Episode 8: A Stellar Send Off Before Sacramento

Hello and welcome 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 back from his international travels. Jon, how are you doing this week? I'm doing pretty good. I'm a little, as you can imagine, kind of tired from the event. I got in super late last night at like 11.30 and then, yeah, I've just kind of been chilling today, did a lot of laundry. But honestly, yeah, we can get into it. My week was pretty good. I mean, really, really good, I'm sorry. We had one of the best, I think, LAICs I have ever had in recent memory. I haven't really ever been to an LAIC as a player or as a judge, and actually this was my first I.C. as a judge too. I played in NAIC last year, but this was the first time I ever got selected as a judge for an I.C., which is a huge honor and I think kind of like the goal for a lot of judges when they start out is potentially to judge an I.C. down the road. So this was like a really good sign of my progression as a judge, and I had a really good experience. Brazil, if you ever get the chance to go, Aaron, I highly encourage it. It's a really cool country, lots of good food in Sao Paulo, especially. We had feijoada one day, my gosh, it's like beans and rice, but then like barbecue mixed in with that. Oh, wow. It's really good comfort food. So I highly recommend that. We made some new Brazilian friends, which is really cool. That's like one of my favorite things about the Pokemon community is just the international aspect of it. That definitely came to the forefront at this event, you know, with like 80% of the players and judges not using English as their primary language, it definitely challenged me a little bit at times when I'm, you know, getting a table call and they immediately start talking to me in Portuguese. And I'm like, English and it's, you know, you don't always get, oh, yeah, let's talk about it in English. It's a new translator. So you have to call the translator over it. So I had to learn a little bit of how to do that this weekend, which was really exciting and good. Good experience overall. But yeah, I can't speak highly enough of Brazil as a country, of the people, the hospitality is amazing. I grew up in Charleston, like, so we're kind of a city known for its hospitality and it felt almost more genuine than that at times. Like I just so many, so many judges I've made friends with, like, just teach me about the food about all the different going on. So yeah, I'm wearing the Copac shirt to represent the organization that runs LAIC. This is the one I, one of the ones I wore throughout the event. I don't have all my, I have all my swag hanging around here. I won't do a show and tell, but I figured I'd at least wear the shirt for the podcast this week. But anyway, yeah, that's enough about my experience. I'm sure we'll get into it a little bit more in the cast itself. But how was your weekend? How was your weekend? Good. Good. Watched lots of Pokemon. I'll say that. Nice. So like you, I've, or prior to this weekend, I've never been to Brazil either, but my wife and I have become very appreciative of one of their local cuisines as of late, given that we don't consume gluten in our household and they have a cheese bread that they make. It's called, I think, pão de queijo or queijo, something like that. And it's basically a tapioca starch based cheese bread. And they are just addictively palpable. They're probably about the size of a tiny hush puppy, as someone from the South. Oh, I know what a hush puppy is. And you can just, you can slam those things all day and they're just delicious. So they just kind of like, oh my gosh. So getting to eat an authentic version of that would probably be a great experience. So I can only imagine that if the country can produce something like that, then I'm sure that almost anything they produce is great. Yeah. I mean, and there's just so many cool factors, like the fruit down there tastes different than the fruit in the US. Like our fruit tastes so much sweeter, I guess, in some ways. Like the pineapple was a less acidic taste to it, more of a like fruity kind of taste to it. I don't know if it's like a different variety or like, I don't know, like there's different types of apples. I'm sure there's different types of pineapples, but and I had like a tiny little apple that was really like an interesting flavor. I don't know, just a lot of cool, like different experiences throughout the weekend where it's like, oh, this is cool. Like this passion fruit, actually, like fresh passion fruit, kind of grown in that area. And then, you know, if you've never had the Guarana, I can't, I'm going to butcher the pronunciation, but it's G-U-Y-R-A-N-A, Guarana soda. It's kind of like, it's in a lot of energy drinks, but they have like a soda specific to Brazil that it's kind of like that Red Bull flavor maybe is like the best analogy for somebody that's never had it, but it's very good. It's super refreshing. It reminds me a lot of like Mountain Dew, but just way better tasting. Sure. You know, yeah, but, you know, obviously, like I said, I've watched a lot of LAIC. I know last week I reported I was supposed to be casting a League Cup this past weekend. Unfortunately, that ended up falling through. The store still hosted and ran the League Cup, but the store owner had also separately set up some sort of K-pop trading event. So the organizer of the cup told me or told me on, I think, you know, Thursday or Friday of last week, hey, man, sorry, we couldn't get things worked out. We're not going to have space for a stream table, would still love if you'd come over and play in the cup. But, you know, it was also my sister-in-law's birthday last weekend, so my wife and her dad went out and did something with my sister-in-law for her birthday. We have season passes to Disney right now, so they went over and had a Disney day at Epcot at the Food and Wine Festival, and I hung out at home with the kids. Yeah. That's fair. Yeah. I'm sorry. Sorry that didn't work out all that well. I know it's all good. You're trying to get into, but yeah, there'll be opportunities, I'm sure. The only downside to it, I should say, is that, you know, cups are quarterly. So now I have to wait two or three months before that opportunity comes up again, unfortunately. But aside from that... I got a cup this weekend, if you feel like coming up to Richmond and running a cup on Sunday. I don't think it's worth it, John. I don't think it's worth it. Fine. But we do have some Surging Sparks stuff that's legal now, so I've been jamming games with that on TCG Live. But we're going to get into our first impressions of Surging Sparks a little later on in the show. The first thing I wanted to jump back to was go back over some of these LAIC results. So we'll start off with just a quick little meta breakdown from the event. As has become tradition in the Cellar Crown format, Raging Bolt continues to be the number one played deck on Day 1, with our V-Star siblings of Lugia and Regidrago making up two of the other top four decks at 10% and roughly 9%. And then we saw kind of a really big upswing of Terapagos for this event, which, you know, we've called that the deck has continued to get stronger and stronger as the list has become more refined and people have seen the list have more success, so they've become more confident in wanting to pick it up. And coupled with the fact that you're going to have more top players travel for an IC than you would necessarily for a regional that's at an international destination. So it doesn't totally surprise me to see it jump up, but 9% is a pretty big number compared to sometimes we were seeing 6%, 7%, 5% for the deck previously. And continuing down our top six decks for Day 1, we had Charizard at 8.5% and Palkia Dusknoir at 6%, with some notable pilots like Gustavo Wado bringing the deck. I know he was featured on stream Round 1 of the event. And looking at the metagame for the event overall, I'm actually going to say, retrospectively, I don't know if Palkia was the best choice to bring, but we can kind of get into that as well. Moving over to Day 2, we see a big uptick of Terapagos, which probably, again, goes hand in hand with the fact that a lot of top players are playing the deck. A lot of them are more likely to convert into Day 2. The Terapagos makes up our new number one slot, with Regidrago also rising up to become our number two, Raging Bolt falling down to number three, but still maintaining a pretty healthy percent compared to some other fall-offs that it's had in the past at 12.6%. Lugia Archeops had, actually, I think, an increase in percentage of decks in the field, but still fell to fourth place because the other three were just more popular. Charizard maintained its fifth place slot at 7.5%, and Gardevoir rose up to 7% to replace Palkia Dusknoir. I don't recall seeing a best-of-the-rest graphic all weekend, so I'm actually not sure what percentages other decks would have made up. But, Jon, what do you think? Did any of these never surprise you? Um, yeah, I think the Terapagos is probably the most surprising to me, like you said. It makes a lot of sense when you, like, kind of look back at it. It was one of those decks that had gained a lot of popularity in the last few tournaments. We've seen Tord kind of pilot it. We've seen a lot of top players move towards it, and it makes sense. It's got as much agency, if not more, than Regidrago, with a little bit more consistency with the Fan Rodim and the Noctowl engine. So you kind of are, like, able to do a lot of the board control you get in Regidrago, especially with Dusknoir, Briar, and Pidgeot, allowing you to kind of just take over and have control of the game once you get established and set up. So it makes a lot of sense, but it's still surprising to see, because it just hasn't been at the top like that before. I don't think we haven't seen that. And then I also see that, I mean, Lugia followed, oh, and Charizard was another one. I know that it's supremely popular, or very popular, in South America. If we look back at Joinvillae, which was the last Brazilian regional they had, 16% of the metagame was Charizard, and that was at the start of this format, when Charizard was maybe a better pick, or at least was perceived as a better pick, you know? Before we saw the rise of the Palkia and the Dusknoir decks, I'd say. It being so popular was a bit of a surprise to me after we only saw, I think there was 4.35% of Charizard was in Gdansk, the last regional we had, about two weeks ago. So that was a little surprising to see it just be at that higher play mark. To see a lot of good players playing it, too. And if you look at the other divisions, a lot of seniors and a lot of juniors playing Charizard, which makes a little more sense. I mean, those are the kind of divisions where if a younger player latches onto a deck, they'll just kind of ride it for a long time. But our juniors champion and our seniors champion, Henry Cunari and Gabriel Fernandez, both Brazilians, which is really cool, but they both played Charizard. So that was kind of an interesting thing to see, was just the popularity and the resurgence of that deck. I don't know if it'll be like that moving forward, but it was cool to see it kind of get a new life out on the main stage. For real, absolutely. It's one of those things where the deck had definitely kind of seemed to be dying off throughout this format. And then, like you said, suddenly when you least expect it, it's going to kind of rear its head and push back against that a little bit. But we can go ahead and jump over to the results now and see that in the Masters division, at least, we did have Charizard make Top 8. We're going to look at that list here in just a second. But the big thing for the top end of this event was just the dominance of Regidrago. You know, we see the event was ultimately taken down by Miloslav Vesledny from the Czech Republic, who also piloted a somewhat similar Regidrago list at Worlds, choosing to exclude cards like Radiant Charizard from his deck list and include multiple copies of Superior Energy Retrieval, whereas Super Rod has become more commonplace in a lot of other modern lists, choosing to include tech cards like what we saw from Daniel Magda in Gdansk. I know Daniel also made Top 4 at this event, reigned the same 60 as Miloslav, using the Goudra and Haxorus to help in things like the Mirror Match, and then the Haxorus for both kind of big basic EX things with that Dragon Pulse attack doing 230, but also having to bring down the Axe attack to knock out Terapagos, regardless of how many Bouffalant are in play. It's really notably strong cards in specific matchups, and something that we didn't necessarily see from everyone else. Yeah, this list I think was a good call for like this tournament specifically. With the rise of Terapagos, we definitely now have like a better answer for it than we did in the list we see from Brent Tonneson that you're about to get into, I'm sure. Yep, and like you said, we see Brent here second place. Unfortunately, this means we're going to talk about our predictions after we go through all these results. I was almost correct about the winning nation of our international championship, but Brent bought what has become the more accepted Western variant of Regidrago that was initially piloted by John Ng and Isaiah Bradner back at Louisville. And now we see the 1-1 Noctowl still, and we can look down at the list of accomplishments that this list has, and it's really hard to say that despite the fact that it did not ultimately win the event, it was undoubtedly the most successful 60-card Regidrago list from this format. For sure, yeah. It has been. It's interesting to see that, I mean, over the span of almost two months at this point, when was that, Dortmund, like the beginning of October? Yep. Yeah, to see that this has had this much longevity, just kind of, I guess, it shows you like the strength of the players playing it and also just the consistent nature. I think this is probably the most consistent way to play Regidrago out of all the ones we've seen. And it gives you probably the best matchup spread overall. But continuing down our top eight list, we next have a Swedish player, Ilya Kornilov Again, as we always say, apologies if we butcher your names, we are lowly Americans. Just a finish. Finish. My bad. You're good. But bringing Goldengo, you know, in the spirit of Yella. Yeah, right. Fellow European player. Scandinavian brothers. Absolutely. And a little interesting of a deck list, we see the letter of encouragement that it's kind of fallen out of favor, popped back into the deck. The other thing being the inclusion of Morty's Conviction to take advantage of the rather large bench sizes from decks like Terapagos or the other Palkia deck that we're going to talk about in a little bit. Just things that have more than five bench Pokemon, allowing you to draw more than five cards for a single supporter, being able to get access to multiple energy much more easily. Make the deck very strong. And we saw again, like we talked about this a little bit before the cast, Goldengo, typically, as long as you play the matchup correctly and draw properly, has a good Terapagos matchup. It's difficult for Terapagos to knock out without utilizing Dusknoir, and it's very easy, relatively, for Goldengo to consistently take knockouts on Terapagos. Or in some instances, if you're going first, you're also able to set up things with Palkia and Greninja to take out Hoothoots and just prevent the Terapagos deck from setting up to begin with. So I can totally see why Yella was able to have such a successful run throughout this event. Yeah, he actually beat a Terapagos in top eight from Austin Ellis, which we'll get into in a minute. But I was the table judge for that game, or one of the table judges for that game. Game one, Austin won. But I think Ilya realized his mistake. He had benched Palkia early in the game, and Terapagos was able to get the clean, like, no Dusknoir use knockout on that Palkia, and then kind of just take over the game from there. And then after that, then games two and three, Ilya was like, oh, yeah, okay, I just won't bench Palkia. And he never did. And it just, you know, he just set up, you know, he kept all basic Pokemon in play, all one prizers in play, until he could basically get the knockout on something, and then did that, and kind of just ran away with the game at that point. But yeah, it's cool to see such a cool creative deck in Golden Goat do well at these events. And it shows the strength of just, you know, conviction that your own deck is the best deck. And, you know, I've put a lot of hours, I'm sure Ilya has put as many hours as possible to play this deck at this high level. Watching his games, I got the conviction that, yeah, this guy knows what he's doing. He's able to adjust his strategy accordingly. He's able to get a good read for what he needs to do in matchups and stuff like that. And I like the Morty's conviction. You know, it's one of those that like, oh, it looks like a bad card. But you think about it, you're at least like getting three most times whenever you play it. And then if not, like four or five. And the cool interaction is, you know, we saw it a little against Terapagos. I think you just had this already. But you have the ability to get more than five with Ares Zero under death, which is kind of cool. In this format, it became more relevant than you thought you might think it would normally. Sure. And a lot of decks, you know, they're not going to necessarily limit their bench against Goldengo. So you're very likely to draw at least four or more cards. And that's better than your average, you know, non-researcher draw supporter in a lot of instances. And Goldengo just wants to have a lot of that raw card draw available. So definitely cool and could definitely see play moving forward. Yeah, definitely no Bibarel kind of working around. I just want to make hand size and just want to go, like, work with that. All gas, no brakes. As I said previously, though, Daniel Magda coming off of a strong performance in Gdansk, following it up with a top four at this International Championship. Notably, for anyone that isn't aware, all four of the top four players got automatic invites to this year's World Championship. So all of them are just totally locked in now. Great for them. A little bit of commiserations for the people that came just short. And starting with those, we're going to see Jackson Ford from Canada with an interesting take on Charizard. So I know, John, you said that Charizard kind of popped back up for this event more so than it had in the past. What did you think of Jackson's list and did you get to watch any of his games? Unfortunately, I didn't really get to watch any of his games, but it is a very interesting list. I mean, we've seen a lot of these cards before. Um, we've seen, you know, all the stadiums have been played kind of catcher, but we see in Breyer, of course, and Thornton and even terror. But like, yeah, there's a the main thing, I think, you know, the thing that glares at you and it's pink, shiny goodness is the secret box. And I know, Aaron, you're excited to talk about it. I don't really have an opinion on it. I have a hard time believing it's the best a spec for this deck. But I don't know, you sell me on it. Like, make it make sense to me. Yeah, I will go to bat for secret box being the best a spec for a multitude of stage two decks. And I think Henry Chow has already made a very strong case for this with Gardevoir specifically. And admittedly, it does work a little bit better in Gardevoir already. But if your deck is a deck that does want to run multiple tool cards, wants to at some point have access to an Arvin potentially, I think that you have a strong case for putting secret box in your deck. And we so we see here in Jackson's list, there is a diminished count of Arvin to compensate for the fact that secret box is essentially a super Arvin in your a spec slot, where a lot of other Charizard lists would run unfair stamp, which you know, is a reactive card can only be utilized when your opponent has taken a prize card in the previous turn. Instead, I could use my secret box on my item tool stadium, the stadium is a little bit of an inconsequential piece most of the time, but item and tool card so I can go get or a sealstone rare candy, you guarantee Pidgeot and then also Iona you the same turn guaranteed. Or you can do those things and then boss the same turn or do those two things in Briar the same turn. And it doesn't have to be Pidgeot obviously you can go get Charizard out as well. You just go grab all rare candy for a sealstone for whatever stage two you need to set up and just kind of get the ball rolling from there and it allows you to be a little bit more flexible in your game plan. Or you can go set up everything if you had all your Charmanders wiped off the board, you can secret box into Thornton sealstone rare candy, attach sealstone to Rotom sealstone for Charizard Thornton away the Rotom for a Charmander rare candy that into your Charizard and you're off to the races and you have an additional liability off the board now. So I think that it opens you up to a lot of strong explosive proactive plays, which are really rewarded in the way that the game is structured right now. That's a good point. Yeah, I guess that's like maybe Jackson came to the conclusion like if I could play Charizard the way it's been played the last few months. It's just too slow. So I need to like find a way to speed it up. And I think yeah, I get that kind of gets at that secret box definitely allows you to set up faster. And we saw like you said Henry Chow playing it and his turbo Guardi build. So maybe Jackson's like, Oh, well, if we can make Guardi turbo, maybe we can make Charizard turbo. And that's what he's done here. Yep. Absolutely. But like you said, other than the secret box, it's a rather standard Charizard list. We do have an, you know, an extra stadium added in maybe to make sure that your secret box hits more times than it doesn't. And allows you to be again, flexible in that all of these stadiums serve purposes in different matchups. And they limit different things in each of those matchups. So it allows you to kind of be teched out, you get to save deck slots by not having to run four copies of Arvin. That was one thing I didn't mention before. I know, like I said, the secret box can be a super Arvin. But the problem in a lot of cases when you do run four copies of Arvin in particular, is that your third and fourth Arvin are almost always useless. Because you're typically out of tool cards that you want to go fetch and playing a supporter just to search for an item is not a very good effect. If we can limit those put in more powerful cards in their place, or more useful cards in their place, you can often turn those into better results. Next up, Rose Gregson was piloting the Henry Chow build of Gardevoir. I know that they called out Henry Chow specifically in a tweet thanking him for the masterclass that he put on prior to this event. And just took a strong proven list and piloted it. Well enough, you know, must have been a strong play throughout the event to make top eight, but did ultimately end up falling, I believe, to Brent in top eight. And then Razzwulp rounding out our true top eight with Regidrago. We're not going to go into most of these lists, a lot of them are going to end up looking very similar to other ones above it. But notably, following Raz 9th, 10th, and 11th place with Julius Brunfeld, Raphael Ueti, and Leonardo Walbrink, all were part of our asymmetrical top cut. Leonardo unfortunately played probably his worst matchup in top cut and ended up running into Austin Ellis with the Trapagos. And Austin was able to just really run him off the board pretty quickly in two rather uneventful games for Leonardo. Yeah that was, I did judge, I stream judged that game. To call it a game implies that there's a sense of fairness about it. There wasn't. It was over as soon as the cards were flipped over pretty much. Game one I guess had a little bit more back and forth, but like the Trapagos list just felt like tech to beat Iron Thorns in a lot of ways. It ran a vitality band, which I think helps swing that matchup a lot. Yeah you've got the full 4-4 knock towel. Yeah it has a vacuum. Energy lotto to go find your energy even under Thorin's lock. Yeah yeah it felt highly unfair. I think you play Iron Thorns, you hope to hit good matchups. That's the name of the game. But you lose some of your agency at the trade-off of getting some auto-wins, you know? Against a Lugia deck. If he had played a Lugia I'm sure he'd be in a much happier situation. But yeah that was probably the most demoralizing stream game I think I've seen in a long time. I guess the best thing is that he was drawing okay. Game two he didn't actually draw all that well either if I remember correctly. No and I know that Austin ended up closing the game out with like a double Dust Noir play on the lone Iron Thorns that was in play. Yeah so just definitely not what you want to see when you put on a stream game but that's kind of how Pokemon is at times. I think there was only two asymmetrical matches and it was like between that and a Regidrago mirror. We had enough of that in Top Cut. Yeah for sure so I think that was the idea behind that was that we'll just have the bad matchup at least it'll be the first time Iron Thorns is on for the day or something like that. And then I had actually forgotten about this list when we were originally calling out lists that we wanted to talk about but Raphael did bring a really interesting Charizard list as well to this tournament utilizing a rather thick Noctowl line at a 4-3 and Fan Rodent and two copies of Tarapagos to get things set up with a really slimmed down Pidgey outline. So really if you look at this it's kind of weird it's almost like you just took your Charizard deck, Tarapagos deck, threw them both on the table and then mashed them together and you have Tarapagos to really get yourself set up with Noctowl in the early game and then Charizard can come in and help you close out some games while also allowing you to hit bigger numbers with Tarapagos than you would in the standard DTE only builds. There's like 23 Pokemon in this thing. I know. It's a lot. Yeah just kind of really slimmed down on energy count you only run four fire that's pretty wild and you have the one DTE I guess so you have the ability to attack with Tarapagos. Yeah it's kind of cool. I don't know consistency wise I guess with the you really are trying to rely on Hoodoots and Noctowls. Exactly. Otherwise I feel like this is such a pile but yeah it's kind of a cool list kind of an innovation on Charizard. I think you know we saw Jackson's innovation being the secret box this is just kind of another way to boost consistency try to make speed the deck up a little bit give it more competitive legs. Charizard is so powerful. I mean it power creep has affected it somewhat but I'd still say it's got one of the best attacks in the game if not. Oh absolutely. Top three. Burning Darkness is broken. Yeah yeah the fact that you're hitting near the end of the game you're hitting for one shot on everything in format even in the mirror and like you're able to control how much you're hitting forward defiance ban and with Dusknoir you're able to like get pretty aggressive with it. So yeah it was cool to see a new take on an old deck there. And I know this next deck was one that you in particular wanted to call out being piloted by Christian Fontenot, Alex Shamansky and Alessandro Cremasoli and that is this Ogre Pawn Mimikyu control deck. So John tell me more about this because from what I see it's just I'm going to put up a wall and hope that it beats your deck. Yeah but then there's also Cramorant here and now we see a little bit more of an attacking option and I think the logic being like oh I can deal with you know stuff that can set up normally that my opponent is trying to get into play I can use Cramorant to take a cheeky knockout on something like a Mimikyu or a uh what is it called the uh Mensina. and Chinchinos and Lugia against like a Dracloak that's hitting into your Pokemon. You can use, spit innocently. I don't know exactly how, like I haven't played Walls control very much in this format. I have played it like in the past in older formats. Okay. But not this variant, but yeah, it's a really cool deck. I think I wanted to highlight it because it was one of the few innovations we saw in this tournament as far as new decks. We've seen a little bit of this. I think Fontenot played something very similar but didn't have the new technology in Cramorant. So I was in like the lost zone with Colorus. I think maybe they were like, well, we need to, let's just play Colorus so we can increase, it's the best supporter for draw. Like it's the best, like let's dig deeper and find your pieces card and the supporter card in the format right now. And I guess Cramorant is just a side effect of, you know, let's just keep using Colorus every turn. And then now like, okay, well, I know I have a free attacker essentially with that, with Lost City, with Colorus, with Vacuum, so. Yeah, I know that Alessandra was kind of the originator of this deck list in particular. And I think it actually stemmed from his father playing a quad Mimikyu deck in both Dortmund and Gdansk, if I remember correctly, and actually outperforming Alessandra on both of those events. So he must've seen something in that performance and decided to soup it up and bring it to this IC. And I'm sure kind of like what we talked about with Thorns, you had some matchups where the agency was just totally taken away from the opponent because they can never deal with four Mimikyus or four Mimikyus and a Cornerstone. And it just becomes impossible for them. Yeah, it's very challenging for most decks to have to deal with the variety of attacking or not attacking but wall options that are provided here. Mimikyu and Cornerstone have the two strongest abilities. I think we'll see a new one coming out in Surging Sparks. We might be able to talk about it, if not on this podcast, but maybe in some other ones with Melodic too. Sure. This deck's not gonna go away. I think this is kind of cool. We'll see variants of this moving forward into the Surging Sparks metagame. Yeah, and I honestly wouldn't surprise me to see something somewhat similar to this survive rotation since a lot of these walls do survive rotation. So this may at some point just kind of replace Block as the de facto anti-fun deck. Yeah, it could do. And then the last deck that we wanted to talk about was this Palkia Noctowl list that not only made finals in the seniors division, but it was piloted by a lot of notably strong players being Gabe Smart and Caleb Rogerson and a lot of people from the DDG group with Palkia Tarapagos. And I think that you got to watch some of these games, John. So did you see any really kind of interesting or intricate plays from this deck that people may not notice at first glance? Yeah, yeah. I mean, the deck's kind of a cool innovation on an archetype. We've seen Palkia Dusknoir and we've seen Tarapagos, but this kind of matches the two together, kind of plays to the strengths of the two. We saw, like, I was able to cast Caleb's game on stream, I think day one. Yeah, it was day one, I believe. And he had a really good Thornton Cure him play. Or Thornton, yeah. He basically had bench-locked himself. I'm going to probably butcher it because I'm not quite there mentally right now as far as my memory goes, but I believe his opponent had basically said, okay, you're bench-locked, you're not going to be able to knock something out. It was a game three scenario. Caleb was on the last turn of time in game three and his opponent, or I think the, excuse me, my brain's starting to fall apart. I apologize. His opponent basically, I think his opponent was playing Golden Go. Okay. They basically just have time to play three turns, or like, you know, two turns each in time. So his opponent goes, plays an Ultra Ball for the Golden Go EX, gets two Gimmick Ghouls in play, and has, I think, a Radiant Greninja outside of that. So just those three Pokemon. Plays that Ultra Ball for Golden Go EX, which I think, looking back at, was a mistake because his opponent, Caleb, had knocked out, I think it was Pheasant Dippity EX, in turn, like his, the first turn zero. No, it would have been turn zero, because you only get, it was right, like turn, the turn right before turn zero of time. Caleb knocks out the Golden Go player's Pheasant Dippity. But to do that, he has to, like, put down every and all bench Pokemon he finds. So he's benched himself, he's basically filled up his bench to the point where he can't knock out anything with a Radiant Greninja. And his opponent just draw, like, doesn't draw a pass, but like, draws and, like, bosses or Prime Catchers something up, and just passes with, I think it was like a Terapagos in the active, or something like that. And then Caleb, in his next turn, is able to pull off a huge play with Greninja, like use Trumpet Energy Switch to power up the Greninja in one turn, take a two knock, take two knockouts on the two Gimmick Ghouls in play, deny his opponent the ability to evolve those Gimmick Ghouls into the Golden Go to prevent him from, like, tying in the game. And then from there, the next turn his opponent doesn't do anything, he doesn't find another Pokemon to bench. I think he realized even before the game was over, he's like, he shoulda got a Bidoof or something like that. And his list was running Bidoof, so if he had just got a Bidoof down with the bench barrier ability, I forget the name of it, but he would have won. And I think his opponent realized that, and it was just like a whole thing, because Caleb definitely got a little too excited. I think his opponent would just bossed up another Trapagos and passed, and Caleb attached one energy, went to retreat, and then announced his attack, which kinda made us all as judges be like, uh, stop, what are you, Trapagos. Caleb didn't realize, because it doesn't happen, like you don't ever really think about it, but Trapagos has a two retreat cost, not a one retreat cost, and I think Caleb didn't really realize that in the moment. So he was able to, we were able to fix the game state, or at least more or less get it fixed, and Caleb was able to close the game out from there, retreating, or just finding a way, I think he did use the energy switch that turn specifically, to power up the Trapagos, to get the last knockout on the Greninja, to win the game on turn three of time. I'm kind of a bad storyteller, I hate to say, so yeah, definitely go back and watch the stream. I think it was round, let's see, I did rounds one and six, day one? I think that's what it is. And it was not round one, because round one was Palkia Dustar. So, I would go watch round six. I did two, I did two and six, sorry, for that event. So, yeah. I do still believe it was round six though, because I'm pretty sure it was in the afternoon. So, my memory might be not serving me correctly. I wrote my notes down, but I think I lost my notes at some point, on day three, or day four, rather. So, it was a long weekend, guys. It's long for the judges, we get there, I got there Wednesday and didn't leave till Monday. I see there's no joke. Nah, yeah, for players and for judges. So, but yeah, it was a really, really cool game. I definitely encourage people to watch it. The Palkia interactions are always fun to watch, always fun to puzzle together. And this deck, you look at all the different pieces you have to work with, it's very cool. You lose Dusnar, but you gain Palkia, you gain a lot of the versatility. And there's no Pidgeot, which I think actually never really came up too much. I think running that four, four Noctowl line, essentially gets around having to play Pidgeot so many times. Yeah, well, I mean, it's essentially Palkia and Teleon at this point, right? Yeah, right. In a lot of ways, and you still get access to a lot of these cool tricks with the Glass Trumpet now, you still have Energy Switch available, you get tricky supporters like Thornton and Kieran involved. And the one cute addition, I have no idea if this is optimal or not, but I liked the inclusion of the 151 Ditto, just allowing these guys to fan call with Rotom for a Pokemon that had the potential to become either a Tarapagos or a Radiant Greninja or a Palkia V if you just bump it up into the active spot on turn one. And probably makes the deck ever so slightly more consistent. So maybe it is correct. Maybe it is better than a third fan Rotom or a third Tarapagos, but at least it's cool. Yeah, it's definitely got the best, it's got the best attack name in the Pokemon trading card game at the moment. And Splup. Splup. Yep. I love, I was sitting backstage during seniors finals, and I just like kept saying Splup over and over because it's funny to say. It's not a real move, John. Yeah, well, you know, this is not a real, Pokemon aren't real anyway, so why are we really getting into semantics, you know? That's fair. Yeah, I think that that's about gonna close out our LAIC discussion. Obviously, it was a very exciting tournament in a lot of ways, and if anyone didn't catch any of that action, I would recommend you go back and watch any of the VODs. Almost every single round had at least a somewhat interesting interaction at some point during the game. And even if you watch it on two times speed until you find a moment that you think could be interesting, just go back and watch it because Pokemon's great. Yeah, I mean, even though this format was an old format, there's still so much high-level play at these events. It is definitely worth watching if you have any interest in becoming a better player or just learning all the different archetypes of this format. Even though the format's moving on to a new point in the next few weeks, it's still valuable, valuable information to watch and learn from these super high-level players playing at this high-level event. And you know, it never gets old. You can go back and watch ICs in the past, and you kind of get the same sense that you're watching some of the best players. It's like, it's the satisfaction of watching somebody that's really good at doing something, do something really well, and that never gets old. But to close out our LAIC section, John, why don't we go ahead and jump back and take a look at those predictions that we made last week? I'd love to. So in our first ever prediction segment for a regional slash IC, I asked Aaron four questions and we both answered. And we'll just go over those real quick, see who did better, and kind of see who gets the bragging rights for the week. So one of the first questions was, will all X2s make it into TopCut? I know we had one regional this year where we got just under 2,000 players, and there was a few X2s that missed. But that was not the case at LAIC. I think there was more ties at this one than at Louisville, where that happened. And I think there was a little less players. So yes, all X2s did make the tournament with 11 total, I think, making it into TopCut. So Aaron said yes, I said no. So Aaron wins the one for this week, or the bragging rights for this one. The next one was, which region will win the event? I said South America. And again, Aaron got a lot closer than me. There was two Brazilians that made it to ASEM, but that's as far as they went. And Brent Tonneson got second place. So close. It's so close. So close, but close does not count. But I, well, we'll give you 0.5 of a point. That doesn't matter. So how's that? Sure. I love it. It's whose line is it anyway? Yeah, right, exactly. So you're up 1.25 points to my zero. The third one was, what's the highest placing Tarapagos? I said top four. You said top eight. Again, I think you're closer. Yep, I know, I nailed this one. Austin Ellis made eighth place. You did, yep, made eighth place. So you get one full point for that one. Good job. And our last question. I'm gonna have to send all of these people money now. Well, you can give them your imaginary points. I mean, that'll make them feel better about not getting the win. For sure. For sure. All right, and the last question I had was, what rogue deck will do well? Not quite a rogue deck, but I put Snorlax down. And you said another different one with Iron Thorns. You definitely won this one with Iron Thorns making a sim by the Brazilian player, I believe. Leonardo Walbrink. You got it. I don't think, I think Golden Goat would have been the best pick for this question. Yep. Yep. With it being in the top four spot. But yeah, I think you got a lot better of an answer than me. I don't know where the nearest Snorlax is. I gotta scroll pretty far. I think it's just outside of top 32. Yep. Yeah, okay. All right, anyway. So yeah, I think that concludes our LAIC post-mortem. Yeah. Yeah. It was great. Predictions are a lot of fun. We'll be sure to do them in the future for other ICs. We may bring them around for regionals. I don't know. It kind of feels like a little bit of an old hat thing if you do it for every single tournament to me. But doing it every once in a while is definitely fun. But with that being said, we're gonna jump from this old tournament into our new tournament after. we get into our Blaine's Quiz Show segment. So John, let's jump into that right now. Yep. So for Blaine's Quiz Show this week, just to go over the rules of this real quick, you will have three multiple choice questions. If you're truly stumped, I will give you one hint, and you can use that for any of the questions. So this week I have the theme of Ogre Pawn. So for those that didn't attend LAIC, the badges, staff badge and player badge, especially, I don't know if I saw any other badges, had Ogre Pawns as the mascot. Let me go get it because it's right within reach. Yeah, I know that the play mats for players were all the Hearthflame Mask Ogre Pawn. And I believe, John, you can correct me if I'm wrong, but your staff play mat should have been a Teal Mask Ogre Pawn, right? Yeah, it was. Can't quite reach it, but take my word for it. It's pretty cool. I'll say I'm definitely jealous of Miloslav. I saw the image they showed of the winner's play mat from this event was really sick. And the fact that there are only three of those in the world is pretty cool. Yeah, they've been doing a really, really good job. I don't know if I should give a shout out, but I'm going to. Shout out to Chad Bosquez, a longtime player that I've known for a while. He's, I think, in charge of the product development for player kits and stuff like that. So he's the one that's been developing a lot of that in the last few years. Does a really fantastic job with all that. And I think he deserves the credit, whether he likes it or not. So, you know, shout out, Chad. But yeah, they've really upped the branding, upped the appeal of going to these events by getting cool merch. But yeah, Ogre Pawn, I think, is a really cool mascot that came out in the newest DLC. And I figured we have a little quiz about it. So how do you feel? Okay. I played the DLC, so I think I'm ready. Okay. All right. So that might come up. Let's find out. All right. Question number one. All four variants of Ogre Pawn EX have been used in competitive play with three seeing major use. And what archetype was Hearth Flame Mask Ogre Pawn seen? And by seen, I mean it has the one limitless entry to its name. And I won't tell you which tournament or player, because I think that would give it away. But I will ask the question, which archetype was it a part of? Was it Charizard, Entei slash Iron Valiant, Pidgeot Control, or Gouging Fire? I'm just going to quick lock in Gouging Fire, because I know this is Luke Kirkham. Yeah, you got it right. No surprise, I think if you've watched the regionals in the EU for the first half of the season, I guess, you've probably heard of the name and watched Luke Kirkham playing his Gouging Fire deck. And for Birmingham, I believe, he played. Was there Birmingham yet? I think it was Dortmund. Dortmund. That does sound better. He played at Gouging Fire. And to me, looking back at it, the fact that he has never played Gouging Fire since then tells you a lot. I don't think it's very good. But he did play it. And it does have the one limit in this entry at like 93rd place or something like that. All right, so one and one. Let's see if you keep it going. All right. So what is the name of Ogre Pawn's signature move in the Scarlet and Violet video game? Is it Revelation Dance, Ivy Cudgel, Mortal Spin, or Psy Shield Bash? Okay, so I have no idea what either move on the left belongs to. I don't even know if those are real moves. But I know Ogre Pawn's move is Ivy Cudgel. So I'm just going to get that out of the way. But I know Psy Shield Bash goes with Weirdeer, because it's the same card we see in the Lugia deck. Are the other two actual moves, though? Yeah, do you want to guess what they're from? I tried to use actual signature moves for Pokemon just to try to possibly throw you off. But clearly, you know, if you played the DLC, I don't think I was gonna do that. But yep, we'll give you the point for sure. Let's see. Revelation Dance. It's a sun and moon legendary, pseudo legendary, I guess. Also has a bunch of different theming elements to it. It's kind of a dancing bird thing. Oh, is it Aura Choreo? Yeah, it's Aura Choreo. Okay. And then Mortal Spin. I didn't know that was legendary. Mortal Spin, I have no idea. That just might not be legendary. It honestly could not be. I don't play the video games. I'm making it up. I apologize. I'm sure somebody's yelling at me for saying it's legendary. It's probably not. But yeah, it's Aura Choreo. I think Mortal Spin is... I forget. Honestly, I don't remember. Okay, no worries. We'll move on. Cool. Love that. Last question. Hopefully you get this wrong. So I look like I put some effort into this. Similar to Ogre Pawn, Castform has four different forms. Which of its four forms does not have a limitless page? This is a really hard question. Yeah, good, good. Because I think the first two were too easy. I feel like I needed to step it up a little bit. Ogre Pawn is too relevant. It's such a meta defining card that we need to move back to something not Ogre Pawn. And I think, all right, let's dive deep into this. So to be fair, I'll give you a little background. Limitless is all the modern era for 2016 on, I believe, other than Worlds. But I will just say it's 2016 on, because I didn't really dig too much deeper than that. Good. That was one question I had, because otherwise I could see Base Castform being included because of Roland's Castform back in the day. But I'm going to go ahead and just ask for a hint, because I have no clue. Okay. So I will help you out a little bit. It is, I'll kind of give you, get rid of one of the choices. The Castform, or Rainy form, was in a, I want to say, it was in Teleon with Moltres, like Galarian Moltres at one point. It was played in that as a free retreater, I believe. So you can cross that one out. That didn't help at all. So I'm just going to have to take a shot in the dark then. You're wearing a red shirt. We're going to go with Castform Sunny form. Okay. And you are correct. Oh, wow. Yeah. Good guess. Good guess. So what were the other two played in? I think, let me look at it, because I, let me find it real quick while I'm on Limitless. I'll look it up. Just lead into it like you already knew. Copy. It'll blend together perfectly. All right. Oh, yeah. This is funny. So Castform in its base form was played in Durant, the Devourer 90 HP ones from Battle Styles in an Australian regionals. Okay. It got, I think, ninth and no, third place in regionals in Brisbane. Interesting. And then the Rainy form, like I said, was played in Dark in Teleon by Steven Mao. So I guess Arceus in Teleon. Arceus in Teleon with Galarian Moltres and Galarian Moltres V. I'm pretty sure this was just for the free retreat. All the Castforms from that era had free retreat, so they were just a good free retreater. It ran like a Hoopa, so you could put up Castform and switch into Castform or put it up after you used ScoopUpNet. Sure. And kind of go from there. And then the last one, the Snowy form was played by Prince as a junior in EUIC 2022 in Frankfurt. And then also by Mohamed Adias in Salt Lake City. He got top 16 right after COVID, I think. And it's the same kind of thing. It just provides a free retreater in this deck. And I think the only reason you played... Well, no, that doesn't really make sense. I think the reason you played these over the Fire one was just because you liked one of those two over the Fire one, because I don't think there's any other difference. Because you can't use the attacks ever, because these ones never had water energy. But yeah, it's just a free retreater option in this format. And there wasn't a lot of Castforms printed since the modern era, especially not the regional forms or variants, rather. Yeah, prior to those ones, I think the last time they had been printed was back when I was playing. The last one I see is from Legends Awakened. Yeah. You get a pretty big time gap. Yeah, definitely not. There's one... Let me see. Oh, sorry. Now you're campaigning from our set review to have sunny Castform as a free retreat Fire type makes more sense to me, though. You're just trying to get him as Limitless Page. I think so. I was like, you know, it's a little sad that it's got that cool alt art. But you know, we don't... We'll get it's Limitless Page. I think you should run it in Toronto just to give it a Limitless Page, Aaron. We'll find a deck for it. Maybe you can put it up as a free retreater for your boy, for your Flygon and go right back into Flygon with it. Flygon has other friends. But speaking of Flygon and its friends, the next thing we're going to do was jump forward and give what our first impressions are of Surging Sparks and then kind of look at some initial data from online events heading into Sacramento this upcoming weekend. So, Jon, obviously you've been busy with LAIC. Have you actually had a chance to play with any Surging Sparks cards at all yet? Very limited, I will say. Most of my focus has been on the current format, like the one that we've been dealing with the last few months. I had one just league battle with Hydreigon at my league. One of my players built a Hydreigon deck and I had some downtime, I think, after a tournament finished a little early. So I just jammed a game of Hydreigon into, whatever, Cyril Edge, the Fire one. And I like Hydreigon a lot. And Hydreigon, I think, I have some favorite Pokemon besides Duckling and Quacksly. Hydreigon has a sentimental spot in my heart. I won my first ever cities with Hydreigon, with Darkrai Hydreigon, back in like 2013, 2014, I think. Shoutouts to the Georgia Marathon for that one. I won that one there. So that was kind of a cool thing. But yeah, I played it in like the finals and had a good, great game with that. So I've always loved Hydreigon since then. But we really haven't seen a good Hydreigon card, I feel like, since then. We've had, I guess, some kind of cool ones. Like there's that Energy Acceleration one we've had recently. But this is the first one I feel like that's been somewhat competitively viable. It has a really cool attack, has two really good attacks. Its first attack is like dark, colorless, and then hits for 200, discards the top three cards of your opponent's deck. The second attack is one of the most broken attacks in the trading card game at the moment. So that's the one deck I've played. And I think today I had a little bit of free time this afternoon. And I'm like, oh, let me try to build some decks. And I built Hydreigon on BTCG Live and played two games with it. The first game I won against Sigardi, which felt really easy. And then the second game I lost because I threw against Dragapult. Okay, because I had the line. I knew the line. And like I knew I had the like, the line, they ran a Temple of Sinnoh. And I had to bump it. And I have Rosanne's Backup, or I think is the card where you're able to cover a stadium. So I played that recovered the stadium like, okay, I need to quick search for the stadium. At the start of my turn, I'm saying I need to quick search for the stadium after I play Rosanne's Backup. And sure enough, I quick search and I grab a Rare Candy for next turn. And then I'll go to attack and I'm like, Oh, why can't I attack? Oh, so I had one of those, you know, slap your forehead moments against that. And I definitely shame, shame conceded after that. As one does on playing live. I'm just like, I don't really feel like I want to recover from this emotionally. And after that, I got kind of tired of playing live and kind of walked around my house and did some chores. So that was my, that was my experience with Hydrogon today. But um, no, it's a fun deck. I don't, I don't know. What are your thoughts on it? I, I think like you said, both attacks are inherently strong, like the just the effects on them ignoring the damage that they the base damage they do, because that's the issue that I have with the first attack. Like just doing 130 to two bench guys and also hitting the active is crazy. So I think that it costing four energy is totally reasonable obsidian is a strong attack. But the problem right now, like, the Terra factor makes it not as good, the fact that you need to be able to use it at least twice, and it's a 4 energy attack with 3 different energy types makes it a little difficult to pull off. We do have some tools to kind of mitigate that with either Sparkling Crystal, or Neo Upper Energy, or Counter Gain, or some combination of those 3 cards. But my big issue is the fact that Crashing Headbutt only does 200. I think if it did 220, this card would be broken. Just the ability to go turn 2, Crashing Headbutt, KO your Regidrago, discard 3 cards, go. Or if it could just 1 hit KO an Ogre Pawn in return to the Ogre Pawn, like, if it could trade with Ogre Pawn evenly, I think I'd be okay with it. That's fair, yeah, I think Crashing Headbutt, it's still very strong, and it still sets up math really really well against Charizard and Dragapult, and Garde you already hit for one shot. But anything like that, where it's got 330, 320, 310, you're able to do 200 and then clean it up with Obsidian later, assuming it's in the active, if it's Charizard, obviously, the stupid Terra attribute, that's such an annoying thing. And I think that's also another factor of, you know, Obsidian's honestly one of the most broken attacks ever printed, but yeah, just because everything now is moving towards being a Terra type, it definitely is weaker than it would have normally been. So I don't know, I think this is probably my favorite card in the set. The deck I'll probably be trying to work out in the next few weeks. I don't know if it's good or not, but I definitely want to puzzle it out. I saw that it did decently in a couple online tournaments. My friend Evan Campbell, who is somebody I've known for a long time in South Carolina, he won at the Pump Gamie, like a weekly one they have, and then somebody else took his list and won another tournament right after that. So I was testing his list today, and it ran pretty good. It's one of those decks where it's just like, so many pieces, man, it's just like, so much. It's like, you need Rakani Apigea, Rakani Hydragon, you need the Neo-Upper Energy, the you know, Dark Patch and then Energy Attachment, I need a way to switch it into the active because you can't really retreat it once it's in the active, it's got three retreat. So his list is cool, it runs a Petra Run EX, which also gives you another late game attacker that Petra Run's attack is really, really strong as well, but it has that ability to switch Hydragon into the active, Poison Damage isn't too relevant when you have 330 HP. So I think that's fine, because you're still taking one hit most of the time from most things. But yeah, it's more consistent than I've, I think the list I played a league, I think that list, like this Evan's list only runs six basic Dark, a lot of other lists are running other energy types, which gets kind of sticky. So I don't know, I'm excited to see what comes of this, and hopefully something does. So that list is more structured around, I'm going to Crashing Headbutt multiple times and try to deny you some resources and then kind of Obsidian once I've really kind of put you in an awkward position. Yeah, I'd say so. Like once you run them out of resources, you're able to clean up with Obsidian. Yeah, and I could see that being the way to go. The thing that scares me is the fact that if somebody just sets up an Ogre Pond, it can likely knock out two. Yeah, being weak to grass is pretty annoying right now. And not being able to one hit KO the Ogre Pond. Like if you, I mean, I guess you can mitigate that by running a means of doing so, but it just makes it potentially very awkward. One of the decks I've been playing quite a bit is Lost on Pikachu, and we've seen Pikachu has already popped up and shown that it can be successful in that deck, as well as serving as the Terra attribute Pokemon for Maridon to have access to Area 0 Underdepths. It's just a strict upgrade to the Terra Mewtwo that that deck was running previously. You now have one retreat. It has this focus band effect built into it with its Resolute Heart, where if it would be knocked out when it is at full HP, it is instead left at 10 HP, and that makes Pikachu very annoying. And then coupled with the fact that in Lost Zone, you're already totally fine putting three different energy types on this Pikachu, and the fact that you can do 300 damage and knock out most anything in the format that is not a Charizard or Dragapult or now Hydreigon is really scary in a lot of ways. And then it's like that ability comes back to the point where it's just difficult to return KO. So we've definitely seen a big uptick in Lost Zone decks, which had previously fallen off pretty hard if Regidrago was around in any level of decent numbers. And then this kind of gives you the tool to fight the Regidrago now that you have a way to actually one-hit KO a Drago that cannot one-hit KO you back unless they have Canceling Cologne available. Yeah, I think Lost Zone was definitely looking for its big, basic one priority, or big, like big one, excuse me, Lost Zone was really looking for its big attacking option after we lost all the Radiant Pokemon, Radiant Rayquaza, or yeah, I guess Radiant Rayquaza is the wrong amazing Radiant Rayquaza with Rotation a while ago. And this kind of replaces that mindset, it gives you that huge reach potential that Lost Zone has struggled with against Charizard, I think for so many reasons. So it's just really cool to have that again. It's a lot. I'm really interested to see like your build of it. I've seen a couple of different builds of it, some that, you know, just have foregone using Sableye and still use Greninja, but like, are you running like five different energy types in your build, Psychic, Water, Grass, Metal, Lightning, all that? I've got a couple lists built, and I actually have both varieties. I haven't put a bunch of time into the non-Sableye list yet, but I like the freedom that it gives you to not be as just totally done with a given option when you have to Lost Zone an energy. Like, it is very, very taxing on you if you ever have to Lost Zone an energy and you're running five different energy types. Yeah, I mean, Lost Zone's already one of those, like, annoyingly unforgiving decks to play, and I feel like this kind of makes it even more so in a lot of ways, especially if you don't have, you know, I think I heard on like Lake of Rage, it was Steven Varesco talking about like not having Raihan in this format. Oh yeah, Raihan, this card, oh my gosh, this card would be so broken if Raihan was legal. Yeah, yeah, but like he also brought up the fact that it says discard three energy from this Pokemon, meaning you don't have to discard those exact three, you can like overload it. If you know that your opponent won't be able to knock it out next turn, it's a safe thing to put energy on and you can then discard cards and then maybe just do a manual attachment the next turn. So that's kind of cool. I didn't think of that flexibility, which is nice. It's not like a Kiram or something like that, where you just have to discard all energy. So that's cool. Yeah, the one kind of scary thing or downside to the Pikachu, if you do opt to do that, is if your opponent just doesn't present you with a two-price thing to knock out, you've committed likely two gates to something already, just so you can avoid having to use a gate down the road. I mean, that can be matchup dependent, but it's definitely a cool move to look out for. Yeah, for sure. I've seen Latias pop up with some just like big basic decks like Maridon, like Gouging Fire and it seems some success there. The card that I've been very excited about recently, though, has been Flygon, and this goes back to seeing the Charizard list from Jackson Ford this weekend with the secret box and saying, what other stage two can we apply this to? And now that I'm thinking about it, John, it probably doesn't work for Hydreigon because Hydreigon needs either Neo Upper or Sparkling Crystal to really fulfill those energy costs for that attack. Flygon doesn't care as much about its second attack because the whole way, at least the way that I'm playing the deck right now, is that you're just doing this hit and run attack with the Reversing Storm for a fighting doing 130 damage, switching back to your bench and you have a combination of cards that are just annoying for your opponent in various matchups. You've got Cornerstone, Clefki, Iron Thorns, Mimikyu, and then you just run either the future Booster Capsule for your Iron Thorns or you run the Rescue Board for your Mimikyu, Clefki, and Ogre Pawn to just allow you to freely switch back and forth, either shutting off abilities to slow your opponent down in the early game or presenting a wall that they can't overcome without a boss in the later stages of the game. And it has some difficult matchups. Charizard in particular can be pretty difficult. That's a matchup where Thorns and Cornerstone in particular can really shine. But it started to suffer for me in that a lot of people are getting frustrated with Pikachu in the Lost Zone decks and they're starting to put Canceling Cologne in decks that may, you know, in my opinion, may not have any business running Canceling Cologne unless the Lost Zone is really going to be that big of a player in the meta. So the online live meta right now may be a little bit warped and my poor boy Flygon is suffering as a result of that. But it's been a really cool card, the fact that it takes advantage of Terra Orb. So one version of the deck that I have built, Flygon is the only non-basic Pokemon. So, you know, your Clefki, Mimikyu, and Trapinch can all be searched with Buddy Buddy Poffin. Your other basic, everything else can be grabbed with Nest Ball and then you just run a couple of Terra Orbs to go fetch your Flygon so you never have to worry about discarding cards or Ultra Balls. So the only real burden you have for discarding is through the Secret Box. You can kind of only get rid of the resources that you want to get rid of when you need to. And it just sits there and you hit 130 and you switch and you hit 130 and you switch. It reminds me a lot of Donphan back in the Black and White era. I wish the second attack was a little better. Yeah. 100 to each. It's relevant for sure. It comes up more than you probably would think it would, but yeah, just with, like we said with Hydreigon, too much is Terra right now. So if it had like a hundred placed, place a hundred damage count, like 10 damage counters on all your Pokemon EXs, that'd be so good. Oh my gosh. I think that the game developers are smart to not do that. It helps balance it a lot more, but I definitely love the head and run strategy and I'm excited to see where it goes. I know you brought up Tatsugiri at the set review. Yes. Have you had any time to test him with that? I have not had a chance to play him yet. Oh, okay. I did get... Mine did come in the mail. I have not built a deck with them yet. For anyone that is interested in the deck, I know that Joe over at OmniPoke put together a pretty cool list utilizing the Terra EX Skeledurge, the Slaking EX from this set, the Greninja EX from Twilight Masquerade, and then Pidgeot, of course. And you're just setting up this Slaking that does a bunch of damage, the Skeledurge that amps that damage by discarding fire energy, which you already want to play for Tatsugiri, and Greninja, which can take advantage of the water energy and also function in games where you do not Cinnabar lure successfully into Pidgeot to still help you find the pieces that you need to keep your game plan going. And the deck works pretty synergistically well together. I know I've seen other lists where people were trying to make Hydreigon work with it and they were playing both the EX Hydreigon as well as the regular Hydreigon from Paldeia Evolved, which was the energy-accelerating one that you mentioned earlier. And then obviously Pidgeot's always included there. But it's just something where you can hopefully live the circus dream of I'm going to get five stage 2s out and not have to worry about playing their basics or any rare candies in my deck. Yeah, it's pretty sick. I mean, we've seen something like it with Cradily, I think, back in the day. But this is obviously much better being a basic. Are you running it as a lost box engine, I guess? No, the idea is you play Sparkling Crystal, I think three or four copies of Town Store to find that Sparkling Crystal, and then you play four copies of Crispin. So you can hopefully use Cinnabar lure on turn one going second. That's kind of cool. And I've seen some interesting takes on this list as well, where you can include that Ditto from 151 to thin your deck ever so slightly, trying to make sure that you find those stage 2s a little bit more consistently. But to keep talking about the meta, we're going to look at results from the three most recent tournaments. And I know, like you said, this Pumpka Weekly event was won by your friend Evan Campbell with this Hydreigon Pidgeot deck, where we see 4-1-3 Hydreigon line, 2-0-2 Pidgeot. And this looks set up relatively similarly to a Charizard deck at the end of the day. We do have copies of Counter Gain and Terra Orb, which are kind of interesting cards to include in the deck, making it easier to find your Hydreigon without having to use an Ultra Ball necessarily. It looks like Evan's trying to take this, like we talked about before, a little bit more in a controlling angle, with the inclusions of Zerosik and Airy. So definitely trying to take advantage of the fact that you're limiting your opponent's resources with Crashing Headbutt. That's pretty cool to see. Yeah. I mean, it's not like a strategy you need to pull off every game, but there felt like times where, like I guess that Guardy deck, where they were like, you know, going to have to set up another Guard of Auri-X after I knock out the active one or something like that. You're able to go, okay, Airy, get rid of all your Rare Candy or whatever that you've been holding onto to try to power that up. So that felt pretty cool. I don't know if it's worth including over other consistency cards, but it makes sense. The only thing I thought about as I was playing would be maybe the inclusion of a Feather Ball to get the Pidgeot guaranteed. We saw that in other Trapagos lists. You don't really want to discard too much in all these Stage 2 lists, so I feel like that might be worth looking into, just so you have one less thing you have to get discarded in order to get Pidgeot set up. Sure. Let's see if anybody has made any new advancements in our Regidrago list so far in this expansion, and it looks like the answer is no. This looks like the same list that Brent took to his finals finish in the last, or at LAIC. Can't say I'm too surprised. Deck's obviously good. It didn't really gain anything from the new set, so why would you change it? Yeah, I haven't had a chance to try out the Alolan. The Exeggutor. Yeah, but I don't think that's very good. No. But it's funny. It's kind of funny. Definitely funny. Go ahead and jump down here. I did want to look at just what people are including in their lost box decks to give people an idea of what to look for moving forward. And this one's a little interesting to me. The inclusion of the Terrapagos. The Terrapagos, there's no Iron Hands. They have Iron Thorns back in the mix. And they are running way more energy than I would expect to see in a Lost Zone deck. So I know my five-color deck, the reason that I mentioned previously, you get a little bit stressed on your energy counts, are that I think that I'm running a total of nine energy. And it's like three Water, three Lightning, one Psychic, one Metal. One Grass. Maybe it's 10 energy with two Grass. I don't know. But it just makes things really difficult. But the inclusion of Terrapagos and Iron Thorns are pretty interesting. A lot of times we'll still see the Iron Thorns subbed out for Iron Hands, for some of those stage two match-ups, or for Mirror in particular. We do see Manaphy working its way back in to compensate for this Mirror match-up or any other decks that may or may not be playing Greninja. But a lot of the other decks from this tournament are what I would expect to be pretty standard lists still from Charizard. You may see some inclusion here and there, people trying out the Precious Trolley as an example, in their A-spec slot. I don't know if that really does anything for you aside from, you'd have to cut search cards for other cards to make up for that. And I think you'd rather make those spots elsewhere and just maintain that consistency. The other standout deck from this expansion that a lot of people have jumped onto so far is Seriledge, which to me is just kind of like Red Goldengo. And you'll see a lot of similarities there. You've just got a one prize board that you can present on turn one often, turning into a two prizer that just does a bunch of damage related to a bunch of energy being somewhere. I think the disadvantage of Seriledge is that you don't have the built-in draw off like Goldengo does with coin bonus. And a lot of times you have to use Squawk ability on turn one, which really hinders your ability to present that one prize board. And then the trade-off for that is that you do have access to Briar. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's a good comparison. You don't run all the energy recovery you would for Goldengo too, which is nice. But yeah, you do give up coin bonus, which is a really nice ability. So it's a decent trade, I'd say, because you can still kind of close the game out efficiently with just Seriledge if it's powered up. Sure. And you do see this list in particular maintaining that Palkia V-Star option along with the Gradient Greninja to be able to sometimes take knockouts with Moonlight Shuriken because Seriledge does not care about what type of energy is in the discard pile. Mm-hmm, very cool. I wanted to see, I know this one's been putting up some results in Japan, but does not look like it has been super popular over here. And we didn't mention it previously, but here's a list. The Archeludon, this one didn't perform particularly well in this event, but we've seen players pairing Archeludon, which just is kind of a self-sustaining metal type EX with a lot of HP for a stage one sitting at that 300 mark. Still unfortunately gets knocked out by Pikachu, but the technology that I wanted to mention heading into Sacramento this weekend was the Star Mii from 151 with the Mysterious Comet ability that reads once during your turn, you may put two damage counters on one of your opponent's Pokemon. And if you placed any damage counters in this way, you discard this Pokemon and all attached cards. So it's kind of like a tiny Dusclops, but you don't give your opponent a prize. And all this does is serve the purpose of allowing you to reach damage thresholds like knocking out Raging Bolt because Archeludon does 220 with this attack. It lets you now hit 240, or you can use one to pre-damage a Pikachu. So you can knock it out without having to hit into it twice. And just something to be on the lookout for heading into Sacramento. Yeah, that's a cool deck. Seems pretty consistent. So definitely something worth testing, looking into. Right, I know we've seen some people also opt to include things like Dialga in their list, but John, these online results aside, as people head into Sacramento this week and we kind of start to wind down on our episode, do you think that there are any decks in particular that you expect to either do well this weekend or decks that have done well in the past that you think are gonna fall off? I could definitely see Pikachu Lost Zone box being a top play for a lot of people players. I think Lost Zone's always one of those, at least there's like a fan base for it. People love the kind of mechanic of, oh, I gotta make tough choices and play well and hopefully it pays off at the end. And then everybody loves Pikachu, I guess. You know, it's no Quacksley, but it's okay. But I don't know, I could see that getting like top 16, top eight. I wouldn't be so shocked by that. I think it's probably the strongest contender out of all the decks we just talked about. I think Flygon's kind of like a dark horse for sure. I think there'll definitely be some players playing it, but I don't know how good it is, you know, into Regidrago or into something like that where they have like a, okay, that's cute. You know, just disrupt your board on your my side and then kind of go from there. Yeah, that matchup's interesting. I think that a lot of it, Flygon to me is in the same category as the Mimikyu Cornerstone deck that we kind of talked about earlier, but it's a little bit more proactive. So, but you have to play more pieces to kind of compensate for that. So instead of running like your Kholrez and your Cramorant, you're running your Flygons and Rare Candies and whatnot, and kind of running about things that way. We expect Lost Zone to do potentially well. I do think because Lost Zone is doing better, Regidrago still has a chance to succeed in the event, especially off of a very strong performance at LAIC. A lot of players haven't necessarily had the time to put into all of these newer decks. They put all this time investment into Regidrago already. It's probably going to continue to serve them pretty well. A deck that I think a lot of people have been playing a lot more in the past that's going to fall off pretty hard is Lugia though. And that is because in a lot of ways, Lugia does not have an answer for Pikachu. It does not have a way to get through the Pikachu reliably. And you're not going to start seeing Lugia players including Cancel and Colon in their deck just for that matchup. They'd rather take the L and move on. And I think that because we're going to see a pretty big spike in Lost Zone, we're going to see a pretty big drop off in Lugia as a direct result of that. Yeah, that makes sense. I think Pikachu counters the two most popular decks we saw in the previous format in Lugia and in Raging Bolt. I feel like Raging Bolt, you can only really... I mean, you can get the other... What is it called? The fighting... The Slytherwing? Yeah, you can run Slytherwing, but it doesn't really seem all that good. I think Sableye cleans it up pretty well. Lost Box feels like an abysmal matchup for Raging Bolt already. And now you have a way to one-shot anything even if it has the bravery charm on there. Right. I don't know. It doesn't feel very good. I could see Raging Drago doing really, really well if we see a huge influx of Pikachu. I feel like it can deal with that pretty well. You can run Hawlucha if you want to pre-damage the Pikachu or just soften it up with a Dragapult is probably fine too. Yeah, you've definitely got options. And obviously the deck still runs Cancelling Cologne. Yeah, too. I don't see any reason to cut that anytime soon. I think other things that we could see rise up, potentially, we did just see Goldengo perform pretty well, and now it has gained access to the Energy Search Pro A-Spec, which allows the deck to be a little bit more consistently explosive early on, which is something that it's kind of struggled with in the past. You may not always have enough energies to take that big key knockout on turn two. If you're going first, you could kind of struggle and just maybe hit something for 100 or 150, and then be like, oh, cool. Now you knocked out my Goldengo, and what do I do next turn? And I have to re-struggle to find all the stuff. Instead, now you go find the Energy Search Pro, you find your myriad of energies, and you dump them all to KO whatever your opponent has active, as long as it's not a Pikachu. And I think that Goldengo is a little bit more flexible. Like if you can cut your Earthen Vessel countdown because of that Energy Search Pro, you can afford to include some tech trainers like canceling Cologne potentially. And you can maybe make the deck kind of work out to be able to combat this new meta that's rising up. So I wouldn't be surprised to see Goldengo move out of that kind of B tier status and move up to being more solidly placed in the meta. Not necessarily tier one by any stretch of the imagination, but I also at some point wouldn't be surprised to see it be a high-performing deck in day two. Yeah, the only thing I think to counter that would be Saorul Edge fits kind of the same demographic that the target demo that Goldengo has. So I feel like some of the Goldengo players might move over to the hot new shiny thing and Saorul Edge. So I can see that being a little bit. But yeah, I agree with a lot of the points you brought up. That's a pretty powerful A-spec as it is. And I think Goldengo can take advantage of it. I don't know if it's better than Saorul Edge. It's fire weakness might be more and more relevant moving forward, but probably not too much. I mean, you just have Radiant Charizard and Saorul Edge at this point. And is Saorul Edge fire? It's yeah, I wasn't sure if it was one of those weird terror ones where they're a different type after they get terror type. But yeah, I could see it. It's kind of cool. Well, John, I know you're kind of running on fumes at this point. So I'm going to give you an out here. We're going to do one last call. Do you have any other extra cards you want to talk about heading into Sacramento this week? I did want to bring up Melodic real quick. Sure. I saw Zul did a little stream with Melodic, had like an hour and 40 minute video on it or something like that. I'll be honest, I didn't watch all of it, but I did see it. I watched a little bit of it. And Melodic's one of those cards where you're going to have to really be able to account for it. We brought up Regidrago's running Cancelling Cologne. And then I think Charizard will probably start running that too if they are wanting to beat Pikachu. But I think Melodic is one of those cards that you should definitely keep your mind on, having the ability to just nerf anything that's a terror Pokemon with probably over half of the meta. Well, maybe not that much, but closing in on half of the meta using terror Pokemon as main attackers, it's a pretty relevant ability. So we definitely want to keep that in mind, especially after rotation. I don't know if it'll be super good into Sacramento. It might be OK. But once a lot of these V-stars and V Pokemon rotate out, I think that'll be Melodic's time to shine. And so definitely one of those things to keep an eye on. That's one of the valuable skills you can have as a player, is to just think, OK, what are the times that this card would be relevant, and keeping that in the back of your mind for future use. Especially early into a format. So if you use Baltimore as an example, that's when we saw that Cornerstone Noivern deck pop up. And there's definitely a chance that something similar could happen with Melodic at this event in particular. But on the flip side of that, a lot of times those decks become more powerful when you have an established meta that you know what you're trying to counter. So you have to really find the right spot to bring that deck out. But it definitely can be potent if you are able to strike when that iron is hot. There's not really anything else. I think we've talked about pretty much every relevant card from the set at this point. So there's not really much left to say. I think that we can go ahead and just wind down the show. As always, thank you for listening. You can follow us here on Spotify, or on YouTube at the Camp Legend Network YouTube channel, or on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. We'd appreciate it. Love getting that follower boost. Love getting that follower base up. Watching the numbers go up has been a real treat to me throughout the week. And I've been sharing those numbers with John when we hit significant milestones. And as always, if you would like to hear more from either John or I, you can find us over on X currently. John is at John Paul Orgel. And I am at underscore Aaron underscore Curry. And we are here with the Battlefront podcast. And we will see you next week. ♪♪