Episode 7: Pocket Thoughts and LAIC Predictions

Hello and welcome back to the Battle Frontier podcast where we aim to help you level up in your career as a Pokemon TCG player. I'm Aaron Curry here with me as always my co-host John Orgel. John how are you doing this week? Doing pretty good man. I'm very excited. Tomorrow I leave for LAIC as a judge so I'm very very excited about that. I've been practicing for the Professor Cup. Hopefully that goes through without a hitch and I can keep my top four streak alive. The format's a little fun this time. They're doing what's called the level ball format. They're doing all the Pokemon have to be 90 HP or less, no rule box cards so no A-specs. None of that. And then I think you are limited to three of any card type instead of the rule of four it's the rule of three. Okay. But yeah I've been testing out a couple different decks. I did a festival lead kind of I think it's not Appleton. Diplon? Diplon yep. I didn't really love that consistency wise. You don't have Grookey in this format because Grookey is a hundred HP so I like her had to figure out okay is this worth doing. And then I switched to pivoted to Solrock Lunatone for a little bit. I like that one. I'm bringing that one. I guess my backup my main deck though is the Venomoth Frostlass deck. Okay. It's basically a meta deck already. Right. I mean it's not like top tier meta but it is competitive and basically item lock with confusion and then you ping everything that has an ability. So we'll see. I'll report back on how I do. Hopefully we can represent the podcast well. So but yeah man I'm very excited about judging at an IC level. It's my first time doing a international championship as a judge. I played in an NAIC which was the first time I ever played in an IC. So this is definitely a big deal for me and I'm very happy to be kind of working my way up through the judging ranks. But that's about all I've been doing. Visited some friends over the weekend. Didn't really do a lot of Pokemon stuff but yeah definitely will be full-blown like Pokemon Thursday through Sunday next week. How about you man? What's up with you? Well so we know Surging Sparks officially released on Friday and as a result of that people got to flood the TCG player market with all of their singles and the pre-release prices plummeted like a rocket. And so you know general advice for anybody listening if you ever feel like you have to absolutely buy into a card pre-release of a set don't do it. It is literally almost never the right move. I ended up picking up play sets of Tatsugiri, Hydreigon, Pikachu, Archeloudon, a bunch of Eevees, all the trainer cards for like 40 bucks. You know for the price of an ETB what would be you know better than perfect packs I think you can't really complain. So you know clearly singles are still the way to go but then... God bless collectors right? Like making the competitive game so affordable. And then continuing that though heading into the weekend we know we're gonna talk about this in just a little bit but TCG Pocket released a couple weeks ago so I played through some of the event stuff for that and then also participated in a Limitless tournament which is interesting and I don't know if it's run quite the way that I would like to see the game run. Personally I think for the competitive future of Pocket assuming that there is one you'd want to look at more of like a conquest format or something similar and right now it's just kind of play best of three where the coin flip is totally random and you have a huge advantage going second. So I ended up just bringing the standard Pikachu Zapdos deck into that event and went four and one losing a mirror because I went first twice and then my second loss was to Wigglytuff Weezing which is a pretty cool deck and actually you know has a chance to beat the Pikachu deck if something like what happened to me happens where I literally never flip Ted's on sleep. And in this game because there's no switch card if you get paralyzed or put to sleep you just lose a turn basically. And then I still had a chance to make cut in that event except I forgot to check in to the next round so I got another loss and summarily dropped from the event because I mean there was no point in continuing if I didn't even have a chance to win. But the part of that distraction is because we were happened to be at my sister-in-law's house doing something for my nephew's birthday so for parts of that day I was sitting over on the couch in the corner like quietly doing my thing. Being social cost me at the end. Yeah that's like real-life adulting and getting in the way of an online tournament. How dare they. Yeah so you know I've been kind of dipping my toes into Surging Sparks and Pokemon Pocket. I know this upcoming week I'm not heading to Brazil but I am heading over to Orlando to cast a League Cup. So I've been looking forward to that. I've been trying to get more casting experience more casting exposure any chance I can. So I've got this thing worked out with a store called Versus Games in Oviedo that said that you know assuming that this one goes well this is the first time doing it at their store but assuming that it goes well I should be welcome back to cast every single League Cup at their store. So pretty cool thing. Great congrats. Thank you. Thank you very much. So I picked it up I think what was it two weeks ago right after we got done with the podcast I think I looked on Twitter and I was like oh Pocket's out and then like immediately started playing. I'm up to like level 14 or something like that like nothing crazy. I did the premium pass so I get like the extra pack per day but I haven't spent any more money than that. I'll say I got pretty lucky. I have the full two Articuno EX and two Starmie EX and so I have the Articuno Starmie deck built and that thing just feels fine. I don't know like. Misty's a pretty busted card. It's broken when you hit three heads and when you get double tails on two different Misty's you're just like well that's the lottery you know that's kind of what she signed up to play so it's fine. I've beat all the like the Lapras thing I got all the cards from that and I don't know it's like I'll probably like I got was at our friend's house today I was visiting some friends out in Virginia Beach over the weekend and we were like just I think somebody we were having like a little bit of downtime so I pulled out my phone and like did the like daily different things. It's fun. I like the I like I don't think it's ever I mean I guess it's still too early to say how competitive depth wise it'll be but yeah like right now there's a lot of just it doesn't feel very balanced like going going first first going second not being able to retreat effectively or like if you get affected by status condition it's just kind of I don't know you just feels it feels bad but I'm sure there'll be like new cards released and the game developers are the same people that do the Pokemon main series or it's like TPC right the Pokemon company actually I think the company producing this is the one that produces the other Pokemon gacha game Pokemon Masters and it's a really interesting coincidence in that I I think a lot of people expected to come into this and said hey it's gonna be a card game and instead are running into the fact that it is a card game or it's got the skin of a card game over top of a gacha game and a lot of people don't really understand how to play into that in that you know you open a pack and you get trash and you're kind of almost incentivized to spend money you try to get the cards you need there are systems that work around it I mean you can be pretty free to play like you said you haven't spent any money I haven't spent any money on the game yet either the trial of the premium pass is pretty cool they wonder big system is really useful I know at some point last week you opened a pack that had an executor EX in it and I happened to go into my wonder pick screen see that and I actually got an executor from let's go so sometimes you can see some really cool things it's been a lot of fun I know my wife downloaded it too and she she ended up wonder picking an art rare Moltres EX the other day you know don't sleep on wonder pick but also like you said it's gonna be a little bit more casual I think at least initially there might be some pseudo competitive thing at some point and really if it gets enough support maybe we will see it at worlds but I think we're a couple years away from that at least I'd agree with that yeah I mean it's fun like I'll enjoy like oh yeah cool you get this like super sick looking card I'm I don't know I'm not much of a collector I'm more of the competitive player and I think that's pretty obvious with the stuff we talked about in this podcast we don't really go over like card prices inflating and deflating over time or anything like that we're both only invested in like playing with the cards primarily but I mean I can appreciate good art when you see it and there's definitely a lot of cool stuff they put a lot of thought and care and development in this game like they really used a lot of the artists that they have for the TCG I mean some of this stuff is just ripped out Ken Sugimori art rebranded into this format which is great I mean it makes people instantly familiar with what they were looking at and I think that's a huge bonus and I'm excited to see where it goes but yeah I definitely will you know probably do my dailies and open my three packs per day or whatever until the free trial ends and I'll go back to opening two and then I'll probably be that unless like there they announce competitive support or something like that but yeah that's about it I mean yeah I don't know anything else you want to talk about pocket or you good no I think you summed it up pretty well like you said open your free stuff every day the biggest thing like I said because this is a gotcha game at its core just exercise self-control don't fall into the trap of spending a ton of money I mean I know they've already put out metrics where this game I think in the first week made twelve dollars or something like that which I mean I know it was released in Asian markets which absolutely love gotcha games and then they also love Pokemon so mixing the two of those together it was just kind of a goldmine waiting to happen like you said I think we've covered pocket long enough I know that you were excited to bring back this next segment so we're gonna go ahead and dive into some frontier fundamentals jump you want to tell us what topic we're gonna be covering this week sure yeah I got some good feedback from one of my listeners my local league area saying that he got a lot out of the last time we covered this so last time we talked about your prize cards and what is prized and playing around that this time I'm gonna go into another subject bench management so bench management it sounds simple like you only could bench five Pokemon so you have to figure out what's the best five Pokemon to put down on your bench but the importance of that is not just over benching not just filling up your bench willy-nilly but knowing when to bench something so you and I both watch a lot of Pokemon and we're both realistic with you know playing at a high level at these competitive tournaments there's just so many nuances to playing at that high level and when we were watching games recently I noticed that people have been benching like Fezzendipity EX against specifically Dragapult and Regidrago that can abuse Dragapult they'll bench Fezzendipity before there's an opportunity opportunity to use it so they'll get it in like their opening hand and they're about to play a research and they run recovery cards but somebody like the player playing Fezzendipity is like well I'll bench Fezzendipity now I'll get some I'll get some use out of it or I have it now I that way and now I don't have to find it off of a research and they go ahead and bench it and research that hand and then as the game progresses you watch the Dragapult or Regidrago player just basically say okay you've benched Fezzendipity but you're not really drawing anything or your deck is really combo heavy and you're not hitting the combos as effectively as you want to what I can do as Drago slash Dragapult player is basically not take knockouts and set up like three or four KOs at the same time three or four prizes at the same time and get to the point where you're not able to function as a deck Fezzendipity I can boss that up I can put 200 damage on it and then bench like snipe something else on the bench like an Ogre Pawn or whatever and then the next turn like you if you can't retreat the Fezzendipity I can just switch it out with something else or if you do retreat most of the time you can retreat a Fezzendipity it's not that hard you can go back and do attacking with something and then I am hopefully set up the thing you're attacking with to be KO'd can KO the Fezzendipity and you haven't got as much value as you would have if you hadn't benched it and there's just other times where you're just like like they can do the double Kirin play where they if you bench Fezzendipity you have a Squawkability EX you can bring up an Ogre Pawn and specifically like the mirror match for Regidrago or against Raging Bolt you know a lot of times we'll have the Squawkability the Fezzendipity and one of the Teal Mask Ogre Pawns you can bring up the Teal Mask Ogre Pawn twice do the once do the Kirin play and then again do the Kirin play and it's brutal like you watch it happen the Bolt player can't do anything because they can't draw any cards they can maybe knock out one of the things but there's just nothing they can do about it so bench management getting back to the topic the main thing is you're thinking about what is my opponent trying to do with their deck like against a Regidrago player I just go back to Regidrago because it's the one I'm most familiar with but you can use this example for a lot of different stuff and I'll get another example out of the way in just a second but against Regidrago what are they trying to do what tools do they have at their disposal and you know that every Regidrago Dragodeck has Dragapult and has Kyurem, like without fail at this point. If you're running Regidrago, you need to run those two. I'm not just saying that it's hyperbolic. It's like, basically, like you go on Limitless, look at the Regidrago deck list, and it's like 2.0, basically, Dragapult, or 1.8, and then 1.0, Kyurem. So they're like, they're there. So you can play with that in mind, though. So if I'm Raging Bolt, I go, I can bench Bolt, Bolt, and two Ogre Pawn without any reprisal, because they can bring up the Ogre Pawn once, but they can't ping an Ogre Pawn on the bench because of the Terra attribute. And then you can bench one or the other of Squawkability or Fezidipity, something like that. So that's the thought process you need to have is that Raging Bolt player. Not to pick on Raging Bolt players, but unfortunately, they're the ones that I see making the most mistakes on stream the last few weeks. So to switch up the matchup a little bit, to move away from Dragapult and Regidrago, one thing that we've talked about, I know that your favorite deck is the Palkia Dusknoir deck. And against the Raging Bolt deck, I know that you love to see a specific thing, if you want to talk about that real quick. Absolutely. So Palkia's subspace swell attack does 60 damage plus 20 more damage for each bench Pokemon on both sides of the field. So if I have a full bench, I'm doing 160. And then the thing that I look for on your side of the field as the fact that my benchmark for knocking out a fresh Raging Bolt is 240 is when you have four bench Pokemon. And there are some times where this is totally unavoidable, but it is sometimes avoidable. And we saw an avoidable scenario this past weekend on stream in the Buenos Aires special event where the Raging Bolt player continued to walk into a 240 damage attack from a Palkia early on in the game where they didn't need to and gave up unnecessary prizes. Conversely, we saw super kind of optimal bench management in this same matchup from Caleb Gedimer back in Louisville piloting his Raging Bolt deck against Aeolice Nowitz's Palkia Dusknoir deck. And additionally, three Bravery Charm into one Lost Vacuum makes a huge difference. But also Caleb went out of his way to make sure that he never had more than three Pokemon on his bench until he was already up by at least four prize cards. And again, sometimes it's unavoidable. Sometimes you'll start with Slitherwing and then you have to Squawkabilly on turn one and you wanna make sure you have two Raging Bolts down so that you have your backup one ready. And that's just something you can't really play around. But if you have the ability to play around it, maybe just take a beat, go a little bit slower. You don't need to necessarily totally flood your bench. If we even take it a step back with decks like Regidrago or Raging Bolt, don't fill your bench to the point that you can only put one Raging Bolt or one Regidrago down because you could put yourself in a position where you can't recover after your opponent knocks that Pokemon out. So just things to be cognizant of. A lot of it is really simple at its core, but it's also really easy to overlook because it is so simple and fundamental at the end of the day. Like we were talking about before the cast, when players first start playing the game, they'll get their hands on a deck and they think every single time they draw a basic, it needs to go down, regardless of what it is. And so you'll see players who pick up Raging Bolt for the first time, since it is very popular among newer players, who will get, you know, an opening hand that has three Raging Bolts and two Ogre Pawns and a Pheasantipidae in it and say, okay, I need to bench all of these Pokemon, regardless of what the rest of my hand looks like. And so taking the time to get the repetitions in to understand the nuances of your various matchups and what the impact of having these cards on your field and when they are really applicable is also extremely important. For sure. And one other deck I want to talk about before we move off the topic. I remember watching Tord play Terapagos at Gdansk and just showing him why he's so good is one of the things that he was really good at was bench management with that deck. He would think, okay, well, now I have the area zero under depth, I don't have to worry about bench management anymore. I can just throw everything on the bench and be fine with it. And there was multiple times throughout his game where Tord had the area zero combo and could bench more things. And he just held the stadium because he didn't need to use it. And he was cognizant of the fact that his opponent still had stadiums that he could counter with. He didn't need to reach for the KO at this point, or, you know, he would even take the time and say, okay, well, I need to save this for a reach later on. And part of that is just like knowing what's left in your deck, knowing your recovery, and knowing kind of how your deck's gonna reach for KOs. Like knowing your deck, knowing your opponent's deck, and just being like, it's a resource management thing, but it's also just a strategy. Like, you know, we'll get into some other topics in another segment with like prize mapping and stuff like that, but it touches on that too. Like, how are you taking your prizes to close this game out? And if it doesn't involve like filling your bench up to hit 220 with Terapagos, like maybe you don't need to do that. Maybe you're cool just hitting for, you know, 120 and then pennying that up and then hitting for 120 again to get that Raging Bolt knockout or something like that. So that's all. Just, it's a really kind of, it seems simple on the face value, but like anything with Pokemon, I think this is why we both love the game so much. Everything seems really simple when you're starting out. And then as you play more and more, things that are black and white become into, yes, and, or yeah, sometimes, but, you know, you get into more like edge cases and nuance and all that kind of stuff. And it sounds kind of like pedantic and annoying, but it really is why we love the game so much is because we're able to see the depth and see the reasons why these top players are able to keep coming back to the top because they're able to capitalize on these situations. And we wanna help you guys get to that point too. So that's Frontier Fundamentals and hope you guys learned something. That's great, great. I know this segment's been a lot of fun. I'm glad people are enjoying it. If people do have specific topics that they wanna bring up, go ahead and let us know in the comments of the episode. We'd love to hear from you. But now we're gonna go ahead and move on to what has become my favorite segment of the show. And that would be Blaine's Quiz Show. And I know this week, it is my turn to ask you, John, some questions. We did kind of take a little bit of a break last week just so we could talk to our guests with Frame and Grafton. And again, thank you to them for coming on. But you know, it's a little bit more fun when it's just you and I. So let me get back to this. Let's see if you can't make up some ground in this week's Blaine's Quiz Show segment. All right, I'm ready for my weekly drubbing. I've gone back. I've gone back to multiple choice here. Oh, thank goodness. So it'll make it a little bit easier. And again, you'll have one hint throughout the course of this week. And we do have a theme that I think you'll pick up on after the first two questions. That being said, are you ready to jump into this? Ready as I'll ever be. Let's do it. For your first question, with the release of Pokemon Pocket, all of the Kanto gym leaders are being highlighted as supporter cards. But John, what did the original Giovanni trainer card do? Was it a broken time-space effect for a selected Giovanni Pokemon? And for newer players, broken time-space was a stadium that allowed you to evolve a Pokemon the same turn you put it down or the same turn you evolved it. So you could instantly go from a basic up to a stage two. Did Giovanni allow Giovanni's Pokemon to do plus 20 damage this turn? Did it allow you to play any Giovanni Pokemon from your deck? Or did it cause your Giovanni's Pokemon to take a minus 30 until the end of your next turn? Or start of your next turn? Yeah. I don't think it's the two on the right. Mostly because early, early Pokemon didn't love buffs that big. I mean, maybe plus 20, but like minus 30 is huge. I don't think. Giovanni's like a trickster. So I could see it being, I didn't play in this era and I don't really touch on like, I don't collect. So I don't know this off the top of my head. So this is the card was released in gym challenge. And this was before supporter cards that you could actually play four of these in a single turn. Okay. So if it's, yeah, that would be really unfair if you could plus 20 this turn, cause then you could go Giovanni, Giovanni, Giovanni, Giovanni, and like plus 80 would be unfair. My guess is BTS for a selected Giovanni Pokemon. Well, John, you saw through me. Maybe I made the numbers on some of those incorrect choices a little bit too high, but you're absolutely correct. The Giovanni from the gym challenge set reads, choose one of your Pokemon and play with Giovanni in its name for the rest of your turn. You may evolve that Pokemon, even if you just played it or evolved it this turn, or if this is your first turn. This effect also applies to the Pokemon it evolves into. Giovanni never really saw a lot of play as a deck archetype, but I thought that this was a really neat effect to have. Yeah, for sure. Next question would be, which of the following gym leaders from the SP era owned the least number of SP Pokemon printed? And your choices are Volkner, Gardenia, Fantina, and Crasher Wake. Oh man. I mean, I know Volkner has a decent amount, so I don't think it's that. I never played in the SP era, I know my brother did. I'm just trying to think of what I know from what I've played with in like retro in 2010. So this is probably a stretch. I think it's, I'm between Fantina and Crasher Wake, and I'm leaning towards Crasher Wake. That just seems like I would, I don't know. I don't think there's a whole lot of Crasher Wake fans out there. I don't think Pokemon's pushing Crasher Wake to sell cards. He's a weird looking dude. So I'll go with Crasher Wake. It's a good guess, some sound logic. Unfortunately, you are incorrect. The answer to this one was Gardenia. Each of the other three options actually all had level X Pokemon when they were released. So they did have two Pokemon and a level X for a total of three, where Gardenia only had the two base Pokemon. Okay. Even Crasher Wake had the Floatzel level X, so he had something going for him. Yeah. We'll close it out with our last question here. Which of the following black and white era gym leaders did not have a supporter card printed during the initial black and white era, which spanned from the black and white base set through legendary treasures? And your choices are Charon, Skyla, Clay, and Salon. See, I should've used my hint for the last one, because I just like know this one, because this is when I played the most and like knew all this. It's Clay, 100%. Lock it in. You saw right through me. Clay did get a supporter card printed at some point. All right. Two for three. I need to be better about using my hints, but other than that, I'm pretty happy with that one. I think that went about as good as I could hope for. Hey, two for three is great. I think that we are all tied up now. Oh, let's go. Thank goodness. So I'll definitely, I'll come up with some good ones. Those were great questions, Aaron. Lots of, I love the gym leader theme was pretty cool. I'll have to like maybe think about something on the way back from Brazil and come up with a couple of good ones for you. That'd be great. Looking forward to it, for sure. Next, we wanted to jump into a deck that you had selected for this week's time capsule. So let me go ahead and pull that up real quick and we will get into it. Yep. John, talk to me about what this deck is, why you picked it, and just kind of, and give me a general overview of it. Deck I chose for this week's time capsule is Decidueye Vileplume. And this was very, very dominant during its time. It came out basically out of nowhere when OCIC, Oceania International Championships, which no longer exists. But this was one of those weird times where we had two international championships in the same format. So this deck, OCIC came, was in March of this year, 2017. And then LAIC, the first ever LAIC in 2017 was in April of the same year. Okay. So at OCIC, before this, if you go back and look at the start of this format, it's a lot of Speed Darkrai, Mega Ray, that kind of stuff, the stuff that abuses items a lot. So this came out right at OCIC and took four of the top eight spots. And the OCIC variant was similar to this, but instead of using Jolteon and Regice, it used primarily Beedrill EX. And one other thing I'm trying to remember. Maybe I wrote it down. Nope. I don't know, but another grass attacker. Oh no, Tauros GX. Okay. This was right at the kind of threshold between EX and GX. Fair. So before this format, there was another deck that was pretty, that used Vileplume. Vileplume, it's a stage two, yep, that has 130 HP and it has a really, really strong ability. I know we touched on another Vileplume with something very similar, not too long ago in one of our other time capsules. That was from Undaunted in the HeartGold SoulSilver era. This is from Ancient Origins in the X and Y era. So late into the X, Y era, we had this Vileplume and it has a very similar ability in irritating pollen. just reads each player can't play any item cards from his or her hand. It has a hefty three retreat cost so that was a real pain to have but just one of the strongest abilities ever printed just shutting off items and like I said this format was dominated by decks that used a lot of items. so earlier on before this format we had a vile plume toolbox deck but this deck was very different from the other variants that we saw with it ran jolteon ex and regice ex or regice not ex just a regular regice the jolteon ex was a weird one it's from the generation set one of the few cards from generations that saw a lot of play and it was just as it had two really good things going for it it has free retreat which is nice and it has an attack and a flash ray that for a lightning color color does 70 and then it says during your opponent's next turn prevent all damage done to this pokemon by attacks from basic pokemon so the main thing in this format was either basics like vulcanion darkrai I don't think I think this is a little past night march but those were like the big ones vulcanion and darkrai or the other thing that was covered was regice had another attack for water color color resistance blizzard for 70 it says during your opponent's next turn prevent all effects of attack including damage done to this pokemon by pokemon ex so very very strong attack once you got that into the active started using it decks didn't really have answers for it um and the answers were usually in the form of a lysander and decks that were using in this format kind of started cutting down on their supporters because the card vs seeker was super popular it allowed you to abuse supporters from your discard pile it's not in this deck because vile plume shuts down item use for both people both you and your opponent and you didn't really want to run a bunch of items just to clog up your hand later on in the game all right so I kind of went over the main thing that was good about this deck but I didn't really touch on the other factor was deciduey gx so this was right at the start of sun and moon with the start of sun and moon we get access to gx pokemon which are like buffed up evolved ex's so gx is it introduced the new mechanic of gx's before we've only had ex's ex's were always basic gx's now are stage two and with that they get a lot more hit points more powerful attacks including a gx attack so deciduey gx is probably one of the best gx's in this format if not the best it has a really good ability in feather arrow it says once during your turn before you attack you may put two damage counters on one of your opponent's pokemon so just a free place two damage counters every turn very very good and then it has one attack that you can use that's not its gx attack and razor leaf for grass color color you deal 90 damage so just a straight 90 for three energy pretty weak in this format but it was solid at this time it's all a lot of use and then a really good gx attack it says hollow hunt gx you put three cards from your discard pile into your hand so you can only use gx attacks once per game they're very similar to v stars like that but they were always attacks there wasn't abilities that were gx and having the ability to just put three cards back you could put any three too it wasn't just pokemon or you know just stadiums or items or something like that it was you could put energy back you could put like a boss if you needed a boss for the next turn all that kind of stuff um right it was basically legacy star but on an attack yeah and no downside of having to discard the top seven or anything like that so um so if we look through the rest of the deck list your main goal is to turbo out um the vile plume as fast as possible and you do that through the use of shaman you run three shaman ex this card is uh is banned and expanded i believe um and part of that is its ability is very very strong it's got the ability set up when you play this pokemon from your hand to your bench you may draw until you have six cards in hand so similar if you're an old head to uh oxy i believe right we're from like a draw at six yep and this one was a little bit um different it had that strong ability and has a really actually useful attack in sky return for two colorless energy just does 30 but it's got the text of return this pokemon and all cards attached to it to your hand so shaman's really squishy for exes even in this format with only 110 hit points it was often a target for your opponent to boss up or in this case lysander was the gust name um if you will and shaman was easily the target a lot of the time for lysander for an easy two prizes so you could sky return to remove the liability a lot of times um and yeah you'll see expanded band uh the main reason for that is scoop of net i believe i was able to abuse it but we won't cover expanded probably ever if you see we're still allowed in expanding you would have even more degenerate things happening oh my gosh that'd be so gross i don't know maybe one day we'll have we'll be big enough to have stefan on and he'll just go off about expanded yeah um but yep shaman basically just get it you could abuse shaman as much as possible um and you would use um ultra ball you would use yep so the main way you know you might be like how do you get a stage two out on turn one don't you have to wait a turn to evolve it and normally you would be correct in that assumption but in this format we have access to one of the most broken stadiums of all time forest of giant plants the text of this card says each player's grass pokemon can evolve during his or her turn or the turn he or she plays those pokemon so basically instead of observing the normal evolution rules you're able to bench a pokemon evolve it to basic to stage one and then evolve it from stage one to stage two you can't use rare candy just because the text of rare candy doesn't allow for that but you're able to just go basic stage one stage two without any waiting you can play it as fast as possible um and another card i want to point to that we don't really see anymore but was popular was revitalizer um one of those things that you don't really know if you haven't if you didn't play in this format i don't think you'd be that familiar with it it's somewhat popular in glc um but this is a pretty strong item card in this deck it just says put two grass pokemon from your discard pile into your hand and so i bring this up because if your opponent knocked out a vile plume you could just play revitalizer if you had um an oddish on your bench you could just go okay revitalizer gloom vile plume we're back where you're item locked and i'm item locked um just some other things i want to point at um is the float stone which is a really strong tool card so you would try to get this on your vile plume or you would get it on your gloom or oddish um and then when you evolved into vile plume there wasn't any tool removal in this format that was not item based pretty much um all you had was uh i think startling megaphone at this point right if that was i think that might this might have been one of those oh no no no this was that weird time where we didn't have any tool removal that was item based so that's why people were running beedrill ex because that was literally the only way it was a dumb terrible promo ex card sorry for all you beach really x fans out there but it's not a good card but the text of one of the things was for one grass energy you're able to remove two tools from your opponent's side of the field so that was the only way to get around garbodor garbotoxin at that point um so that was the only way to remove tools from garbodor to shut off garbotoxin to allow you have access to abilities so a lot of the early versions of this deck ran the beedrill for that garbodor matchup but um if we look at this uh juan solace uh and a couple i think he was the only one that didn't really run beedrill in this format he made the meta call that okay garbodor is on the way down in this format there wasn't a lot of garbodor if you look at like the placements from this tournament i think the closest garbodor is like 30 something and there's really no other ones there's one here yeah okay 20 so there's one in the top 30 to one in the top 32 so he made a good meta call basically oh there's a yveltal garb uh 22 there you go so two in the 10 32 so he made the call saying okay if i run into garb i run into garb hopefully i can get set up before they get their item lock or whatever um and if not you know oh well i'll be fine but he gambled on the the idea that the jolteon and the regice would be much more strong than a useless beedrill and a tauros and um this list isn't all that different from the other decidueye vileplume lists other than the fact that it cuts four grass energy for four rainbow energy rainbow is a really strong uh special energy this format i think we've maybe covered it in another format but just to go over it again it's counts as any type of energy when it's attached um and then you have to put one damage counter onto the pokemon you attach it to and that's it so really strong really versatile uh but yeah i think that's pretty much it um this deck when it set up turn one turn two just slowed the game down immensely this was such a fast format with some of the decks that we see with mega ray mega rayquaza um with speed dark cry with vulcanian those decks are able to swing really fast for really high amounts of damage but used a lot of items to do so so this deck basically is like all right i'm gonna slow it down i'm gonna just sit there with my wall in the active spot just ping ping ping with decidueyes um maybe and a couple times lysandre something up that you can't retreat and we'll just kind of spread damage around or wall wall with um jolteon and regice and then you can use this lugia gx or ex which had a very similar attack to mu2 ex but had a better second attack if you will so lugia for once it has 170 hit points has aero ball which does 20 times the amount of energy attached to both active pokemon um so very simple you know if you have two energy on your pokemon you're doing 40 and then yeah it just goes up from there but deep hurricane was actually played a good bit um it was kind of like a closing move you could do in your deck so just now that i've established lock and kind of run you out of your bench pokemon for setup or something like that i just need to close the game out quick let's just move into deep hurricane it does 80 and then if there's a stadium card in play it does 70 more and then you discard the stadium so you already run four of your stadium and you're not really using it past uh once you get the vileplume setup so you can kind of use that um pretty efficient efficientlyly so uh that's it i think that's all i really wanted to talk about as we move into laic it's always fun to like look back and see what's done well this wasn't a new deck for this format but this was a very different take on an existing deck and juan solace was able to come away with the first ever laic uh championship um with a nice new take on an old classic in this format so that's really cool yeah i think that you know it's almost poetic that we get to now look at laic this year where instead of having a brand new set to play with we are at the end of an existing format so maybe we will also see the new take on an existing deck this weekend as well yeah that's a good thought one thing i had a question though so i know obviously the goal is to get vileplume set up asap was this a deck where you would just play three or not three shaman ex on turn one and then take your time sky returning them back to your hand to kind of declutter your board so you could set up your decision wise or was like i guess my real question is is the goal just get vileplume out at all costs on turn one um not always i know that um it just depends on the matchup um against decks that really were item reliant um like set up decks that didn't have access to um force the giant plants that had to use for a candy if you could get vileplume out and then you could just have time to sky return you had time to do anything because if they can't rip candy they're kind of just sitting there um or against like a garboader deck you would definitely want to like push the advantage and try to get that vileplume out as fast as possible but a lot of times um there's also that wall strat like that was kind of the nice thing with this deck um you can you know if you can't get vileplume out uh you can kind of just sit there behind it like depending on the matchup just sit there behind jolteon or regice and say all right if you don't have an answer for this like i got nothing else to do man you know this is on you like this is your problem to figure out. So you can kind of, if all they're running is basic attackers like a Darkrai deck, I don't think the Darkrai deck really ever ran anything other than Darkrai and maybe a Weavile in this format. I don't know. I'd have to look at the lists. But okay. From my memory, you know, I think there was a heavy emphasis on getting the Vial Plume out turn one, or getting access to like most of your deck in the early turns where you could still use and abuse items. You know, you see four trainers mail, so you can get your level ball and ultra balls pretty easily. You can get access to supporters with that. So yeah, four trainers mail, you wouldn't want to play four of those if you weren't trying to like see most of your deck turn one, I'd say. You still want, I think the main thing you're looking for is like Stadium and Vial Plume most turns. But yeah, I don't think you'd ever really go for three Shaman to answer your original question. I think you're definitely like only need one or two throughout the game, but you ran three in case you had one prized, because there really wasn't access to prize cards like a Hisuian Heavy Baller and Azelf or something like that. Okay, cool. Well, you know, I'm a big fan of this Decidueye card. When the limited amount of time that I did play any sort of Sun and Moon format, as long as it was in the format, I was looking for some way to play it. Whether it was, you know, Decidueye Ninetales or Decidueye Alolan Ninetales or Decidueye Zoraark, or Decidueye Alolan Ninetales Zoraark, just some way to ping things has always been a really fun strategy. And I'm sure that when this deck got set up and was able to get two, three or four Decidueyes in play, it was probably really oppressive. Yeah, it really was. It basically, like we said, I think it got to the point where it's even more strong as the format went on. When a lot of the like Zoraarks and whatnot had to set up behind a 60 HP Zorua or something like that, you're able to get pings off before they can evolve. So yeah, definitely once you got three up, you're basically able to control whatever bench Pokemon your opponent's putting down and wipe it off the board before they're able to do anything. Exactly. Exactly. Very fun. Very cool. Absolutely. And then to close out the show, Jon had come up with some fun predictions for us to do heading into LAIC this weekend. And so Jon, why don't you take us into the first of those? Yeah, so we had a couple things happen since we last looked at the ranking hall. But I think we had Palkia Dusknoir over the weekend, take top spot with Jeremy Gamila, a North American player coming down early, I guess, to Buenos Aires, getting a head start on the World's Invite he needed, already just qualifying straight off the bat. So good to him. And then yeah, I just wanted to look ahead. I think it's fun to just kind of make some predictions to put our pride on the line. No, no real prizing. But I had three questions. I already wrote down my answers. And I'll definitely let you say your piece and then I'll say mine. So I had three questions. And I'll write down your your response just to keep you honest here. Okay. So first question for you. Will all X2s this weekend make top cut? I think this event is going to be sufficiently large enough that absolutely. Again, I know we've had some other developments in kind of the competitive system moving forward. And we'll probably touch on those a little bit more next week since they'll be applicable starting next week. But for this weekend, yeah, for sure. I think that Louisville was kind of a fluke. I know it scared a lot of people, but this event is going to be over 2000 players. I don't think that there's any shot that it will not be X2 making it into asymmetrical cut. Well, I'll be contrarian then. Because I definitely think we have the opportunity for some X2s to miss this weekend. I think we might not get to that 2000 mark based on if we have a lot of no shows and we still have eight rounds, we might dip under that 2000 mark. It's a possibility. And I think we might have some heartbreak on that winning end with some people that made day two in this format, not making it into top cut if they go undefeated day two. I do actually, I want to defend my point before we move on to the next question. And that being said, I think that we have progressively seen the tie rate at these events go up as the events have gone on throughout the season so far. And I think that that is what is going to lead into all the X2s are absolutely going to make cut because we're going to have more people that have ties. Like ties in day two? Yeah, or just in general, if somebody makes day two at X1 one, and then they lose a game. Okay, that's fair, because people won't be making as many gentlemen's agreements starting from round one. All right. All right. Yeah, I could see that. I think now that we know like now that the format or now that the structure of the tournament's a little more known, I could see somebody being like, Hey, I don't really need to get a win here. I can take a tie into day two or, you know, work it from there. Right. So my next question is, what region will win the event? So all the different you have four different regions, I think, right? What are your thoughts? What do you what do you see pulling out a win for their home country for their region for whatever, wherever they're from? So we've got NA, Latam, Europe, Oceania, and then the non-TPC regions. Exactly. I want to say TPC just because it's the cool answer in my mind, but I actually don't know if any of them are going to show up to LAIC or I don't know how consistently they go down there in general. The other thing that I'm leaning toward is the fact that I'm sure that the entirety of the strong Australian contingent is going to be present, and they've really been on a tear already this season. So I think that either Brent or James or KaiWen is going to pick up a win, and I'm going to go with Oceania. Nice. Yeah, I definitely can see the logic with that. I'm trying to spell Oceania while I'm talking. It's very difficult. I don't think I spelled it correctly. Sorry. But I like that a lot. And I think there's no real wrong answer other than Europe, maybe. No, I'm just kidding. Europe's still really strong. We have a lot of great players from Europe. But I think the home country wins it, dude. I don't know. I think watching back some of the coverage for LAIC, the home crowd gets so behind every Brazilian or every South American player that's playing on the stage. It is an atmosphere unlike any other tournament that we see, where you just have people doing soccer chants, and it's so fun. And I'm excited to be a part of it as a judge, but I definitely want to see somebody from the home crowd take it just so we have that moment where there's just pandemonium. I want to see the crowd surfing and just the Viva Brazil and all that. You know, the Olay's and all that stuff. So I'm hopeful. My pick is South America or Latin America. LAIC region gets the home win. I can get behind that. I think that the one player that I could really see doing that this year in particular is Giovanni Sassos, who has also been on an absolute tear. He's made first year master and has made finals three times already, including a win. So I would not, and they've all been with Tarapagos. So I know that that's going to feed into your next question, but I could also definitely see that being the case. Yep. Yep. And you touched on it. So my next and last question is, what is the highest placing Tarapagos deck? So I chose that because like you brought up, Giovanni Sassos has been doing really, really well with the deck. We've also seen Tord play it, but it's one of those deck that either is in the meta and like doing really well, or just kind of not there. Like we've seen it at the start of this format, it was played, but the lists were still being figured out. And then I think a little bit later on, people were tooting its horn saying, this is the best deck in the format. And we've seen Tord latch onto it, which is really cool. But we, I mean, I don't know. It's like, is it, is it a fraud? Is it really good? I know Regidrago has like kind of found ways to beat it in some ways. We saw Tord losing to a Regidrago deck in the finals, but it was definitely like a favorable matchup in some ways for him. So it's definitely like, okay, we know, where do we think that Tarapagos after maybe coming on and being stronger in the last few weeks? But is it the real deal? Like, where do you think it'll be? I think the deck is solid. I do think, like you said, we saw some interesting stuff in Gdansk, like the inclusion of the Haxorus specifically to be able to KO a Tarapagos, even if they have the Bouffalants on board. We just saw Palkia win this past weekend, which has a very favorable matchup into Tarapagos. And Raging Bolt can kind of go either way. It depends whether or not you have Bouffalant and how well you run. But I think the deck is definitely still solid. We've seen it have some really good success getting second past two weekends of most recent majors. But I still think the best it's going to do this weekend is top eight. I couldn't tell you for sure who's going to be the pilot there, but I'm going to put it in top eight. That's fair. I think, yep, I think I'm right there with you, but I think that we'll see a top four. It'll get just a little bit further, but I don't think it'll close out and be in the finals, be on that Sunday showdown. I think people are starting to wise up and kind of figure out how to play against it a little bit more, but not enough to where I think we'll have some top players playing it and have a deep run with it. It's still consistent. You know, you still have one of the best support engines in the Noctowl line, and Fan Rodim's pretty good. Getting that turn one Fan Rodim abuse is pretty wild. It's very... I think it's a rewarding deck, so I'm giving it that top four nod. Okay. Okay. And then just to close things out, I had a last minute addition to this list, and I wanted to get your take on it. We've seen the rise of some very, I'll say, interesting decks that have done well in this format, like Yella's Goldengo or Luke Kirkham's Gouging Fire. What do you think is going to be the highest blazing rogue deck at the end of this event, just capping off our Stellar Crown format? That's a good question. Do we consider Snorlax rogue still, or is it meta at this point? I think it's existed too long to really... Well, no, it's still a fringe deck. I think you can lump it in there. Yeah, I give it to Snorlax then. I think unless you're Tord or somebody that is just paranoid about Snorlax, you're not prepared for it. And we've seen consistently it gets that top eight finish. It might not be able to do well in top eight, but it just has that ability to just stymie so many of these top meta decks. We did the whole breakdown last week of meta matchups and all that, and Snorlax has some of the best matchup spreads, I'd say, going into this event, and I think that'll get the top eight. What about you? Okay, so if we're going to expand this beyond, you know, I guess the traditional definition of rogue and just say, like, lower plate archetype, this might be kind of cheating as an answer, and if you want me to pick something else, I'm totally fine with that, but I would lean towards saying Iron Thorns doing the best, just because I do expect Lugia to see a lot of play. Regidrago is obviously going to see a lot of play, and Raging Bolt is obviously going to see a lot of play. And Thorns has play into all three of those decks and has the chance to, you know, just bring it back to that LATAM region, just like we saw happen at Worlds this year. That'd make for a cool story. If Iron Thorns won this event, two people would go nuts. Yeah, I think it's definitely well-positioned, like we talked about last week. I know Grafton was really high on it, and I think it beats Lugia sufficiently, unless you're running Fluttermane, but not even then. Sometimes you're just able to cheese the wins out. So yeah, I'm excited to see what comes of it. I'm sure there'll be lots of cool Pokemon. I'm sure there'll be some decks that we're not even prepared for. Even in this old format, people bring out the best they got for the ICs. And I'm excited to see it, and we'll talk about it here on the Panel Frontier. Absolutely. And so with that, we're going to go ahead and close out for the week. As always, you can find us over on YouTube on the Camp Legend Network channel. Those videos typically get posted a day or two after the audio broadcast, though, which you can find on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you find your podcasts. And if you want to hear more from John or I, you can find us on Twitter. John is at JohnPaulOrgil, and I am at underscoreAaron underscoreCurry. That being said, we've been Aaron and John here on the Battlefrontier Podcast, and we will see you next week post LAIC.