesome deck for like multiple copies of Cypher. I think being able to Cypher stuff like your crystal, your PPF, your energy switch, your specific energy, like seems totally insane. I think for some people that are trying this deck, I know it was built by Henry Brand, so I'm sure there was, you know, Henry Brand, very, very known for playing rogue decks his whole career. I'm a big fan, have been a big fan for a while. I'm sure that they tried some of that stuff, but yeah, I want to try Cypher in this deck to just be able to narrow down the exact cards that I want to get, but I guess with four Drakloak and double Zork, we'll probably pile it through the deck pretty good. And then one other deck before we go on, just a quick shout out to Yoshitaite at 56th. I know it's a little further down, but I just love this list, just some cool innovations on his part with a Ho-Oh deck, like a Ho-Oh box kind of style with Armor Rouge to move energy from the bench to the active, and just power up a myriad of different attackers with Durante X-Seeing play. We have the Hearthflame Stone, is that right, I don't think it's Hearthflame Stone. I haven't said the name of this thing basically since it's been printed, even though it was the poster child of NAIC, no one played it but him, basically. So very cool to see, like this guy gets some love for sure. But yeah, just quite an innovative deck. I saw him playing it a couple times walking around. He's just a really nice guy if you ever met him in a tournament, he's like genuinely one of the nicest players you could ever interact with. So cool to see. Yeah, exactly. He always plays a Rogue, and it's always cool to see what he's playing. And he did pretty good with this one. So it's a, you know, one if you're trying to like play something new on PDCGL, try this one out. It seems like it'd be a fun time. Yeah, him and Yakira, his daughter, have been playing forever. And Yoshite is a legendary Rogue deck builder, he has built some of the most insane decks ever. And he does not care about the meta, he does not care about any of that, and still can play swell. Cashing $2,000 with this pile is insane, and that just shows the type of, no hate to you Yoshi, I love your piles, but getting cash for this pile is an exact, you know, determining factor of how great of a player Yoshi is and how long he's been playing. He's definitely been playing as long as Ross, like 2005, 2006, 2007 type of player. So shout out to Yoshi, man, big fan, big fan. But just that's about it to round it out, I'd say. Most of everything else, you know, was kind of close to what we had expected, at least in the top 64, I'd say. Yeah, I think, I mean, I guess last thing just real quick before we move on is just Oh, sure. If we can look at Fabian's list. Oh, Fabian. Shout out Fabian. This, I think, is a few cards different from his Master's Cup list. It is. Because I don't remember seeing Petrel in there at the time. There wasn't. There wasn't. But, you know, big thing, you have the proactive damage amplification with the Roserade, you have reactive damage amplification with Monkey Dory, you have Spiritomb after you sponged hits with a couple of guard chomps to just whack something with a single prizer, still rocking four copies of power away, two copies of Watchtower. Now, I think he only had one in his Master's Cup list and just proactive gusts in the form of boss, super consistent when you TM Evo into Gabite on turn one and just kind of getting off to the races and get things rolling. The corkscrew dive keeps you refreshed with your hand so you don't have to play research in the deck. This honestly, after watching Fabian's games in particular in the Master's Cup and this placement as well, I'm not going to say this deck is tier one, but I think this deck is significantly better than I thought it was. Yeah. Again, another GOAT Rogue deck builder, Fabian plays a lot of off-the-wall decks. The fact that he got top four at the Master's Cup, cashed, then also cashed at Nationals not only shows how strong he is as a player, but how strong this deck is, especially when you have a skilled pilot that understands their lines. And I do think this thing absolutely dogwalks Dragapult. Dragapult is almost a free win, I believe. I think Dusknoir makes it a little tough, but the power weight, man, it's just so much to deal with. 400 hit points is just a wall, so you can't get it. Yeah, and three copies of Iono plus Watchtower versus any of the Noctowl decks or any deck that sets up Pidgeot is also just like, what do you do? What are you doing when that happens, you know? We desperately need Beedrill to clock back in and come back to the format. It's colorless. He gets shut down by Watchtower too, man. You know what I meant. Something that's not colorless. Not Beedrill is colorless. Octillery. Yeah, that's what I meant. Octillery. We need to clock Sushi Master right back in. We need some draw. But I love this deck, and I love the innovation. Shout out to Fabian. He's a close friend of mine. We've tested. We actually tested this year with the Charizard, Tarapagos, Noctowl deck for, what was it, Aaron? Was it Toronto? I don't know if it was Toronto. Toronto. It was the one with you, Aaron. It was Toronto. Yeah. So, great friend. Decent. We've worked together on some decks. Shout out to him. Really proud of him for playing Garchomp, because after he got top four, we were hanging out after the event, and I told him, I was like, bro. He said he wasn't going to play, and I'm like, dude, what is the point of not playing it? You just smashed a room of players that are the best. Why are you not going to play this deck? And I'm so happy that he listened. I'm sure it wasn't just my advice, but he listened to himself and actually went out there and played the deck and got another cash with it, which is just super sick. It's awesome. Yeah. So that's going to close out our main coverage on NAIC. I think, John, real quick, just to hit our predictions, and then we will let Hunter give his shout outs, and we'll probably head out for the evening. So what did we have written down last week? All right. So we had five predictions going into NAIC. The first one was, would Badoo be in over or under 3.5 copies in top eight? I did the math. Aaron, you picked under. I picked over, and it was way over, with eight copies in top eight. So Badoo, I think, had a bit of a resurgence. Yeah. Aaron's going to hold that, but we'll move on to the next one real quick. This one stung a little bit. Highest-placing Team Rocket's deck. Aaron, you said top 256. I was very optimistic about Team Rocket's, and I should not have been. I picked top 32, and we both were wrong, but you were less wrong, so I'll give you this. Andres Torres had the highest placement, with 294th place. Team Rocket strikes again at being mid. Yeah. There were some other players that played a Spydop-centered build of it, but the best one of those was actually one of my locals, or, yeah, I think it was one of my locals was one of the few people to make day two of that list, Zachary Zavelsky, at like 300. So shout-outs to my local crew, I guess, but yeah, not a very good showing for that deck, for sure. So Aaron takes that one. The next one was, which region outside of North America will have the highest placement? Aaron, you said Oceania, good guess, and I picked Europe, and I was much, much closer to getting the overall winner with Tord Reklev finishing in third or fourth, I forget which one, but top four. So two to one, me. Next one is, we had to pick a player to do well. We picked Henry Chow, very good pick. He finished 31st. I picked Kirin Fara, you know, great player. I figured Marnie's Grimmsnarl would be great. He did not make day two. He finished at 902nd. So you got that one. And then the last one, probably the most heartbreaking, and maybe if Twitter followers had known the answer to this one before we came on the podcast, but what A-spec would win? Aaron, you picked Secret Box, and I picked Unfair Stamp. And Aaron, you were so right that it hurts pretty bad. There were five out of the eight decks in the top eight played Secret Box. So just, you know, between Gardevoir and Grimmsnarl just dominating this category. I made a comment this weekend that I'm pretty sure Secret Box is literally the best A-spec that's ever been printed. It's so crazy, though. It wasn't like we knew that when it was printed. No one would have said that. Like when it came out, it took Henry Chow basically proving it was Gardevoir over and over. That's what started the Secret Box hype. And at the time that it was released, everyone was correct. The card was not good. Well, no, never mind. Now I'm looking at when it came out. The point I made this weekend and the point I was about to make are both incorrect. Because I was going to say that the technical machines didn't exist yet, but they did. They had been released a set prior. So I really have no idea why this card did not catch on sooner. Well, Evo wasn't huge when it first came out. Well, that's true. Oh, no. That was the point that I had made. We still had access to V-Star powers and Forest Seal Stone. The game was so much faster that you couldn't really take the time to embrace the power of the tool cards that this thing can search out. We also have much better stadiums now than we did when this card came out. And the card has just progressively gotten stronger as that format has progressed to that point. Shout out to everyone putting their stick in the box at this tournament, man. Everyone had their stick in the box. Yeah, it's surprising. I mean, I knew it was strong going in. But definitely any stage 2 deck, essentially, other than Dragapult, is going to run it. And then basically anything that wants a decent setup, you know, just makes a lot of sense. Big combos. Yeah. Big combo turns. Big swing turns. You can set up for the first turn you're on, and then for the next turn as well at the same time. When getting another supporter, you can arbor for it and then get a boss and kind of set yourself up for a win con. All that kind of stuff. And then the crazy thing to me was not that, you know, Secret Box being the number one ace deck, sure. But like right at second place is Neo Upper Energy. We saw so many Straight Bolt builds running that over the tool, which makes a lot of sense when we have a lot of just ace- Jamming towers. Yeah. Jamming towers in play. Thank you. So people have pivoted off of the Sparkling Crystal and are now moving over to Neo Upper Energy, which, I mean, it works out. You can attach it and have no fear of it being- there's not energy removal. No one's running- there's an enhanced hammer, but no one's running it. So we don't really have to worry about it getting discarded like you would or turned off like you would with jamming tower. And then, yeah. Colts kind of moved away from the I mean, there's still like the first I looked at a Brian Antonucci with Polt czar In 10th place was the first player to be playing so it's still pretty close, you know outside looking in For unfair stamp, but definitely a lot more Neo upper energy and secret box and I was gonna be expecting for this tournament Yeah, and you know, they're making To because you want to stand an attack with a big Charizard and basically say you can't get through this Sure makes a little more sense in that bill regarding and you have the energy acceleration with Charizard So you don't necessarily need a sparkling just already winning the energy attached war against other dragon points, which is super nice Exactly. Yeah, and that's a deck You know Charizard is an archetype is one that has always played a very reactive game Which unfair stamp definitely feeds into whereas, you know modern guard of our Grimmsnarl at its core that Grimmsnarl can kind of play both ways But is really reliant on stadiums and tools in particular So secret box feeds naturally into that but guard of our particular wants to be very proactive and how it's setting up now so secret box feeds into that much more than back when it attempted to play unfair stamp as its primary a spec and Like you said John the the dragapult decks that are not playing Charizard are having They're almost being forced to be more proactive they can't sit back and just be an unfair stamp deck anymore and pray that their opponent will walk into a Setup that they have that prevents them from coming back Once they get stamped and instead they have to say hey I need to be able to put my foot on the gas as soon as possible If that you know that board say to that situation comes up Yeah Before we wrap up completely. I just wanted to shout out the list I was talking about Charizard our senior champion Gabriel Fernandez Played a straight Charizard build for this Charlie, baby and just unreal like player diff honestly like this day the School, baby You're not wrong, dude. The final guy's green Bro, that greens that green jersey is going crazy. Yeah Yeah, he's uh He's he's built different. I'm not gonna pretend like I'm a super fan boy. I'm a blazer I'm literally that I yeah, I don't care the biggest Gabriel Fernandez fan There's nobody who's a better fan that once because you know I've watched him play because I have students in juniors and I have students and seniors So I've got to watch games but having him at the Masters Cup and watching him play versus the Masters He was basically the only person I was like talking about like I want to see all the games I want to see The same exact play the same death and made Yep He lost a Fabian which seems like an unwinnable matchup. So if you're in seniors, maybe you should play Garchomp, but If you think Gabriel is gonna run back Charizard, that is Yeah, I'm uh, I'm a super fan. He's an incredible level of play his level of I don't know He built the deck with I couldn't did he like come up with it it's himself at this point or Yeah but like just the level of deck building to have the picnic basket to settle on the max belt to settle on like so many different things that like the turbo came in clutch in the finals like Like Omar was playing really really well, and I don't want to take anything away from him by like giving Gabriel shout out but like Just every time Omar did a really good play Gabriel had the counter play and then Pidgeot can do that obviously But sure just being able to say, okay. I know my game. I know how to play it I know I think if I play my game I can beat anybody and he does it every freakin tournament. So shout out Gabriel I mean, it's it's like almost like a haters gonna hate mentality at this point like yeah Yeah, it's like you try like we you know It's He's just I can't wait till he's like 17 18 and he is straight popping his collar, bro Oh, I just cannot so I'm cuz I'm just excited to see what he does next year. Yeah He's not stopping I can tell you that like he's I'm gonna be making I'm gonna be making some personal bets with people for sure It's so cool. Like you see his family there like it means so much more to seniors in a lot of ways like The parents tearing up and like the kids getting emotional and like mass not like masters don't care obviously Isaiah was very emotional at the end of it as he should be like, you know, I mean anybody wins an international championship, you're You're just different like you're you're you're immortalized not necessarily It's like one step below the world championship and it's like almost just as hard honestly to like Might even be harder with the sure it's a very different style tournament, but Just you know to win three in one season and then to win all but one regional that you participate in is just You can't really like comprehend. No literally the best thing ever. Yeah, it's it's a perfect season except for like I'll Go ahead. I'll make one point for the pert for the best senior ever And so this season will probably never be topped as of winning everything Tanner won 18 regional championships in seniors. I don't think that will ever be touched in history sure, so I think him intent like him and Tanner are just like I'm gonna look I'm gonna look I was actually just at Tanner's house with the amount of trophies. I'm like, dude, like You know, I don't I gotta look at Gabriel's full lineup because obviously Gabriel has more He has the world champ Tanner never won worlds, right? Close Gabriel one and then what all these ICS Tanner also one I think two ICS and an 18 regional championship So, yeah, I'm gonna have to look but I don't like it's pretty much Tanner or Gabriel are the best senior Pokemon players To ever play the game hands down. There's nobody else Yeah, so Anyway, that's and like if you guys, you know need some good storylines this this I see provided them in spades with it The brother and sister combo in the finals and juniors just the cutest thing possible We've seen I think in a long time in a tournament I hope they play the commentary or like the little chit-chat going on between them in the finals It's probably one of the cutest things that ever exists like they were just like, you know multiple times they were playing and they were like They both had buddies doing a cheap on and they're just like buddy war Just like I don't know Bobby can tell you all about it. I'm sure If you had some with me and he was like, man, I think you would have came to tears Yeah, yeah, and Bobby's Bobby if you know him, he doesn't really like crack a smile too much He's not emotional, but he even he was just like this is this is great. He was gushing yeah, I Spoke to him right after the match was happening because we were walking through the venue and he was like, dude I can't wait till they you know, I can't wait till they hopefully release this footage because you know Like the comms were unbelievable and I was like, what were they saying? He was like they were just saying brotherly and sisterly cute things and they were talking about how much fun they were having and I'm just like Yeah, like Shuffling his deck and his sister's like don't don't let mom see like mom. It's gonna yell at you for doing that Like that you know the stage is huge but like the family ties and the camaraderie from the game is even more important in so many ways like Players being respectful and loving one another and like, you know, Isaiah giving Riley the hug at the end of it Just stuff like that man. That's what I mean. I we watch the competitors We watch them duke it out and all this stuff But like when it's all over whenever the tournaments done we all go back to being friends I'm gonna go back to this community and that's I think probably more important than even prizes at the end of the day So, yeah, I think the only crazier still because we already got the brother and sister Gabriel's hat trick the only crazier thing was if Tord beat Riley and we got the rematch from EU I see Tord verse Tord verse Isaiah, I think that it was like straight-up cinematic movie for all three finals Just like everybody would have walked. So not no shade to Riley. I'm incredibly impressed With the play but that would have been just yeah So this one's in the books and we move on to the world championship I'm excited to see kind of a new format coming forward. But for the next few weeks, we'll be focusing on some other things Hopefully we have some collaborations and stuff coming up a little bit for the offseason Hunter I appreciate you being on You know, you're such a great guy for the community We appreciate all you do as far as your tournaments and coaching and personality and just presence in the game It means a lot man I remember my first interaction with you is right when you're on that first cusp of your first worlds and That's always one of those memories. I will stick in my mind Just how much that meant to you and all that stuff So I'm just I'm glad you're still in the game man, and I hope to see you around for a long time yeah, man, I'm gonna I'm gonna try to evolve and not be an old man and Don't be able to be Player but also, you know like moving on towards bigger things, right? Focusing more on the coaching these tournaments doing more things In the community is because Pokemon has been a part of my life since I was a small child You know so to see it blow up to what it's been and how much coverage there are and how many lives are being changed monetarily culturally Traveling all of this stuff like that can be brought to not only the kids But to the adults that become well cultured or better financially off because of the money or the traveling whatever it encompasses Pokemon It's just it's the best time in the world to be a Pokemon fan Even with all this crazy nonsense happening in the world Pokemon It's good. It's really good to be a fan of Pokemon right now And I think next year it's gonna be you know Just like this year with the double prize money in the top X system all that type of stuff I think it's only it's only up from here. So yeah, I really appreciate Your kind words for sure. Of course So yeah as we close things out hundred did you have any shout outs or anything that you wanted to plug before we? Say goodbye. Yeah, big shout out to everybody that helped me with the Masters Cup. It was not a one-man thing Yeah, I ran it and whatever but this could not have been possible without a bunch of people shout out to Jesper Shout out to Pedro Pertuzzi. Those were the two guys that helped me gain the most players and Carter to Help link me with the Japanese guys who were so elated to come and play there Like please let us know when the next one is so really excited to keep inviting Japanese players and getting them involved with our circuit Shout out to all the casters Kyle most importantly for getting all together. Obviously. I love you Aaron I appreciate you being there Kyle got booing Jeremy. So that was a huge W Shout out to Bobby and Lucy without them I would not be able to have the support from outside Pokemon stuff as I try to move forward doing new things Hopefully this can be something that will grow bigger and bigger and become, you know, something worth the value Shout out to all of my kids There's too many with ten of them too many to name. However, I love all of them. I'm so glad that we could crush this year Who else shout to the sponsors evolutions trading for providing boxes and being a sponsor of that and believing men He's a are believing in me. He's a great guys from Texas. He's got a couple of stores Please go check him out also shout out to last but not least but shout out to rip dot fund my sponsor without them I would not been able to fund this tournament They you know trusted me to do what I'm gonna do with this tournament without even meeting me in person So I really appreciate their trust and support and me as a player and me as a business person To make this happen and you know, they're gonna be sponsoring me this next year So that I'm able to go to more events and put on these tournaments. So please go check them out. The beta is live That you for those who don't know you rip packs on it and they record the videos and they allow you to trade and gain XP There's a bunch of great functions on the site. So please go check it out if so really appreciate them without them It would this none of this would mean anything And yeah, just shout out to everybody that came out to the tournament And yeah Just shout out to everybody that came up to me and said they loved the event or the interactions that I had with the parents Some of them I had to hold back tears. I went to so many dinners. I yapped so much. I lost my voice So this was an event for networking a business for me at a high point Most people know that I'm not an extremely Social person with everybody. I'm a nice guy and I'm totally open But I'm definitely very private in my life and who I hang out with so I hope Oh No, everyone's interactions with me they were there are very positive for mine and I appreciate everyone that came up to me to say whether they like the tournament or stuff that I had with coaching or the games that I had with my opponents, especially the ones that were So close to worlds like LC crossier Joey Gaffney Ethan rival the guys that were close to their worlds that I had to play against all of us had amicable Games, even though there were people who were upset on both sides, right? so shout out to all my opponents shout out to the event people shout out to everything everything that came together for the cut for the Masters Cup and then please go check out cutter tap either on the website or on Medify We started working on Medify obviously Rowan winning the tournament Super huge for the brand right being a sponsor of the event and also winning. So that's super sick He's gonna release his thoughts and how he prepared for the Masters Cup as well as our other writers Piper Lapine Jackson Ford Rowan stave now Andrew Hedrick Caleb Rogers and Michael Davis and we have an insanely stacked writing staff So really appreciates all those guys for donating their time and writing from writing for me and been sight It means a lot and all the people that support so yeah I know that was a lot but got a lot of businesses going on so I appreciate everybody's support and all the things that we're doing and Letting me be a grown adult and live this Pokemon life, you know, I really appreciate it No, it's great and last shout out on the Masters Cup front If you are interested in any of the footage the entire event VOD can be found limitless TCG YouTube page So big shout-outs to Robin for providing us with that resource to broadcast the event Without which you know We probably would not have been able to pull as many viewers as we did because as hunter said, you know The event was probably Under Marketing that's the word I'm looking for. Thank you very much. Yes, exactly. So what we're gonna do better. Yes The plan is to advertise the event More heavily heading into future iterations of it and I've spoke to Robin It seems like we're gonna still be okay to use limitless is twitching YouTube as I have no want for a Twitch or a YouTube or clout on that end. I just don't want any of that. It's not the purpose of the event for me. And Robin was really happy. He hasn't streamed anything on there in multiple years. So I think it'll be really cool to continue giving back to some of these old head organizations like Limitless, like me and Finn for Cutter Tap, kind of the older generation that is kind of lingering around with this new generation of Pokemon stuff to keep us old men around here, you know? So hopefully we continue to do that. So shout out to Robin, really, really appreciate him. Not only trusting that we wouldn't do any brand risk stuff for him, but they would be put on a good event and do something great for the community. And he loved the tournament. I had a conversation with him afterwards and we're gonna work out a deal where hopefully all of them will be streamed on Limitless. And if not, if anybody has inquiries about streaming stuff or inquiries about the Masters Cup, we're gonna get that handled soon to where stuff like that can happen in the future. So just stay tuned for that, for sure. Sounds good, sounds good. Well, with that being said, I think that we have talked quite a bit this week. And honestly, we really didn't even cover everything that we could have covered. A lot of stuff happened this last weekend. These ICs are always Pokemon packed weeks. It's a lot of people gathering in one place, doing something that we all love and having a great time doing it. So I don't really have a better way to close this out. I think that it was a great week for me. I hope that everyone else that is listening to this also had a great time at the event. Maybe in the comments this week, what I would love to hear is what was your best experience at NAIC if you were present for it? Or if you weren't present for it, try to make a point to come out to it next year if you are at all able to. And with that being said, you can find the socials for the show in the description of the episode. And we would love to hear from you in the comments. But from John and myself, we'll see you guys next week on the Battle Frontier. Have a good week.