Episode 37: NEW SEASON NEW PROBLEMS?

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 have got a lot of news to cover this week, with some announcements coming out from the Pokemon Company about the upcoming 2026 Championship Series, updates to championship points, regionals dates, updates to actual tournament play, and the proceedings therein, and we'll be giving you our opinions on all of those things as we get into it. Before we jump into all of that news, I want to hear from Jon, and Jon I want to know how your week was. It was pretty good. I went up to New York City Wednesday last week, and was there from Thursday all the way until Sunday. I had an interesting job I had to do. I got contracted through my company to do air emissions testing for Bank of America at their corporate headquarters in midtown Manhattan. So I went up to a roof for six, seven hours, and just stared at six different smokestacks for six hours to make sure that they weren't blowing out harmful emissions to the air. And that was it. You know, that was my work for the day, but the fun part was we went up a little early on Wednesday, and I had Thursday off for Juneteenth, and then we were able to just kind of go around the city. We went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which was cool. I'd never been there. Really cool museum. I really only scratched the surface there. But it had some amazing paintings. And then we just did a lot of good, you know, walking around, being tourists. We went to Times Square because Sydney had never been to Times Square, and I'm just like, you have to go. Like, I know it's hot and obnoxious and loud, but it's a lot of fun. So we had a good time. You know, went up to a couple good restaurants, a really good Italian place, and then met up with a Pokemon player who I've known for a long time that lives in New York, Tristan Masick. Yeah, he's a really nice guy. So we got dinner with him one night. And then, yeah, came back. We took the train up and back. I have like a love-hate relationship with the train. It's romantic, and it's like, it's convenient. Like, it leaves Richmond, and it's a little bit cheaper than flying, but not much because if you factor like the bags you can bring in on a train versus, you know, having to pay extra for bags and all that. And it dumps you right in the downtown area of New York City. So that's really nice. But it takes six hours, but there was an hour delay on the way up and an hour delay on the way back. And they were both right before we got into the station, like our final destination. It was like an hour-long wait. That's crazy. It's one of those things where like, the idea of a train, it's like a road trip, but you get to avoid the stress of having to drive. And you can always just get up and walk around whenever. I mean, I'm definitely jealous of the fact that you guys have trains and just general public transportation up in the Northeast that we do not have access to down here in Florida. They're attempting to build some sort of infrastructure for it, but it is just not anywhere near ready yet. Yeah. There's some stuff that goes up through Orlando, like Miami through Orlando, but not really at where you're at. Yeah. We're like at the bottom, bottom of the Northeast corridor. DC is a little bit better situated and you've got the Acela that goes through the DC, which is like their high speed train, which that gets you to New York City pretty quick, like three hours. Oh, wow. Yeah. Don't quote me on that, but it's a lot faster than just whatever, like the Northeast regional that I have to take from Richmond, but it's still like, yeah, I agree. It's convenient. It is nice when, if you don't have to be there in a hurry, you can just take the train and it's like, you know, I read a book the whole time and just chilled out. So it wasn't like, you know, flying, you've got to go through TS, you know, all this stuff. We're getting off on a tangent, but yeah, the train was fine, but it was a good trip. And then, yeah, I came back into this hellscape that is now Southeast and Northeast US of this oppressive heat wave. That's why I have, if you're watching the video, the nice view, a green wall behind me, because my office is very, very hot right now. It's like 80 degrees up there and I'm not really feeling like sweating too much. So I just moved everything downstairs for this episode. Hopefully it'll be back to normal next week. But yeah, not a lot of Pokemon is for me. I watched a little bit of kind of the master's cup on a train and I watched some of the Japanese finals for the Japanese tournament they had, but I didn't really do a whole lot other than that. We had league yesterday. We did like a cube and then. Okay. I was going to ask, like, how's your turnout there right now? Like what things actually kind of like that post NAIC prior to the start of the official next season. It's kind of like a weird twilight zone where you don't necessarily know how interested people are. It's also summer. So families are kind of off doing their own thing. So has that affected your attendance at all? A little bit. Yeah. We've had a little less kids than normal, but we've actually had like pretty decent attendance for summer. We've had like last night we had 10 players at early and I think eight of them were playing in the cube that we had, like I had a friend, one of my friends built a cube and wanted to play it. So I just said, yeah, you can play it in my league. And I put it in my discord channel for my Pokemon league and posted the cube list and sure. You know, use this emoticon if you want to participate. We had a full participation in it. So that was fun. And then, yeah, I had a couple of new people that hadn't met, you know, one new older guy and then another kid that came in with his parents to like play board games and had brought his Pokemon deck for some reason and then didn't know that there was a league going on. So I think I rocked his world and that was pretty fun. Like he was super jazzed to find out about that. So that's always fun when you're like, you know, yeah, Pokemon league exists and they're like, oh, this is the best. Like I get free cards, like, you know, just for showing up. That's great. Yeah, man. So it's, it's a lot of fun. It's still cool to see, like, you know, I do judge it regionals, but it's still fun. Like I love Pokemon, like any way I can get it. And I love when people love Pokemon. So that's what it's all about. You know, just helping people or having people play Pokemon and that's, I mean, yeah, like I'm sure attendance might pick back up. We have our first league challenge in a couple of weeks. The first Monday of next month, actually, for our league. So we'll see how that goes. I'm going to do like a fun tournament next week, just try to get people, you know, prepped for that. Okay. We got a couple of players that haven't really played in a tournament before, so we'll have to get them ready to do that. Especially with some of the updates that we have coming down the line, right? Yeah, we'll definitely have to incorporate that in there. So we'll talk about that in a minute. But yeah, I'm looking forward to kind of getting back into the swing of things. There was like a professor conference that got announced, but I don't think I'll be able to go to that. So but yeah, summers are interesting. Like you have that kind of lull period between NAIC and Worlds. And for a lot of people, myself included, who aren't going to Worlds, it's like an even longer period. Sure. But, you know, there's a lot to look forward to and there's still stuff going on locally. Pokemon was pushed in like the mid season. I forget what they call it. Might be the end of the year celebration or something like that, where they did like a lot of alternate format tournaments and like different leagues were pushing, you know, different things, like either alternate format or just fun tournaments with different prizes or something like that. Just to get people to play during this time. No championship points in the line, but you know, that doesn't always have to motivate people. I've seen a lot more posts of people doing like GLC events and whatnot at their league too. For sure. But anyway, I rambled enough about you, man. What's going on in your part of the country? I have not touched a physical Pokemon card since NAIC. I believe it. The past week I've actually done a lot. I tried to muster the motivation to climb to Master Ball in Pocket. Like initially I had not wanted to play during the last expansion just because I wasn't pulling the cards. I felt like I needed to, to build a deck that I felt was adequate enough to climb with and just because of that wasn't fun. So I ended up, but I failed because I didn't realize that the season ended on like Saturday night, I think, or Sunday night. I thought that I had a couple more days coming up here, but yeah. So I like, I don't know, upper third of Ultra 4 or Ultra 1, whichever way, whichever one's the last Ultra Ball. Like almost there, just couldn't quite muster up the, I don't know, stubbornness, persistence, the grit to push my way through, make it all the way up. But you know, we'll get back there eventually. It's not, that's mostly just a matter of time commitment more than anything. And I definitely, during this last Pocket season, committed far more time to prepping for physical TCG events instead and, you know, prioritization. But the other thing I've actually been playing a decent amount of Unite this week in particular. Not like a ton, but like a couple games pretty much every day. And that's been a lot of fun. I added some guys that I used to play Unite with that I've gone back and like hit them up on Discord and we'll do like duos or trios or, you know, I think one of the nights we did a five stack and just a fun game. It is, I still feel like it's not a super great game to play solo, especially if you feel that you have any sort of grasp on how to approach the game. And then you try to play solo and you end up with four people that you swear are not actual people and they're just doing whatever the heck they want the entire time. And, you know, I guess at some point it is still a game, like have your fun, but it just sucks when it's supposed to be something at least semi-competitive or has a goal in mind and there are winners and losers and you feel like you get the short end of the stick based on your teammates. So some of that happens, but you know, not the end of the world. Like you, I looked at a little bit of that Japan championship over the weekend where I didn't realize top, I think 64 from that event all got world's invites. Oh wow. That tournament was primarily invite only as well, where you like had to win a city or you had to, I think top 32, a champion's league throughout the season to get an invite. And then they filled the last, I don't know how many slots from their lottery system, which was undoubtedly inundated with hundreds and thousands of potential participants. But yeah, it was, it was definitely interesting to see that the format they had was really weird in my mind though, where for whatever reason in Japan, they still operate on this system where you can change decks between day one and day two. And then day one was their typical best of one Swiss with at time. If the player who went first is the final turn, the player who went second gets one additional turn. So players have an equal number of turns, but if the game ends at time with the player who went second, the game is just done and they typically operate with a double game loss. But for this tournament, they swapped things out a little bit and made it so whoever was ahead on prizes actually got the win in the game. Oh, wow. But then for day two, they did best of three, but also had these really weird time rules where, and kind of just match rules where I think it was, if you were one, Oh, in the series, when it concluded, you got three match points. If it was one in one, I think you got three in your opponent. Like what was it? I don't know. It couldn't end at one in one because it was still be concluded by prize cards. But if you lost a series, but still won a game, you would get like one or two points. And if you two owed somebody, I think you got five. And so it was just an odd and I've heard of similar sort of things happen. Exactly. Something like that. Right. Right. But for their organized play, they also run like best of two or like two game series, which, yeah, it's a whole different can of worms. And it seems, I guess it seems to work for that game. I'm not really entirely sure. From what I've heard from other people who have played Lorkana events that are Pokemon players, a lot of them don't feel that it would work very well for our game, but I don't have enough experience with it. I haven't played it at all. So I can't say for certain one way or the other. But yeah, I am. That pretty much sums up what I did this weekend. Like I know that I checked out like one round from that other big event that was happening in Ohio that I know like Hedrick and Shemansky and Michael Davidson and a few other people were at that they were advertising. I can't remember for the life of me like who put it on, but I know like Andrew Mahone was streaming it and their stream table was this special custom like poker table, which is actually pretty cool looking. But yeah, I'm not. I honestly couldn't tell you who won the event either, but I know that it was like a 5k. So at some point, you know, if you really want to check out more competitive content in the Deaths and Rivals format, go check out Mahone's, you know, VOD channel. I'm sure that it's up there. Sure. Yeah, I'm kind of it's tough like this stretch between worlds and or between NAIC and worlds, especially like when we don't have another big tournament coming up with this format. Sure. Like it's I'm less motivated than I think I've been in a long time to play standard. I've been playing a lot of alternate stuff or just other games. Like it sounds like you are too. Well, yeah, eventually I'm waiting for Black Bolt and Whiteslip. Yeah, yeah, exactly. That's where I was going with that. It was just I think we're all just waiting for, you know, the new set to basically drop in England. push and we can start play testing it and getting ideas together and getting cards and start playing it. Right. But that'll come. You know, it's kind of nice to have a little couple, like maybe one or two weeks off, um, just to like rebalance, recess, you know, not play Pokemon, do some other stuff. Sure. Um, but you know, enough of that. Uh, we gotta, we gotta refocus on Pokemon for just a little bit. Um, you know, we got some big news coming out. Yeah, we do have some big news this week. Uh, so first thing there is a new pocket set coming out this week called Eevee Grove that is featuring all of Eevee and its various evolutions. But we don't have all of the cards from that set yet. And we also have a lot of other kind of what I feel are more important topics to talk about. So we're going to save that till next week. And so if you're a big pocket enjoyer, Oh, actually, sorry. If you are a big pocket enjoyer with the release of that set this week, there are a twitch drops happening with some select streamers. Um, I know Spraygoals is one of them, um, Ursa Day, who does all the pocket tournaments on Limitless. And there's a few others. There's a whole list. If you just go search the TCG Pocket Twitter account, you'll be able to find that whole list. The drops are happening, I believe all day, Thursday and Friday with various content creators that are on that list. I think that there are seven or eight of them. So you can get I think a couple free packs and some wonder pick hourglasses as well. So you know, go stock up and you know, hopefully your polls are good. Good luck with that. We do have other news involving the upcoming championship series for this season. But before we jump into that, we thought we would bring back an old favorite of ours in the form of Blaine's quiz show. Yep, I am quizzing Aaron this week. And you know, I went to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. And one of the cool exhibits I saw there was about kind of Japanese water, or it was calligraphy, like folklore and water watercolor, like painting and stuff like that. And I felt like this week, I would kind of take some inspiration from that. I wanted to do a one about Japanese folklore, Pokemon from Japanese folklore. So just a refresher on how to play, Aaron, I'll give you three multiple choice questions. If you are well and truly stumped, you'll have one hint you can use at any time. But if you answer all three questions without the use of a hint, you will receive an additional bonus point. I kind of took a different path this week. I'm trying to, I don't know, kind of pull in from some different areas, just to see how it goes from here. But yeah, so let's without further ado, jump into it. First question. Real quick, before we get to question one, sorry. Just an update on point totals for as a reminder for everybody, since it's been a little bit since we did this segment on the show. Currently the scores are 26 points for myself and 25 for John. So I'm hoping to extend my lead to a point where he cannot surpass me next week. Well, we'll see about that. Yeah, let's get into it. All right. The first one I have for you, which Pokemon gets his name from the Dorotabo, which translates to muddy rice field of monk myth. Is it Swallet, Muk, Guzzlord, or Garbodor? So all the Pokemon I chose for this week, you know, just how we have all of our mythical creatures and fantasy stuff in the West, Japan has a lot of that in the, in their own cultural history. And so I kind of wanted to ask some questions based on Pokemon that are based on those myths. So the Dorotabo, muddy rice field of monk myth, which Pokemon listed below pulls from that? Boy, I really wish I knew what the Dorotabo myth was. I mean, the guy, he, so in this image, I'll give you a picture of him at the bottom, right? In the image, I'm assuming, so this is a Dorotabo. He looks like a Muk. And so, but I'm wondering if that's not just you kind of leading the witness and Muk's here as a distraction. I'm going to try to guess, narrow this down a little bit. So I know like Alola and Unova are based on Hawaii and New York city. So theoretically they have more American influences and might shy away from those Japanese influences. Whereas Hoenn and Kanto are specifically based on regions in Japan. So I think I've got it narrowed down to Swalot and Muk. Just looks, he looks like a Muk though. I'm going to go with Muk. All right. Muk? Yeah. Is correct. Okay. Good job. Yeah. I mean, I gave you a softball to start with. I feel like that's a, that's a stereotypical Muk pose though. Like the Ken Sugimori Muk art looks exactly like that picture. Yep. So I definitely think that, yeah, they definitely pulled pretty well from that. Sure. All right. One point for you. The next question. Which Pokemon gets its, or I don't know, apostrophized gets, sorry. Gets its origin from the Japanese, not capitalized, my grammar is really bad, sorry. Folklore of, I'm going to butcher this I'm sure, but Nerariahion translates to the slippery gourd who has an elongated head and fancy tastes. So our little dude down here is the Nerar, I'm going to, I can't, Nerariahion. There you go. A little better than me. Is it Goodra, Arctovish, Jellicent, or Electroth? Okay. Let's see. So again, I'm going to go with not Arctovish because that's England. Similarly, I feel like that would disqualify Jellicent because it's a Unova Pokemon, or is Jellicent a Unova Pokemon? I think it is Gen 5. Yes, yes. It's Gen 5 because it was in the Plasma stuff. So yes. Which would also eliminate Electroth, so the only one that's left is Goodra. So I guess I'm going to go with Goodra. Okay. So your process of elimination worked for the first round, but I specifically chose a Gen 5 Pokemon for this one. Oh no. It is actually Jellicent, which I kind of picked a tricky one. Like if you look at Jellicent, it has like a regal look going to it and it hangs up by cruise ships. Sure, sure. And then this guy has kind of, yeah. So it definitely has like that going, like it's kind of a weird parallel. It's a bit of a stretch, but like, they're all just a bit of a stretch, right? Like, you know what I mean? Yeah, yeah. I feel like a lot of this would make more sense if I knew what any of these creatures were. Right. So I definitely appreciate that because I definitely, I didn't really know much about it before I started researching it. But yeah, I tried to like make it at least a little bit, like give you a little more context clues. Sure. But all right. So 0 for 1, or 1 for 2, sorry. Last question. Which dragon type Pokemon listed is not based on Japanese folklore? So I'll give you four different options here. Is it either Zygarde, Druddigon, Goodra, or Hydreigon? Which one is not based on folklore? Well, I'll go ahead and use my hint here since I already can't get the bonus point. Gotcha. So it is not Goodra or Zygarde. Those are both based on Japanese folklore. Sure. And that makes a lot of sense. I mean, my gut is just Hydreigon because it's a Hydra, and that is very Greek. But I also feel like that leads into, what is that Godzilla monster? It's, oh my gosh. There's definitely a Godzilla monster that is a Hydra, and I cannot remember for the life of me what his name is right now. And gosh, I don't know what the heck Druddigon's supposed to be. He's like a Lego guy, sort of. That's always what I kind of imagined it as, just like an amalgamation of random toy parts. Like you took a bunch of action figure pieces apart and put them back together. So is the Hydra, but is it based on whatever Godzilla's enemy is? But it's also German with the naming scheme, but I don't know if that carries over to what its name is in Japanese. It's very tough. Very tough. I think we're going to go with Hydra or Hydreigon is too similar to whatever that Godzilla monster is, that Kaiju guy. We're going to go with Druddigon here. Okay. You got it correct. It was very close, but yeah, Druddigon is not. It's I think just fabrication. Hydreigon does have roots in Japanese lore. I think they have their own kind of mythical many-headed dragon and like, yeah, a good pull from the Godzilla. I think it is. Is it just Hydra from Godzilla? I honestly couldn't tell you. I know that there's Mothra, and King Kong is technically a Kaiju, and it was in one of the more modern Godzilla movies, but I can't for the life of me remember what his name is. This is going to bug me. Let me look it up real quick. But two for three. That's not too bad. Heck yeah. Heck yeah. I still do not at all understand how that dude on the last slide is related to Jellicent, but I will take it. That was definitely a stretch. I was trying to pick one that was a little more difficult, but yeah, I mean, truthfully, I did get most of this from Reddit, so it could just be somebody's conjecture. It could all just be totally wrong. Yeah, right. That's so funny. It made sense at least a little bit on the like, oh yeah, I can kind of see it, you know, but anyway. The three-headed Kaiju from Godzilla is called Jidora. Jidora. Okay. I would never got that, but yeah. Me either. But he is definitely a three-headed dragon. Looks very much so like, yeah, oh, okay. So Jidora, have you seen like the meme of the two dragon heads where like two of them are ferocious and then one of them just, and they're like side-eyeing the third one that looks like he's dumb or silly or something? Those are Jidora's heads. Okay. So yeah. So yeah. Just like Hydreigon has three heads. That makes sense. Yeah. But cool. So two points for myself here. So a three-point lead next week. So unless John is able to capture that elusive bonus point, he will not be passing me at least for one more week. Yeah, we'll see. We'll see. But cool. It was a lot of fun there. I love Blaine's Quiz Show. It's still one of my favorite segments that we do. But you know, we don't normally do a ton of news talk on the show, but this news seems pretty important, especially as it impacts players who are looking to approach this upcoming competitive season for the 2026 Championship Series. And so as you can see here, there's a list of topics on the official Pokemon website, just including League Cup and League Challenge start dates. There are adjustments to Swiss tournament rounds for championship tier events, which are regionals and internationals. End-of-round procedures are actually changing this season, and that applies to all tiers of events. So that's going to be a big discussion point for us. There are some championship point adjustments for regionals and internationals specifically. And some of the other stuff is not as big. There are some Unite changes, which I think are really cool, but we're probably not going to spend a ton of time talking about them. And I admittedly know very little about what is going on in Pokemon Go, so we're going to probably gloss over that as well. And there's a little bit of a mention of the Ace Trainer program. So some slight updates, hopefully some expansion on that, which should be really cool to see. But the first thing here are the kickoff for League Challenges and League Cups for this upcoming season. And like you mentioned, Jon, you already have yours scheduled for not this upcoming Monday, but the following Monday, the first Monday in July, because the soonest you could schedule an event for this upcoming season is July 1st, which is a week from tonight, Tuesday at some point, next week, July 1st. You are able to have an event scheduled for that day, and people can start immediately gathering their championship points. Now that we've seen this bar that's been set for the top 125 system for qualification and spoiler, before we get down to it, the system for qualification for this year is very similar, just actually ever so slightly easier as far as the raw number of invites that are available. But we've seen the importance of these local points in doing this qualification process. So people can jump in nice and early, grab them ASAP, instead of having to scramble to get them at the last minute, right? Yep. And yeah, we already started. This one's a little bit of an abbreviated section. We only have two months since June was kind of a month off. So if you're going for a travel award, if you're like a junior or senior, I know some of them go for that. Or like a master that's gone for that EUIC travel, I guess EUIC travel awards would be based off of NAIC. So this would be for EUIC, I think, right? Yeah. These are... These should... No, you're correct. So this will be the start of the EUIC cycle, because the LAIC stuff should be finalized now. Yeah, that'll start. That'll be in like November. But yeah, that'll kind of start up with that. But yeah, this is just the first foray for a lot of people. We always get a huge, I shouldn't say huge, but an increased turnout for the first few events of the year. It's exciting. It's exciting to, you know, test for Worlds format or play like in their first few events for the season. You know, and this is a good time if you're a new player. And if you never played in a tournament before, you know, head out to one of these, get your feet wet, get involved in the community, learn how to, you know, navigate through these things and, you know, have fun. Like this is definitely like a little bit of a lull between big tournaments. This is the only real. events will have that'll earn you championship points for a while till after Worlds. So this is a great time to, you know, stock up if you're a Worlds competitor to get your championship points early. That way you can spend more time on regionals or travel for other stuff. Yeah. Yeah. So the big thing... Are you planning on going to a lot, you think? A lot? No. But some, yes. I mean, I guess, big spoiler for this upcoming season, I'm, I don't even know if I'm planning to go to five major events. Just the... I don't know if I will have the time available to do so. Like, my son's still doing travel baseball. And we, I've gotten to a point now where we're going to have tournaments two weekends a month. And that's just literally the entire weekend. And a lot of those coincide with a lot of the, at least, North American regional dates. So it's just, I don't know how feasible it's going to be, unfortunately. I do have some other plans to hopefully be in the area of all of the international events at the time that they're occurring. So I'm hoping that I'll be able to sign up for all of those successfully and be able to participate in them. And they do still pay out more points than regionals. So performances there may still lead to me getting an invite. And I may end up having to make a late season locals push again. But for the time being, I'll probably play in a couple. Heading into worlds, like you said, they could be decent little warm-up events, being able to test out concepts or see what other people may be thinking of that you're not necessarily on the ball with, instead of being stuck in that echo chamber that you can get into with testing. And have a true modern grindstone could be pretty nifty as a testing tool. I hadn't really considered it. Yeah, definitely. It's a little bit challenging. We won't really have the worlds format available to play until after worlds, basically. I think Black Bolt and White Flare aren't legal for play until the Friday before worlds or whatever. Oh, is that true? I actually, I was actually not sure. I don't know what the release date is on that. I'd have to look it up. Before we just say that, we should probably say it. So we've got Black Bolt and White Flare. Release date. July 18th. July 18th. That's pretty soon. I know. It's really bad. I just got my email about my worlds invite today and I for the life of me cannot remember when the tournament is. So August 15th. So the set's out for a month. So there should be a couple weeks where it's legal. And when is worlds? August 15th. August 15th. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. It's August 15th. Oh, so you'll have... Yeah. There'll be two weeks where it's... ...two weekends. Okay. ...legal for locals. But not for the next two months. No. You won't have anything. But, well, yeah. Well, so just, yeah. It's gonna be a little challenging. The next two months, we won't have any worlds format tournaments, but it keeps you fresh, keeps you, you know, sharp, if you will. Sure. And admittedly, like I do like the Deaths & Rivals format a lot and I was a little disappointed that there was only one big event where it was legal for play. Yeah. Definitely. From what I've heard from a lot of people, at least in other podcasts and people I've talked to, there seems to be some people that, like, it's a pretty good format, you know, pretty balanced, I'd say. Yeah. I think Pokemon's in a good spot right now. Like, this doesn't feel like there's an oppressive, like, three-price Pokemon, which we definitely will have at some point. For sure. Absolutely. But... And... Yeah. I don't know what else to pick up, but it'll probably be a pretty short window for some Deaths & Rivals League Cup mats. Yeah. I think... I haven't seen any yet. I don't know what it'll be. But I'm sure that, yeah, if it's a Rocket-themed one, that would be pretty cool. Oh, I'm sure it's Giovanni and Mewtwo all the way. I would hope so. That'd be so sick. There's no way it's not... I mean, I'd be polling for insert random Rocket, Krunt, and Crobat, but I'm sure that it's Mewtwo. Or maybe it's Cynthia and Garchomp, you know? Like... They usually pull from box art, at least they have for the last, like, for Deaths & Rivals they did. So, I would imagine it would probably be Giovanni and Mewtwo. Yeah. That would not surprise me at all. No. Another big update, and this is one that I think a lot of people are going to be pretty happy about. So, for the last season, we had the potential to have an asymmetrical cut that went out to 32 players, and the cost of adding that to the mix was the removal of one Swiss round from Day 2. So, as a result of that, you know, people were, quote-unquote, less likely to bubble out of cut, but it also led to this system where you had a lot of people that were getting into Day 2, and they just legitimately could not make top cut because they were X2-1. Or you would have, instead of having bubbles for top cut, there were a lot of bubbles for top 32, or top 64, or even top 128. And having it, you know, seeing that happen, and the fact that that top 32 round was literally never utilized over the course of the season, Pokemon has decided to axe that. Asymmetrical top cut still exists, but it only goes down to top 16 now. And instead, there will be one additional round added onto Swiss. It's not specifically stated here in the article that it is into Day 2, but I have to imagine it would be into Day 2, no matter what. I can't imagine that they're going to have people playing 9 or 10 rounds on Day 1, and then only playing 4 or 5 again on Day 2. I think that it's going to be, you know, 8 rounds Day 1 into 5 rounds Day 2, or 9 rounds Day 1 into 5 or 6 rounds Day 2, at the end of the day. Right? Yep. Yeah, I can't imagine you do an 8-round, or 10-round tournament Day 1. No, that sounds awful. Day 1's already insanely long. Like you start at 8 and go till 9 or 9.30 a lot of times, if it's like a 9-round tournament, like any ICOs. And I can see, it makes sense if you're going to cut off the ASIM to 16, to tack it on to Day 2 at that point. Day 2 usually goes a little bit faster, you know, the round turnover is a lot less. Well, you just have fewer players. Right, exactly. Less fewer games, less, you know, opportunity for multiple games. The stated goal is to have like more clear, you know, it says in an effort to smooth out tournament proceedings, asymmetrical top 8. Yeah, and then, what did they say? They wanted to do it, to vie for top cut placements and cash prizes. I think that's the biggest thing in this. Yeah, you have clear breakpoints, right? Yeah, it felt so bad when you just lose your winning end to top cut, and then just bubble out of cash, or like, you know, like that happens. Like that, and that feels really bad. Like, you should be going for the top cut, but like, you know, there's definitely pressure to ID to make sure you're still in the cash at that point where you would have a winning end for top 8. And then if you lose that, you're out of the money contention, like that felt really bad. But like this allows, in theory, to have more breakpoints, like you said, to where now, if you lose that winning end to top 8, you're still on the money for top 32 or top 64. You have the opportunity to be, or if you're legitimately on a winning end for top 8 in that extra, that true final round in this new system, then yeah, you are less likely to bubble out of cash, for sure. And or it also gives the opportunity that there's a chance now, if you go into day 2 at x21 and go truly undefeated, that you might still be able to make cut. And they call out here specifically that they want to ensure that players with a record of x2 or better make cut. But I do believe that there would be some circumstances where x21 would still potentially have the opportunity to make it in. Yeah. It just depends on how many rounds and how many kick, like the kicker for, or like what the cutoff for like top 8 would be, like for a smaller tournament, like a smaller tournament right on that cutoff line, you'd probably have a higher number of players above the x21 line, you know? But yeah, I think this is good. I think players really were complaining, not complaining as much as saying that they wanted that extra Swiss round. I think a lot of players felt that with the new system implemented last year, taking away that Swiss round from day 2, I heard a lot of griping about it. And I get it. Like, you know, and I think this was a good solution. It's a good compromise in a lot of ways, like looking at it from like, yeah, we never had a top 32, at least for TCG. I think VG had top 32s and stuff. So yeah, they definitely did. Because they don't have as many ties. So there was more. Oh, that's true. That's fair. But for TCG, it makes a lot more sense to just say top 16 is perfectly fine. You know, after doing a whole season where we had all these different events, the most we ever got to was like 15, I think. And yeah, I mean, I think it's fine if like, I'd feel okay bubbling if it meant that like, I gave it my best shot and like, did really well and still just bubbled at 17th or something like that, if it does come down to that. But you know, I think this is a good compromise. I think people will be generally pretty happy about this. And it doesn't, you know, from me as a judge perspective, it doesn't really impact my day's length in theory. It does probably make it a little bit longer for day 2. You know, realistically, we weren't having the top 16. So we weren't getting done, I'd say around 4 or 5pm, as opposed to now, it might be like 6 or 7. Yeah, just an extra round, a decent amount of time. But you know, we'll see. We don't know what we don't know yet. It could, the next thing we're going to talk about could impact the end of round length. Yeah. So we have, when's the last time they changed something like this? I guess it would have been the introduction of plus three turns, right? Yeah, probably when they changed it over to, I don't even know. Because yeah, I guess when we had, it would have just been best of one, it was plus three. Right. I don't know when it was plus three added. I honestly couldn't tell you. It's been a long time. It's been forever. So as long as I've been playing. Plus three, plus three turns is no more. You know, at the past season 2025, we had the opportunity, you would play a best of three in Swiss or at a League Cup or League Challenge best of one in Swiss. And then when time was called, if your game had not yet been resolved, you would have a total of three additional turns after the current turn to attempt to resolve your game. Otherwise the game would result in a tie. There were apparently some logistical issues that we would run into. And I can agree with this to a certain extent that a lot of times plus three turns ended up somehow taking people upwards of 20 minutes to resolve because players, they go into the tank and they think, okay, how, what, and admittedly, it's a lot of pressure. You know, I have a maximum of two more turns to figure out how to turn this game into a win for myself. And you oftentimes see players who realize they can't win. So instead they just try to force the tie at the end of the day or try to figure out a way to prevent their opponent from winning so they can win a game 1-0. And so with this new system, we will have plus one turn, which from my understanding, you still have active players turn zero, and then the other player gets one additional turn at the end of time to attempt to resolve their game. And I don't really know what this solves, to be honest with you. So additionally, there is also now a quote unquote overtime clock, which is a maximum of 10 minutes for these additional turns. So both turn zero and this plus one to hopefully give a better idea. This is the maximum length that a round can be, I guess, still barring time extensions, which already have a defined slash unofficial maximum to them. I think it's 17 minutes. But the confusing thing to me, John, and maybe you would have a better idea as somebody who does organize more events or judges these events, do you feel like this actually solves anything and will lead to fewer ties or better, more accurate match outcomes? Or is this purely a logistics thing? It's a good question. I think just a good point of clarification, it's plus 16 minutes is the maximum time extension we've been told to give. And players have been told that that's basically where we're at now. That might change. Who knows? That's not in the rulebook. So that's kind of as the tournament organizer dictates. But I'm unclear. So you can still win a game 1-0 in this rule change. So there's still that factor. Yeah, I don't know. I think just having a hard cap on the end of rounds, that will be beneficial in some ways. Because I don't know. NAIC was a good case study if you wanted to go there. If you watch all the finals, all the finals went to time, I think. Maybe not the juniors finals, but the seniors and masters finals, definitely. Even after 75 minutes went to plus three turns. And they went, it just took forever, dude. It definitely pushed the tournament longer. It pushed the championship Sunday longer than the organizers were planning on going. So that made it interesting. And then the Tord versus Raleigh top four match, the plus three turns there. I don't know. Did you watch that at all? Yes. But I was not necessarily aware of how long it was taking. It took close to 25 minutes, I think, to finish the plus three aspect of it. That's kind of crazy. I mean, it's frustrating to me as a judge. Because you watch a judge or you watch the tables play. And they play within the pace of play guidelines as long as there's a clock on the table. And then the moment that the clock stops during plus three turns, those guidelines go out the window. And unfortunately, as a judge, I'm not incentivized to penalize a player. There's nothing in the rulebook. In theory, we're still gonna... If I'm a judge of the final table, like the top four of an NAIC, I'm not gonna be the judge that just says, hey, guys, we need to make sure we're keeping our 15 seconds per game action. No one wants the judge to be the deciding factor, especially when it's plus three turns to give a two-price penalty. You say that, but apparently Pokemon does. want that to be the case because they call it out in this overtime clock section where they say the overtime clock will be instituted for the additional turn and if play does not conclude within the allotted time the game is a draw the overtime clock is intentionally long compared to the average turn length with the hope that this clause will trigger only in extreme situations where slow play penalties may already be considered and applied where appropriate so they're already calling out 10 minutes is way too long for turn zero turn one and we totally understand that we do acknowledge that in extreme circumstances it may be necessary but there is already leeway you know as it is written for judges to apply slow play penalties during this there is um i just i've never seen it done in plus three turns um i've seen it done before plus three turns plenty of times but just this kind of gives like the judges like a get out of free card a great out of jail free card like it basically says all right we're going to remove that authority from the judges and put it like on an empirical everybody knows you have 10 minutes after time is called and then your game has to be over so that that basically enforces it without you know giving a penalty or anything like that it just forces the players to hey either you guys figure it out within 10 minutes or it's a draw and that that also i think helps with the whole a lot of times after matches conclude and there's not a clear winner in sight sure players will deliberate amongst each other uh quite a long time to try to figure out hey okay what's your hand what's in your deck what are your resources can you win this game okay well my board state looks better i i think i can win this game what what you know what what do our next three turns look like that kind of thing and you can spend 10-15 minutes trying to figure that out and this says okay you have 10 minutes after time is called and then it's a draw like straight up like if you guys haven't signed a slip at that point i as a judge can go over and say okay guys sign it now or it's a draw and then you know that is that's good i think from an organizational standpoint or from an like an organizer standpoint something needed to be done because it was getting to the point where our end rounds were getting to be pretty long you know and i don't want to say that like i understand that players have a lot of hard decisions they have to make and that it's not always clear who won a game of pokemon especially after 50 minutes you know best of three like that's not a perfect system it's just it's a system that exists to have maybe one good match and then you know one or two games that don't finish with a full like conclusion yeah it's designed to have basically one good match in my opinion um and then you you kind of go from there but this hopefully will encourage players to figure out their game plan going into like the final few turns of a game and then after time is called they can you know either say okay well if you're not gonna be able to win on your turn it's gonna be a draw or i'll just establish terms from a gentleman's that we had before game three started and go from there you know so my issue is a player go ahead yeah i was gonna say my issue with this is that the way it is written now and the yes i can totally understand the perspective of plus three turns can take excessively long at times but at the same time a lot happens during those three turns as far as game progress is concerned if both players are actively attempting to progress towards winning the game and you can end up seeing you know over two turns a dragapult deck can take five or six prizes and win the game and now if they only have one turn to do so it's just it's literally never going to happen and what this ends up doing is pushing i think i think this pushes games towards artificial conclusions or matches to artificial conclusions i should say and that you'll see a lot more games that result in 1-0 wins for people who win that big long game one and maybe that is totally satisfactory and that's the aim of that pokemon is going for at the end of the day here and that's just what everybody needs to get on board with but it feels really unsatisfactory when you tell me that i'm sitting down at the table to play potentially three games but i know going in i'm gonna play one and it almost you know i'd like i said i think there's an interview that ray chan did with um kevin clemente over on like a rage after their breakup performance in portland where ray made the decision to scoop on like turn two of multiple games to attempt to finish a best of three playing a very fast aggressive deck in a plus three turn system and now you're telling me that we have two fewer turns to potentially satisfy the conclusion of that best of three which in my mind says okay now as a player i need to be ready to scoop when i just see my opening hand in game two if i won game one and i don't think that this looks good enough to win yeah i definitely think you definitely need to like i would say if you're gonna go to any tournament i mean this is this is the nice thing is this will be instituted at locals um so it won't be best of three so it'll be definitely a little bit of a different feel but i would say before you go to regionals this year definitely get a feel for how this impacts how you play your rounds yeah um put a 50 minute timer and then like i guess a 10 minute timer after that to determine like what you should be doing at that point i mean i think the 10 minute timer is largely irrelevant from a player perspective i think that that is for organizers and for logistics and i think it will have a large impact there and that's totally fine i think the big thing is the removal of the two turns which at the local level for league challenges and league cups i think it's totally fine best of one yeah i think you will see very little difference in match outcomes based on this change i think that the big thing is going to come from trying to play best of three at regionals and i just don't know if it's even feasible anymore yeah that's fair i think it will have a larger impact at regionals um and it definitely feels bad when you're not able to have a natural conclusion to a set um and this will definitely impact that um and i'm not going to argue otherwise um it just goes back to like okay um well i guess do we play differently do we choose a different deck yeah maybe maybe yeah like i don't know and that's it's a bummer but like that's kind of at the end of it like you're not playing tournament that finishes if we're gonna add an extra round of swiss we have to find a way to like have it go at a timely manner we can't have these tournaments especially on day two you know if we're adding an extra round day two we can't have it go till 8 p.m like sure we have to close the hall down everybody has to go back home and work on monday like you know what i mean like no that's fair i think what i would have been interested in if the overtime clock was on the table could we have kept plus three turns but instituted the overtime clock and then if you haven't finished your plus three turns that's it like who cares i don't care what turn you're on in overtime and yes then you really have to have judges on the ball with slow play penalties potentially being applied or making sure that pace of play is being kept up because reasonably you should late later in the game you should be able to reasonably finish three turns within 10 minutes i would think i don't i don't know man i i i want to say yes but like if you watch dragapult have one of their like last two turns like with drag with dust snores and uh recon directives and flip the scripts and you know unfair stamp and then iono and then you go back to another recon directive another recon direct like it just takes five minutes six minutes yeah it there's a lot of decisions being made with damage placement there's a lot of decisions being made with what you're putting damage on with dust snore and where you're attaching energies and if you're monkey dorying before you do this or that you know it just you know and that's just one deck and there's other decks like marty's grim snarl i'm sure has a lot of decisions that has to make um with monkey dory damage and all that kind of stuff but yeah i don't know i think if you look like back at naic it definitely was getting to be a problem oh yeah having agreed just games go for for especially stream matches were going really really long um and that's fine like i don't like if that's how the rule set is that that's fine with me i would rather but like yeah i get i get what you're saying um and i think yeah this will be a pretty big sticking point i think people will love it or hate it probably hate it for the most part pokemon players don't love change but for me as an organizer especially at local levels i'm excited about it yes um i think at local levels this is a great change i really do um sure like i said the big sticking point for me is that like the championship level or premier level of i don't remember what the actual classification is but at the higher tier of events i think this is going to be an issue and i think it will ultimately be felt as a net negative change from the player base over the course of the season well and that's that's important yeah you know is it better than what they did in japan this past weekend i don't know i know a lot of the length of my pokemon career prior to a lot of these plus three turn systems was time gets called who's ahead on prizes that person wins the game and is that the best system in the world absolutely not it definitely the concern there and why people have pushed back against trying to you know shift back to a system like that is that for the most part it largely pushes control decks out of contention and alternate win cons become very very difficult to play when at the end of the day if you're behind on prizes when time gets called you just lose and you know it's been interesting and i think healthy for the game to allow strategies like pidgeot control or block lax or great tusk mill to be at least theoretically viable going into these events so taking that off the table definitely feels bad but you end up having to now factor in not just the overall tournament metagame when comparing cards against each other but also how does my deck perform within these new given time constraints and is it still viable to play a third game when i know that it's two turns shorter yeah i think that'll be interesting to see how that plays out i definitely feel like uh gentlemen's agreements would be a bigger factor this season with these overtime rules uh because if you can't have two extra turns each or like one extra turn each on top of you know zero and one um you definitely have to figure out a win con sure like a match conclusion because like time you just say or you just take the tie yeah i think that you're gonna see you're gonna see a lot more ties especially early on in the year yeah early on i could see that before people we were still figuring this out right um and i think i don't know i'm excited to see where it goes like pokemon's been pretty open to feedback so if you guys don't like this um you know put a support ticket in um that's probably the best way like pokemon does read support tickets absolutely kind of a cliche to say it but like if it definitely is like hey this season has felt empirically worse than the last season where it was plus three turns um can we do something else you know make that known to pokemon um they do listen and yeah like we saw changes this past season you know at the beginning of the season x21 didn't make day two and then we had a mid-season change when did that happen was that toronto yeah it's pretty early on like i know in baltimore x21 didn't make cut i don't think it did in louisville either so it was either either i want to say it was toronto was the first one where it was possible yeah so i think but was it by euic for sure oh for sure for sure it may have honestly even been before laic yeah before november so it's like pretty like you said pretty early on in the season so if this comes out of the gate first champion event and we'll get to some locations here in just a moment and it is just a total flop and everyone vehemently feels that this is just a bad system and lets pokemon know that you know obviously there's growing pains and maybe we're all maybe i'm totally wrong in my take on this and this system is totally fine and it's great and everybody loves it but they don't know they love it yet because they haven't actually experienced it or given it the time it deserves i don't think we'll see a change prior to at least two or three tournaments in yeah but i think if there is if it's negative if the feedback is negative for long enough a change will probably be made you know yeah and i think something did need to be done about end of round length oh absolutely it was egregious i do yeah i got to the point where they were taking 30 30 plus minutes 40 minutes between the end of the round and then the match last match slip getting up to the hive um i mean some of that's time extensions obviously but even then it's still just painful you know to be a player to be a i mean the judges feel too when we're waiting we're not happy either to be honest with you um but yeah like if you played at naic there were some it went pretty smoothly i'd say but like there were some rounds where you were just waiting on one or two matches to finish and it just felt painful painful you know so but hopefully we'll see how this goes yeah definitely interested to see how it plays out um you know i think this will be after worlds right yes so um majors specifically wolf glick asked if these procedures both this and the added swiss round applied to worlds or next season and play pokemon responded that they are officially for the 2026 season so they do not apply for worlds got it so yeah all these changes that we've been talking about today will happen if for region like uh it'll happen at league cups and challenges starting july 1st but weirdly enough the seasons kind of overlap we have the 2026 season starting july 1st but like other worlds worlds is separate from the 2026 season it is the culmination of the 2025 season even though it is in august it is still part of you know it's really weird it's just in a bubble it's kind of like its own thing but we had that happen where like uh yeah the whole rule set didn't apply to like we had rule changes and then the whole rule set didn't apply to worlds but we had like stuff going on like the first term rules or whatever changing um and that not being a factor until after worlds but still impacting locals and stuff like that yeah but i don't know i think this will be interesting to revisit as the season progresses sure and and see what kind of impact it has, because it is definitely going to have some level of impact, I think, to the outcome of events. Yeah, we'll definitely have to see if it's positive or negative. For sure. Next thing up, and we'll go into this in just a minute. I actually want to finish everything on this page, but there have been some changes to the championship point tables for regionals and internationals. Apparently, there are also changes to the kickers for league challenges. I don't really think that that's super relevant, but the big changes are for placements outside of Top Cut, but still top 64 or higher for internationals and regionals. And we'll get into specific numbers here just to run through them in just a moment. The other big thing on this page to go over is the Ace Trainer Rewards Program is returning. Hopefully, it will be more than just a singular promo card this year. It would be really cool to have a secondary threshold to reach for for players to say, you know, the total you can get from locals this season is still 260 points, and that obviously exceeds the 200-point bar. I think that it would be nice to have something higher than that to incentivize people to go out and go to a premier event and get to 300 points. Maybe you max out your locals completely. You go get top, I think it's 512 at a regional, gets you 40 points, and that's 300 points. There you go. You get, you know, whatever extra thing is. Maybe there's some 2026 Champion Series sleeves that they send to everybody. No, please don't give me sleeves. Okay, well, just an idea, just an idea. A pin, like give me a pin or something. I think that that'd be pretty neat. That'd be cool. Just something else. Just something beyond the singular promo card seems like it would be nice. And they said that they will announce more details for the next season pretty much, you know, but we had later date, you know, took until what, like April last year? Yeah, probably, probably. So hopefully it won't take that long. But yeah, I'm definitely excited to see if we add on to that. Organized Play used to do a lot for like play points and like rewarded top players in that regard. So it'd be cool to see something like that maybe, or. Or yeah, ship out another, ship out a set of, like you can already get, like you can already get the stamped energies out of the like play or the rewards packs at League. But give me, I don't know, it'd be different if we had something that wasn't regularly available. Like, you know, we got the. Yeah, I would like the 30th anniversary. Give me like a 30th anniversary card. That'd be super sick. Is stamped with play Pokemon or something like that. That'd be pretty cool. That would be extremely cool. If you had a whole set of, I don't know, of whatever pattern they're going to have on them, quote unquote mega energies that are going to undoubtedly come out this season for since we did, we had the terrestrial background and energies all throughout this year. I think that we're going to have something with like a helix or a DNA swirl or whatever that like S shape that they have on mega Pokemon is. And put that on the background of the energy and then put like 30th anniversary Pikachu head in one corner, play Pokemon in the other corner, ship everybody a pack of one of each of those energies if they reach a certain championship point threshold. And, you know, just an additional thing, more stuff obviously comes out of Pokemon's pocket at the end of the day. But I think that the players would really appreciate and enjoy it. Yeah, I mean, we saw like Pokemon catchers with the play stamp. Or the call of legends energies, the hypnotoxic lasers. Those are sick. Lasers are crazy, yeah. Did you ever get those? Yeah, yeah. Lasers? I think that I got every single one of the original like play Pokemon mail out. Do you still have them? I honestly don't know. I'd have to go look. It's like buried in a pile. Probably. That'd be cool. But yeah, Pokemon's got a long history of giving players rewards and incentives. And hopefully they flush it out a little bit more this season than last season, I guess. Yeah, I have faith that they will. Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's really not a reason not to think that they would just say, well, we're happy where it's at. Well, I mean, I think they've heard enough from the players to say like, there's enough players, not complaining, but saying it could be more. And yeah, I think you bring up a valid point. But yeah, I think this is a good thing to have in our community. Oh, absolutely. I mean, it's interesting to see like my locals are like, there was a couple of them that were pushing at the end of the season this year to get that ace trainer. Yeah, whereas in previous seasons there would be a drop-off, right? Right, exactly. That's like three or four players that wouldn't be playing in the league cups or challenges in the last few of the season. So definitely like a good free marketing incentive to, well, not free, but like relatively cheap. It just increases player retention throughout the course of the year, which I think is definitely an important thing to have. And it gives somebody a, the important thing, especially with how difficult it is to get a world's invite now in these systems that they put in place with Top X, you need a secondary goalpost for somebody to attempt to achieve. Whereas prior to Top 125 from this current season or with the new season, it's Top 135 for invites for TCG Masters for the US and Canada region. You had, what was it? Like 600 championship points, I think, or maybe 650 that you needed to acquire to have an invite. And that was just the goalpost to reach. And if you had anything below that, they were worthless. And so this gives somebody, especially somebody who's just starting out, or maybe they come in partway through the season and you say, okay, cool. Here's a goal you can get to. You may not be able to make worlds this year, but here's something else you can do. And so just more of those things scattered around, or even if there's a threshold below 200, that doesn't even have to be above 200, but just more steps, like a battle pass of sorts for the season. And it's cool for me as a professor, like I don't get to play in many regionals. I do play on my locals from time to time. So this is something I could go for. It's like 200, like I got to 150 this year. I tried to get to 200, but I whiffed a couple of times. I didn't play in that many events, to be honest with you. But yeah, it was within my grasp. So it was something I was definitely going for, at least a little bit at the end of it. But yeah, it's something that incentivized people to play locally and have something to go for. And yeah, hopefully you have different tiers like you would for other games. I hope so, I hope so. Yep. I'm not going to dive into this, but I just want to mention, I think this is really cool. Pokemon Unite is basically setting itself up similar to the LCS structure for anybody who has ever followed League of Legends. So there's actually going to be basically an official pro league where teams can be promoted and relegated in and out of it throughout the season. So I think that that's going to be really fun to watch, makes Unite a much better spectator sport than it currently is. Real quick, did you want to go over the kickers, changes, the thresholds? And then you had a tab. I was just going to run through the rest of the page first. Like we've got the schedule that I'll, yeah. So the last thing here that they mentioned on the page is the schedule. And I think that's my next tab here. Yep. And so, like you said, the next upcoming event that we've got is Worlds here in Anaheim on August 15th to 17th. And then there are, I believe all of the EU and LATAM regionals and events have already been announced. But interestingly for the US, we've only had three events announced so far and all of the ICs have already been formally announced. So one of the interesting things you'll see here, just the first two regional slash special championships that are popping up for this upcoming season are Frankfurt and Monterey. And yes, they are in two different regions being, you know, Monterey in the LATAM region, but I'm sure we'll see a lot of NA players going to that. And then Frankfurt over in Germany, but they're occurring on the same day. And so we didn't see as much of that overlap in the current season, but it looks like as we go down this list, there will be significantly more of that heading into the upcoming season. Yeah, I definitely see a couple further down too, but I think this kind of touches on, it harkens back to if you played back in like 2012 through 2017 or so, Pokemon, even in North America designed regionals, like they would have multiple regionals in different parts of the country on the same weekend. And the whole idea was, and this has changed a little bit now, it's more, we're going to have different regionals in different regions, like North America, you know, South Latin America, Europe, wherever, but on the same weekend. And this, I think, is good. Like, I think it's interesting, like we had a lot of players this year, or at least a significant portion, I wouldn't say a lot, but like we had Brent Tonneson coming and going to basically every single regional possible. And there wasn't a lot of weekends. There was a couple this past year where we had, you know, like an Australian one and like another European one, and then maybe one in North America. Like the max I think we ever had was like three on a weekend but it looks like Pokemon's designing it to where, all right, you know, we respect the hustle, we respect the grind, but realistically like let's make sure that regionals are specifically for that region that this is hosted in. And that way, the way we do that is we have multiple regions you can go to and the players obviously would favor whatever region's closest, right? So you just say, okay, I live in Europe, let me go to Frankfurt, or I live in Brazil, let me go to Monterey, or wherever, or I live in North America, let me go to Monterey, something like that. I mean, my hope is that this is like, but this is a pipe dream thing, but the onboarding process to doing like East and West Coast regionals on the same day. Yeah, I don't think, I think we're past those days. It's never gonna happen. No, I think, I mean, that's how it used to be though. We didn't have that at one point. But I don't think, as much as Pokemon, it's too global now and the money is too high for that to be the case. I think this is probably a good compromise. This is like, okay. And then you have like ICs are their only, the only event going on on a weekend is an IC. Like that makes sense. You don't want anything else going on. You want everybody that can come to come and play. Yep. So this makes sense from a marketing and like a play standpoint. I'm sure we'll see hopefully more NA regionals. I mean, I don't think, hopefully. I'm sure that they're gonna pop up. We have a theoretical list. Like they released that video and we saw all the light beams, people are speculating. You've got all the like Charlie Day with the board and all the pins and we're trying. But I mean, and there's sound locations. A lot of them are repeat locations from what we've had previously. But from what we know concretely, the first true NA regional for the season is going to be in Pittsburgh, September 19th to 21st. And honestly, I can't say anything bad about this. It's a good location, pretty central, has a good, easy to access airport. I guess the other thing upfront, it looks like North America is being split the same way it has been this past season where we'll have three West Coast, three Central and three East Coast events. And so Pittsburgh is eating one of those East Coast slots. And then the first Central slot that we have up is Milwaukee. So they're getting two events within six months of each other. Yeah, definitely a little bit. And October is a good time, I feel like. Oh, yeah, sure. Pokemon looked like they did a good job of like planning this out, other than like London in February. That sounds miserable again. But a lot of these make sense, like having your featured cities that you wanna have. I don't know, I guess some cities get the short end of the stick when it comes to like when you can have, you just gotta fit them in there. But yeah, Milwaukee in October sounds great. I've never been to Milwaukee. I don't know, did you go this past year? Yeah, my friend Ben went. He said it was a great time. I mean, he had fun, I guess. I've heard it's a pretty good location. It's just awkward to get to. Yeah, it's definitely not as big a hub as we've had, like not Chicago or even Minneapolis. But yeah, it's not tiny. It's not like, or at least I think we're moving past Peoria. Yeah, and sorry to just dunk on Peoria. My aunt lives there now, weirdly enough. So their population doubled? Probably, that's funny. But speaking of destination cities, the third one that got announced was Las Vegas. And this is crazy to me. If you were to ask me, before COVID, when Pokemon regionals were like 200 to like 500 players or day one, I think we maxed out at like 600 maybe. But like there was never a world in which I thought Pokemon would ever host a tournament in Las Vegas. I just thought they wouldn't based on like Vegas as an environment. But I guess now that we've had New Orleans for two years, like Vegas is fine. Yeah, and I think that kind of hints at like, hey, Pokemon's saying like, all right, is it a children's card game? Yes, but like the vast majority of players playing it are not children and like are young adults. And are male. And Vegas is definitely on the radar of a lot of those people. Yeah, and I mean, to be fair for the families, there are like shows and different things. Families can definitely still have a good time in Vegas, even if it is definitely geared more toward adults as a whole. Yeah, it is not, you know, there are things that you would not wanna have a child exposed to at Vegas, but that's any major city, I'd say. Definitely. So I don't think it's like, think of the children like that kind of clutch your pearls moment when this got announced. But it was definitely like exciting. I know a lot of- No, there's a lot of buzz. There's a lot of buzz around this one already. And so, and it makes a lot of sense. I mean, Twitch has their streaming thing going on in Vegas every year, TwitchCon, and then just a lot of different conventions happen in Vegas. I mean, you had a lot of, Pokemon already had some other stuff going on with like PlayLab in Vegas. Okay. So I guess they just got more comfortable with the idea of it after a while. Yeah. And yeah, like you said, after it being in New Orleans and the place didn't burn down and nobody's like kind of raised, like nobody- really raised the fuss about it, I'd say. And the players really liked New Orleans, so it makes a lot of sense, you know, at the end of the day, when you're saying, okay, where do we wanna have these things at? What are the main drivers that would bring Pokemon, like, would bring people out to these things? And even casually, like, you know, not necessarily to play, but just to show up and have a convention out of it. And that's where we're moving, right? We're saying, these aren't just Pokemon tournaments, they're Pokemon conventions. We're gonna have vendors, we're gonna have a bunch of trades going on. There's a huge trading community in Vegas, like, realistically, like, there's a huge number of card shows every year in Vegas. It's probably one of the most central places, you know, other than Florida, maybe, where PSA is. But Vegas is, like, probably number two. And so, like, Pokemon is a huge trading card game and a huge trading community, and so that kinda leads into that, too. For sure. And then, so this list is actually all just regionals and special events, but there's a gap here. LAIC has already been confirmed for Sao Paulo again this year, the week after Vegas, so the weekend of the 21st, so the week before American Thanksgiving, thankfully, instead of being the same week this year. And then we go to NA. Those are all of the NA events we have so far, but undoubtedly, we'll get something announced for December and so on. I'm sure that we'll be on track to be very similar to this year, where we'll have roughly one regional every month, from starting in September, you know? And then, just to close things out for what we know already, for things that we expect more North American players to go to, London is, again, hosting the International Championship. Weekend of Valentine's Day, which is interesting. But, you know, my wife was excited. She said that, like, we can just go make it a couple's trip, and I'm just like, okay. There you go. You know, that's... There you go, yeah. My wife found out London's in February again. No, thank you. She does not very excited about the prospect. The fun thing for me is it's like right before my birthday, so I'll definitely, you know, be celebrating that a little bit. For sure. Yeah, it's, you know, I'm not too excited about London in the middle of winter, but like, whatever. I'm just happy to go back. Like, we had a great time when we were over there for Worlds, and I've got... Actually, I've got family over there, like, not in London specifically, but in the area. So, hopefully, we'll have enough time to be able to maybe go see some people that I don't get to see very often. So, it just seems like a good time. And then, again, to close things out, we got confirmation that we're going back to New Orleans. Not on Father's Day weekend this time. We actually hit the week before, so won't have to worry about that. But I think for people who celebrate Flag Day, this is your weekend. Have fun with that. You can have all your flags in New Orleans. There you go. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. It's like the weirdest holiday to me. I know, I don't know. I have no idea what Flag Day is about. I'm just gonna leave that up to people who celebrate it. Yeah, fair enough. Yeah, I mean, we have a couple of new cities, too, that are on the first time that they're ever getting regionals. Cool to see, like, I saw one of my friends who's a judge in New Zealand. Auckland got a special event for the first time. This is the first, I think, special event or regional in, I mean, maybe not first ever, but first in a long, long time. Oh, yeah. We've seen in New Zealand. Yeah. And that's really cool. And then, yeah, we got a new one for Brazil. Had to go back up. It's the Belo Horizonte. Yep, that's a new city for Brazil. Okay. So that's pretty cool. And then, yeah, Mexico's definitely flushing, like, getting a lot of love. This, I think, which is really cool. Monterey was confirmed again. I believe Merida got another event. And then, is there a Mexico City event as well? There was one other one. Oh, Queretaro. Okay. Yeah, I don't know where that is. I don't either. I, unfortunately, do not know too much about Mexican geography. My Mexican geography is struggling. But, yeah, definitely some, and then a lot of repeats. You know, Utrecht, Seville, Lima, and then, yeah, going back up to the top, Birmingham. I do think, I will say so, for the people who were in the crowd of, oh, the special events are gonna ruin everything, it does look like a majority of weekends that have special events also have a regional the same weekend. So, the players who would want to chase the quote-unquote free or easier points have to make the decision, do you want to give up the opportunity to go for also a cash finish in addition to those points? Yeah, and that could change. You know, they might add more events as the season goes on. For sure. Just like we don't see Puerto Rico yet, which has been a perennial inclusion. South African events are obviously not on here. And like we said, we still have six more presumed NA regionals that need to be added. But, again, those should be, you know, one a month from December through the rest of the season. Yeah. And there'll be one month in there where there's two of them. Yeah, on a personal note, I know I'm gonna try to hit up all the East Coast ones. I'll probably end up going to a couple Central. West Coast is tough for me. Oh, yeah. Vegas, I might see. It's really cheap to fly to Vegas from Richmond. Oh, lucky you. From DC, yeah. For me, it's, I think, well, maybe it's just right now. Like when I looked up those dates, it was like 500 bucks round trip per person. Yeah, there's like nice flights on Allegiant. And I think Allegiant's probably the biggest one that flies out of Richmond or flies out of Dulles or something like that. It's not too bad. But, yeah, it's definitely more accessible than like Milwaukee. So it'll be interesting. I'm gonna try to go to a European regional. I was talking, I worked with one of the organizers or one of the head judges for a lot of the European events. And she was very encouraging and saying like, yeah, we can make it work. Like, you know, increase your comp or like figure something out with your hotel situation as far as like getting you over there and making sure you're taken care of kind of thing. That's really cool. As far as that goes. Yeah, it's definitely encouraging. Like, that'd be cool for me. I've never judged a regionals outside of US and Canada. So it would definitely be cool to like have that. Like, you know, I see experience, but like on a regional level would be really neat. So I don't know, something that I wanna do. I think that's a goal for me this season is to do like a, either like a South American or European regional. So that'd be cool. Nice. Next thing, just real quick. Like I mentioned earlier, we have confirmation of the number of invites total for the season. And if you compare this to the table that we have for this season, we did get final confirmation today that everyone who is tied for 125th in keeping with the asymmetrical top cuts that we've had throughout the season, the asymmetrical invites were handed out and everyone tied for 125th did receive an invite, which led to a total of, I believe. And I think that there were at least a couple of auto invites that were actually not within the top 125. So I want to say it was a total of 140 or 142 invites total for US and Canada. And so it looks like Pokemon took a look at those numbers and said, hey, we want to bump that up a little bit. And now we've got just 10 extra invites added into the pool. And the same was done for Europe. I think Latin America is actually at quite a bit this year. I don't think that they had anywhere near 125 going into the last season. And then Oceania and Mesa are still kind of small pools as they typically are. I think Oceania got bumped up maybe from last season. Maybe, not a ton though. No. I mean, none of these are real drastic increases. Like we already know where the event is next year. I don't think San Francisco has a huge convention center by any means. No, that one was, from what I remember, I never went to it. It's pretty small. But it was a very small venue. I imagine they'll do maybe a different venue than they did the last time. It was like in a hotel room, hotel ballroom or something like that the last time. So Pokemon's kind of outgrown that. But yeah, definitely be interesting to see what they do. And then we got confirmation again that winning a regional or special championship earns you an auto invite. And top four at an IC also earns you an auto invite. And these invites, once again, do not pass down within an event. So Henry Chao can loss zone many more invites this season as Gardevoir maintains his strength. Or Gabriel Fernandez. Oh, for sure, yeah. The two of them can duke it out for who eats more invites this season. Right. And then the last thing, just to jump over, we are gonna do that comparison that I talked about between championship point breakdowns from this season and last season. And so if we look at up here on the screen on the left, we have the new 2026 championship point values. On the right are the current 2025 season championship point values for regional events. And so first place, still auto invite, obviously, but also earns you 350 championship points. All of top eight is identical. So 350 for first, 325 for second, 300 for top four, and 280 for top eight. Where we start to see differences are in top 16. And this was one of the stated goals of Pokemon was increasing championship point payouts for non-top cut placements, but still good day two placements. So for top 16, we are bumping players up from 160 to 200. Top 32 is being bumped from 125 to 160. And top 64 is getting bumped from 100 to 120. Then 128 and below are all staying the same at 80 for 128, 60 for 256, 40 for 512, and 20 for 1024, respectively. So the big thing here, just rewarding deep finishes for players and consistent deep finishes, trying to ensure that those are the players that are qualifying for Worlds. But I guess also theoretically, you're rewarding somebody who just does decently well at a couple of events and is able to kind of get over the line rather than having to spike an event to really have a good season. Yeah, maybe it's like shining a spotlight on somebody that gets a lot of top 16s or top 32s. But definitely hasn't made a top eight before. I think that's, and I like this change. I don't know how you feel about it. I think generally speaking, it makes a lot more sense to do this as opposed to have a more, I don't know, even point spread going down. So it doesn't really make sense to give somebody that's top 16 160 points and then, yeah, like the top 128s, half of that. Like that feels pretty bad. You know what I mean? Well, I think the bigger thing was the point delta between top 16 and top eight last season, where there was 120 point difference. Now that point difference has shrunk down drastically. And so this, I think part of it, in addition to these players being able to more easily achieve that top 135 for an invite, it also allows somebody to, if they want to, be a part of that stipend and travel award race without having to make it into top eight to do so necessarily, at least on a consistent repeated basis. So repeated top 16s should allow you to achieve that level of success. And another thing this makes sense with is like with ASIM, you know, before top eight was like the end goal. Now ASIM kind of changes it to where it's top cuts the end goal. And what happens at top, once you get to the single elimination portion of the tournament, it's a lot less tenuous, right? Like it's less on what you can do. It's more on match to match what's going on. You know, you dead draw twice, you're out of the tournament. And I think this helps reflect the nature of that, like having it focused on, like making it top 16s a little bit better. Like, you know, getting into like the number one seat maybe not number one seat, but like number four seat going into top cut at an ASIM tournament. And then you play, you know, asymmetrical top cut and lose. And now you're in the top 16. That feels really bad, right? Like you did all you could and then you hit a bad matchup and top cut. And then you're just out of the tournament. Like that feels a lot worse than now. Now this helps cushion the blow a little bit. It still stinks, no doubt. Cause you're losing a lot of the money and a lot of that aspect of it. I think that all changed. Is that all the same? Like we've confirmed that that's- Cash prizes, packs, everything else is exactly the same year to year. So like that's okay. But like, yeah, like you said, the fact that like it's still a good finish if you finish at the top 16. Like, yeah. So like this kind of recognizes that for sure. Yeah. Yeah. Confirmation top cut payouts are all the same here at top 32 all the way up. So still no top 64 prizing for regionals. And then the other graph that I wanted to show was for the international events to where again, top eight point payout, actually top 16 point payouts are all identical year to year. But where we start to see differences are top 32 for internationals. We're moving up from 200 to 240, top 64 from 150 to 180 and top 128 from 120 to 140 with then 256 maintaining at 100, 512 maintaining at 80 and top 1024 maintaining at 40 points. And again, for this year, best finish limit is shared between ICs and regional. So still heavily incentivizes people to go to all three international events if they are able to, because those are going to still be the highest point payout events. And, you know, now with these changes, even more so, honestly, like if you can make it into top 64, that's the equivalent almost of making top 16 at a regional. And realistically with how big these fields are, it's not that much different. No, realistically, especially with the more rounds being added, like this makes sense. Like if you're adding more rounds, you're able to like shift it out. Like you're able to sift through the like real competitors, I guess. Like that's not the best way to phrase that. But like the players that are able to compete at a higher level and like rise to the top should shine through with an extra round of Swiss. It should help eliminate some of the variants that we encounter in a lower, like, you know, you just, like if you're a scientist and you're collecting data, now you have a larger sample size. Now you have more like mashups to play against. If we're not, if we're doing best of three. you're like this, this in theory should help with determining like, who's the best player by championship point total. So this, this is good. Yeah, definitely incentivizes people to go to ICS. I think it's okay, though, like, as much as that's the case, like, it still means like, that you can spike a regional or like two regionals and still be in the chase. And not for sure, like, like, the drop off not being so drastic at regionals helps, necessarily, like if you only can go to one, I see, but you do pretty well at some regionals throughout the year, like, you know, yes, it'd be great if you could go to all the ICS. But realistically, it's a lot. It's a it's a challenging thing to travel internationally for some players. Oh, yeah, especially, you know, if you're in like South America or something like that. And you don't have easy access to a visa or just to travel, like, you know, if you can only go to events in Brazil, I get it. Like, it's tough to try to get a world invite. So yeah, definitely. This helps, like, I think, I don't think there's a lot of people complaining about this at all. Now, it'll be interesting to see what happens at the end of the season next year, where they're like, it makes everything closer or like, how this all shakes out. Well, it's weird. We've got these two things working against each other. Yeah, we got more invites, more points, more and more invites, like how I think it's like, well, you'll see the the the overall total point number will still probably be around the same, but the position of that point number will just be shifted lower. Right. And so I think it'll still probably end up being somewhere around the 700 720 range. But there's a chance that it's, you know, 1020 points higher than that, at the end of the day, which realistically, you know, given these point values is still the same placements you achieved this year. And for the for most of these players, it just translates into more points for them. So it's kind of like artificially moving the goal post. And it's also not I mean, that's not also factoring the fact there that we could have a huge influx of growth, like we've seen growth year over year for the competitive scene. So if we get more players in and more people are competing, you know, that will actually will impact that's still dependent on these events. And you know, how the cap for the events and true for like how some of them can only get so big, right? Yeah, I guess the the number of players receiving championship points at these events doesn't really change all that much. You know, some of the kickers activating definitely is a factor for regionals. I guess all the ICS I think, hit their kickers of 2000. Oh, for sure. Yeah. So that we almost have, I wouldn't be surprised for any I see next year to be 4000 over the 4000 number. Oh, yeah. I mean, we had more than 4000 register over 4004 masters. Yeah, actually show up. Yeah, exactly. We had we had over 4000 registered. Sure. Not all of them showed up. So we had like, I think 30 3800 this past NAIC, which is still amazing. That's a lot. Yeah, that's Yeah, I mean, it was crazy. It was it wasn't like we had nobody really complained about it not being flighted. And I was kind of happy to hear that, like, it ran really efficiently. For how many players we had, yeah, considering that arcanine gets all the credit for that, in my opinion, well, and like the layout for the event was I feel better this season than it was last season, like the location of the hive relative to the table, there was more aisle space to get around. Yeah, it was just I remember last year was really difficult to like, go between tables and stuff. This year felt a lot like there was a lot more room between tables. And between players and all that stuff, plenty of room to play on. We didn't have that. Do we have narrow tables last year? I'm trying to remember what I honestly don't remember. But just honestly, like, but it's impressive, because I believe every single game in every single age division had more players than we had in the 2024 season. And it still seemed to be an overall smoother experience. I agree. Definitely a positive. It's good to see, like, you know, as much as the challenges that come up with having more players introduced to the game and more complexity and all this stuff, like, you know, from an organizational standpoint, every year, we're getting new judges, like brand new judges, because we just need more bodies essentially. Sure. So you're having to train people on how to play regional like judge at a regionals level. So like, to see that players, I think, for the most part, have been fairly happy with the level of consistency of rulings at tournaments. I mean, we've always seen like Twitter, like, always after regionals has something to prove. But like, I don't know, like, I don't know that I don't have my finger on the pulse of fan experience. I'm not like an organizer dealing with feedback from players all that much. But I don't know, I feel like quality control wise, like, it's been a pretty good year for that. And if I'm wrong, please let me know in the comments. Like if you've got a bone to pick with TPCI or with organizers or with me as a judge, you know, let me have it. I want to hear it. But I don't know, it's exciting to see like just the growth of the game and to see like, Pokemon keep getting bigger. You know, and I and I like that they're willing to make changes. You know, they, they may not all be well received. And they may not necessarily be the immediate right move. But they're experimenting with things. And, you know, time's gonna tell how successful all of these are going to be at the end of the day, there are definitely some good ones in here. And they may it's kind of like a mileage may vary thing, especially with that end round procedures thing, that's going to be kind of a way to especially at the premier event level, again, really think it is a very positive change for local level events, at the end of the day, and should help those, you know, be expedited in a proper manner. So because they're not meant to take forever. And realistically, you probably don't have a ton of games that go to time. But then when they do, like we've seen consistently, and I'm sure you've seen this even more than I have, as a judge, everyone's brain turns off once they hit plus three. So being able to concentrate that and, you know, shorten that time period will definitely help those things. And I'll be honest with you, judges don't enforce slow play. Like, yeah, we know, we know we should. We talk about it. And it's really difficult as a judge to be like, hey, empirically, this is slow play, you know, and then give a penalty on that. And then then that penalty, because like giving a penalty just makes the game longer, right? Like you stop the game and say, and then give a time extension to offset the slow play. And then so it's not like a mess. It's a it's a it's not a zero sum thing. Like it's not like, oh, you're slow playing. All right, the game's over now. You know, maybe if you give a two price penalty, that's the case or game loss or whatever. But realistically, like, it doesn't always like most times it's a warning and then a time extension because of you try to offset that. But yeah, this is hopefully because it's so difficult to enforce as a judge and because it never, ever, may not ever, but rarely ever gets enforced after time is called. This definitely helps, like, helps have an artificial judge in a sense, like, sure. All right, you have this hard 10 minute, like wall. And once you hit that, it's a tie, you need to do something like that'll motivate players intrinsically to figure out how to finish the game. But anyway, we've talked about it enough. Yeah, for sure. We'll definitely revisit all these points as the season progresses. Yeah, I'll let you guys know how like my first league challenge goes for the year and how players respond to all that stuff. I'm excited to see how locals go for the next few months. And yeah, I'm excited to play some more Pokemon and kind of get a feel for it. I don't know. Are you excited to? I know you're not you said you're not you're going to take a little bit of a step back. But I feel like I'll be surprised if you you know, especially if you're going to ICS if you're not going for a world's invite by the end of the year. Um, I hope so. Like, yeah, I would I would hope that there would be success because I do intend for the events that I am planning to attend that I will do the level of prep necessary to be successful in those events. And I think that I've gotten my process down throughout the season a little bit better, especially at the latter half of the season, to where I think I know what I would need to do to be successful in those events as well. So hopefully being able to convert those a little bit better would be great. But yeah, did you have anything else you wanted to hit before we close things out for the week? No, I think I'm good. Um, yeah, I don't think I have anything crazy going up the next few weeks. I know Pokemon changed the professor layout. Do we talk about that? off top of my head? I don't know. Yeah, they basically made it to where it's more Oh, they're like all of how you do the exams and everything now. Yeah. There's essays. If you want more if any people want more information about that, let us know in the comments, we could definitely make it a thing that we a topic that we talked about on one of our episodes. But you can obviously also go find all that information. Yeah, if your website, but just know that the process for leveling up and evolving within the professor program has changed and is going to shift rather than just being simple questions and essays or are other processes and requirements for doing that now. Yeah. And one other news thing that came up for me as a league leader and organizer, Pokemon's moving away from reporting my league on pokemon.com. And they're going to do it all in play tools, which is nice. So it'll have where I report all my tournaments and schedule all my tournaments. I'll start putting leagues stuff there. Okay. And what that means is it's a more centralized thing. Now I can just pull that up. And they're gonna say they've said that they're gonna have app support for it. So I can have it on my phone. Because like, that was always the pain was I had to like, pull out my laptop and go to pokemon.com because pokemon.com on a mobile device wouldn't recommend it. Like it's not an easy thing to do. Especially as an organizer, like I have to navigate through. It's just a pain. So hopefully, as a mobile app, I can just click a button and say, Okay, this person's a league. And then the cool thing that it's, I think it was announced, at least to league leaders. I don't know if it's public yet. So I don't really know how much I'm going to get into it. But they're developing like a organized play app at some point. Oh, yeah, I've heard about this. Yeah. So you're gonna have like a QR code that I could scan as the league leader, and just use that. And like now you have a league app, you can download, and I get your player ID from that, you know, and that way you have your player ID on your phone, you don't have to carry this piece of paper around and memorize your ID number, you can just pull out the app. Here's my here's my QR code, like it's a Venmo or something like that. And I just have that as a league organizer. So that's cool. So we'll see how that goes. Yeah, we'll just just some cool like quality of life updates for organized play moving into the 25th. Well, the the next quarter of our century, I guess. Yeah. A lot of exciting things. Definitely. Yeah, definitely. We would hope that you would stick around and stay tuned to the show if you are interested in hearing about those exciting things as we report on them. But I took a little look at some of our metrics last week and noticed that less than half the people that listen to the show are currently following it on Spotify. So if you have not yet go ahead and give the show a follow. We'd really appreciate it. We would also love a rating and or review and we would love to hear from you in the comments of the show as well. If you want to get more plugged in and follow the show other places as well. We do have a social media page on Twitter that is at BF PTCG pod, or you can follow john and myself john is on blue sky at john original.b sky.social or myself on Twitter at Aaron or at underscore Aaron underscore curry. And you'll also see those if you're on video, we'll have both of those social handles on the screen. And with that being said, john and I will see you guys on the battlefront here next week. Have a good week.