Episode 43: WORLDS MERCH AND PRIME PICKS

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. And here we are, folks. We are at World's Week. John and I are going to be in attendance, John as a staff member and myself as a player. And this week, first, apologies for missing several episodes over the past month. Just have had a lot going on. But that's life. Everybody gets busy sometimes, and things come up. So thanks again for John filling in for the couple of episodes that I was unable to make. And we wanted to bring you just a couple of fun things to go over this week heading into Worlds. The first thing we're going to hit you with is we've had a bunch of Worlds merch revealed, and we want to figure out what are the top three things that John and I want to go home with from the Worlds Pokemon Center, given how large it's going to be this year. Then we're going to hit up our Blaine's Quiz Show, where John's going to ask me some questions. And we will dive, lastly, into an analysis of John and I's top picks, bottom picks, and a couple of sleeper decks that we think have the potential to do well going into Worlds. So we're going to skip the whole rigmarole of doing a full tier list. A lot of other people, podcasts, YouTubers, et cetera, are going to be doing that this week. And we just kind of want to give our opinions on a few select options, and maybe how they interact with some of the other decks in the metagame. But before we jump into all of that, I'm going to ask John how he's been doing this week. I know, you know, we've been busy. Yeah. Yeah, it's been a little bit since we've really just got to catch up. I had a good week the rest of the week last week. I played in a League Challenge on Wednesday, and I got top four, I think. Yeah, that sounds about right. I had one loss. It was my first round. It was actually to the guy I helped coach and get ready for NAIC. He's still on Joltikbox, and I played Goldengoo, which, you know, it was good. I like the deck I played. I think I made the mistake of playing my Iono turn two, and that was the only hand disruption I ran in the whole deck. And so he was able to just kind of keep his hand after that. The Iono stuck him kind of poorly, but he was able to get just enough to get a KO on one of my two prizes, and then just use two Pikachus with Joltikbox, and I couldn't really get a whole lot going to counter all that. It's really hard to knock those out in one shot, so that was tricky. There were some chances. I had, I think at one point, an opportunity if I got a knockout, but I whiffed all. I didn't see a SCR the whole game, superior energy retrieval the whole game. So I just wasn't able to get any closer to knockouts, and he was able to, you know, kind of steamroll me after that. And then round two, I got the buy. There was a pizza place right next door, so I stopped and got a slice of pizza and ate that for dinner, and then came back. And round three, I played against, I think, a newer player. I wrote a tournament report somewhere, but I don't really want to pull that out right now. I don't think it was in a very eventful game either way, and then round four was pretty good. It was against a Raging Bolt. No, sorry, round three was against a senior who was playing Raging Bolt, who she never really got set up. And then round four was against another Jilted Box, which they ran Genesect, like the baby Genesect. And I ran a Tool Scrapper, which was nice. It came up clutch in that matchup, like I was able to Cypher Maniac, put Tool Scrapper, and then put Energy Search Pro after that, and get drawn to those two, and then Tool Scrapper, Energy Search Pro, and then take kind of knockouts from there, and go 2-2-2. So that was fun. But yeah, it was a good deck. It's a solid deck. I think it's getting to the point where it's solved, like people have figured out how to play against it. So that's kind of taking some of the edge off of it. But it's still solid. Like even if people know how to play against it, like if it has a strategy it can execute successfully 80 to 90% of the time, I don't know, it's pretty good. But that was Wednesday, and then the rest of the week we went up to my in-laws, and we had just a nice little, I don't know, runabout Wednesday. We went out to like a winery with my in-laws, played some board games, and then got dinner. Celebrated my wife's birthday a little bit early since we won't see them again for the rest of the month. She's turning 35. I don't know why I said it like that, that was weird. And then yeah, hung out with her aunt as well on Sunday, like got brunch, and then came home and got my house in order before. Today and tomorrow, two busy days, and then I leave for Worlds Wednesday early morning. So just yeah, kind of pedal to the metal for the next couple days, and then hopefully Wednesday is not too crazy, just a travel day, and then pedal to the metal Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. But it wouldn't have it any other way. I'm very excited, and I'm sure you are too. I know you've had some kind of chaos in your life, and I don't expect you're, you know, we're cramming it in like super late for us on the East Coast, this podcast. But anyways, I know you've had a little bit of a bumpier month, the last couple weeks rather. But how have you been overall, Aaron? Yeah, busy is definitely a way to describe it. But just bouncing back and forth, my son was sick, my wife was sick, multiple trips to different doctors and whatnot, baseball starting up again, and then school just started today. So we're recording this Monday night, August 11th. And yeah, school started up here in Florida for the school year. And so went back and had like school registration one day last week, and then finished, realized, oh, yeah, you've kind of grown. And you've, you know, you've been wearing flip-flops and Crocs all summer, but we need tennis shoes for school, don't we? So went shoe shopping with him yesterday, and like finalized a bunch of stuff. But also on Saturday, was fortunate enough to get the opportunity to head over to Versus Games in Oviedo and commentate their League Cup for the quarter. So that was a lot of fun. Saw a lot of Grimmsnarl decks, but other otherwise decent variety saw, I think a Grimmsnarl mirror match. We saw Grimmsnarl versus Goldango. We saw Grimmsnarl versus, no, Typhlosion was up against Eeveebox. And then it was Grimmsnarl versus Ogrebox and Ogrebox versus Eeveebox in the finals. And Ogrebox ended up actually taking the whole thing down in what I would say was a little bit unfortunate from the Eevee player side of things, like if they got the game three and the Eevee player just totally bricked. Or it was actually, it was a cool sequence, but it was pretty unfortunate. So the Eevee player happened to open with their 50 HP Eevee, was able to evolve into Flareon on turn one going second and had Crispin to get all the energy to it so it could attack and one shot a Teal Mask from the Ogrebox's side, but didn't have a Pokemon to accelerate to. And he had like a Fan Rotom and no, didn't have a Fan Rotom or he should have had another Eevee, but he had like Hoothoots or that he was playing a 101 Pidgeot line. And I think he had like a Hoothoot and a Pidgey on his bench. You're not going to accelerate energy to any of those. And somehow the the Ogrebox player was able to do some crazy play that involved double Teal Dance into Attach to Mew, Retreat to Mew because a lot of play ends plan to move the two grass up to the active and Genome Hacking copy the Flareon and Flareon player is just like, cool, I've got a couple, I've got a couple of birds and no supporter in my hand. So that's a dirty play, dude. And he could have played it out, but he was just like, there's no point, I'm done with this and decided to pack it in. So that was it. It was a it was a fun day and it was a lot of fun to commentate. I was able to get the footage from that. So I'm hoping to chop some stuff up between that and the Masters Cup footage and another stuff that I've done to make a commentary reel at some point and see if we can, you know, get some more with that. So a lot of fun other than that. And then the other other stuff has just been World's Prep, just playing a whole bunch of games and bouncing back and well, not even really trying out a couple of other decks. And I just keep coming back to Grimmsnarl and it's 90% what I'm going to end up playing to this event. It's a little bit different from the NAIC list. A couple of cards out there like the deck didn't really gain a ton from Black Bolt, White Flare, and the metagame hasn't changed enough because of that set release to really warrant changing a ton of cards out of the list. But the big thing is just trying to figure out what are the matchups that you end up wanting to tech for? Like, do you need Shaman in the deck? Do you need, you know, I've tried things like the Fezendipity, the Bloodmoon Ursaluna and just really trying to nail down my 60, hopefully before I leave. I actually have contemplated just going to Worlds with just my deck and no other cards. It's just calling my shot that way and letting it be what it is. And I think the reason that I wanted to do that was just to prevent any last minute panic switches to a different deck, because it just never goes well when you do that. It's just not worth it. You know, just for anyone else that happens to be playing that cares about my opinion, when you go into this event or any event, really, like you should play what you practice, play what you're confident with. And it's the thing that you're most likely to have the best results with. I hope the people listening to this podcast, well, I met people like listening to the podcast that also would happen to be playing at Worlds. Because I feel like for the most part, a lot of people at Worlds, most of them probably don't know who I am. So I'm just going to. But I'm hoping to change that this weekend. We draw a wide net. You know, we take off. Sure, sure, sure, sure, sure. I am high, right? Yeah. But well, speaking of Worlds, we got a lot to talk about with Worlds kind of leads into the next segment. We talked that you teased at the top of it was a lot of merchandise that got released in the last couple of days. We didn't really I don't think we talked about kind of the overall arching different themes that they're doing for this year. There's a lot of cool different themes that they got, like three different ones that I saw, like a rockabilly one, go ahead and pull like the varsity one is the one of them. So it's like a bunch of kind of high school, but also stylized in a 1950s manner. And they have like some cool. Yeah, like a boogie board here. They have like the backpack that's kind of synonymous with Worlds now. Sure. And a nice checkerboard print was cool. And then that's the rockabilly one with like a I wouldn't call it punk rock, more of a that's supposed to be like, you know, like the biker gang or like the quote, quote, the bad kids. Right. Sure. You know, as far as Pokemon is comfortable with bad kids. But I like that. I mean, Arcanine is front and center. So I'm sure some a lot of, you know, Carlos Perro is real excited for that. All the Arcanine fans are rejoicing. You get squawkability kind of fitting with rockabilly. That's kind of cool. I like that. I'm surprised they didn't do some like, like Toxicity or Tox, I can't say the word. Toxtricity? Yeah, that guy. That would have made some sense, but hey, you know, the ones they did choose are pretty cool. For sure. For sure. Then yeah, I think those are the there's been one other one. No, these are the only images that the stock images, there have been some other things that have been revealed because Pokemon has done the thing that they do basically for every big, big event, the Ice Season Worlds, where they've sent some kind of care packages out to social media influencers. And so because of that, we've seen the reveal of the jersey for this year. So instead, a lot of times they've gone with what I would describe as like a soccer jersey or something more similar to a soccer jersey. And this year, they've actually gone with baseball, which fits really well with LA, I think in a lot of ways. I think it looks really nice. It's pretty simple. It's just like white with red pinstripes and says Pokemon on the front of it with a 25 on the back. And I think it looks really clean. Honestly, it definitely does something like you could almost wear in a public setting and not just be like immediately. You can't write. You can't tell it's Pokemon. But yeah, exactly. I mean, not that I'm ever all that self-conscious about Pokemon, to be honest with you. Most people like see Pokemon stuff, but they get school. So like but yeah, this one's a little more subtle. Doesn't beat you over the head with it like some of the other stuff we've seen, or it's not it's not nearly as like MLG gamer ask, you know, over stylized and aggressive. This is more subtle, like you said, so. But but yeah, I mean, with all the merchandise, Aaron, I know we were talking beforehand. We both talked about some things we wanted. Let's just go ahead and list three things that we want from the world's store or from worlds in general for merchandise. Sure. So I'll go ahead and lead us off the first thing. And I think, well, actually, first things, the baseball jersey, like hands down, that's the thing that I'm most excited to get. It's not even for myself. I really want to get one for my son. He loves baseball. It's like literally his favorite thing in the world right now. His top two things are Pokemon and baseball. And so being able to combine those things into one item. Super cool. I really, really hope that I'm able to get a hold of one of them. Nice. Yeah, that'd be great. My favorite thing I liked from the merchandise from the three photos we looked at was the Rockabilly hat, the one with Pikachu on it. Right. Yep. Front and center. I love I love hats like the one I love hats. I mean, I love older style retro hats like the one I have now. But like with the cord on the top and then like, yeah, I usually just like the five the baseball style, but flat bill. And then, yeah, so that's that's right in line with what I would want to wear as an everyday hat. I bought I bought the Psyduck one. I don't wear it as much as I thought I would. I still like it. The one from NAIC or UIC. Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty good. But this one is a little more cleaner. I think it looks pretty stylish. Sure. Next thing for me, again, it's going to. sound like I'm just shopping for my son but literally every year from worlds we try to get him one of the backpacks for school and so you know it's that time of year it's time to update but I I'm gonna include that as a bonus thing I think I think that in this collection and I don't remember what this one is actually called but it is that one with that checkerboard pattern that John mentioned I'm actually interested in this the hat from this collection where is a flat brim with that full colored checkerboard pattern with Pikachu on the front of the hat with his whole varsity jacket get up I just think that it looks really nice and it looks like it matches a lot of different stuff because it's got a lot of colors going on so should be able to wear it with a lot of different outfits yeah it's pretty cool and the next thing I had on mine I don't know if you can see it it's the Machamp that's in the center of that binder there's an actual plushie for it oh we don't have images of any of those it's on the main if you go to like to go back to the website yeah I just came from I I closed it but it's basically just like a stuffed ant like a Machamp plushie sure Machamp was my first competitive and I use the word competitive very loosely their competitive deck I ever played was Machamp Prime my screen name a lot of the time on twitch is champ buster which is the name of the attack on Machamp Prime and so my chance kind of got a soft spot in my heart and I think he looks really cool and that varsity jacket look so I kind of want that one nice nice and then to round things out I'm actually interested in this cooler bag again like I think that this pattern looks really nice it's not super like in your face or anything and I was hesitant to pick this as one of my three because we actually got the cooler bag from Hawaii and just if this is the same quality it's a really nice cooler bag and it holds up really well but just having you know another one as long as we have somewhere to put it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world no I mean yeah it looks like it could kind of push down and collapse a little bit that binder looks nice too and see that on the first glance the last thing I had and it's not something that is in the merch store but it's something that is really special to me it'll be the staff hoodie I get okay so there's some stuff you get a staff you get a playmat promo but one thing that I think a lot of staff look forward to is the hoodie you get I don't know it's not something I'm like gonna wear every day but it definitely like when I was a player starting out and I remember like the some of the judges like walking around or whatever and wearing the staff hoodie it was always just really cool so like that's like an aspirational thing but like yeah I kind of just uh oh that looks cool that'd be something cool I'd want to get one day is a staff hoodie or something like that so that's just you know it'd be nice to have like this will be my first time as a judge at worlds and the first worlds I've gone to since 2019 so it'll be nice to have Eric you know I haven't played in a world since 2015 and at that point I think I still have the shirt I got somewhere for that world but you just got a shirt and you got like the welcome kit with the backpack and all that stuff but you didn't get quite the like for staff you know there's there's certain aspects I think and that's probably one of them that that sticks out to a lot of staff members very nice very nice yeah yeah just real quick um you know if you're listening to this or if you're watching rather since you'll be able to see the nice images that we've pulled up here let us know in the comments what from this merch said you would be interested in purchasing or receiving from the world store and you know honestly if somebody can list something that isn't ridiculously outrageously overpriced like a you know one of the skateboards which unfortunately were lottery only items anyway that neither John or I were able to get into that lottery section if you put a comment on it and we may be able to you know get it to you if you're not at worlds so just get some common engagement going let us know what you think of all of these wonderful items but with that being said we can go ahead and jump into a segment that we haven't done for several weeks because either we haven't been I haven't been here we haven't had a show or we had a guest so let's see what we have going on with Blaine's quiz show this week now those that aren't familiar with a segment this is just our weekly quiz show segment we haven't done it every week for the last few months but we're back at it again I don't have the scores handy I'm sure Aaron in post or yeah well we'll put it right here with a nice ding yep well just show you I think I know Aaron significantly ahead as usual and this will be a chance for him to push his lead just to go over the rules how to play you'll be given three multiple choice questions if you are truly stumped you will have one hint you can use for at any time and then if you answer all three questions without the use of a hint a bonus point will be awarded so I'm gonna go and bring back my favorite segment that always seems to stump you pokey Mart where I list a lot of different cards I was sorting through and bulk and all that stuff these ones I mean I tried to make it a little more fair so we'll see if that actually pays dividends or not all right first question what is the most expensive non full art tag-team supporter is it Malo and Lana red and blue Guzman and holla or a Cynthia and Kalen you know I think specifically because you said non full art the answer to this is gonna be very different I think if it was full art it would 1 million percent be the Cynthia card yeah and I think that for non full art though it's then gonna default to the GLC folks and the only card on this list that I recognize from being in GLC decks is Guzman holla so I'm gonna go ahead and go with that okay maybe a little too easy for you to start out but yes Guzman holla it's a six dollars and sixty cents for a near mint copy and yeah like you said good pull from the GLC community it is definitely a staple in that era that that sphere I should say it is a supporter card and the whole gimmick of tag teams is that they combine two things in one and this one has the weird pairing of Guzman and holla from Sun and Moon this is a supporter that has two different effects the first is search your deck for a stadium card reveal it and put it into your hand and then shuffle your deck but then if you discard two cards from your hand when you do this you can also search for a Pokemon tool a special energy card so has like the added additional effect to it and all of these have an additional effect for usually like discarding I think is to pay the additional cost on there but yeah Guzman holla it's great so great to have as a way to search out a stadium special energy and tool which are you know important in every format but especially so in GLC all right so one in one for Aaron the next one what heart gold soul silver basic energy is worth the least amount of energy that's a typo amount of money they're all that it's a trick question yeah they all say it's a trick question they're all worth the same amount of energy which is worth the least amount of money is it fighting metal lightning or fire and I put the images in there to help you miss it and have this is a tough one honestly because I know some of it's gonna be driven by what Pokemon are on there but I know a lot of competitive players like to use these two and I think that some of the type shakeups you know what types are popular in the game can often be a contributing factor to which one would be the most expensive so I know fire lightning have both had some cause for use for quite a while between my right on decks iron thorns base decks things like Eevee box or raging bolt that use lightning energy and then same thing for fire with dragapult Charizard Eevee box again metal it's mostly goldango I mean I know we had the brief stint with Dialga last year and even with that I mean I know you use fighting for raging bolt but it's also a pseudo wudo and I think Steelix is cooler than pseudo wudo what a hot take one of our listeners might disagree with you there no Steelix is my Felix's he's awesome man pseudo wudo I like pseudo wudo wishes he was a tree oh I'm gonna I'm gonna go with fighting I'm gonna go with fighting okay fighting is your final answer yeah all right well to the dismay of Patrick my brother it is fighting it is I think pretty close between the you narrowed it down to the right to definitely fighting a metal or the cheaper options lightnings like all the fighting metal and lightning are the cheapest of these three but yeah it is fighting I think it's right I'd like six dollars maybe eight dollars that's obviously cheaper than I thought it would be yeah I mean somebody like the the Eevee ones like the the embryon yeah they're 60 to I don't know maybe not that much but well into yeah tens of dollars so for one basic energy yeah from HeartGold so slow yeah I mean and when you order it on TCG player it's probably like run over by a car right yeah I mean nobody takes care of basic energy but yeah these are some of the prettiest energies some of the ones that players definitely seek out so two for two good job Aaron let's see if you can't go three for three so which Pokemon and I think this question you should be able to get but which Pokemon has not been featured on a Champions Festival promo card is it rufflet pavilion ducklet or crustle I should know the answer to this because I just looked at all of these days right we just had this whole a couple weeks ago so I know I know rufflet is on one and I know Vivian is on one I I'm not sure if ducklet is on one or if you threw it on here because you like it and then same to crust crustle seems like it might be on one hmm the problem is I feel like if I ask for a hint you're just gonna give me ducklet and crustle so that's not gonna help I'm just gonna have to guess I'm gonna have to guess um I mean the upside is you get an extra bonus point if you get it right that's true that is true I'm gonna I'm gonna try to hold on to that we're gonna go we'll go with crustle crustles your final answer crustles final answer lock it in oh my goodness Aaron you are a hundred percent correct it is crustle ducklet made it on its way to the 2015 World Championship if I'm not mistaken with the duck boats oh okay yeah they're swimming in the water in Boston Harbor so crustle no love for the weird crab under a piece of rock at least in Champions Festival era I was gonna say he gets a lot of love and unite like he's got a whole bunch of skins where they really turn his rock into all sorts of things like one of them it's a sandcastle there's one where it's like a cake yeah yeah he's a cool little guy definitely getting annoying in the TCG hard hard agree yeah but definitely yeah so all right well you know good news for Aaron Curry fans out there Aaron pulls way way ahead with a four-point sweep with no hints this week making it nigh impossible for me to ever reach I'm redeeming myself for how abysmal some of my more recent Blaine's Quiz Show entries have been I mean that's a take no I I appreciate your expert knowledge I I will say you know we might waste we'll let somebody else win trivia this time we won't probably be doing that with Xander this time around but thanks for playing Blaine's Quiz Show Aaron as always it's a pleasure to make these and it's always fun to give you a run for your money and this time you well earned your money for it's a nice thought exercise you know through yeah yeah definitely definitely and then the last thing here so you know obviously we're heading into worlds people want to know what decks are we gonna see at the World Championship and here I've got trainer Hill pulled up and we've got a whole smattering of decks that they have data on from online limitless events and obviously we're not gonna see all 50 of these archetypes of worlds we're certainly not gonna see anybody playing for alligator Tim Danklin fans may be disappointed and we're very unlikely to see people playing I assume this is just a straight grim snarl deck like no frost lasts because frostless is up here so John and I went through and have selected one deck each to fit the following categories so we have a solid what we expect to be a solid pick going into worlds or a good pick we have a deck that we think is a bad pick going into worlds and then the last one is going to be a deck that we think is actually a sleeper heading into this event and may catch some people off guard and have a surprisingly deep run and just to kick things off really quickly I already talked about at the top I'm a bit grim snarl fan and I think it's got a lot of stuff going for it right now I think at worst into most of the dragapult variants you're basically 50-50 and that makes it more of a skill-based matchup and if you are well-practiced and you are knowledgeable of the matchup you can actually come out ahead and I think that having a good guard of our matchup is never a bad thing especially when you're going into a room where a lot of the top players of the world who are guard of our players are slightly incentivized to stick with what got him there because guard of our really hasn't gotten that much worse in this format you know a little bit golden goes rise to prominence has kind of prompted a slight decline in guard of war but I think that the like cream-of-the-crop guard of our players are able to kind of rise to that challenge adapt the deck and play around with it to that deck well enough that they can overcome it. Some kind of potential negative things would be the fact like we see an indicated rough matchup into Goldengo. I think that it's actually a little bit better than this personally. So again, this is all limitless data. So kind of take some of this with a grain of salt, but I think that this is a little bit better of a matchup for Grimmsaw than this indicates. And having rough matchups into Joltik and Raging Bolt, I think this week is actually going to be a good thing because I expect both of those decks to be relatively low play rate if they're even present at all. And, you know, that just bodes really well for this deck heading into things. So, you know, Joltik is not highly played by top players. It's just something where they want more of a skill ceiling than what the deck typically offers. So that being on the decline is great. Raging Bolt, a lot of people think is just poorly positioned going into the event. So that being on the decline is great. And Eevee Box is also just a really low play rate deck. So having that as a bad matchup is also great in my book. The one odd duck out is kind of the Crustle scenario. And Crustle seems to be the iron thorns of this year where I don't think it's the best thing to bring to the event, but I also wouldn't be surprised to see somebody deep in day two with Crustle just because they've hit the right matchup table. But all of that being said, I think that the 50-50 into the Dragapult variants and the good Gardevoir matchup and the maybe shaky, maybe slightly sub 50%, but close to 50% Goldango matchup make Grimmsnarl a solid play going into this event. Yeah, definitely. I mean, it kind of carries over from NAIC in a lot of ways. Right. Like the strength of the deck didn't really diminish with a new set coming out. You know, the decks that were popular after the new set came out, maybe Joltik, or not Joltik, Goldango and the Jellicent Gardevoir. You do okay into the Goldango. I don't know. There's ways you can beat the matchup. Um, you can use Devo a lot, abuse that early. If you get, you know, two Frost Slash down early, the damage adds up really quickly against Goldango. Just the ticks, because everything they attack with has an ability. I mean, if they run Seizure, maybe that's a little different. I don't know. But, um... It depends on if they're teching for you. And if, like, they typically will be, but how much they're teching. So, you know, if you sit down across from somebody that's got Monkey Dory and Moonlit Hill and Picnic Basket, yeah, you're probably not winning that series. But I think that that's acceptable, because that means that player is probably losing to other decks, and you're less likely to see them the deeper you go into the event. Right. Like their list will be less consistent in the mirror or... Exactly. I guess a Dragapult deck, necessarily. But that's tough to say. But yeah, definitely, I think that's a safe pick. It's like a 50-50 matchup for a lot of the things that you're trying to hit. And you're banking on the fact that you can outscale and outplay somebody. And just kind of out math. Like, just Frost Slash and Spread Damage are really, really... I mean, we saw it, you know, last... Before you even had Grimmsnarl, now you have this 320 Behemoth that is hard to deal with for a lot of decks. Right. So the strength of the deck is... You know, it's not understated, but it definitely feels like it's undervalued a little bit at times. Sure. But I think, yeah, you're gonna see a good bit of it at Worlds. People will probably kind of pick it as a comfort pick for some people. And then, yeah, it'll just be like, I can really allow my skill expression to show with this deck. And so you'll see it a lot because of that. And similar to that will be my top pick, Dragapult Dusknoir. I mean, this shouldn't be a surprise to anybody that's listened to this podcast before. I'm a big fan of this deck. And to be frank, I was kind of cold on it coming out of NAIC with the release of Genesect. I'm like, oh, well, I think Genesect pushes Golden Goat to a place where this deck might have a hard time dealing with it. And, you know, the more I played against it, the more I saw that that wasn't really the case. I mean, your Golden Goat matchup isn't favorable by any stretch of the imagination, but you can still do okay against it. Similar to how, I guess, Marnie's Grimmsnarl does against Golden Goat, like we see here. Sure. The 46.9%. You definitely feel like there are times where if they get a fast start and you don't get your Dusknoirs out and they're able to boss KO like Dusklobs, then it gets a little tricky. But you just have so much board control, board presence with this deck. You're able to really come from behind at any point. It just feels so unfair sometimes. There's times where you just don't have anything going for the first three turns, and then you're able to just get a countercatcher, but do stall for that one turn, build your board back up, and then start swinging with Dragapult. And then over the course of the next two turns, with a combination of two Dragapult attacks and a Dusklobs Dusknoir KO, you're able to just win the game. This deck gained a little bit with Hilda, the new supporter from Black Bolt White Flare. I think it's from White Flare. I don't remember exactly. Off the top of my head, I couldn't tell you which one it is. One of the two. But it's a pretty solid supporter in the deck. We're seeing two copies of it in play to most lists, and I think that's fair. Maybe some players are running a split with Jacques or with Brock scouting. I've seen that. Yeah, a little bit down there. You know, just some other options in there. Some people are running Rare Candy and Turo. And those all make sense. But a lot of the lists have gravitated towards a less unfair stamp build and more of a Neo-Upper Energy build. I think everybody, it looks like 96% on Limitless, have moved towards the Neo-Upper Energy. If you look at the price of Neo-Upper Energy now on TCG play, it's $11. Yeah, it's having a secret box moment, right? Yeah, two months ago, it definitely wasn't that. So I think that's fascinating to me. That really shows you the driving force behind this deck. And it's rightfully so in my mind. I think, like we talked about with Grimmsnarl, that Worlds is going to be the top players in the world trying to show that they're the top players in the world. And those that are feeling confident, you know, you'll see a lot of top players playing Gardevoir, I'm sure, and a lot of top players playing Grimmsnarl, but just as many playing Dragapult Dusknoir going into this World Championships. And I think it's a good pick. Like I said, you just have so much board presence. A lot of your matchups are 50-50. So you're really relying upon just how well you can play into them. Yeah, we only see like a couple bad matchups here with Joltikbox and Zoroark, I guess, which I don't know how I feel about that. And Gardevoir can be tricky at times. It definitely isn't favorable, but you can still, you know, pressure them with early Dusknoirs and disrupting their boards. There's ways that they can come back and beat you for sure. But I think everything else you're 50-50 or better into, and then you have favorable matchups against, you know, a lot of stuff that, like all the janky stuff that other decks are worried about, like Krustle and Ethan's Typhlosion, and, you know, weird stuff. You're just going to be able to deal with with Dragapult and with Dusknoir, like with having an attack that can place damage counters. It's a good pick. An attack that can place damage counters to get around stuff, and then having an ability that just kind of deletes stuff off the board. You're going to be okay. So that's good. Yeah, I mean, I don't think this is a surprise to anybody. We picked probably the top two, like mainstays coming in from NAIC. Sure. I was leaning towards Goldengill on first take, but I think the more the format played out, the more people started hard countering it. And I don't know if that carries over to Worlds as much as, you know, I don't know if the meta will be as much hard countering as it was on Limitless the last few weeks. I don't imagine it will. Probably not. It's weird, like you have to guess, you know, what part of the cycle are you in, right? Or have you ever seen the graph that I think it was related to the Decidueye deck from like the Sword and Shield era? Yeah, where people were like, can I tech for, do I need to tech for Decidueye? Right. And then the moment you stop teching for Decidueye, Decidueye becomes viable again. Yeah. And so I think Goldengill kind of falls into that category, even though I do, that being said, I think that Dragapult Deathsnore, Grimmsnarl, and Goldengill are probably going to be the three most played decks at the event. That would not surprise me at all. But the thing that's really scary about this deck is obviously the board wipe potential that it has. And that's how it really is able to often just steal games from decks, even if they may, under other circumstances, be slightly less favorable matchups. Yeah. All you need to do is give it a little bit of breathing room, and then this deck just starts to build, and build, and build, and we'll just start to wipe the floor with you. If you get the one turn of Countercatcher Badoo, and then your opponent passes, you just have them on the ropes, and you can work them from there. So yeah, I'm still excited by this deck. I know we've seen it played a lot, and I mean, I think it's still a good pick for Worlds. Like, I think if I were to play in the World Championship, it'd either be this or Goldengill for me. So that's where I'm at. Fair enough. Next up, we're going to talk about a couple of decks that we think are bad picks. And I'll lead us off here with Ho-Oh Armorouge. This deck had some hype going into NAIC for a little bit, and gained a couple of notable tools from Black Bolt White Flare. You know, Prism Energy is kind of a really big pickup for the deck. And to a lesser degree, Reshiram EX is also decent. This deck just struggles, I feel. You know, you can sometimes, again, steal games because you get like an early Wellspring Ogre Pawn or an early Iron Hands, and you just run someone off the board. But this just feels like you're trying to play Joltik Box, but you're doing it with extra steps. In order for that extra complexity, by having to include this stage one line that you have to set up and keep in play to keep things functioning, you gain extra options that the Joltik Box deck doesn't have access to. And it's also just less consistent because you don't have more Rhydon to work with. You're not just powering everything up off of a single, like one Joltik charge from Joltik. Sets you up for the game most of the time with that deck. Whereas here, you're like, okay, I hope that I drew my fire energies. And sometimes you only get one that you get to attach with Ho-Oh. And sometimes you get two, but all your chart cadets just keep dying. And you just having to balance everything becomes extremely difficult, I think. It's just too much of a tightrope for the deck to walk. It doesn't have enough favorable game plans in games where it sets up to just not be a bad pick for this week. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, it does feel like a worse Joltik Box in some ways. Like the attackers you gain by having Prism energy, I just don't think are strong enough. Like Durant's not that, it's okay. There's a reason why we haven't seen a huge amount of play with it up until now. It's not like, it wasn't waiting for Prism. It's like, oh, okay. Yeah, I mean, it's okay. But like, I don't think that it's a mainstay of this format now or anything like that. So yeah, I just, it's a fun deck. It's a good deck and you can win games with it for sure. But like you said, it just seems like a more complex version of what we've seen already from some other decks. Sure, sure. And the deck I chose for the bottom pick is Ethan's Typhlosion. This was kind of a counter pick in a lot of like people were hyping it up coming into this format a little bit. No, we get the Brave Bangle. We get, you know, Golden Go is going to be huge and this hard counters it. And now we have a way to just deal with Golden Go. You can delete it. And sure, if you look at the top there, you can see like the Golden Go matchup is 81%, which I feel like it should be higher almost. But yeah, like it's very, very good. Like you're not worried about Golden Go, sure. But everything else pretty mid to bad in my mind, especially you look at the top two decks we just talked about. Our top picks for Worlds are, you know, Dragapult Dusknoir and Marnie's Grimmsnarl. Both of those decks just body this deck. And I don't hate this deck. I think it's a cool deck. Like I love when we have attacking non-EX Pokemon. But there's just so much going on. Like you have like having an attacking stage two Pokemon that you have to like keep setting up and keep getting back into. It doesn't feel good. Like we don't have really a great way to like, we don't, I mean, we don't have a way to just chain attackers as much as we did before. Ethan's Adventure, the bummer, it's a good supporter for this deck. You know, like having the ability to set up Quilava and then kind of use those to power up more Typhlosion and all that. The problem is like you want the Ethan's Adventure in the discard pile so you can start attacking more. But then you also want the supporter later on in the game to be able to set up more Quilavas and Typhlosions to keep going. And you've already exhausted all of them. Like you've already put them all in the discard pile. And so now you're kind of forced to using Arvins and Ionos and trying to dig for them. And at that point, it's just like really difficult to just chain attackers. Like once your opponent deals with the first, or like three Typhlosions. explosions, you're forced to figure it out from there. And so you you're forced to use like support Pokemon in the form of Pidgeot in the form of dragapult. And that just feels really bad. Like you'd rather just be a low to the ground attacking deck. But there's just so much support that's required. Yeah. I don't know. It just it's a high maintenance deck for what it is. And I just don't I think there's better non attacking decks, I think crustles probably come out as the probably preferred way to play a non ex deck. If you're trying to play one in this format, it has better matchup spreads, it has, like a little bit easier to set up, like you said, it's more like the iron thorns approach. So and this one, this deck came out as a way to counter golden go. And now as we get into worlds, it's like we talked about, like, where are we at with the cycle? And we're moving away from golden go being unanimous top tech and format. And now we're seeing dragapult, dust snore, and grim snore, I'll come back in and guardi. I would include that too. And this has a decent guardian matchup over there. But like the other two, well, it doesn't even have a good guardian matchup. If we look at like straight guardian. Yeah. You know, if you're using monkey Dory's and scream tales, it's probably really bad. You know, once you get those set up, it can be really difficult to just chain attackers and they can just disrupt your board, your bench really easily. So yeah, I just don't see how you beat the unanimous like, especially at worlds, we don't expect players to play golden go as much as we would on a limitless tournament, or something like that. You expect them to play the top three decks we talked about. So I would stay off of this for this weekend. And probably pick one of if you're trying to play a non EX attacking deck, probably crustal would be the way to go, right? I'm not going to recommend anybody play that. Fair enough. Fair. But I don't know that this deck is it's so interesting because it's it's always kind of even before brave bangle came out, which is huge for this deck. It's really what kind of makes this deck viable to begin with. Because it was just always way too short in the destined rivals format. But now that you have brave angle, things have kind of flipped on their head a little bit and the matchups can become significantly closer and this deck can definitely steal games like these matchups all probably were 10% last format, and they've climbed up a little bit. And I'd still actually think that some of these might be a little off. But I do think that it is definitely still unfavored into a lot of the bigger, quote unquote, better decks. This is this deck misses something specifically, I think the card that would make the stick viable is versus seeker. But it's just doesn't have access to that. Like you'd be able to trim out, you know, one I don't know one research put in a couple versus seekers and suddenly you have access to a fifth Ethan's adventure or just can dump your ethos and then still use one later down the line when you really want to or also go fit your I don't know like you could trim a lot of stuff around slap in three or four versus seekers and the deck would flow a lot better. Now granted, everything else would also have access to versus seeker and the format would be totally different. But this being so dependent upon the supporter card is really a driving factor. I think for why it just it's also sometimes it just stumbles. And you'll just like with an energy when you're trying to draw into it off of like the Iona that you have to use or the Fez draw that you need to use. And the fact that you have to often put liabilities in play like pheasant dipity, or realistically, from what I've seen and what I've played the best support partner in this deck is Pidgeot. And that's still just another ex that you're putting into play. And people will either go around your Typhlosion or against Dragapult or Gardevoir, they'll set up a multi price turn with the spread options that they have, and your advantage of being a single price that kind of vanishes over time. Right? Yeah, the moment they can bully you and start picking putting like picking stuff off off the bench is the moment your deck just starts to fall apart. You know, we have shaman but it doesn't prevent everything like it doesn't prevent monkey Dory or, you know, Dragapult. Yeah, so, yep. So, you know, we talked about top and bottom, but somewhere in between there is our sleeper picks. And I'm excited to talk about these two decks. The first one we have is Flareon Noctowl. This is maybe not quite as sleeper of a sleeper pick. But I think, you know, the top end is really nice, like what it what it does well into is pretty nice, like, sure, it has a bad Gardevoir matchup. And the Dragapult matchup doesn't feel good. But like you can kind of catch your opponent sleeping sometimes. Or like if the if your opponent doesn't have a lot of test games into those matchups, and they won't because Flareon is not all that popular. It has options like you have ways like this deck has, it almost feels like it has unlimited options when you're playing down when you're sitting down and playing it like you look at your opening hand, it's like, it truly feels like chess with this deck, like you're really thinking three or four turns ahead managing the limited amount of resources you have, figuring out like when when is the best time to use this Evie, the colorful friends Evie, can I use that turn one? Or should I try to push for, you know, the turn one Flareon EX play? Should I go for that is like a more aggressive option, or something like that. And I mean, we look at the matchups right up top, it's, it's okay. I don't think it's truly fantastic. But you have some good bright spots there. Primarily, Golden Go is really good. You have a 64% matchup there. And then Grimmsnarl is not too bad. So that makes sense. Golden Go, you know, this was a nice kind of hard counter to Golden Go when that started to becoming popular. But unlike Ethan's Typhlosion, I think this deck might have a little bit more staying power in the way that it allows for skill expression. Ethan's Typhlosion, you're forced to use just the one attack. This one, you can run the Leafeon, you can run, you know, Terapagos, Lelous Clefairy, you have some other attackers that we see here. You know, Blood Moon or Saluna, Sob, Ogre Pawn. I think a lot of players have been staking out Sylveon EX. I don't know, I think it's still pretty good into some matchups. But it might just be kind of cope in a lot of ways. Like it might not truly swing anything, in my mind. I don't know. To be fair, I haven't tested this deck as much as some of the other ones. I've only played a couple of games with EDV box in this format. But it still feels pretty good. Like every game, I feel like I'm in it. Like every time I'm playing it, I'm like, I'm having fun. I'm learning, you know, and I can usually recognize the point the decision tree where it all went wrong, or this is what won me the game is like saving my resource for this moment. And then you also are able to use Briar really effectively, which is a nice thing. And you catch a lot of decks off guard with that. So I think this deck, I could see like an Ian Robb type, who played this deck a lot, bring it to worlds and do well with it. I could see some I'm gonna say, sorry for interrupting. I'm gonna say, I think a lot of these matchup numbers are straight up wrong. Okay, and I think that this deck is a victim of limited sample size, because so few people play it. And by when I say a lot of these matchup numbers, I mean, specifically the charizard. This one might be more accurate than I'm willing to admit. But I think all of these Dragapult numbers are wrong. The one that is probably closest to being correct is Dragapult Dusknoir just because that deck has the ability to steal games from literally any deck because you can just board wipe them get them off the board. But I in my experience playing Evie box prior to this format, Dragapult has never felt like a problem deck that you're playing into. And a lot of that is largely off the back of balancing angel light, plus attacking and picking apart your opponent's board with things like you'll angel light one turn. And if they ever just stumble and cannot recover those Dreepees or get the Dracloaks back in play, you just run away with the game. And like you said, being able to go a kind of 123 prize map with KO a small basic KO a two prize or briar for three prizes lets you close out games very efficiently. And one of the things that is a big addition to that that I had overlooked and just really underrated going into Destined Rivals and is still the case here is the inclusion of gravity mountain. I think that this does not make your guard of our matchup favorable, but it certainly makes it a lot better. And it also takes Grimmsnarl from being a close matchup to being a flat out favorable one in my mind. It makes a huge difference. Just because typically, now you're not limited to one hit killing a Grimmsnarl with your leaf yawn, you can actually also do it with a flurry on at some point during the game, because they are undoubtedly going to have a frost last in play. So their Grimmsnarl gets pinged down to 310, you drop gravity mountain, which puts them down to 280. And then you carnelian and they're knocked out. And just nice, clean, wham, bam, you're done. I, I, my argument here is that I think that the deck is better into these Dragonbolt variants than this makes it look like. I also think that it's actually worse into Typhlosion than this makes it look like. But again, limited sample size, none of these are over 100 games, except for like the Goldengo and Grimmsnarl matchups. So I think over time, you would see a lot of this spread kind of normalize itself a little bit better. Um, yeah, I think if Typhlosion is not running shaman, you can probably cheese with the sob. Yeah. And then it also is dependent again, like you said, on what are you taking in the deck? So we've seen some people include Pidgeot, which is I what I saw this weekend, the flurry on box that was playing. It makes a lot of sense that I commentated Pidgeot, the two games, they set it up like that this deck, a lot of times it feels like it needs more than a knock towel, you know, or like a lot of combos that you want to set up typically require two to three cards. And sometimes knock towel often knock towel is enough to get you there. But sometimes you're like, Okay, well, I really hope I draw the third card I need with my mu or my fez. And then I'll knock towel for the other two. And now instead, you get to say, okay, I'm going to knock out and I'm going to quick search. And then I just have a bunch of other cards I get to work with as well. And I can pull off everything I need this turn and just go from there. That my big struggle, because I sat down and attempted to put a list together with Pidgeot is just figuring out what to cut. And that's what this deck's problem has always been is just fitting everything into 60 cards. Yeah, yeah, definitely a cool deck. I'd be excited to see this on stream. You know, I think, like I said, I can see a world where like we have some really good top players come and play this and do well with it. And are rewarded for the deep level of plays you can pull off with this. You know, so that'll be that'll be exciting storyline if we see that our worlds for sure. So one last deck for you to cover. And that is your this ogre pawn box. Yeah, very fun box. So again, that we're not going to even going to look at these matchup percentages. I think this deck is so clearly not played by a ton of people. But I think that it has a lot of cool options. And maybe I'm just over hyping it because I saw it do some neat things this weekend. But I'm a sucker for ogres mask. I've wanted this card to be viable since the since it first got revealed because I thought the idea of having a straight ogre pawn toolbox deck was really cool. And the deck has slowly picked up tools that have made that somewhat at least a little bit slightly viable and the meta has kind of warped itself around to where this functions properly again. So you have your teal mask that can one hit ko grim snarl is also just generally kind of a beat stick attacker early on in the game. Well spring is really good right now because basically nobody's playing shaman and sob is always a good attack. And cornerstone is also pretty uniquely positioned to be really good into a number of decks like goldango and charizard as examples of things that are like kind of popping up that is just good against and we've seen things like teal mask Clefairy just be a combo that people play already as like a standalone aggro Clefairy deck to try to combat dragapult and it is somewhat effective at doing that. So all of these things kind of mesh together into being just kind of another flavor of an aggro deck. But you get to offset things with legacy energy. I've seen a couple of lists that play things like Lily's pearl ends plan is a card that I thought was absolutely terrible. And the text here you can't read but it's select to energy from your bench and move it to your active. So I think that you could select to either from one Pokemon or one from two different Pokemon and just move it straight up to your active. And it also does not say basic energy. So you can actually reposition your legacy energy which is really cool. You can reposition a prism energy to make an attack viable that you didn't otherwise have access to and the deck just has a lot of options to where it isn't necessarily hindered it plays off the board really well is something that I think is really cool about this and why it's not necessarily prone to the iono spam that a lot of other aggressive decks can be hindered heavily by. So maybe maybe it's not going to do well, it probably actually won't even be played at worlds. But I do think that this is a really neat deck in this format. And I wouldn't be surprised to see it do well, because it still has a little bit of surprise factor on its side, too. Yeah, for sure. I think we saw I mean, I know online results are only so far, but we definitely saw a good placement from this deck. And I think the there's like the tournament of doom, like it was like a but it was like 1000 player tournament or something like that. Okay, one of the larger ones on limitless and I think it got second. So very, very strong showing for this deck. But yeah, I think this definitely is a sleeper pick. And one that will be exciting to see on stream. Yeah, like you said, ogres mask is pretty sick. It's a cool card. So it's a cool like, we've seen it like, you know, swoop teleporter or, you know, well, I mean, it's literally fans. Yeah, it's Thor not an item card. Like, yeah, yes, it's good. It's limited in scope. But that's a powerful effect. Sure. So like, yeah, just the versatility of powering up with a group on like a teal mask, and then using the ogres mass to move into cornerstone and start swinging and not having if your opponent doesn't have an easy way to deal with that, like it puts a lot of pressure on them to come up with one and if they don't then you're just kind of you're chilling um no if you're playing this deck are you playing it just straight up like your main draw engine is just using teal masks ogre panel bunch i mean yeah you've got your dance you've got teal dance you've got fez you've got restart from you you still play raw draw supporters and you you can thin your hand down pretty frequently with this deck you've got a lot of item cards you're attaching your energy earthen vessels discarding cards ultra balls discarding cards a lot of like burnable item cards like terra orb energy switch gets pretty freely played out of the hand as you try to combo off into things and most of you think you don't have a bunch of clunky cards like extra copies of stadiums like you can see here there are no stadiums included here you don't have things um you don't have evolution you don't have rare candy that you have to worry about you don't play things like arvin that are just going to be sitting in your hand you're either researching away a bunch of stuff or your iono it back into your deck and you draw fresh cards that you can then burn through to really just cycle through things and teal mask ogre pawn is just a really good it's not a hard draw engine but the filtering that you get through your deck while also accelerating energy has obviously been extremely good since the card was first released yeah yeah and i think a little cliff area as far as attacking options is a really good one yeah um like super efficient like just having a two energy attacker that can swing for gobs of damage um and then having that amazing ability that just basically says all right i'll drag a pokemon or toast you no matter what yep it's pretty sweet yeah that it's what makes me surprised like this is a sub one percent inclusion of area zero but i'm a little surprised that there is not an area zero in here i honestly but it's i guess you don't need as wide of a bench because this is basically tarot box minus the owls right and in exchange for that we get to play just more good cards that we can immediately play rather than having to play teched out options and search for them and i guess at the trade-off of that is your cliff area damage is kind of capped out in a lot of matchups but you can still get where you need to i think against dragapult like they'd have to get down to two bench pokemon i believe for you to not be able to one hit ko them right and that just doesn't then the deck's not functioning very well right um the straight dragapult might be able to do that but realistically even those want like two or three bench poke like they want two or three track cloak in play yeah um every game and they want they want to have backup attackers and all that kind of stuff um and yeah it's just it's just cool it's a cool deck so i would be excited to see it do well for sure um and then uh so last thing here we're going to close out with a just a couple of quick predictions that john has written down for us so why don't we go ahead and read off the first one there sure so i just challenged both of us to pick one player we want to do well or what we think will do well um in the master's division i should say i mean it'd be like easy to pick gabriel fernandez for seniors right like too easy oh but if somebody had the hot take and just said gabriel wouldn't make cut wow oh is that the boldest prediction somebody could have for worlds this year as i think it's just illusional at this point maybe maybe we'll have to see we'll have to see yeah no i mean i i fully expect him to make at least top four like he'll i think he earns his invite to next year's worlds this weekend i think he loses to omar in top four my good point omar gets his revenge okay that's my that's my hope maybe i'm just uh you know being a little bit biased but a little bit a little bit yeah yeah but as far as master's players go uh i'm gonna pick somebody who has done extremely well this season i think that he earned a total of three invites because i'm pretty sure he earned two in tpci regions and one in his own region in japan and i'm gonna go with ryuki okada i don't know how well i expect him to do but i do expect him to do well you know i i'm tempted to just pick henry chow here like it seems like the auto auto include button i don't know if he's had the best run of late um you know at naic i think it was top 32 i think he was he whiffed out yeah i think he just whiffed out on uh tops like a sim okay um so like maybe he lost his winning in the final round i think okay or something like that um so he was pretty close and i'm sure i mean guardi we always talk about oh you know guardi's dead or in a worse spot i look i'm talking myself into it i'm just gonna pick henry chow like it's a safe pick it's a good pick it's a u.s pick we all love you know and henry's a cool guy like it it's his year in some ways it would just mean so much to have him as the world championship it would be a really good like storyline thing to cap the year off with you know he wins the first regional of the four of the year with guard of war closes out the format with god if he doesn't play guard of war to this event i think that'll be really interesting that that would be like a tragedy like euic where he switched to gold and go if it goes back to gold and go you know the world is over like we've lost we've lost faith in maybe the american players maybe um all right uh the next one i have is what a spec um we expect to be in the winning deck um so aaron what a spec will you think it'll be that's a slam dunk i'm gonna go with secret box yeah i figured you would i i am going to say hey either a grim snarl deck is winning or henry chow is winning and in either case secret box is in that deck and i guess i have to stick to my guns with my top deck and i'll just have to pick neo upper energy i mean at least your answer is different from naic right like you said unfair stamp before i'm pretty sure yeah yeah i think so and that was honestly a lot of players moved to neo upper energy at naic so it would make sense that it carries over you know watch they all go back to unfair stamp now that'd be kind of funny um but i mean we're not that exciting uh so far uh but all right uh the last question i have is uh what region do you think uh will win naic this year or naic worlds this year i'm gonna go i'm gonna go with the u.s i think it'd be interesting to see one of the non-japanese asian countries do it like if we had north america as in u.s yes yes yes yes yes but i know we've got a quite a few chinese players that are actually coming this year okay um i want to say it was like several dozen which is honestly surprising to me i didn't even know that they were getting that many invites nor did i know that they had come anywhere close to catching up to our card pool to be able to participate but i'm pretty sure they've got at least like 48 invites coming over i think we had chinese players play last year we've had a few before but normally it's been kind of like two four like like single digit numbers where i'm pretty sure on the invite the list of invited players there i i swear i saw like somewhere between 30 and 40 chinese players listed on there gotcha so you're not picking but i'm not going to pick china i just think that that's a really interesting it is fascinating it is cool to see that world is becoming more global with the inclusion of china um and i you know it's it's what we want right we want we want worlds to be the showcase of the very best from around the world i mean it's kind of cliche but yeah we want that um and i guess to be contrary and i'll pick somewhere else um we haven't given eu any love uh so i'm going to show them some love now uh tord or stefan or you know somebody from eu maybe yellow um golden goes good now right so hey have you seen his latest tweet about goldengo no i'm off twitter now so he oh that's fair he's got his um tech for cornerstone okay do you have any idea what it is i don't uh it is let me guess let me guess okay go ahead and guess uh is it a metal pokemon it is not so okay does it use metal energy can you use metal energy to attack no i mean you can it's colorless to attack with okay um um is it ethan's uh okay and nope what is it it is mo wrote him oh that's funny i like that with counter gain and oh my god so i went down a whole rabbit hole because i was thinking yesterday you know quick tangent here before we close things out i was thinking what if i wanted to what if i wanted to play goldengo and how do i improve my mirror match specifically and then i a bunch of people i'd seen were talking about yellow's tweet with the mo wrote him and i said well wait a minute there's a fire one that does the same thing what if i just played both of those and now i'm covered for cornerstone and i'm covered for crustle and i'm covered for mirror where i have my single prizer that one hit ko is a goldengo how many counter gain how many counter energy are you running uh i have no idea yeah you'd probably counter gain or it's counter gain it's counter gain okay that's a little bit and they do they attack for 30 for each tool that you have on your board okay so you get all your balloon you get all your balloons down you attach a counter gain you pray your opponent doesn't have a tool scrapper and you do 300 to something with your rotem i mean the cornerstone one is a lot more applicable because you only need to have four total tools in play but he also said that he played more than five tools so i don't know he's got a lot of stuff going on with his list but he is one of the like he is the goldengo pioneer so i'm gonna kind of trust his logic on it and see that he's got something going on that other people are not aware of yeah and you never know like maybe we have somebody that comes up with control like alessandro crema soli or somebody like that comes out of italy um we've had a lot of like uh yeah i mean there's a lot of good spanish players a lot of good so i mean i think you spent a little bit slept on this year um it feels like i don't know maybe they had a really good like ic runs last year and i think it this year maybe not as like it's been north american dominated so i could see a world they started off hot like they won la ic and then they just kind of fell off from there yeah so uh now that we've had a little bit of golden girl resurgence i think he comes back and dominates okay okay hey that's my take and anything can happen anything can happen that's the exciting thing man and i hope everybody will be watching and if you guys see us at worlds if uh we're not actively involved in doing something at the moment please come up and say hi to us we'll make a point to be friendly i'll be doing side events so i'll have a little bit more of a um hopefully a little more opportunities to say hi to people um you know when i'm on the tournament floor for masters or whatever um i'm more focused on that but like inside events i'm definitely more focused on fun and and fan interaction and player interaction and ensuring everybody's having a great time so i'll definitely try to say hi to anybody that's you know wanting to say hi um and i'm sure aaron will be locked in for competition um and not scrubbing out and playing in the pocket open or anything like that my plan is to be in that arena on sunday playing let's go let's go i love that um but you know um we will hopefully see aaron there and hopefully have a nice podcast episode shortly after detailing his tournament run and the eventual uh quest to become the 2025 world champion um in a couple days but uh until then everybody have a safe week um safe travels to those that are going to the worlds and um we will see if we can make anybody's world streams of merchandise come happen please remember to put those in the comments um and if you want to engage with us in other ways i'm on blue sky at uh john underscore orgel at b sky i forget the social but just search john orgel there's not that many of us out there you'll find me um and we have a twitter account um for the podcast uh aaron go ahead and list that now it is at bf ptcg pod i think yep regardless and then mine is at underscore aaron underscore curry regardless all three of those will be in the description of the episode you can totally find it there and plug it into the social media platform of your choosing and hopefully it will come up on whichever one it is so thank you again to everybody for getting to the end of the episode with us i'm really excited about this week a lot of fun to be had and i hope that everybody that does head out to worlds whether you're a competitor a spectator a family member a friend whoever just have a good time enjoy the atmosphere it's going to be a great time for everybody i hope that being said have a great week and we'll talk to you soon see you next week audio aaron exists he's back hey you drank some more water you've been revived okay we'll go with it sorry it's time to go with the water the call the call back the call back my father-in-law did move back from virginia so we don't have to worry about your nasty virginia water anymore it's not my nasty it's literally like calling it all all virginia water is nasty it's just like saying all of florida is a swamp you're not wrong but maybe that maybe that's you're not wrong but maybe that maybe a bad comparison the parts that have not been paved over are still swampy i promise um the the problem is that is the only frame of reference i have for virginia water yeah i have no other like the it is an n of one i will admit that but that's all i have to go off of so it's just i have to pass judgment on it that's fair