Episode 44: A TRUE SEASON FINALE

Hello, and welcome back to the Battle Frontier podcast, where we aim to help you level up in your journey as a competitive Pokemon TCG player. I'm Aaron Curry. Here with me, as always, is my co-host, Jon Orgel. And we are back, I would say fresh off of worlds, and that wouldn't be the most inaccurate thing to say. Fresh is probably the hardest word to qualify in that sentence, because I know Jon just flew back today. I landed up from a red eye from Anaheim yesterday, and boy, was that rough. But yeah, we're going to detail both Jon and I's worlds experiences on this episode. It's going to be a little bit more freeform. We don't have a hard structure for this one, just because there is so much ground and so much information to cover. We may not actually be able to fit everything that we want to talk about into this episode. So some of the things like some of the closing ceremony announcements, or some of the information that we've already gotten for the upcoming season, including some details on events happening at worlds next year in San Francisco, are more than likely going to get pushed to next week's episode. But for this week, it'll be mostly detailing how Jon and I experienced worlds in terms of things like what events we were able to participate in while we were there, both as a part of worlds and just in the city in general. How we felt worlds was run and how good of a time we had in the things that we were able to do, including things like the Pokemon Center, the main event itself, the closing ceremony, and just try to cover as much as possible without taking too much time. So with all that being said, we're going to go ahead and I'm going to concede the floor to Jon and let him take the first crack at his worlds experience. So I got in Wednesday, right in the morning, because I had an early Pokemon Center slot. And I had a great time. The flight was fine. It was like a little delayed, getting out of Richmond and then a little delayed in Chicago. It's like an hour delayed both times, I think. So but thankfully, I had a lot of leeway, like I was scheduled to get in at like 1045. And my Pokemon Center slot was two. So I got in around 1145 and still had like two hours to get from the airport to the hotel and then from the hotel to the Pokemon Center. We were staying, I think both we were staying at the Marriott right by the convention center, which was primo location. For sure. So shout out for Pokemon for putting me in up in a hotel that was right there. That was really nice. It did turn into kind of chaotic come Friday, Saturday night, when, but we'll get into that a little bit. I had an okay Pokemon Center experience, I'll say I got there like 130 and got in line to just get into the center or get into the building like the convention center. I had a 2pm slot. So when I went through people were still like, we were the very first people to go through the Pokemon Center. And that was fine. Like I felt like at that point, it was fully stocked. I wouldn't say people were being respectful, people are still being like pushy and shoving even then. So that was trying. There was a cool DJ while we were waiting in line to get in and he was playing toxic by Britney Spears. And I felt like that was a very appropriate song for the amount of like scalpers trying to just push their way through the line. Like, they tried to like line us up, like they did the corral system that they've done at other ICS that I've been to. And they just put you on a big like holding pen for your time slot. But there was just so many people trying to go in at the same time, like close to 200 to 300 people trying to go in, maybe more, I don't really know, it's hard to gauge all that. And they were like lining us up in a line and like snaking it within the corral. And somebody was like, Are you that our people are gonna actually follow this line when they open the corral? And I said to them, like, I don't expect people to do that. And sure enough, they like lower the rope, and it's just a mad dash to get over there. So I don't know. I don't love that experience. But when I went through there was a lot of cool stuff, a lot of good merch, like the branding, and the design, like every the production level and branding for this year's worlds was really, really cool. I had like a varsity theme, kind of like a 1950s 1960s California varsity, like, I don't know how to describe it, like if you're if you're like a football kind of jacket, like, this is like the logo. So I'm wearing probably one of the more sought after items from this world was like the baseball jersey they had. So that was a cool thing that they made. And I'm sure that was it was very hard to find later on. So I'm glad that I was able to get one that had a lot of like rockabilly stuff that sold out immediately. So I have the hat from that collection. I just got like this the hat of Ray and Spooner shirt. I got the cooler bag that you told me about. Oh, yeah, that was pretty cool. Yeah, that's my wife love that. She's like, Oh, that'll be great for groceries or if we go on a trip. So that's really nice. And then I just got like the binder, some deck boxes, the dice kits, the damage counter sleeves. Just stuff like that. I got like a fridge magnet and then they had a cool diner mug, which my wife loves diner mugs. So that was nice. Like their coffee cup they had was a diner mug and the shape, you know what a diner mug is? So like, it was like kind of con. Yeah, I didn't actually I didn't end up opening that. So I yeah, I'll get into some of the other items. It was a 14 ounce diner mug, which is giant for those like usually those are just eight ounces. So that was kind of cool. I'm almost jealous now because I skipped that item because I saw the box. I didn't see a display item for it. So I was just a coffee mug and I just walked right by it. Yeah, they did it like that's the cool thing is like everything had like a really cool branding to everything. Like I said, and then I was able to win a couple of raffles. I got the jukebox in the corner. So I got that I got the backpack over there too. So in the jukebox is really nice. I tested it Saturday, or sorry, Friday. And it's I thought like originally when I got it, I was just like, Oh, I'll just get it. And if it's a CD player, and an FM radio, and a aux, and that that's fine. But then I found out it does have Bluetooth connectivity. So that was pretty cool. I was very excited about that. Because now I can actually use it because I don't, I mean, I have some CDs and I have have, you know, but nothing I have now has an aux cable, like I don't run everything's just Bluetooth now. So it's kind of like, okay, but very cool. And I'm planning on using it in my office up here. What else so and thankfully, like when I went through, you know, being the first wave, the checkout process wasn't too terrible. So I will say I did get very lucky because I know most people had a very different experience going through the Pokemon Center, especially a lot of the professors, they got like 6pm slots. And I heard the by the time they got there, there was there was still people from the 430 slot still waiting to get in just because it was so backed up. And a lot of them didn't get out of there till like after eight, the line for checkout was super long. So I don't know, I don't pretend to know like how to fix these problems. I just know that they exist. And they will probably continue to exist for as long as Pokemon is popular. And I don't see the popularity really decreasing in the next few years. So it's just going to be I mean, one thing I will say that was the Pokemon Center this year was open to the public like you could reserve a spot without having having to have a spectator badge or a competitor badge or something like that. And because of that, I felt like there was a large number of people that were just coming for the Pokemon Center when rightfully so like it's very cool merchandise, very exclusive, very nice. But what you had then was people coming out of the center, like buying a boogie board and then immediately selling it when they left. Yeah. And buying like, you know, this that and so that just kind of kills the fun for a lot of people. And it's like if you're just buying it to then try to sell later on, you're taking that away from somebody else that actually wants to wear it and wants to use it. We can go back and forth. Do you want to talk about your Pokemon Center experience before we kind of go any further? Before? Yeah, let's just cover that. So I want to hear your side of it. My first the first slot that I went in was the same day was Wednesday. So we had the same thing. Woke up super early on Wednesday, flew out from Orlando to Nashville, and then Nashville straight to the same airport as you. Our Uber ride is a bit more eventful, but it's not entirely appropriate for this podcast. So I'm going to leave the details of that out. Oh, goodness. Oh, I'll be like a late after maybe battle for it's your late night or something. Something that was a relatively interesting, interesting story. It's also pretty short. So if if anybody ever does run into me and wants to hear the details of that, feel free to ask. I am more than happy to talk about it. It's nothing embarrassing for myself. It's mostly associated with the Uber driver. But we we got in, had the store slot of 245. So that would be the technically the fourth wave going into the Pokemon Center on Wednesday. And by then we walked up at like 235, so about 10 minutes prior. And there were just a mob and a whole mob scene that people conveniently had made an aisle to where you could walk to get into the line, except there were security personnel who cannot touch you. They are not legally allowed to do anything to you as a person waiting outside of the store or outside of the building. But they were shouting from the ramp leading up into the entryway. If you are not here for insert time slot, please leave. Please come back later. And just nobody moved. Nobody did anything. They just kind of stared at them. We got lucky because our son was with us and they still considered him a small child. I don't know at what point that qualifier goes away because he is relatively tall for his age. He's like four foot seven now. But they let us kind of cut right to the front of the line for the 245 slot. And so we went right in, went through the hole. They had two separate lines for security as far as do you have a bag or do you not have a bag? And we had a couple of backpacks with us. They forced us to zip tie the zippers of those closed, which that's a decent security measure. They cut them open when we got to the end. No big deal. So we go in and like I outlined last week, the two of the big things that I was super concerned about because almost every year they have run out of backpacks. This year that actually didn't seem to be a problem because I went back later on on Sunday trying to fulfill one of the other items I was looking for. And they still had plenty of backpacks in the store. So they really seem to like booster boost up the production of that item in particular, grabbed one of those. No problem. And then immediately tried to hunt around for where the baseball jersey was because that was another interesting thing. It was far in there. Yeah, it was. And so a lot of the exclusive items, they weren't all just, you know, in previous years, the exclusive stuff is all kind of just clustered and it's all right in the front. And that's where it's so you'll get this big glut of people that just are kind of stuck there and bottlenecked in that opening section and don't move through. Whereas this year, things seemed a bit better allocated and were more spread out. There were still some trouble areas like when we were going through, we didn't even attempt to look at the whole rockabilly section because it was just a mob scene in that corner by the time we were in there. But I made it to the baseball jerseys. And by the time I got there, the smallest size they had left was three X, unfortunately. And that was actually the case. So my wife went in again with someone that we know on Saturday. And same story. They were in like the third time slot on Saturdays, like 930 in the morning. And again, smallest size is three X. And then we went back on Sunday at 915, immediately went to the baseball jerseys. And again, smallest size was four X. So despite talking to staff who were supposedly working in the store that had assured me that they would be reallocating quantities of all sizes for all items every day, either that was not the case or it was severely limited, especially toward the latter end of the event, which I can't be totally surprised by. So unfortunately, I thought I was leaving the event with no baseball jersey for my son. So I immediately ran into somebody in the store on Sunday after I had failed to acquire the jersey who told me that they had an extra, not the size that we wanted, but it's a medium. So it's small enough that he should be able to grow into wearing it soon. And so that was a bright spot, like where we just paid the retail price for the item and he's going to ship it to me. It's supposed to show up either Thursday or Friday this week. So that was good. That was great. Got the backpack. We actually decided not to get the cooler bag because it was so similar in size and shape and everything to the one from Master. We just didn't need two of them. But we did pick up the stemless glasses, which seemed pretty nice. They're just shaped like the top of a white wine glass, essentially. They're a little bit thinner than what I would consider to be like a normal tumbler. So because they really do just look like stem wear that had the stem cut off of it. But they look pretty nice. It has the Varsity Pikachu and then the image of the associated Fennekin on the other glass. Oh, yeah. Okay. That one's cool. I'm trying to remember what else we ended up grabbing. I know our son grabbed a Machamp and a Pikachu for himself. And then for some reason this weekend, he got really into Piplup. So I know this kind of crosses over into some of the other events and vendors that were available. But Build-A-Bear was actually in the vendor hall. And so there's a whole story with that that I guess I'll just say right now, Build-A-Bear had stock of every single Pokemon plush that has ever been available at Build-A-Bear, including ones that you can no longer buy in brick and mortar or online Build-A-Bear stores. And they said, this is the end of whatever these items are. If we sell out of them here, you will never be able to buy them again. And so my wife decided to let him just pick one out and he got a Piplup. So because of that, he went back and they had a Pokemon Center exclusive Piplup Funko Pop. He picked that up. And at some point Bandai Namco had a bunch of Pokemon model kits and he got a Piplup model kit as well. So went full Piplup this weekend. Nice. Respect. That's probably my favorite starter from that era. So and we got a few other things. I know that both my son and I got the other jersey, like not the baseball jersey, but they do kind of the like jersey shirt that they do basically every year. Yeah, it's I mean, it's not quite that. They've kind of they used to be more like a soccer jersey, and now it's more just like a dry fit shirt, really. That's got some kind of world associated artwork on it. But we went relatively light, I feel, on world's items, all things considered. I did pick up and I know that I mentioned last week that we were going to pick up some stuff for a potential podcast giveaway. It did not pick up any playmats whatsoever, so I do not have any of those to give away. But I do have two extras of the varsity double deck box, one of which I'm pretty sure that I'm and I'm going to talk to my local game store and see if they're interested in having it for either a store raffle or a giveaway for a local tournament. But the other one, I would love to give away to somebody listening to the podcast. So we're figuring out the best avenue for how to process that giveaway. But I would just stay tuned and we will let you guys know at a later time how we're going to handle that. Right. I really throw in a I'll throw in a thing. I have a let's do two more people. We'll get a set of world's sleeves. So I have a lot of sleeves I got. So I'll put two aside from my what I got. And we'll pick three total, I guess, at that point. So we'll get the double deck box and then to one each. We'll get a set of sleeves. And we'll figure all that out from we. We will figure that out and hopefully have something to present to how we're going to handle that maybe by next week's episode. I think that would be ideal. And maybe John and I will just set that deadline for ourselves. That'll kind of be our homework for the week. But I think that that about wraps up the Pokemon Center. I guess to also talk about the line aspect of it, even by two forty five on Wednesday, we were in line. So I want to raffle for a white flare ETB and the line. And I guess it ended up being the raffle line and the non raffle line because it kind of reconvened together once you had gotten your raffle voucher. We were in line for probably an hour and a half after we decided to line up. And at some point, I saw several pictures from throughout the day that the line eventually backed up into the store, well into the store. And you had people trying to figure out, oh, is this a line? Oh, now I'm in line. People are getting cut off. People are getting pushed. I know the police, unfortunately, ended up having to get involved within the Pokemon Center a couple of times on Wednesday. But I will say by Sunday, maybe there were just fewer people that were trying to go in or things have been so picked over that people weren't stopping and staying, because I think that was the big problem was people would come for a certain time slot. Like you said, for like the people were still there when staff went in at 6 p.m. on Wednesday, they would they were there from 430 and hadn't left yet. So I think one of the ways that they could improve this, and I don't know how to really enforce it, but doing a sweep. After a certain point and say, you know, if your time slot, it was more than an hour ago, please leave. Yeah. And just like forcing people to move on to at least a different section of the store or you somehow. And this sounds even weirder, but you kind of gate each section of the store and say, OK, you're here, you have 15 minutes to shop in this section and then we will move your group to the next section. And that's how you could potentially process everybody through. But I know there are downsides to all of these options, but I think there's got to be a better way. And I know for next year's world store in particular, it is going to be badge only. So hopefully that alleviates things in some sense. But it still might not. Yeah, it might just make things crazier. Like if people if it's more exclusive fair, then it just becomes crazier. But so for other conventions, I've been to like packs unplugged. I went to the merch was all like a menu like you ordered on a menu. OK, I just gave it out. You know, there's some advantages and disadvantages. So that's like you can't like you're waiting in line. You pick what you want and then you check out immediately. So like a little bit more line control, like shopping at a concert, basically. Yeah, exactly. So you don't have quite the spectacle of like the wall of plushies and like the deck boxes laid out and everything laid out to where you can pick it up and, you know, hold it up to you to see how big it is or something like that. Although they do have like shirts on racks and packs where you can just hold it up and do that. So it's not like they're pretty, you know, forgiving when it comes to like, you know, you picking it up and feeling it like. But yeah, I think something needs to change. It's. A little discouraging to have this happen every year to where now it just feels like, you know, it's such a hassle. It's just like I'm sure you as a competitor, you're not like in the right mindset. But you don't want to have to go through this gauntlet and then like get ready to play in the actual world championships. Like you're trying to find a baseball jersey for your son just turns into like this never ending side quest. And so, yeah, I don't know. It's tough. I mean, like I said, Pokemon's so popular and people want stuff and I get it like I am happy that I was able to get what I got. And I pity and I feel sorry for the people that couldn't. And it's it was just yeah, like. The crazy thing to me was just how much reselling was going on around the venue, like right outside the Pokemon Center, like when you walked outside, people were trying to buy your stuff from you. Yep. When I got my staff kid and was walking back to my room, people trying to buy that. I got I will say when I picked up my competitor kit, there were people trying to buy promos from people while you were still in the room. Yeah. Like literally, as soon as you exited the line from picking up your competitor kit, hey, do you want to sell your world's promos? So there's a staff member standing right there. What are you doing? Right. But they were they. And then there's another group immediately outside the door, too. And they didn't seem to be doing anything about it. Now, Pokemon. I mean, I can't really speak because you don't you only know what you saw. But like there was stuff there was there was people selling it like so we stayed at the Marriott, which was where most of the staff stayed. And I don't think that was a huge factor, but. I mean, it was fine, like Marriott and the hotel across the street had just basically like an open market of like people selling stuff out of suitcases and out of they were selling like Japanese exclusive stuff. I picked up and I didn't sell I didn't buy anything with cash. Everything I did was like with trading because I like doing that. But I brought some like hats I had from L.A. I see and I see that I'm not going to wear and some other stuff that I traded for. I should have done something like that. Yeah. Just stuff. I'm like, it's like I went through like I have a big box in my closet and I'm just like pulling stuff up like I'm never going to wear this. Let me just pack it in a suitcase. And I know on Friday night. No, sorry. Thursday night in particular, there were a bunch of players. And I'm assuming also people trying to sell things out of their suitcases in the lobby of the hotel across the way, which was a Hilton. And the Hilton staff actually forced everyone to leave the lobby regardless of what they were doing. If it was Pokemon related, it was not to be happening in the lobby of the hotel. And I believe also on Saturday night, something's very similar. Happened in the lobby of the Marriott, which resulted in everyone converging into that strip in the center where there were a bunch of food trucks during the day. And it turned into like a night market, essentially. Yeah. With just people with items on tables and like all over the place. Talking to each other, trading, selling, buying, et cetera. And I mean, that was a pretty interesting experience. I didn't actually get to do it, like participate in it at all. But I know John and I went and got to Cube on Saturday night. And walking back from that, I walked through that whole like the remnants of that night market. Right. So I think that that was an interesting experience. And it's it's it's cool that you get to have this whole international experience that doesn't typically happen. And you get access to things that you may not have access to throughout the rest of the year. It's just unfortunate that typically the way that most of the people who bring those items want to interact is via selling. And that is very much so frowned upon by the Pokemon company. And oftentimes some of these hotel chains, too, because they don't want anything like that happening on their property because they don't want to be liable for something if it goes wrong. Yeah. I mean, you know, there's a disagreement or something like that. It was cool to see. Like, yeah, we had like a lot of people from the community showing up. Like I saw the there's a pokey YouTuber Pat from what was it called? Deep Pocket Monsters or something like that. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He I saw him in the lobby buying and like looking for gangers, I think, for his his gang request for Japanese gangers, I think at this point. So that was kind of cool. But yeah, just like so many people. And it was like it definitely got to the point where you couldn't walk around the lobby anymore, like as a staff member. I couldn't really like just hang out and do anything like we had to like go somewhere else. Right. I mean, there were some areas like there was a pool table and like a little lounge area that wasn't too bad that we were able to like play test in on Friday night or Thursday night. But and I don't hate that. Like, I like the fact that like we can do that. Like I spent like like there was a somebody that just brought a bunch of like damaged Harcourt's old silver through like black and white and sun and moon or early X era. Sorry, like early X, but like X, Y era stuff that I was just like, all right, I'm going to have a backpack that I don't want. Like I got the staff backpack and I sold it for way too cheap. But I also was just like, I don't really I don't I don't get hung up. Like I know like you're probably just cringe a little bit when I say this, but I don't really care like too much about getting max value for stuff. Because like to me, I'd rather just trade and make the memories of trading with like some people that I meet and something like that. So it means a lot to them. And I was able to pull a lot of cool stuff. Like I got like all that old damaged stuff to make decks with. So I probably got ripped off. But, you know, it's like I can't live my life. Life's too short to really get wrapped up in all that. So but it was a lot of fun, like to just meet and talk and hang out with people in that regard. It's really cool. Like you touched on it, but like the international aspect of World War II, the international aspect of world's like you really see people from every corner of our game from Korea, Japan, China. Now, you know, the Philippines and then you South America everywhere. Like every everybody is at this thing. It's and I saw that, you know, inside events to get into that. So we did actually, you know, compete and we did actually staff. We didn't just go to the Pokemon Center and then do nothing else. So I'll touch on what I did. So my role for this weekend was to do on demand side events. So if you go as a spectator or if you go as a competitor for your game, but then don't make it to day two, you can then schedule you go to the side events area, register on. I think they used OpenTable to process all the payments. Right. You you go register, pay for it on OpenTable and then show up for your time slot that was listed on OpenTable and then go through the line and then get put in a pod to. Do either like a couple of different things, so then there was some pretty cool stuff at the prize. Well, you had like an exclusive playmat and a promo card. You could get the the promo card for the event through the prize wall. So lots of cool stuff there. But I did the schedule side events. There was also on demand side events. Sorry, I flipped that. I did on demand side events. There was also a lot of scheduled side events for all the games. Pokemon Go, Unite, TCG and video game, but then also they had a couple pocket tournaments, which was cool. And so I did get to do a couple of scheduled events. I did the standard tournament on Friday and then on Sunday, I got to actually help fully with a pocket tournament, which was one of my goals for the weekend. I really wanted to be able to dip my toes and get an understanding of what competitive pocket looks like. Just because I've never had that experience. Was that the big, big pocket tournament? Sunday wasn't. Sunday was just a four round like, you know, schedule side event tournament. So you just had like. Sure. So interestingly enough, like we've had a lot of three round tournaments the last few regionals and ICs. They went to doing four round tournaments for this event, which I think was a good move, like it allows just a little bit more like, you know, three rounds feels too short. Four rounds is a good middle ground. Like you don't want to be there all day for a side event. Like it's about three to four hours if you do four rounds. So depending on the turnover time, there were some issues. With some things, I wasn't doing the scheduled events except for those two. So I don't really know the full like the full of what happened, but there was a lot like we had. At one point, like six events going for scheduled events at the same time, and there was only four colors of printer paper we had. OK, so I think at one point, like two of the events had the same printer paper for their match slips and some of the match slips got mixed up. And so that was the whole thing to untangle. So there was just a lot of, you know, some of that. Like it was, I think, for the most part, a good, efficient, well-run side event experience for a lot of people. But Friday, like, I mean, we can go into it. Some of the behind the scenes stuff we had. I don't want to say I had some issues with OpenTable, but I don't I'm not too familiar with the software. I know that they've been using OpenTable for side events for a minute now. But if you don't clear the tables, like if people play in a tournament and the table is not like cleared in the app, you can't sign up for that table again until it's cleared. So like that's just the system. So you have like 200 slots available. Those all fill up immediately. And then if you don't clear the tables, nobody can register again until you clear those tables. And so we had a mad rush Friday morning until about like side events opened at like 10 o'clock or 930. I think I think it was 10. And then by like 1130, there wasn't anybody in line. And then by like. Like when I went to lunch at one, it was pretty quiet on sides. And I think that might have just been because of the scheduling software that we were using. So thankfully, it did get fixed going into day two. People were able to, like, I talked to one player day one who was telling me he signed up for an on-demand side event and was only able to play in one and then had to sign up for a bunch of scheduled side events because that's what he had options to play. So day two, he played in four on-demands, as opposed to the one he played on the first day. And he had a much better experience. But because they fixed OpenTable, we were slammed. Like, we were insanely busy. I don't know if you ever went over to the side events area. Probably not. Not really. But the line just to register for a four-player pod was, like, 200 to 300 people deep. And it never got shorter. Like, it was that until side events closed the line. And we had to, like, stop the line a couple of times. But for the most part, we were turning tables over fast enough to keep up with that. So, like, players coming in. Like, we had to co-opt some space. Friday was a lot. Sorry. Saturday was a lot. We had to, like, kind of figure out how to balance the scheduled events and the on-demands in the side events area because the main event was still going on for the most part on Saturday. They still needed, like, the bulk of the tables. They started using kind of the VG areas and stuff like that as it went on. But it was just a lot. Like, I think the player experience from when I, like, all the player interactions I had were really positive. Like, I didn't have anybody really upset. I had one dude who was, like, kind of in a VG standard pod that maybe got passed up a couple of times. And so I had to work really hard to get him into a pod. And we were able to make that happen to where he was able to finally play. Like, just handling customer service stuff. You know, we had a couple of players that had some static seating concerns or, like, auditory processing things that they needed to, like, basically have earplugs and, like, basically were really overwhelmed by sound. So we had to make sure that the environment was fitting for them and just stuff like that where there's just a lot of challenges to balance on top of the just logistical hurdles and, like. I mean, I think, though, that it's really cool that you guys were able to accommodate things like that. Because I can imagine other games, other companies, other events just saying, sorry, we can't do that. And asking those people to either deal with it or not participate. No, yeah, I don't think we turned away anybody that wanted to play, as far as I know. Jeremy John, shout outs to him. He was, like, the guy at the front of the line that was, like, helping people get to where they needed to go but was also, like, helping with accommodations. So it was really cool to see him working on the gaming grid side of stuff. Gaming grid really was a good partner for this. You know, once we figured out the open table situation after day one, like, they were great. Like, they were rocking it, working as hard as everybody else was. Had some really cool people on staff for that. So it was, like, really just felt like a community effort on, like, the, you know, organizers and staff level. So Saturday, Sunday, we're fine. I think Friday was a little difficult. But, like, we got through it. And we did as best as we could. Like, everything from our perspective was, it was Friday was good. And the cool thing was, Sunday, when we had extra help from other groups, like, the staff for day two did a really good job of just planning out, like, this head judge, their whole group's going to be doing this event. And this head judge, their whole group's going to be doing, like, schedule sides. So, like, they had planned all that out, which doesn't always happen. But they planned all that out well into Sunday. And so, like, when Sunday morning comes and, like, the new teams, like, when everybody's, like, because Sunday's championship Sunday, you really only have, like, the championship matches left. So everybody that worked the main event can come over and help with sides. So it was really just, like, by the time that happens where you have all those people over there, there wasn't a whole lot of confusion because everybody knew what they were doing. And so, like, after the first hour, it was just kind of like a, I don't know, I wouldn't ever call it, like, easy or peaceful or anything like that. But it was, like, steady, like, a well-run machine, like a, you know, humming along. So that was cool. And, you know, by the end of it, like, by the end of Sunday, you're just able to, I was able to explore and experience worlds a little bit more, like, walking around and seating stuff, like, helping out with the pocket tournament was fun. So I got to experience, like, what that looks like from the player's perspective. There were some really cool matches I was able to, like, watch as I was waiting for the match slip, like, the last few matches of the tournament. There's a lot of, like, the double deck format's fun. And I learned, like, what happens if the players tie, like, if there's a sudden death situation or something like that. Because you can have that happen, like, where, you know, both players win the game on the same turn. And it's like a bracket reset to where the decks, you're able to repick what decks you play. So you have a- Oh, really? Yeah, so that was interesting, because I didn't really expect that. I thought you just had to, like, replay the same decks you just played. But it goes back to, you're able to choose what decks you want again, like, all over again, like, round one. So that was kind of cool. And there were some hurdles with that, but I think everybody stepped up, like, everybody I worked with, all the staff members, nobody's ego was bigger than the fan's experience. Nobody put themselves above the players or other people on the team for the most, like, there was nobody that I had to, like, really just work around or anything like that. So that was really good. Like, everybody was there for what felt like the right reasons. And so it just made that whole, like, because sides can be, so the term that's used a lot is organized chaos. And I'm thinking, like, I spoke with my friend Miguel about it, and I hate that, I don't hate that term, but I really don't feel like it's an effective way to look at things, because it just says that I don't have any control over things. And you're ceding control. You're saying we were not able to make effective change and change from event to event to make it better over time. So, yes, it is chaotic, but I feel like when you do drill down, when you are able to, like, put people in place and, like, give training and, like, have all that stuff in place and put judges that are able to be flexible and able to step up and adapt, it becomes much better. And it isn't just chaotic. It's more like a battlefield, in the sense, like, maybe not a battlefield, but, like, maybe like a football field where you have, like, 15, 16 players, like, judges all doing the same thing while working towards the same goal. And at the end of the day, like, the play is the fans are able to get through line effectively, register for their events effectively, learn the rules for their events effectively, have their judge interactions go effectively, have any, like, questions answered effectively, and then leave effectively, like, going to where they need to go next to cash out on their prize wall tickets and stuff like that. And, yeah, like, I saw that process. I wasn't handling it all start to finish, but I saw, like, the people on GG's side doing the beginning and then the people at the prize wall and our cash, like, prize out doing their thing. And so it was all just, like, people working really hard. And so, like, that felt really cool to be a part of that. You know, I don't ever, well, I shouldn't say, I don't, I rarely work sides. I mean, I don't ever work from the start of the event through the end of the event in sides. And I have a lot more respect for sides after this event. And I really, I wouldn't be ashamed or I would never turn, I wouldn't turn down sides again, especially at this level. Like, at a regional level, it's a little different because there's not as many people trying to do sides. There's a lot, but worlds is just different. So to give you an idea of scale, I think, I don't know the exact number, but we had more people Saturday for sides. Like, once we figured out OpenTable, we had more people Saturday for sides than all of NAIC. So all three days of NAIC, we had more people come through and do on-demand side events. Well, you figure, if the sheer number of spectator passes that were probably sold for the event had to exceed the number of total players and spectators across all games, all age divisions at NAIC, for sure. There were tens of thousands of people at this event this weekend. Yeah. I mean, it can't be understated how large this convention center is. Like, if for people who don't know, this was hosted at the Anaheim Convention Center where they host the D23 Expo every year. I got actually, interestingly, got to talk into a couple of cops that happened to stop in the hotel lounge and ask them if this event was, how this event compared to some other events that they've maybe done security for or had to work at in the past. And they mentioned, you know, PAX gets hosted. PAX West gets hosted here. Comic-Con gets hosted there. D23 is a really big one. And D23 apparently has more people than what we had. And that convention center can handle it no problem because there was a whole upstairs level that we didn't even utilize for the event. There were some staff stuff upstairs. I'm not privy to what was up there. Maybe you are because you can go up the magical escalator that went to fancy staff land. But I imagine it was more of like a, probably like, yeah, a break area and maybe some cafe stuff. But no, granted, I guess the number that you're stating doesn't necessarily account for repeat customers, but also that would be the same for the NAIC numbers. So it potentially isn't that many people relative to the number of people that were there, but it was still a lot. And the times that I did, I didn't really go through the whole side event area, but the times that I would walk over to meet up with my wife and son while they were doing some other stuff around the venue, I would be able to like look over. And it always looked busy over in that corner of the room and definitely looked like a space that I did not want to go to unless I did not want to come out. Right. Yeah. So it reminded me like the Roanoke regionals we had in 2019 or 2018, I think, like at the Berglund Center, it was the size of that just for side events, like to give it a perspective. So like, I don't know, that probably means like that's a significant thing for like six people listening now, but it felt more like the area I was working in felt like a big conference ballroom size. So that was kind of like, just to give you the perspective of how big it is. But yeah, like you touched on, there were so many other things going on. Like I was just part of one thing and then you had so many other fan experiences going on. I didn't get to do a lot of those because I was working, but I was curious, did you get to do anything like the vendor area or like the signings or anything like that, or like the meet and greets? I got to wander around. I got to wander around a little bit, but kind of between rounds if I finished around early and more so Saturday, like later in the afternoon, but no, I didn't. So I know hall A, I almost didn't get to go into at all, except I made time Saturday evening to walk over and go through like the world's museum that they had set up. And they had a whole section that you could walk through with giant, like full art blown up cards for the new upcoming mega evolution cards or some of the black bolt white flare artwork. And they had like poster size artworks of a lot of those cards up on the walls as well over there. There was a whole pin and card trading area that was set up over there. The one thing that I actually wish I had gotten to see, there were two things I wish I had gotten to see that I didn't get to. And one of them was, I want to say it was Toyota that made them a ride on motorcycle. Apparently that thing was at World's. I have no idea where it was, but apparently it was there. Sounds like it was really cool, even though you couldn't do that. I know when they had the thing in Japan initially, they allowed fans to like get up and actually sit on it as long as you were under whatever, they had some weight threshold. I don't know what it was. But for World's, no, you could just go up and look at it. And at some point during the day, they would transform it between, oh, it's got it's quote unquote feet on the floor or it's got them pulled up and it's in bike mode. And I don't know when they did any of that because again, no idea where it was. I assume it was somewhere in Hall A, but I don't know where. And then they did have a whole stage area where they did various meet and greets. Like I know Ross Gilbert and Joe Merrick, the guy who runs Serebii.net, big new site for Pokemon mostly, does a lot of video game stuff. They had a meet and greet one day. There was a couple of podcast people that did a meet and greet over there. One day. Austin John Plays, who does a lot of video game content, not just for Pokemon, but for a lot of Nintendo games, did a meet and greet over there, I believe. And then the other thing they did that was the other experience over there that I wish I had gotten to go to was a Pokemon game show that was called Gotta Catch Them All. And so they did one episode of that that they released on either YouTube or Twitch. And then they did the second episode of the show, Live at Worlds. And I feel like that would be a pretty cool thing to experience, especially in person. Just because game show, I've never gotten to see a game show in person. I know that some other people that went out to Anaheim actually went to filming episodes of The Price is Right. Okay. And so being able to experience some other kind of game show just seems like it would be a fun thing to do. And especially one where if somehow, if they were like selected, I don't know how they selected who was participating. I'm assuming that they contacted content creators and other people ahead of time and said, hey, are you available to come to Worlds? Yes, cool, here's a pass. You're gonna do this thing on this day. And okay, cool, good. That's like your pass and your present, your hotel room, whatever's contingent upon you doing this. And so they probably pulled people into it now. But if it was more like a Price is Right, let's pull people from the audience, being the person selected from that would be a really cool experience as well. But no, so they had that. That was all Apollo A. I think that there may even have been some other things that I didn't describe that were over there. So you talked about the museum, right? Yes, yeah. And that is- a really that's a really cool thing that could be even cooler because it only goes back to 2010. So specifically, and I wanted to highlight that specifically, because a friend of mine, Steve Sylvester, who won worlds in 2009, and it was a deck that I helped work on and helped build was not featured in there. And I was like, Oh, and that was a little bit of a girl moment. But that is what it is. You know, obviously. So my dad was at worlds, and he actually commented to me that he was surprised that they actually had all of these items still, you know, because they did a museum last year, I'm assuming they use the same items for that. But he said he was surprised that they had the items going back as far as they did, that we're still able to be utilized for this rather than, you know, it would be very easy for these things to not be kept by the company, because there wasn't really a reason for them to do it. Right. I'm sure like now, Pokemon has a. Oh, yeah. No, now, now they've gotten to the point where, yes, they absolutely will be keeping like one of everything forward. And but then they also had things like I mentioned earlier, they had build a bear. Bandai Namco was selling model kits. There was a whole Pokemon sleep and Pokemon pocket booth. There was a booth for signing up for the Pokemon or the play Pokemon access app, which I think could help streamline this side of an area very well if they're able to incorporate that moving forward next year. And also would alleviate a lot of headaches as far as especially if we can get to the point where we're doing match reporting on the app as well would alleviate a lot of problems. The only issue you may run into then is potential like network congestion if everybody's trying to utilize the thing at the same time. Sure. That's a problem for a different day. Yeah. And there were a few other things, I think, over there as well. The other really nice thing I thought about the world's venue this year is that there wasn't only like one area where you could purchase food. There were kind of food vendors all throughout the venue, both outside of all of the convention halls and inside and in between the convention halls inside. And it didn't seem like the lines for any of them were ever excessively long. So if you were hungry, like food was readily accessible. The bathrooms were fairly, like were not crazy congested throughout the day. And also they, you know, shout out to the convention center staff. They had full restroom attendance inside the bathrooms at all times, making sure that, you know, things were stocked, things were clean. And, you know, sometimes the bathrooms at regionals or internationals get kind of gross by the end of even day one. So just that, that was a almost a highlight of the experience. Thursday was like just kind of badge pickup and trying to last minute figure out what deck I was going to play. I know I said last week, I was pretty sure I was going to play Grimmsnarl and had some talk from my friend Hunter throughout the week that he was, he felt pretty confident that Raging Bolt was the play just because the way the meta was shaping up, a lot of top testing groups were moving off of Gardevoir and onto Dragapult or Goldengo, both of which are fairly favorable for Raging Bolt or can be made favorable for Raging Bolt. But I just hadn't played a bunch of games with it. I tried playing a few games with it. I know I actually enlisted John's help to play two best of threes, one with Grimmsnarl and one with Raging Bolt against Goldengo. And neither of them really filled me with a ton of confidence about, hey, this matchup is terrible for Grimmsnarl, so don't play it. Or this matchup is amazing for Raging Bolt, so you should play that. And even then I sat down in the lounge area of the hotel Thursday night at probably like 11 or 1130 PM and just sat there and flipped back and forth between both decks on Arcanine, trying to debate which one I was going to submit. And no, it wasn't even on Arcanine yet. It was just on TCG Live because I needed to export a list and put it into Arcanine. And then the funny thing is part of the decision was it would have been too much of a pain for me to convert the like max rarity Raging Bolt that I had on TCG Live to the actual artworks that I had in paper. And then on top of that, I also realized I could just copy my NAIC Grimmsnarl list and change the two cards that were different to accommodate what would eventually become the list that I played for Worlds. And so I know the next thing that I'm going to talk about here is just kind of the tournament run that I went on and how my experience as a player went. So we got into things. So I ended up submitting this deck for Worlds. And I'm not going to talk about the list in particular quite yet. There's not really a ton to talk about with it. It's basically the same list that I played at NAIC minus Energy Search for Pokigear and minus Rescue Board for Aeroballoon, literally the only two cards that are different from the list that I played two months ago. And it still was just as good as it was back then. So I ended up submitting this, go to bed, wake up early enough to get to the venue in time for the opening ceremony and everything on Friday. And it was really cool. I mean, they had like a whole mini concert, essentially. Anna Prosser came out because she was a part of the Worlds songs for this year. And she was both hosting and singing on stage for the opening ceremony. And then we sat down to play. And I'm curious, how did you feel? Before we get into this, I just want to add one. Well, before round one, when you're sitting there and it's like, I'm about to play my first Worlds in 13 years since the last time I played in Worlds, like what emotions go through your head as a player? Because I know I was a mess. Like before we had players come in, and they did the soundcheck, and they did the recap video, and I'm watching it. And I'm just thinking about all these parts. I cried, dude. I don't cry ever. And I cried because I was thinking through all these times where I was at this event, and at NAIC with Omar doing well, and then at EUIC even, and being a part of LAIC and meeting all these new friends and being a part of all that stuff. And I mean, I was just emotionally going through it. And it was really meaningful. But it was my first time as a staff member at Worlds. And I think that really hit me really hard. So I want to hear, how did you feel as a player playing for the first time in 13 years? I think it wasn't any different for me. Okay. I was just kind of ready to sit down. I wasn't supremely confident as of round one. But I felt almost at peace, I guess is a way to describe it, to where I felt that I had done an adequate amount of preparation. I probably could have done more. But I felt confident in my deck. I felt confident in the list that I had chosen for the deck. And I was ready to let that carry me through how the event went. And so I sit down for round one, play against Lewis Roach here from the UK. And he immediately flips over Genesect. And I say, okay, I guess we're going to hit Goldengo right away. And well, you know, anyone that watched the stream will discover that after this round, we learned that Goldengo was a quarter of the room, which was definitely not on my bingo card. I knew it was going to be popular, but I did not think it was going to look like that. But our first round was actually relatively uneventful. Lewis prized or did not play a buddy buddy Poffin at all in game one, and in game two, prized two gimme ghouls. So it was just a pretty quick two oh, and unfortunately, it looks like he did not have the best day. The next round was against another Goldengo with Oscar Rivas, and his list was a little bit different. It was very similar, I think, to what Daniel Magda played, which was a Goldengo list that was not energy search pro. It was kind of in some in some way text for mirror in the sense that you have a one prize attacker in the form of fan wrote him plus baby Goldengo to take early prizes and offset your price trade or attempt to offset your price trade. And you're able to do things like this with large quantities of earthen vessel copy of letter of encouragement to find your energies and then you have whoever rather room to draw a bunch of additional cards. LaVincia like recycles things to your hand and secret box kind of lets you set up all of this stuff more consistently without necessarily having to put a bunch of two prizes in play. And game one, I lost I believe Yeah, I lost because he just got off to a quick start. I didn't really do much. I think I prized a snow run. And then I won game two in game three, we had a little bit of a back and forth. This was kind of a contentious situation because I thought that I heard Oscar tell me at the end of game two, that he was going to go first. And so we shuffle our decks, we set up everything. And then we both flip over active, and we're just sitting there. And he's like, Oh, no, you're first. I said, um, no, no, you said you were going first. And we go back and forth for a minute, just arguing with each other about who's going first, and we eventually call a judge over. And the end of the way that that ended up being resolved was, well, you guys cannot decide who's going first, because you have theoretically not adequately communicated with each other who is going first, you should not have basic Pokemon in your active spot yet. Therefore, I'm going to ask you both to shuffle your hands back into your deck, reset this game. And now we have adequately communicated that Aaron will be going first. I'm hoping that it was just a simple miscommunication. And I'm not gonna like try to claim that Oscar was attempting to cheat. But the unfortunate result from for him was that at the end of that he opened Lone Genesect, no other basics, and I killed him, I got he made me go first, I opened Impidimp, Candy Grimmsnarl on turn two, and said Shadow Bullet twice to win the game. Yikes. So that was round two. And at that point, I'm starting to kind of feel myself a little bit I've beaten those games. No, that was that was going into game three. So he won game one, I won game two. And then that whole situation happened at the end of game two, when he was deciding who was going to go first. And but now I'm like, you know, everyone supposedly says that Goldengo is a terrible matchup for Grimmsnarl. And I think that I even said last week that, you know, I've doubted that data from my own personal playtesting. Sure. And I felt the matchup was close, but definitely winnable, as long as they are not hardcore teching to beat the deck. And we'll get more into that later, unfortunately. But round three, I sat down to play against Cameron Chinoy, fresh off of his top eight at NAIC. And of course, Cam's playing Zoroark again. And game one, he had some issues getting Pokemon set up. I made sure because my list does play three copies of boss. I never used Shadow Bullet into a clean Grimmsnarl. So I got I opened Shaman game one, which was a really big deal because he had turned to Zoroark plus Darmanitan. But he was never able to utilize Flame Body Cannon effectively. You're in Shaman. Yeah, that's yes. Was a specifically for the Shaman was included in the list specifically for Raging Bolt. It's also helpful against Gardevoir. And then obviously also can be helpful against Zoroark if they are playing Darmanitan. But so big deal that I opened with it in my hand in game one was able to get it down without having to search for it. And then essentially just whittled away at Cam's board by bossing up Darmanitan and Reshiram repeatedly while just pinging and letting damage build up on his Zoroarks passively from Frostlass. I devoed three Zoroarks out of play at some point, and he just had to scoop and go to game two. And in game two, he just he had a bunch of Zeruas but couldn't ever find any other end's Pokemon to do anything. At one point, he had to use Night Joker to copy Scratch off of a Zerua just to just to attack for the turn. And it was just really rough for him. So I won that series 2-0. Then I played against Oiven in round four and was despite losing this series 0-2. It was a relatively pleasant experience. Oiven seems like a totally wonderful person, and I would love to play against him again at any time. But game one, he gets turn two candy, Zard Candy Pidgeot, just like naturally has everything to do it. And I'm kind of just behind the whole game because I didn't have Evo on turn one. I think I either didn't have an Arvin to get the Evo or I didn't have the energy to use it. And I just ended up behind the whole game to where he was, or no, I never played an Iono in game one. And that was the real killer for me because he was able to set up Mist, Turo, whatever he wanted to with because there was never any pressure on resources in his hand. So he could set things up turns in advance as necessary to just slowly whittle away at my board. And then in game two, Oiven goes, I force him to go first. I actually set up a relatively stable board going into his turn where I have Frostlast Snowrun, Morgrim, and Impidimp on my bench with a Monkeydory active and a Monkeydory on my bench. And he goes, Mazegoza flips heads and uses that to find Pidgeot, goes Candy Pidgeot, uses that to quick search for another rare candy for Charizard, or uses that to search for the Charizard to candy into Charizard. And I'm just like, oh, come on, man. And I'm like, so cheesy, like that, that feels kind of bad. But it's the funny thing. And I know I mentioned this to you before the podcast is that this is so on brand for Oiven to have in his deck after winning a regional with Pokéstop as his stadium of choice in Charizard. And I know he said in an interview after a game that he played on stream that he's not playing. He's like, I don't play with my mind. I play with my stomach or something like he just plays off of his gut and what he feels in the moment. And that just seems quintessentially describes his approach to Pokémon, which I think is really wholesome and very funny. But I lost that series, too, and then started to feel like, oh, man, like I was doing was really hyped at some point. Actually, I think going into this round, I got a shout out on stream from Puka and Kyle Sable House. Nice. So that was really cool. Somebody made me I ran into Kyle after this game that I unfortunately had lost. And he was like, oh, yeah, we talked about you on stream. And I was like, oh, you didn't. I had to go back and like search for that to just be like, well, what the heck? Like, what did they say? say. But had to kind of recenter myself. It was a relatively quick round. So I had time to this is when I actually went and met up with my family and found out what they were doing so far throughout the day. Still at this point. So I should say I said that I felt at peace. I was obviously I think from an outsider's perspective, I was nervous going into this. Because throughout like all of day one, I don't know if I ate anything. Like I had I had a coffee in the morning. And I was just like, I did not feel hungry at all throughout the day. So I feel like my adrenaline must have just been up pretty much all day. So I'm sure there was way too much cortisol in my body. Yeah. But I'm set to play against Nathan or Nathan. I actually don't remember how to pronounce his first name. But another goldango deck going into round five. And actually, I wanted to double check this. He was playing monkey Dory, but no picnic basket, no Moonlit Hill just looks like opted for for cipher for boss for Arvin trying to keep his deck as consistent as possible. And because of that, he didn't necessarily have the tools to fully combat grim snarl. Maybe he just did wasn't accounting for the deck or expected people would be scared off of it because those cards could definitely influence the matchup. And I won game one and then he just bricked game two. Like another Genesect past story. So and that's how I started out three Oh against goldango throughout the event. So next round, sat down to play against Hassan Kanuku. Oh, for sure. For sure. And it showed me you know, the deck's consistent. Absolutely. But it is definitely not the most consistent deck ever. Right? Like it has it has like finding a coffin or finding like like having a good opening hand really dictates like how well you're going to do in a game. Yes, it can come back. But it can be really challenging to like build back momentum after you lose it in the first few turns. Exactly. Round six sat down against Hassan Kanuku. And he opened with a fan wrote him and search for Evie on turn one and my heart sank a little because this matchup is very difficult for grim snarl. And I think going into any I see I felt pretty confident in it. One because I had practiced against it so much. And two because people had not optimized the deck yet. But coming out of any I see people had discovered that gravity mountain is a very good card in this deck. And it makes the grim snarl matchup even better for the deck. But game one, we kind of go back and forth. Hassan and I am kind of employed the same strategy in both games where he committed a bunch of energy pretty early on had to discard one instead of getting a lot of us out had to discard one to retreat a hoot hoot on turn to attach with use Crispin and attached the second energy from the Crispin to his flurry on used burning charge put two on his Evie X on the bench. And I spent a lot of the game just gusting up knock towels and saying, Hey, retreat this Hey, retreat this Hey, Turo this out of the way. And eventually was able to kind of stall things out enough that I made a devo play or I just rock killed the leafy on first, while I own owing him low, and then was able to, like countercatch or boss up a knock towel and get a bunch of damage built up in play. And ran through the game that way by just taxing his resources throughout the game. And then in the second game, things got weird, because I did not say shadow bullet once throughout the second game. Okay. And we did a lot of I did a lot of the same where it was, I'm going to countercatch for this thing. I'm going to countercatch for this thing. I'm going to boss this thing up. And I was just doing a bunch of itchy pollen moving damage with monkey Dory got to frost last online ASAP. And just Hassan was never in a position where he was able to use moss agate at all to heal his bench. And I just got to build like this critical massive damage on so many Pokemon that everything just got kind of not I took the I think fight one prize one turn and then like the other five prizes the next turn. She's dude. Wow. So, but when I shadow bullet, yeah, did not say shadow bullet one time, I think I corkscrew punched something. But I did not say shadow bullet. But a relatively fun series had a weird situation happened in this one too, where at some point his thumb on his right hand, like super cramped up to the point where we were shuffling for game two, and he like couldn't shuffle his deck. Oh my god. So we had we had to call a judge over and they were like, Hey, do you need to leave and go get medical attention? And he's like, No, can I just he requested a judge to sit down and just like be his basically personal shuffler for a little bit while he was trying to like work the muscles in his hand. Yeah. And throughout that, I mean, that was like a 12 minute judge call trying to get the situation resolved to even get things situated. And by the time like it was so cumbersome with how he like the judge trying to like fan his deck out for him to try to like, finger through it to search for everything. He eventually was like, nevermind. I appreciate your help. I'm just gonna try to figure this out with my partially disabled hand. Yeah. And so we were playing the rest of game two like that. So I'm sure that that didn't help the situation for him at all, as far as decision making when you're dealing with, like pain at the same time. But it was a, it was a close series. And I was really, really happy to come out on top of that one. And my day, kind of from then on, and it shouldn't be surprising at all, because it is worlds and especially sitting at a five and one record. But my day from then on did not get it easier by any means. And so I sat down and had to play his buddy Robinson with Golden Goat going into the next round. And this was just kind of a back and forth series that unfortunately, like had a long game one that he won, I had a long game two that I won. And then we had like four minutes going into game three. I know, I think you actually walked over while I was playing in this I know you sent me a couple of pictures. And I believe I remember overhearing you ask, Hey, is this game one or two? And I looked at the board state from the picture that you sent me and I'm like, okay, so you came to game two because it was he had like five Pokemon on his board and my board was just a grim snarl. Okay. And I'm just like, I'm gonna shadow bullet this and I'm gonna boss this and shadow bullet this and I'm gonna, and just able over time to kind of whittle things down that the Golden Goat matchup is really weird and sort of intricate to try to piecemeal your way through it as grim snarl. And in a lot of ways heavily depends on how many times you can I don't know your opponent. But being able to do that consistently really makes a big difference. But unfortunately, I didn't have enough time to play game three and we tied. And then to close out the day, I played against a lot Blitzle playing raging bolt. And the thing that got me here was I went into this expecting James to have a, you know, relatively stock standard raging bolt list. Where and maybe a couple of tricks here and there. Because I know he's been one of the people that's been playing cornerstone in his list, but that doesn't really impact our matchup at all. And in game one, I prized a snow run, which is really impactful in this matchup, you really want to get to two frost laughs out ASAP if possible. Surprising a storm heard a lot and I ended up losing a relatively drawn out game one. Specifically, though, the thing that lost it for me was the fact that James played two copies of boss in his deck, because I attempted to itchy pollen stall something at some point. And he was able to boss up a grim snarl on my bench, because I was he had played one boss, and I was locking him out of prime catcher. And he was ahead on prizes. So I'm like, Okay, you shouldn't be able to gust anything, I'm going to evolve into this grim snarl. And utilize it next turn after enough damage is built up on your ogre pond on the bench for me to gust it up and KO it. And instead he said, No, I have another boss in my hand. Let me KO the grim snarl with my ogre pond. That was his last two prizes. Then we played a another again, kind of long drawn out game two, to the point where we had maybe eight minutes left going into game three. And he forced me to know he went first, I went second, and I made it probably my biggest misplay of the tournament on turn one of game three, to where I have I had secret box Arvin rare candy. And I don't remember what the other cards were in my opening hand. And I opted instead of playing Arvin first, I opted to just play secret box. And I think in my head, what I was thinking of doing was secret boxing away. No, so I had I had Arvin research boss candy, secret box, monkey Dory and a dark energy. And what I was thinking of doing was discarding enough resources so that I could, I, I think what I wanted to do was Evo that turn, play Poffin off of the secret box, and then just I own myself into a fresh hand to continue the turn. And what I opted to do instead, because of my prize cards was play the Arvin for the turn. And if I had just committed to playing the Arvin first, I would have been able to get a useless card to discard like TM Divo out of my deck and discard it with the secret box to really set my board up and establish it and be rather robust. But instead, I ended up discarding the rare candy specifically with the secret box. And it turned out that my second candy was prized. And that made it to where I don't think it was ever going to be possible for me to win this game, specifically because I didn't have a candy to play with at all. Okay, tempo. Yeah, right. And so this was it was kind of unfortunate time got called. And it was to a point where like we hadn't discussed the gentlemen's at all. But it was pretty clear to both of us that there was almost no way that I was going to win this game. But we ended up with a tie just because we hadn't agreed on anything ahead of time. And it's it's it's worlds like I'm not just going to give you a win. You know, yeah, especially if you haven't talked about it beforehand. Like if you haven't had a gentleman's I think that's reasonable, especially because a tie you're still I mean, I was in I mean, I was going into going into day two, either way, but I we and both of us thought this, I'm assuming going into day two at five one and two meant that you should be totally locked out of top cut should not be able to make it. But you can still play for top 16. Yeah. And so that was kind of what I had resigned myself. This is what my end goal is going to be going into day two. Yeah, I remember talking to you after day one, and you're like, Well, I'm bummed. Because like, yeah, it's, it's a little stings a little to like tie to your last two rounds, especially after going five and one. First six rounds, you're like, money heater, like, I'm going to keep going, you know, yeah, that kind of kills your momentum and kills you're like, it messes with that whole vibe at the end of the day. But I was like talking to your mom. I remember your mom was just like, is he still is he is, you know, she's like, he's doing really, I think I told her, yeah, you're, you're x, x, one, two. And she's like, is he still in contention for top eight? And I'm like, well, mathematically, I don't think he's eliminated. Like, I don't think I think there's a world where like, it gets to that point. And we'll talk about that in a minute. But like, yeah, it was just like, I don't know, it sucks to like tie your last two, but like, what a run, man, day one. Yeah, I mean, I can't say that I was totally unsatisfied with it. I know, I knew that I was safe. I mean, after the first six rounds, I was going into day two, no matter what. Yeah. And at that point, I had actually, foolishly, I guess, started thinking about, like, can I do this? Hmm. But yeah, so anyway, played the last year and tied the last year ends got finally got some food. It was like, Oh, gosh, I really need to eat something. Yeah, got some food and went to bed. And what are your day to meal? Just curious. You mean like breakfast wise? No, for like dinner when you go to a world I don't even I don't even remember. I honestly don't read. I think because the problem was my son was really like really jet lagged by this point, or we still were kind of recovering from jet lag. What did I honestly I don't even remember what I ate, man. I got something. I know. Like shout out to the food trucks that they had out and they were good. Yeah, the food out there was really, really good for sure. And I mean, it was kind of food truck prices. It is what you would expect. But basically, if you wanted a meal out there, it was going to be like 15 to 20 bucks. Yeah, easy. But that that was what it was. So I ate something I have no idea what it was. I went to bed, woke up the next day. Again, coffee, no food for breakfast, and sat or saw my pairings like an hour before going into it and saw that I was playing against constant. I don't know if you pronounce this column or Kalama. But knew he was playing Gardevoir because he was the featured match on stream at the end of day one, but still also knew like he's a good player. So sat down. One game one. Relatively like nothing fancy about it. Like Gardevoir is a relatively good matchup. I lost game two because I made it he his list was interesting in that he played three bravery charm. And I made a play anticipating and assuming that he only played two and he had already committed one to a monkey dory. But he had committed two of them because he was gonna he played a research earlier in the game. So he just played the charms because they were discarded anyway. So he had one of the monkey dory that's irrelevant, literally means nothing. And the other one was pre committed to a drift loon that he utilized to attack at some point throughout the game. And then he KO'd my Grimmsnarl I counter captured up his Gardevoir and did a shadow ball to KO Gardevoir and KO the damaged driftloon on the bench. And that's when he went secret box for his third night stretcher and his third bravery charm. And I said, Oh, like I audibly said, Oh, he's like, and so he was able to recover a Gardevoir recover driftloon, put the bravery charm down and take his last two prizes. And I said, Okay. And so I had a digital notepad with me throughout the entire event. And literally the only thing I wrote on it all weekend was three bravery charm. Yeah. Never once did I write down my prize cards. And that's a discussion for a different time. But I actually felt like I was relatively kind of in the zone enough throughout the weekend that I just had mental knowledge of what my prize cards were throughout the day. And it was a short enough event that that was not too mentally taxing to do. It also helps your same list other than two cards. Oh, yeah, for sure. I had, I had, I had enough to get that list. I have been like, no, it's at this point, I have probably played at least 500 games with this list specifically. Um, but getting into Game 3, Consta prized two Ralts, um, and so that, the game was just like over. Yeah. He basically didn't get to play. He did some interesting stuff because he was also playing Jealousant, so he kind of kept me at bay. That was the other thing. Game 2, I made a major blunder where I secret boxed and got a Spikemuth and immediately played it and utilized it to get a second Impidimp, and he bumped my stadium and then locked me with Frillish, and if I hadn't played the Spikemuth, I could have played it the following turn, used it to go get a Morgrem, and that basically, that probably would have just sealed the game, or sealed the series at two games, but instead we ended up having to play the third game. He got kind of screwed over by his prizes, and I was able to, um, close it out from there. And then, playing against another very strong player for Round 10, sit down to cross from Grant Shen. Sheesh, man. So, she sits down, and the first thing he tells me is that Rahul told him that I had major Unk status. And I can't say he's wrong, but I discovered that, I think, the first Worlds I played at was 2004, and Grant told me, he's like, I was 1 that year, and I was like, jeez, I am You do have Unk status, yeah, you're just like, you're just like the old, like, I think you're probably, you have to be the oldest player in like, the furthest, like, when that went the furthest. Uh, Jimmy Ballard's got that title, I'm pretty sure. No, I mean, this year, this year. Oh, maybe, maybe. The funny thing was, up to the point where I tied my first two games, so that, I'd said that I had the thought where I was like, hey, can I actually do this? My other thought was like, am I gonna do what Jimmy Ballard did? And, um, but yeah, so sat down to play this game, and again, we were like, one and one going into game three, where just, again, like, oh, both game one and game two, I prized a Snow Runt, which this is another matchup where that's a really big deal. But still managed to close game two out anyway, because Grant had some awkward prizes. Game one, he was able to cypher, like, set his deck, so that even if I Ionode, I wasn't gonna be able to stop him from winning. So that's how he closed out game one. Game two, I got a faster start, and was able to set things up, even through only having access to one Frostlass, and kind of got enough damage built up that the game, the win was inevitable. At one point, he made an error where he coined bonus for two with a benched Goldengo. And just because I was already ahead in the game, rather than, like, having to deal with any sort of judge involvement, he just scooped, and we went to game three. And so playing game three, we're kind of going back and forth, and then time gets called, or we had a time extension, because we got deck checked after game two. So we're, like, one of the last games going, and it gets to a point where I've got five prizes left, he's still at, he goes to four, and time gets called on his turn. So he's turned zero, and then I'm gonna be turn one, he's getting, so he's only got one more turn after what he finishes. He takes a KO on, like, a one-prizer, I think, because, like, that turn, I only had one-prizers in play. He KOs, like, a Monkey Dory or something, and all of his stuff gets pinged for two counters. And I set up a turn, or a position, where I can KO his active Goldengo. He's got one Goldengo active, two Gimmy Ghouls on the bench, because he turrowed one out of play as well that turn. That was at, like, 240 at that point. And so he's got a Genesect on his bench with, like, 60 damage on it, and a Monkey Dory on his bench that he just moved damage off of, but it's at, like, 30. So it pings up to 50. I get a Grimmsnarl out, countercatch up his Genesect, KO Genesect, and KO Monkey Dory to go down to... Two prizes? No, I had, sorry, I only had four, so I went down to one. And so I literally just have to Devo to win the game. And I've got a Froslass with no energy, two Monkey Dories with Darks on them, like, I was able to move enough damage over to his Monkey Dory to KO it. And then I've got a Grimmsnarl active and, like, a Morgrem or an Impidimp on my bench. No, sorry. I had Grimmsnarl active, Froslass on my bench, three Monkey Dories, all with Darks. And he's got a Goldengo with, like, 80 on it, two Gimmy Ghouls, and, like, a three-card hand. And he's also got, I think, maybe he's got a Pheasant Dippity as well. So he draws some cards, doesn't have enough to KO my Grimmsnarl, and opts to simply try to force a tie by countercatering my Froslass and hoping that I don't have an energy to retreat it, because my Air Balloon's already down, and I think both of my Knight Stretchers are gone. I've only got, like, one energy, one or two energies left available total. Luckily, I had just taken one off my prize card, so I show him I've got a Dark, I've got an Arvan, and I, like, flip my deck over, find the Devo, and show it to him, and his Goldengo's gonna get knocked out. So I won that series, 2-1-1. And so now I'm at this point, I'm like, okay, I have 2-0 in Day 2, I need to win one more game to make Top 16. And so I sat down, I'm like, I just, I doubt I'm gonna be able to convince my opponent to ID, so we're playing a $10,000 money match right now. Because the way the Swiss structure was set up this year, this was gonna be the last round. If this was the Swiss structure for this upcoming season, I'm pretty sure we would have had 12 rounds. So this was just the all-or-nothing cash game for me. And then, so I sit down, play against Ryota. How do you feel going into this game, before you talk about the game itself, like, does this hit, like, this is, this is, this is, like, I mean, because this is about as high stakes as we get in the Pokemon, and even more so after the fact, maybe, when you find out, like, the true implications, but like, like, how did you feel going into this? Going into it, I was definitely nervous, because I didn't know anything about Ryota. I hadn't seen, I don't recall having sat anywhere near him throughout the tournament, and had no idea what deck he was playing. And he opened ridiculously well both games, unfortunately. So game one, he just kind of steamrolls me, opens Gimme Ghoul, double Poffin for two more, for three more Gimme Ghouls, and got Scyther out, and had a Nest Ball for Genesect, searched for two Goldengos on turn one, and then found another Goldengo and a Scizor on turn two. And I'm just like, okay, I guess I'm not gonna play this game, because I basically just drew past until I lost. And then game two, things are getting pretty tense. We're gonna run low on time, and at that point, I kind of resigned myself to, I'm probably not going to be able to win this series. So then it transitioned into, I'm playing for top 32 by tying this game. Or maybe, on a miracle, I can win this game and hope he bricks in game three, and I can just do what I've done against Goldengo like two or three other times this tournament, and close out a very quick game three. But he opens very strong again, uses Picnic Basket, and I'm like, he's used Picnic Basket, has Monkey Dory on board. I haven't seen Moonlit Hill by this point throughout either game, so I'm assuming he doesn't play it. And I figure the first Picnic Basket largely does nothing, it just kind of delays things by a turn. And then I'm slowly building up damage on his entire board, like he's got four Goldengos in play at one point, that all have like 180 damage on them, to the point where I was threatening to just take six prizes by KOing things rather than even playing Devo. Or no, not all of them had that much, sorry. One of them had like 180, one of them was at like 120, and one was at like 60, and the other one was at like 30, because he kind of staggered when they came into play. And then I move a bunch of damage over to his Monkey Dory, and so I'm threatening a turn where I'm going to like KO all of his Game Eagles and his Monkey Dory, and then he drops the second Picnic Basket, and my heart dropped out of my chest. Because I'm like, I just can't win at this point. And I'm sitting there, I'm thinking, and I'm thinking, and I'm thinking, and I'm thinking, and time gets called. Not on that turn, like I try to process a bunch of information, I just don't see a way out of the situation. And eventually I end up losing because he's able to do like a boss like two turns later or something. And at that point, I just kind of sat at the table kind of shell shocked for like a minute and a half or two minutes. Because it was one of the situations where I was, I felt so close, and in a lot of ways, I ended up telling my wife this, this tournament felt very similar to my last Worlds prior to this one, where in that tournament, I had had to play through the LCQ. And in a lot of ways, NAIC this year kind of resembled that for me. And it almost is ironic that I played the same deck at NAIC and Worlds this year, because it really resembles playing the same deck for the LCQ and Worlds in 2012. And it's kind of considered to be a relatively underdog deck, especially looking at the tournament in hindsight. But I was disappointed to say the least. And then a couple minutes after this, Kieran Farris' stream game finishes in a tie, and I discover that if I had been able to win this series, I would have made it into CUT. And honestly, man, that crushed me. Yeah. Like, it is not an understatement. I was upset, like beyond upset. Because it's something where, like, you work really hard. That's what you go for. That's why you play the game. You work really hard for a lot of this stuff. And you don't, you know, I'm not one of these players like the Azuls and the Tords or the Brent Tonnesons of the world that go to, well, Azul's kind of weird, but not in the same campus as other players anymore, because he goes to like three tournaments. You're not a professional Pokemon player. Right. And I'm not, I'm not traveling to 20 something major events throughout the year. I'm not, because of that, I'm not guaranteed to get a world's invite. And so being able to play in this tournament was really special for me. And then doing as well as I did was, while cool, also extremely disappointing. And it sounds really entitled for me to say that, I'm sure. But sitting in a position where I dropped from potentially playing to win the event to getting no cash and getting like a booster box, well, yes, it's nice to get some amount of prizing. No, but let's not kid ourselves. It feels like I did nothing for all of the effort throughout the year and for this event specifically that I had to put in. It was rough. It was really rough. It's taken me like, I mean, I, for the most part, I've gotten over it. I'm still disappointed, obviously, but it, it took me a lot of time to kind of come to terms with the fact that I did do well at this event, did better than a lot of, a lot of people. Like we had 721 players and I managed to be, you know, quote unquote, the 41st best player in the world throughout this season based on the results of this event. And that is some level on some level that is an accomplishment. Yeah. I mean, but I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to praise you here. I think Aaron, like considering like your competition, like you're playing, like I out of all these players, I don't know Ryota because they're from Japan. I don't know the first two opponents you played, but like everybody else is like either a regional champion or like in that conversation for top 16 in their region. Like, I mean, Oshvin's a multiple time regional champion. I mean, Grant Chen's won like two, I think like Kassan, I don't think he's, I don't know if he's won one, but like, he's gotten really close a couple of times. And like Bodhi, I think is huge in seniors that just aged up and is doing well. James is like, I mean, he's, he's a legend online. Like, I don't know, like just you played some of the best competition in this tournament. And I mean, everybody granted is a really good competitor, but like, you've played, you've, you've proven that like somebody that isn't, you know, in college that doesn't have a full-time job or whatever, like you've proved that like, there's the potential for somebody that has a family, has, has other commitments in life can, can do it, can like, you, you're kind of like holding it, holding the dream for the old, like the, the, the former players that want to come back to the game because there's a lot of us. It's funny. You say that because I have gotten several messages since this weekend from old friends and former, what I would consider to be former players saying, you know, like, man, thanks for like, wait, wait to do it for the old guys or, you know, showing that we can still do it. And I was like, dude, I haven't talked to you for like eight years, but thank you. Yeah. It does. And people see that name, they like, man, I remember that guy. I remember playing him in this regional, I remember playing, like playing against him at locals in like 2006, 2007, you know, whatever. And I mean, that's huge, man. Like that's why we started this podcast in a lot of ways was just because it was me and you like talking about our experience as older players that are getting back into the game or like me getting into judging, you know, and it's just, this is why we're doing it. Like this is, and I, I think I'm really proud of you from like a friend perspective, but also from like a, an older player perspective. And it, I mean, this run means a lot. Like I remember checking in on it, like I was swamped, but like, I remember checking in on it and like the Florida chat blowing up that you're part of and like people from there and just like all of that stuff. And my brother was texting me about it and like, it just means a lot, man. So like, congrats. I know this isn't the result you worked for. Like it's, it sucks. It's a little crushing, but like, you know, hindsight, you know, a year from now when Maybe you're not like going into worlds or something like that. Or even if like, you know, the cool thing is like Bodhi can see like how good of a player you are and can see like your, he, his dad knows how to play Pokemon and knows how to win and like knows, like can do really well at these things. And like, that's, that's really cool, man. Like just that, that kind of, it's, it's really, I know this sucks, but I think the takeaway will be, you know, down the road, like I can't compete at the world championships like at a high level. And that's really cool. I just wanted to earn some money, man. That's the, I know at the end of it, so I'm missing out on top 32 sucks. I like the next form next year's format. Like hopefully that'll help a little alleviate, I think that it would. Alleviate a lot of some of the giants you get from yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I mean and we've seen it We've seen it all throughout this season. It has happened to Dozens of players throughout the year and so I think getting that extra Swiss round back will make a huge difference and I know what I feel like now granted I could have played that game and I could have lost and I could end up in Exactly the same position that I ended up in anyway But I'll never know and that just is what it is, like you said this this is still given Like the record that it is and that they I definitely think that this record is better I don't know. It's it's so funny because you it feels like when you look at Oh 41st place, that's terrible Relative like from an outsider specific perspective 41st doesn't sound very good But it just goes to show like how difficult it is to place well in these tournaments how they're how small the margin for error is and So just to transition away from this and get out of like my pity party zone You didn't play a Dragon Ball deck the whole time You didn't know I did it's like any like you're having to go through one of your harder matchups and golden go and like yeah, it's Impressive that you had such a good run against those for sure I will stay I will now stand by the fact that gold and go is not a bad matchup Sure, it is only a bad matchup if your opponent is Ryota Tanaka who plays Basket that man took me that man took me out to lunch and then made me pay for it Yeah Anyways to get off the pity party So just to close things out and kind of frame things in a lighter perspective like the hindsight perspective to where say yes I did do you know better than maybe I initially thought I did Or maybe in fact, I still stand by the fact. I liked my deck choice I really think that this is a very good list for this deck and Retrospectively, I do not know if I would change a single card in this the only card that I would consider cutting is shaman And that's specifically if you do not think you're the metagame that you're playing into requires it As far as what I would add in its place I have no clue haven't haven't thought haven't given that any thought whatsoever I would say if you are considering playing Grimmsnarl do not play Maractus. That card is terrible if You could play blood moon I'm not the biggest fan of it just because I have some kind of trauma from playing blood moon and other decks throughout the season And starting it way too many times and then just not playing a way to pick it up in this deck Makes it even more punishing to do I Think that maybe the card that I would consider I was considering like a third spike myth could be really good You could put the energy search back into the deck one other card that I floated playing and actually may have been relatively impactful throughout my day was a third copy of snow run and Just playing a 3-2 line to try to ease how Likely you are to get a 2-2 frost lesson to play in the mattress where you do need it And those are namely raging bolt and goldengo Making sure that you can do that as often as possible is really important so I would maybe consider doing that as well, but other than that I I Might be cocky enough to say that this is the perfect 60 for this deck. Okay in in this format specifically I mean, that's hard to argue because you ended up being the Best placing Grimmsnarl deck out of all the decks that were played at worlds and it was a pretty popular deck Well, so let's go into some of the tournament statistics exactly. Yeah, so that was the transition Let's do the stop. I want to stop talking about myself Yeah, let's uh, so before we go into the actual results. Let's look at the percentages of Metashare and yeah, you see Grimmsnarls right there in the middle kind of thing with a fifth or six fifth or six Fifth overall it was the fifth most popular deck, but there was a but it dropped off pretty heavily after the top four Yeah, so it it goes from the top four and then yeah, you go from 10% to 4% So it was very top-heavy With Goldengoat, Dragapult, Gardevoir, and Raging Bolt being those top four decks in that order and like you said Goldengoat almost a quarter of the room was playing Goldengoat and even more if you factor in the new emergence of Goldengoat with Joltec, so that made up another 2% I think so. Yeah close I think at that point it is at a quarter of the room is playing Goldengoat How this works if I turn very yeah, if I turn variant grouping on it does lump those Goldengoat, Joltec decks together And you do get almost 20 literally almost 25% 24.65% of the room is Goldengoat and then when you also are lumping the Dragapult Dusknoirs and Dragapult Charizards And Dragapult or straight Dragapults all together you hit almost 24% of the room on Dragapult as well So literally like half the room is either Goldengoat or Dragapult Which is interesting because like going into this tournament I didn't feel like it would be that top-heavy like we talked about it And we're like, oh, there's a lot of good decks that you could play But I guess just worlds players kind of picked the decks that were just the strongest in this format necessarily Or at least felt like they were the strongest going into it you know and those top four are definitely that where those are like Considered a tier versus you know a B tier or something like that if you want like They're lucky. They're like a cut above from a consistency and like overall strength strategist standpoint, but like I don't know I think It's a fallacy in some ways and it's still like there's still a it's still I think proved to be a wider meta because you look At this meta share and it wasn't like Goldengoat and Dragapult made up I mean Goldengoat was well represented in top eight But there was a decent spread of decks if we go to the conversion into day one into day two after looking at that a Lot of Goldengoat and a lot of Ragingbolt made it through which honestly that's kind of surprising that Ragingbolt made it as far But that just shows you how good the deck is in the right hands like when you have worlds level competitors playing it as opposed To like maybe the general masses. There's gonna be a higher conversion rate and Ragingbolt I mean like your friend punters said if people are playing Goldengoat and Dragapult like in this yeah, that's the those are the top two decks. That's half of the room. Yeah. Yeah So that worked out. I mean and Gardevoir is Gardevoir, you know, it It didn't convert amazingly, but it's still there It's still in the conversation and the Dragapult kind of the same situation like you had pretty good. Like I think it's solid conversion Charizard, Dragapult is notable. I mean, it's not highly played but 50% converted So that's like the highest conversion rate out of any of the decks Well, that's where I don't know how they did This looks like a weird limitless error because we have Charizard, Dragapult down here and then Dragapult, Charizard up here Maybe just like how many Charizards versus how many Dragapults like a 2-2 Dragapult liner versus a 2-4 But um, yeah Yeah, there's a huge spread of decks at the like further down but like yeah, I think There wasn't as much there's a lot of variance, but there wasn't a lot of variance. It's kind of interesting There was also there was not I feel like there weren't a ton of people attempting to apply rogue strategies And the the small pool of players who did were not successful right like this This is a format that does not lend its end of the problem is I think a lot of that is because the format is simply too wide and the decks that are at the top and A lot of ways almost have a stranglehold on the format and where you cannot Effectively beat all four or five of them. There is just it is not possible, right? And touching on that I mean Dragapult and Gardevoir I think are some of the hardest decks to just beat Like with a counter strategy Like if you try to play against them like you can run the Lily's Clefairy to help if you're running a control deck Against Dragapult, but it's utterly useless in a lot all your other matchups and like Gardevoir It just has an answer like just it runs so many different attackers so many like Monkey Dory can always just cheese out wins if especially against control decks we're trying to set up a Board and then apply pressure Zero Crustles made it to day two Thank God. So our bar our prediction of like what deck not to play. I think that was that was a win for us Yeah, we said um, which one I know we didn't say we actually didn't said Ethan's Typhlosion I think was you did you we said we said ho-oh box was one not to play Yeah, and that is a deck that I believe only one of them made it into day two one out of four made it into day two Now admittedly, I think that player actually did make top 16 So kudos to them, but only one made it into day two and the other one was Oh goodness, I cannot remember for the life was it was it was it Typhlosion? It might have been Typhlosion Yeah, so maybe only three people were like what three people were brave enough Yeah, now the rogue said the sleeper picks we picked were flarion box Which yeah did fairly well did pretty well for the other one that I mentioned Yeah for sure and the other one I mentioned was ogre box, which it looks like nobody brought instead Well, that's not true. Did you know people? Brought terror box terror box It's kind of like that's like ogre box adjacent and I know one and this is specifically is Alex Shemansky Right made it into I believe top 32. Yep. Yep. So he had a sleeper pick went on a fairly deep run especially for low Representation, it's not terrible. There were more crustal decks and none of them made day to shame on all the crustal players Right, um, I got scared at one point because I was sitting next to Greg I was sitting next to Greg in like round three and I Won my game and he won his game and I was like, oh god I don't want to play against crustal and then he went on stream and I don't remember who he played against Or no, no, he ended up on stream in like round five because he was 4-0 and he lost to oiven on stream Because a Charizard simply seems to have a good crustal matchup, thanks to Chi you plus Charmeleon is just too much for that deck to deal with but Yeah, I I think that this was a very very bold deck to try to bring and it just didn't convert well There's just too much there for the crustal to deal with But moving on from our meta percentages, we can go ahead and look at the fine standings for the event Sorry, did you have another note? Oh, I just wanted to point out another rogue deck that did well was the ends Zoroark This was kind of a surprise deck of the tournament If you want to say one deck that kind of there was two decks I'd say that kind of came out of Obscurity at least for the masses and Zoroark had some play going into this on online events But a lot of people I make made the like determination. I think who was I talking to? I think yeah All out blitzel on a stream going into this was like testing the deck and he's like this is the best deck going into Worlds, I just don't want to play it because I haven't tested enough with it So like this had a really good run. I mean you had the seniors You know champion of so many other events Gabriel play it and into a finals appearance losing in the finals And his brother, you know, see his brother and see his brother So, you know pretty well represented across all the different continents It was you know, some really big names picking it up and playing it like Marcos of Fuentes. So What is it? That's a brother. Yep. Oh my gosh for Fuentes is yes. Fernando's brother Fernando's brother. Yeah, and I believe If I'm if I remember correctly, I think Marcos list is actually I did the same list that Vinny and Gabriel played The same list that Vinny and Gabriel played so I believe they were working on the deck together, okay Christian Labella was a big name. I met her Liam Liam Halliburton And then like I mentioned Cameron Shannoy who has been playing czar arc recently I know play test with Liam their list was interesting, too So I didn't get to highlight it because it wasn't impactful in our game But they were also they were playing the toad school as well So well not I believe not working with Vinny and Marco and Gabriel came to a very similar conclusion. It's just good against golden girl right now Yeah, yeah Yeah But except they were playing like a 2-1 line or a 2-2 line like they really didn't want to lose to gold angle Wow But that was a surprise one and then they jolted box jolted with golden go combo Which is another deck that kind of came out and did okay on the online I believe in the lead-up and this deck Surprised me a lot just because I Didn't know what to think of it, but it ended up winning in seniors So like that was surprising. Yes Did you did you watch the seniors game at all this from Championships on day? I did so I think I was one of the better we didn't talk about this quite I guess we're getting ahead of myself. Sorry Yeah, I would say I would say so like we didn't really talk about it as much But the arena experience as a whole Mm-hmm and to try to keep things as brief as possible because we are already approaching two hours on this episode the arena experience it was mind-blowing to me and just the Largest step up that in terms of quality that Pokemon has ever produced in terms of the world championship I know unfortunately John you didn't get to experience it because you were still working that day And I know a lot of other people there were some logistical Issues that resulted in some people not being able to get into the venue because of the fire marshals involvement But being able to sit there and just the visual effects that they had applied to the LED floor of the stage was Crazy it cross and this goes across all games like unite was ridiculous They had all of the players set up So each team had five kind of isolated desks on either side of the stage and they all had a piece of like a pie chart essentially extending from their player space on the stage and It would display what Pokemon they were playing and the health bar of their Pokemon was essentially displayed in their wedge of the stage. And as they would lose health on their character, it would slowly deplete toward their desk. And if they were KO'd, their wedge would get grayed out temporarily. And like, if anything big was happening in the game, there would be some sort of effect on the floor of the stage. And then for TCG, we had, I don't remember what the software they use backstage is. I think it's called TCG Plus. Yeah, that sounds about right. Or something like that. And essentially the overlay that we have on all the stream games. And they were able to essentially project that onto the floor of the stage. And it looked like a dang, like, you know, early season Yu-Gi-Oh anime game. Yeah, it was sick, dude. I mean, I only got to call it the video of it, but like, even that was like visually impressive. Like just, yeah, that's like, oh my gosh, we've arrived as an eSport. And I think that was the goal. I think that's, and they accomplished it. And yeah, did you stick around for a video game or did you have to leave? I did not. Unfortunately I had to leave. We were taking a red eye back Sunday night and I was worried about LA traffic because we were flying out of LAX. So we had pre-booked an Uber and had to make sure we had gone back and finished packing everything up prior to heading downstairs for that. So I actually didn't watch any of video game at all. So I do not know what any of the floor effects looked like, but I have to imagine it was equally impressive because that stage made Pokemon Go PVP look cool, which is not a sentence that I ever thought I would say. But kind of similarly to Unite for Pokemon Go, they displayed each of the six Pokemon for each player on their half of the stage. And it had like all the little symbols for what type they were at the top of the wedge for that Pokemon. And if a Pokemon was selected by a player, that wedge would stay highlighted. But again, similarly had like its health bar displayed in its wedge and that would deplete as the Pokemon got knocked out. And if it was totally knocked out, it would gray out again. So it's eliminated. And so you just get to kind of get a status update of the game just by looking at the floor of the stage. And that, I don't know, man. I don't know how they're gonna top it, I think is my concern. But I guess the counterpoint to that is I don't know if they have to. But even if they do it again, that's still pretty cool. And like they've already announced and we will maybe talk about it some more next week for sure. But next year is gonna be even bigger. Like you're gonna have it at a professional NBA stadium, like potentially 15,000 people in there. Like double what you had for this event or triple, I think. Cause it was only like 4,000 to 5,000 that could fit in the arena. It was an older arena from the 60s. I was talking to, I got the chance to talk to the guy that was the production coordinator, I think for opening and closing ceremony at the airport and talking. But yeah, next year is gonna be crazy. And like, yeah, it was so cool. I think, especially like you playing in Worlds 13 years ago versus Worlds this year. In a hotel ballroom. Yeah, Worlds 13 years ago was where exactly? I'm trying to remember. Was it, it wasn't- 13 years ago it was in Hawaii. Oh, Hawaii. It was in Hawaii. And that was the first Worlds that they ever attempted to stream. Right. And that was to where Puka and Pram and the TopCut guys were recording things. And then for finals specifically, they had a stream that was being run by GameSpot. And there was a commentator who knew literally nothing about Pokemon nor anything about TCGs in general. So he was calling Pokemon the wrong names, saying the wrong attack names while he has the things displayed in front of him. And it was a mess. Yeah. To go from that to what we have now has obviously been a long road because 13 years is not an insignificant amount of time, but they have made incremental progress along the way to eventually arrive at what we have now. And this is kind of like throwing down the gauntlet for other TCGs in a sense. Like, hey, can you match this? Yeah. I mean, it makes Pokemon cool, like you said. And that's the goal. If we can make it a spectacle, like the Super Bowl or like, you know, whatever, the Olympics or something like that, like that goes a long way towards the brand perception, towards like kids getting involved and wanting to play. Like they see that stream or they see like, you know, just anything like that. And they're like, oh, I could be there and I could participate in, or I could go to that. So, but yeah, let's wrap up the tournament results. Sorry, before we crash and burn. It has been a very exciting week and weekend. For sure. And that all kind of culminated. So there were two days of gameplay that led up to the finals that happened in that arena on Sunday. But on the way there, we did have to get into the asymmetrical top cut. And so we'll see at the bottom of ASIM was the opponent who knocked me out of the tournament, Ryota Tanaka. I believe he lost to Junya Tanaka playing Charizard Pichiyot, which I imagine Charizard seemed like a decent meta call for this event. It has a relatively stable and relatively strong Goldango matchup. So with Goldango being such a significant portion of the room, it is not at all surprising to see that there were two Charizard decks that went fairly deep. So just to look at the construction of ASIM in general, we had three Goldango players. So Ryota Tanaka, Landon Kaitler from Canada and Piper Lapine. Then we also had a few Dragon Ball Dusknoir players, Daigo Yoshihara out of Japan and Justin Newdorf, a new up and coming, was a seniors player, first year master, managed to make it all the way to the finals this year. And then we had Marcos Cifuentes who we mentioned earlier, along with Matej, I am not gonna attempt to pronounce Matej's last name, on Zurark and Zurark. The interesting thing I think to call out about both Marcos and Matej's list is that they did not play Darmanitan. And that's kind of a really cool thing about the list in general. It was more of a, I guess, controlly or like tempo driven list. So there were things like Cornerstone and Water Ogre Pawn and really just going about utilizing Zurark as it has been utilized in previous versions of the card. You know, back when we had Zurark GX, you would see these more slow, really methodical lists that would attempt to put your opponent in awkward positions and tax the resources or tax the board in a way that you could leverage your position and make everything advantageous for yourself. And so definitely a cool list and definitely something that I overlooked coming into this event. Yeah, for sure. Continuing on, we have Oyvind. Oh God, I will attempt because I've heard his last name a few times now. Sven, nope, nevermind, not gonna do it. I was going to. Svenhold? It's Svenhoved, I think might be it. Svenhoved, yeah. Something like that. Is it Oyvind or Oyj? It is Oyvind. Oyvind, yeah. Because I did hear when they did, like I remember like listening to Shy say his name over and over again when he won the regionals and it was Oyvind, not Ojivind or whatever we were saying. Yeah. So Oyvind and Junya on Charizard Pidgeot and then the Lone Raging Bolt and top cut from Shizuki Nakagawa. And then the Lone Gardevoir deck resting at the top of the pile where Gardevoir seems to always live. And it is Riley McKay, fresh off of second place at NAIC and making it all the way to the world's finals and winning in the arena with, of course, what has undoubtedly been the deck of the year in Gardevoir. And the cool thing about Riley's run, I thought, because I know that he was featured on stream at some point during day one, and Riley had a repeat of NAIC finals. I didn't see that. In round two of the event against Isaiah Bradner. And they played another Gardevoir Mirror and they tied. So kind of an unfortunate result, but it's really almost ironic if you think about it, because I think that NAIC finals would have ended very similarly if there weren't a need for a winner. So if they weren't playing kind of like the next prize card scenario, I think it would have been much more likely for the two of them to tie in that situation as well, especially given the fact that this was a 50 minute game rather than a 75 minute one. Right. But just- And he had a gauntlet to go through as well. I mean, that's every world's competitor. It looks like a rap sheet of like, just the toughest players you can stack up against. Like, this is crazy. I think not only at this point, and I've thought about this more, especially trying to come to terms with the whole like not making top 16 thing, was this was one of the most difficult worlds ever to qualify for. And then to kind of compound that, the players that did make it through that gauntlet of a qualifier system are literally the best players in the world. And so you sit them all down and have them all play against each other. Nobody in that room is a bad player. Nobody lucked their way into that situation. And so every single person you sit down against is a killer. And you have to keep that, like you basically had to keep that in mind from round one. There were no easy games to be found in that room for any single player. You know, unless you were playing like Typhlosion and you happened to like pair up against Goldango, then you probably would have stopped free. Yeah, sure. Yeah, exactly, exactly. In a lot of ways, I think that that is what a lot of... No, no, there was no skill diffing. I don't think that, although in turn, it was funny when I played against Consta, not only did I have a major matchup advantage, he also said, you know, I didn't even bother testing this matchup because I just assumed it was so abysmally bad because we had a mid-game discussion trying to determine who should go first and who should go second. And so while we were shuffling up for game two, we just had like a two-minute conversation where we were trying to both rationalize who should be going first or second. And he was trying to basically have me help him figure out who should be going first. Goodness. So that was a really funny interaction that I had throughout the weekend. But just to look at Riley's list real quick, so we'll see this in a target near you sometime within the next calendar year. Oh, yeah. But it looks very reminiscent, I would say. Well, no, I shouldn't say that because there are definitely some standout cards in here that would not have been included back at NAIC. And those include things like the Fluttermane coming back into the list, being utilized against things like Goldango specifically. Also potentially niche, good in both Mirror and Grimmsnarl, being able to shut off things like Frostlass or shut off Punk up by dragging the Morgrem up to the active spot before it can evolve. A copy of TM Devolution. So you use that in tandem with, you know, your Monkeydories and your Fluttermane spread to set up a Goldango board to a point where you can devolve all their Pokemon. Or again, in Mirror or against Grimmsnarl if they were candy up into a stage two, you say, no, those things go away. Or against Dragapult, you can actually, we didn't get to see this utilized in the finals, but I do think that there are a lot of circumstances where a Tempo TM Devolution to get rid of all of the Dracloaks off of your opponent, your Dragapult opponent's board can be a really big deal because 90% of Dragapult dust snore lists do not play Rare Candy. And so just some kind of heads up inclusions. There's really, there's no fluff in here. There's, you've got the one bravery charm, I guess the big standout thing is that there's no Drifloon. And so having to just kind of brute force your way through Goldango seems very difficult. But when you look at the run, Riley was fortunate enough to only have to play against two Goldangos throughout the entire tournament. And instead played a whole bunch of Gardevoir Mirror. So all of those Garde players were teching for Goldango and Riley was instead teching for Mirror. I mean, it's no surprise that Riley was able to go really deep in this tournament. Yeah. His only loss being the Zoroark deck. And other than that, it looks like he played a meta deck every time. So just a really good matchup into all the other meta decks, including in the Mirror. And like, yeah, I mean, it's kind of funny because we joked about it the week before saying, well, we'll pick all these other decks, but like Gardevoir, like we'll probably, we'll say, oh, it's probably not the best pick for this one. And then, you know, me and you were joking, just saying like, well, we'll say that. And then of course it'll win and like prove us all wrong once again. And sure enough, like we all were like, oh, Gardevoir, this might not be Gardevoir's tournament to win after Goldango comes on top and just doesn't feel as good, you know? And sure enough, Riley proves us all wrong and says, hey, like, don't discount it. Like, you can't count me out. Don't count me out until you've seen me play. And I mean, yeah, you just, when a great player picks up Gardevoir, you know, we talk about a lot about like what deck allows for skill expression. Like Gardevoir, I think it's easy to say at this point, allows for the most skill expression out of any deck in the format. And it's just been proven because you see the top players playing Gardevoir and you see them continuously find their way to winning these tournaments. And this has been the year of Garde in so many ways. Oh, absolutely. From the first tournament to the last. And I think the most interesting thing about that, and part of this is, part of the skill expression of the deck is that the deck building choices for the deck, the requirements for deck building have changed over time. And the Gardevoir, the successful Gardevoir players have been able to stay ahead of the curve in terms of what needed to be included to be successful in a given event where the deck was good. We've seen it time and time again, goes all the way back to not Pittsburgh. Oh my gosh. What city was the first Baltimore? Goes all the way back to Baltimore with Henry Chow's Garde list with like only played one Monkey Dory and played Secret Box and Research when that was kind of an unheard of combination in Gardevoir at the time. And then you fast forward. to all the way to NAIC, where Isaiah Bradner wins with the turbo-energized 4-Monkey Dory 4-Dark to counter Mirror and counter Grimmsnarl, and really, just to say, I'm never losing to Dragapult. And then you come here, and everyone thought this was gonna be the thing, the tournament where, if you were playing Gardevoir, you just had to play the straightforward Gardevoir list. It plays Drifloon, it plays Bravery Charm, everybody knows how it works. Yes, it's good, but who cares? It's boring, it's vanilla, and it's not gonna win this tournament, because everyone understands it. And lo and behold, we've got something different that comes out on top. Yeah, so very cool. Congrats to Riley. Very cool to see, like, the wrap on the season, and like, yeah, going from second at NAIC to first at Worlds. What a run, man. That's so impressive. And like, a really nice player to have happen, to do it. And like, Justin, I remember, I was talking with another judge, Jim Squire, and he showed me a picture of him in the finals of a tournament that I judged at a convention in Fredericksburg, or no, sorry, Chantilly, Virginia, where it was Jim versus Justin in the finals of this tournament. And this was like, just a nothing tournament. But like, it was just like, holy cow, like, just to go from like, something like that. Like, I think he was a senior at the time, so I didn't know who he was. Okay. But just to go from like, that, like, moment of like, me, it was like, more judges than staff, like, players at this tournament. Like, there was like, a huge amount of staff for not a lot of players, but like, Justin was there in the finals. And it's just cool to see, like, somebody that puts in the work that gets, that gets the results like that. Same thing with Riley, all these players. Yeah. Justin has been a notable TCG live grinder, and limitless tournament player, honestly, but I believe has made, made it to like 1900 point Arceus rank, multiple sets in a row. And I actually had the pleasure of meeting Justin back in Puerto Rico. He's the one who knocked me out of top eight. And I had a nice conversation with him and his mother at the airport following that event. And then, interestingly, actually ran into Justin's father at Worlds this year, he stopped me after one round, asked me how my event was going, and actually mentioned our podcast. So if you're listening to the episode this week, Mr. Newdorf, thank you for being a listener. And congrats again to your son for his stellar performance. Maybe we'll get him on maybe that'd be cool. Real quick to close things out. We did want to highlight one other major happening from this weekend. And that is the seniors division results. So there this finals was really big in a lot of ways. So Gabriel Fernandez obviously made it to the final one, I shouldn't say obviously, but not surprisingly, made it to the finals of this event, and was on the precipice of literally completing the perfect season, being fully maxed out on championship points, having won every single international championship. And the only person who stood in his way from accomplishing the goal of also winning Worlds in that same season was Fuguan Lau from mainland China. And so notably, this is the second year where China has been eligible to participate in the World Championship. China doesn't have access to all of the cards that are legal at the World Championship at the time of recording this episode. And yet Fuguan was able to make it to the finals with this Joltik Goldengo deck and came out on top over Gabriel in a relatively close set. I mean, there was a weird issue that there was a nice audible gasp throughout the stadium at the end of game one, where Fuguan made a very, very good sequencing decision to Arvin for prime catcher rather than and so he could get his other Goldengo into the active to then coin bonus for two, rather than just using coin bonus for one. And I get like the way the math works out. I know Henry Brand did a nice breakdown of it over on Twitter. But I believe that it was like 17% chance to be successful because Fuguan needed to either coin bonus for one into prime catcher or superior with I think three superiors in deck. Or Fuguan has to use Arvin to go find prime catcher and a tool card, so an air balloon, which would thereby thin two cards out of the deck, also promote the Goldengo to the active and then coin bonus for two. But even though he would have two fewer targets is drawing twice as many cards and therefore increases odds by like 8% or something to hit the card that he needed to win the game on that turn because otherwise Gabriel was going to win on the following turn. And Fuguan does all this. At some point Gabriel had picked up Fuguan's deck to shuffle it rather than cutting it and had accidentally flipped a card over face up and nobody noticed this until Fuguan goes to use coin bonus with the new Goldengo active puts the two cards on the table and the third card on the deck is face up. And not only is it just a face up card, it also coincidentally is a superior energy retrieval. Oh my gosh. And at that point, everyone in the auditorium just yeah, it's dramatic. And so the ruling on that was, you know, the judges went back and reviewed the footage saw that Fuguan had not done anything malicious that it was totally an accident when Gabriel was shuffling the deck. And so they just ruled, hey, you need to reshuffle your deck. And we'll never know what the two cards that Fuguan had initially drawn were. But the new two cards did contain a superior and Fuguan was able to close out game one. And then they play a back and forth game two that Gabriel comes out on top of and then unfortunately, in game three, Gabriel just like bricks and is never able to really come back throughout the game. And Fuguan closes out the series and not only is able to topple the Titan that is Gabriel Fernandez, but also becomes the first world champion from mainland China, which is really just that's like one of the coolest storybook or not storybook, but really the coolest storyline endings that could have come out of this world championship. And, you know, being able to not only beat the player who, by no stretch of the imagination was the best seniors player this season, but to also do something for a country that has reasonably not done anything in the Pokemon TCG throughout its relatively short tenure and the accessibility to do so. So it was just a crazy accomplishment for who a player that with the skill that he demonstrated in this match alone is someone that I think we need to be on the lookout for in seasons to come. Yeah. And there's like extra stuff on top of that, like so many Chinese players couldn't even make it into the country. You know, just like you look at like the masters results or whatever. And if you go down, it's a bunch of one drops from the Chinese players. There's like, all the way at the bottom. A lot of the mainland Chinese players just didn't like they registered like they wanted to come and then they just couldn't get there. So just a little it's a bummer to see right? Like, you got I think, yeah, there's like three or four there. No, this is the very bottom. Yeah, there's a couple. So we don't know the full story. For sure. We don't want to speculate too much. But it definitely was cool to see. Yeah, there you go. There's one. Okay. Yeah. Jose Maria went for a fourth one. But I mean, it's really cool. Like we talked about Pokemon being a global game, and it definitely feels like that more and more every year. And especially now with the introduction of China into the game. It'll just become I mean, there was a lot of I will say some of the issues with translators kind of there's some growing pains with Chinese translators haven't and all that but like definitely like cool to have have them at the table and have I mean, it's only fair like that if you know a country is introduced to Pokemon and like, like I'm surprised like maybe we'll get India at some point maybe we'll get Pakistan at some point like some of the more popular like you know it'd be really cool to see like just I don't know like from when you played in 2013 when you didn't have as many like from South America or there's still some players I'm sure but not to the extent we've seen now or like yeah I don't know what like Diego Casaraga has been around since the Stone Age just like sure sure but like I mean you wouldn't think of ever playing against the Chinese player or anything like that back then so it's very cool to see real quick before we do close out we made some predictions last week oh sure run through them real quick yep we had one player you think will win worlds you picked Riki Okada and who finished at 171st and I picked Henry Chow who finished at 73 I should have kept on the guard of I should have kept up with the Gardevoir theme because I will get punished for it later on so point one to John after that we said pick one a spec you think will do well at worlds or the sorry one a spec you think that will win worlds I stuck with my dragapult you know that was kind of my pick going into a year so I picked neo upper energy and Aron wisely sagely picked secret box and of course you know Gardevoir cannot be played without secret box at this point so that was what one so congrats Aaron on that one to be fair to be fair your neo upper did make it into the finals it did make it into the finals so moral victory but you know came up just a little bit short and then final question what region do you think will win worlds I picked Europe which had two of the top eight and I'm gonna butcher the name so I'm not gonna try but the finished player you got it and but you you know and your infinite wisdom I think in preparation for this event pick North America and which was very well presented including the winner Riley McKay so congratulation Aaron and in lieu of Blaine's quiz show you win this recap of our predictions it was a fantastic worlds I'm so excited for the upcoming season I'll be going to a decent amount of regionals include and hopefully as many ICS as I can get to I know you'll be going to ICS at least as participant for casting for not yet not not not from the main event I do not want to at all insinuate that I am working with paper light or the Pokemon company that is a that is a dream of mine I would love to do that it's not that is not something that I am at all doing at this time um the we do have plans to put on Masters Cup tournaments at all of the international tournaments we were able to do so we are in the process of planning things for Brazil and are hopefully going to be able to announce more information about the upcoming Masters Cup tournament in Sao Paulo as soon as we have all of that information available but for myself I know I've already made a couple of announcements on like Twitter and just talking to people in person at worlds this past week I am taking after going quote-unquote hard this season the whole five major events that I played I'm taking a small like a step back from competing so as hard this year I'm just not going to be as available time wise my son's baseball schedule is really ramped up to where he's playing two tournaments minimum per month starting in September and those tournaments are both Saturday and Sunday minimum of two games per day and so that's just a lot of the tournament weekends overlap with Pokemon tournaments and I'm gonna choose to support my son over trying to pursue something myself it's something that I hope that any other parent would do in my situation as well I hope at some point that I'll be able to get back to a what I would consider a full tournament grind in the sense of what I accomplished this past season but my plans do still include going to all three ICS and probably the Florida regional tournament well whether it's in Daytona or Orlando or Jacksonville or wherever the heck it is assuming we have based on our that the whole map that they showed at the beginning of the year and so far all of the locations that they have revealed are all lined with the little stars that they had on that maps true so I would not at all be surprised to see a Florida tournament pop-up probably in March like it is pretty customary to do so but we hope you will join us on this journey through the battle frontier thank you guys so much for listening this kind of week this is the final podcast for this season of our podcast and we'll start a new season up next week but for all those that have been here from the start and through just so many different ups and downs of the season thank you for being Aaron we really appreciate the support we've got and just we do it as a passion project more than we do it for cloud or for whatever other motivation people might have and but it means much it means a lot like that we do have some recognition from people now and again and it is just nice to be part of this community you know just to just be able to talk about it and hang out with each other each week but also include some others in the conversation so thank you for listening and Aaron anything else you want to add before we head up just thank you for listening to this episode in particular because it is the longest episode that we have recorded to date and I know looking at the back end of things I am not going to be edit editing very much out because it is just a content-packed episode and we still have not hit on everything that happened at once this week so stay tuned next week like John said we will premiere season two of the battle frontier podcast by talking about some upcoming things for the 2026 season that were announced this week at the World Championship so again from John and I thank you very much and we will see you guys next week on the battle frontier have a good week