He Built His Own Deck...and Won The Whole Tournament | Uncommon Energy Episode 209

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Check responses, setup required, compatibility and availability varies. 18 hello and welcome to another episode of the Uncommon Energy Podcast. On this week's episode we're going to take a look at the season and Worlds qualification cutoff as the North American International Championships has concluded. So we get an idea of how many players will be qualifying from each of the regions and give our thoughts about that. We will also take take of course a look at the results of the North American International Championships, talking about the decks that were played, the metagame, how things shaped up at the event, and then also the myriad of new announcements made during the closing ceremony, including Nic's new location, other stuff announced as well. Mostly I guess, Nic's new location. And there's also an interview that Chris Brown, the Director of Global Esports at TPCI did with Game Rant at the event talking about some of the thought process thought processes behind the tournament. So we'll talk about that. We will of course have guest that flavor text everyone's favorite segment to the podcast. We're going to wrap up this week by talking about the Pokemon TCG AI Battle Challenge put out by the Pokemon company and give our thoughts and opinions on all that. And we will of course also have our weekly bonus episode exclusive to YouTube channel members and Spotify subscribers. If you want a little extra content from us each week, that is a great way to do it and also help to support us. My name is Chip Richie, joined here as always by my friend and co host Azul gg. What's up Azul? How are we doing buddy? How was your NAIC experience overall? It was good. Had a lot of fun cut to hang out with Some, some people you don't usually I don't usually get to hang out with obviously from around the country. So I had a really good time at naic. Obviously the tournament run itself, not great. Played Zorark and my list was definitely like undercooked in comparison to like a lot of the other builds out there. I didn't spend that much time prepping was arc before the tournament. Just knew that I kind of want to play Zork. So I tested some of the ideas a couple a day or two before the tournament and then just kind of last minute hail married some stuff. Just kind of threw it all together and hoped for the best. And then the run did not go not go great obviously but looks like if I hit some stuff you're probably not super tooled for. Yeah you're gonna have. You've got the Petch evil tall mochi which is like usually enough to like handle crystal I feel like. Right. Yeah. I mean I got shred so. You shred? Yeah. With the Zekrom the cross of matchup isn't too bad. To be honest if I, I didn't think Russell would be like that great of a play as well. So I wasn't trying to include some like a tool scrapper or a ruffian or anything like that as like a tech card. Wasn't really even on my radar as like an inclusion. Like I thought about the tool scrapper but I was like I'm not teching for Crustal. I hadn't looked at your list yet but dude, you are obsessed with Acerola's mischief. Man, I love that card. I, I, I had a, a really sick line lined up in my round three against the Mega Greninja. I ended up tying but it was in the bottom two cards of my deck. I was like I screw up Cyclone, my pet shadow play and then I could have protected my damage Zoroark and play with Acerola. So and just like made a checkmate board say. But it was in the bottom two of my deck and it's more so in there for obviously like more aggressive decks like Beedrill and stuff like that. You can do some kind of cool plays against like Beedrill where you like Petris or to the active play. The ace rolls mischief. You punch them for 290 and you build up the 20 poison from monkey Dory and you combat with like Watchtower red card and the next turn you draw four prize cards. But yeah, I didn't play against any Beedrills or slot boxes. So I never got to use it in that way. I had it lined up against a Greninja, but it was just at the bottom of unfortunate. Israel did not show up for work. No, definitely not. Yeah, so I said my build definitely compared to a lot of the others that definitely undercooked in terms of how much time I actually put in with Zorg. So if you're looking for a better Zork deck, go look at the. The top placing list, Liam's list towards list, stuff like that. Yeah, unfortunately hit the Rockets Mewtwo in that last round. I probably made a mistake in the second game. I don't think it would have really mattered though. I went for an aggressive KO on the Mewtwo as opposed to waiting for like a boss on a tarantula. This guy went from playing you into playing Robin. Robin got him, buddy. Robin got him. Yeah, he's got the Darmanitan, though, which is a pretty big difference for the, for the matchup, being able to KOA spite ops and a tarantula off the bench because it's hard for him to get all the spite ups and play aggressively. Not a great run, obviously. My expectations were like super high or anything either though, which is kind of a last minute zork ideas. And yeah, that's my run. But yeah, like I said, had a good time at the tournament in general. Definitely had a lot of fun at the tournament. New Orleans is a fun city. I'm excited for next year's Naic as well, though. What about you, Chip? You're casting over the weekend? A lot of Cuban? No, I did fire off one cube though. Actually I brought the whole family with for this one. So Brook and the two boys came and also my parents as well. So anytime I wasn't working, I was trying to kind of do some stuff with them, though. Usually by the end of the work day, the boys were already asleep, so. But had some time in my off rounds to like get out when I like the time I normally walk the tournament hall. I like got out and walked it, but like got to go walk it with them, which was kind of fun. So I had a good time. Samuel is like, just really loving, like, just Pokemon in general. Like, he loves the, you know, he especially loves the, like, meeting the characters stuff. Like when we went to Disney World earlier this year, that's what he was all about was meeting characters, getting his little autograph book signed. And so they have a little setup where you can meet Pikachu. And I think he got to meet Snorlax and Gengar, which he was super excited about. But, yeah, that was a lot of fun. And then, yeah, Casted saw some pretty great games, some really funny moments as well, from the stream. Yeah, man, it was a lot of fun. It was. It was really, truly just a great weekend. I felt super in tune casting and feel pretty proud of the the weekend overall, to be honest. And then also at the very end, got to do the closing, like, statements and announcements with Rosemary at the very end after the VG Finals, which was pretty cool. I was, like, kind of surprised when they were like, yeah, we're gonna have you two guys do this. I was like, let's get it. And it was like a moment where Rose just finished the VG trophy ceremony and she's like, I guess it's time to say goodbye. And then my line coming out was, not so fast, Rosemary. And when I came out of the backstage and said that, the roar from the crowd was just. It was insane, that moment, to be honest. I know it wasn't for me. It was like, for the announcement, for the, like, yeah, that's some. But it was just still so cool to like, be up there and experience that. So, yeah, a lot of fun, man. I love getting to do what I do. So it is a cool gig, that is for sure. Also got to watch both while we were there in New Orleans. The NBA Finals concluded. The Knicks get the win over the Spurs 4 to 1. Unexpected. I think for a lot of people, maybe not after, like, the start of the series, but, like, going into the series, the spurs were definitely the favorite team. And then also got to watch the Hurricanes. The Carolina Hurricanes from my hometown, Raleigh, North Carolina, get the Stanley cup win over the Vegas Knights. So that was pretty fun. Brooke, actually at a work function, like, during the middle of their workday, their boss heard about, like, something that the Hurricane's team was doing in an area nearby, and they went to the restaurant that they were all at and they. Brook took a picture with the Stanley cup at work today, which is. Oh, that's pretty cool. Pretty cool. Yeah, that's pretty cool, for sure. So. But yeah, great weekend overall, for sure. Like you said, New Orleans is a fun city. I did miss out on getting to do a lot of the fun, like, kid things that my. Like, they went to the aquarium, like, and went to, like, a children's museum and walked around the French Quarter and stuff. I didn't get to do a lot of stuff because I was obviously busy working, but got to eat some good food for some of the Meals and yeah, it was a fun time. For sure. We did. We actually didn't see each other at all through the weekend. I saw you one time because I walked by your tournament table at like, I guess it was round. What would it have been? Round five? I think I walked by your game because I was like walk out, walking around and I just looked and saw what table you're at. Just walked by it. But you were like, I like to walk behind you and you didn't see me obviously. But we like didn't link up at all throughout the weekend. No, yeah, yeah, I saw you. I saw you once or twice more like moving around the crowd, buddy. I didn't. I didn't stop you or anything that you were moving around. One of the times you're headed towards. It wasn't like. I mean it was like to go backstage. It was like from the main hall. And then you went to a door. Yeah, yeah. I was definitely like where I saw other catchers like going in out of that door. Oh yeah. Our backstage entrance. Yeah, yeah, yeah. For sure. I'm not sad that we're leaving New Orleans, but I think it was. It was good while we had it, you know, for sure. I'd say that I do think that like we didn't really have much potential to like Naic this year was the same size as it was last year. Player base, like player number or like it was actually technically a little smaller. Like a few less players. Yeah, yeah. More no shows probably. We have outgrown that venues potential space for us, I guess. Right. So yeah, we'll talk about it more later. But we are going to Chicago for naic. We'll give more of our thoughts. But it does seem like that the growth is a big part of that reason based on the interview that Chris Brown did. But before we get into all that and talk about the results, we did want to talk about just the end of the season. World championship point cut off Zapdos. TCG tweeted these numbers out over on X on Twitter. I don't know. I said tweeted out on X just doesn't feel right. I don't know why did they change the name of this website? Man, it's so silly. Anyway, would you even. I guess posted right. Posted on X. I still like Z did Zapdos these GZ over on X. This is it. But yeah, here's the numbers and the numbers that he gives here. I think does assume that auto invites. The invites will extend down to the players who are tied. Yeah, yeah. Because like, if we look at the leaderboard right here, there are some auto invites. I believe it actually goes down to the person in 150. First place is what I've seen people saying has 720 and then these four people with the play point tiebreakers would miss. Yeah. Based on the precedent they set last year, like, all the people who are tied did still get their invites. Not necessarily a guarantee, I would say, but like, I think it would be very silly for them to not. Yeah, it would be people their world's invite. Yeah, it would definitely be weird. They didn't like that. It felt like I was like, didn't we just go through this last season? And they gave the tie. The people who had the same championship points their invites and that's what they did last year. So I would assume they would do the same thing. I. It felt like there had been like some other precedent set between last year and this year. The way people were like responding on Twitter. But it feels like people are just like, well, they don't. They haven't said anything for sure. So we just want to make sure we get the. We get it across. Some people talking about like submitting support tickets and stuff like that. But my assumption would be, yeah, if they did it last year, they would do it this year because they haven't said anything otherwise. Right. At least I haven't seen them say otherwise. I didn't see anyone like tweet anything or talk about like, it's. I think most of it is just because, like the verbiage in the invitation information says, like, we may use championship or may use play points to determine tiebreakers when. Oh, sure, sure. Yeah. And so like people are just. Because that is still what it says. It doesn't say everyone tied with like, that's like what the words say. And someone did submit a support ticket and that's what, like what the support ticket person quoted was that line that said we may use play points to determine as a tiebreaker. But these numbers here from Zapdos TCG do assume that the 150. I'm going to operate under that assumption as well, though it is not a guarantee. I do not speak for the Pokemon company International or yada yada, yada. People may think influence is not that. No. But yeah, 720 points for us in Canada. I think it was 700 last year. It's up a bit. So it is up a bit. There was more spots. But I also believe the points paid out increased as well at regionals compared to Last year, right? Like they made it more top heavy. Thanks. I don't remember. They increased some of the numbers up at the top. Like, yeah, wasn't there. Like, didn't they increase them? I don't even remember as they changed it so, so much. I don't remember at all, to be honest. I'm pretty sure they did increase it. Maybe. Europe 640 championship points, 148 players. Latin America 610, 134. Wait, I think I said that. 148, then 134. Yada yada. Oceania 710 for 22 players in the Middle East. South Africa, 400 championship points necessary. 11 players qualified. Yeah, I think this is all like. I mean, I don't know. There's nothing really too much to say about it. It seems all fine. I guess like one comment I would have is like, this is the second year in a row we've had the top, Top X system. Right. For making, getting worlds invite, you don't need a set amount of championship points and it does feel like for the better. The idea around the champ, the world's invite has began. Become way less toxic than it was. The mentality around the world's invite previous to the topic system was like super, super toxic. But we're two years out. All the people who complained about the change, there's no complaining anymore. I think this is a better system. It's healthier for the game, healthier for the community and, and yeah, I don't see them. I don't see any reason for them to change the system at all besides like fluctuating. You know, we went from 125 last season to 135 this season. However, they want to mess with those numbers. Championship points you get for placing at X placement at a regional, whatever. Changing those numbers obviously is fine, but I don't see any reason for us to ever go back to a set amount of championship point system. I think it's just better and healthier for the community in the game, at least for here in the US and Canada for sure. Which is what we can speak the most to. I do take a little bit of caution when seeing this number being almost the same as this number compared to the number of players invited. Right. For Oceania specifically, they have so many less tournaments. But I heard some, I saw some people talking about it on Twitter in regards to like the younger age divisions as well. I actually want to look up. Yeah, I would say, yeah, I guess Australia could be a little bit weird. I guess juniors and seniors could Be a little bit weird as well, I think, like, for masters in Europe and North America and probably Latin America, this is probably the optimal system. Australia for specifically, it is a little weird. Traveling is like very like the. The trade off to get your world's invite. If you travel to like an extra IC or two or an extra regional or two outside of just the local ones, you're going to be at a massive advantage for getting your world's invite over everyone else there. I think juniors and seniors might be kind of similar. So there's definitely a discussion for maybe an adjustment in those age divisions and that region specifically. So Oceania, 20 players were slated to get their invites. So it's 22 after the automatic invites. Who got the automatic invites? Even did Brent throw in our regionals this year? I think Brent picked one up somewhere, probably top four. And I see, yeah, he got second. Right. At laic. Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep. You're right. Yep. And then one other one somewhere in here, but 710 championship points. I mean, I don't know the details about all of these players, but I recognize a lot of these names in the top, you know, 20 as people who, like, did travel outside of Australia to get their invite. Yeah. Like, to earn some of these points. Not like that. That solely is the reason or whatever. Right. But I do think, like, I mean, if we look at US and Canada, not. There's certainly people who qualified here who did not go out of North America to compete. Right. Yeah. But if you just kind of make it a numbers game, it might just be kind of similar. Right. Like, some of the players down here maybe only got their invite because they were able to go to, like, UIC and laic. And obviously, like, it probably costs as much for an American player to go to EYC and LAIC as it costs an Australian player to go to one of those ics. Right. Yeah. So, yeah, it was like a big. There's a big. But like, yeah, my. Like, numbers wise, like, the community obviously in Australia is way smaller as well. I mean, they just had like their biggest tournament ever without almost a thousand players at the Melbourne Regional Championships. Right. So growing. And maybe there's an argument, especially after seeing that number, for them to get more invites. And that's like, all you can really do, I think, is just continue to show up and play the game. And I think Pokemon will respond in kind with, like, more invites, hopefully getting to bigger tournaments. I mean, part of that is obviously esl, who actually runs the tournaments over in Australia, maybe potentially eventually bringing Back OCIC as well, which would be a big bump for like local points. So you don't have to compete as much with people who like travel. You'll be able to get like another finish on the board because like right now it's kind of funny because if you only play in Australia and maybe you go to one ic, you can't even fill up your finishes, right? Because it's best of five. It's your best five finishes at majors. Yeah, but Australia had obviously had three regionals and then the special event in New Zealand, right? Yeah, but that only had like 100 players cap. So like it was like a super big instantly sell out as well. Yeah, instantly sold out. Like I also don't think it's particularly cheap to fly from like Australia to New Zealand. Yeah, I'm not sure about that. So like you couldn't even if you, if you only played locally, you couldn't even fill up your cap. So you can't even be competing against anyone who travels and gets a finish outside of Australia. Right? It's not like my five finishes can beat your five finishes because I only have four finishes in Australia. So. Yeah. And even then like getting into the New Zealand tournament's like impossible. So. And here's the numbers for the juniors division. Now I don't know how many direct invites exist, but they are the top 80 get an invitation. So you know, probably somewhere down here. I, I don't want to say anything without knowing, but certainly like 800 plus is safe. But that's a lot of championship points for, I mean these, A lot of these kids went out of region to, to earn some of these points. Right? Not all of them obviously, but I don't know that there's like a conversation I think worth considering when it comes to the top end here. Or not the top end, but like the, the bottom end. I guess I should more say like. Sure. Like for the top players up here that are like traveling to most things, you know, like this is their, you know, travel sport. Right. That like some parents grow up investing. Like the kids grow up having a lot invested in those things. Right. But for some kids, like, it's just their, they don't have like even traveling. I don't know how to best word this. I guess, I guess like one way I could like, I, I think I, I know what you're saying. I think a lot of people understand what you're saying. But is it even like that big of a deal? Like if they can't. If players who just can't travel as much as can't compete for worlds invite, like, is it that big of a deal? That's what I'm saying. Like with like the adjustment we've had when we've gone from the threshold championship point threshold to now a top X system, the idea about getting a world's invite has changed so much. And it's like previously everyone was playing for their worlds invite and the only thing people cared about was getting their worlds invite and. And they haven't added that much more to the game to play for. Besides like the. Which I think has been a big success has been the ace trainer reward. I think a lot of people make that their goal in the season or one of their goals. Yeah. The idea around needing to get your world invite has completely like gone away from the game. And previously it was like pretty toxic I think and it just kind of like made the game way less enjoyable for like a lot of the community. But now it's completely gone and people compete for their invite and if they don't get it, it's not that big of a deal. And some people don't compete for their invite, but they still enjoy the game and I think enjoy the game more healthily where now they're just competing. They're not competing to get the world's invite, they're competing at the tournament they're playing in. And I have to imagine at the juniors and seniors level it's probably pretty similar where getting your invite is probably just not that big of a deal. And it's like if you can travel more and you can do it, cool. But if you can't, maybe that's fine and maybe it's not that big of a deal to not be able to do it. I guess that's kind of like where I'd like pose the question, is it that big of a deal that these kids can't. I mean you can always compete in terms of honestly to fix that more auto invites, like top four at regionals, getting an auto invite, top eight. Like making more opportunities for more people through those means would maybe be a good route to look at. There was a time in the game's history and this is probably this probably even predates you where like you know, competing at a Battle Roads, like the winner of a Battle Roads would get an invitation to or like whatever maybe even the predecessor to those was but there would be like local level tournaments where like the winner got a trip to nationals or like a invitation to World Gym Battles. Yeah, I don't remember. This is all before my time. I've heard people talking about these things like those things have existed before. Maybe like that would be cool if there was something like that for the younger divisions. But also at the same time, maybe it's good that there's not something that on the line at the local level. You know what I mean? Yeah. Like, doesn't need to be that cutthroat necessarily. Yeah. I think look, maybe looking at like expanding like the auto invite things maybe even just for juniors and seniors, maybe. Maybe that would be like something they would. Maybe Masters doesn't need it, but like maybe getting top eight out of regionals and juniors here, that just lead to a World's invite or something like that. But also with that as well, maybe it just doesn't need to change. Maybe this is kind of like a fine system and the players who can travel enough to compete will be able to. It's sitting in the Master's division as well. I just feel like there's. There probably is more Masters division players who are able to compete for their World's Invite than juniors and seniors. Right. I feel like junior singers get cut out a lot more aggressively because I mean they have school, everything going on. Even when like Master Division players have school, you know, they have their own money and stuff to work with as you get older. So I do agree that that does seem to happen and as like a complaint I've heard from parents is that like they want, like the kids want to compete for the World's Invite, the parents want them to be able to, but it's just that, you know, they can't make it work for what they've got going on. So yeah, there's a lot more junior seniors who get cut out from that. Whereas I feel like the Masters, obviously there's a lot more Masters players, but maybe percentage wise it could be similar, I guess. But I feel like it's probably not. I feel like Jesus, years get cut out a little bit more aggressively on the, on those terms, but maybe that's just kind of the way it is like. And nothing really to be done about it. I definitely will agree though that like, I mean, I think we both agreed that this is how it would be. Right. Whenever the change was made. Top X versus championship points that like the drive to play the game, it's. It's been a healthy change, like a healthy mindset shift in the community almost where it's like people are not so like, and it still does exist. Right. For the people who are close to like what they Think the threshold is going to be this like, I deserve it or like I'm this like toxic mentality of like being solely focused on that more people are still just playing the game because they just want to play the game. Like, I saw a bunch of people at Naic who like, have been playing for a long time, but this was their first tournament of the year. Right. Or like the guy, John Webb, who got top eight, it was like his second tournament of the year and he got top eight at the event as well. Right. Like, I mean, I think there's like, people are just playing to. Because they love playing Pokemon, you know, more than anything. Yeah. It feels like there's more of that in the community, especially on, like, the more obviously, like the, the more casual side. It was never that big of a problem. People were just playing it for the lovely game. But on the more competitive side, I feel like people are playing the game for more of the love of the game. And maybe it was always kind of like that. It was just the. We just heard more of it because it was a more attainable number. There was more people in the mix almost. Right. Yeah. It definitely used to be quite a bit easier to get your world's invite, for sure. It's gotten quite a bit harder with the. The new system and everything. Undoubtedly. Yeah. Let's see. How many Worlds invites would there be if there were. It was like 500 championship points or something to qualify. Oh, my goodness. I'll share the 300. 500 points to qualify. We're looking at how many more? 348 as well. Yeah. It would be way bigger. It would be much bigger for sure. We'll see how. How far down do I have to go to find you? You gotta go away. What do I have, like 200 and something? I don't know. Now you're gonna get your Ace Trainer, though. Let's get it. Let's go get the Ace trainer. I do kind of wish I'd gone to some more locals, to be honest. Maybe that'll be. I probably should have gone into this year with that being. My goal is like, just go to enough locals. One or two tournaments, like get the Ace Trainer because I don't know, it's kind of worth it for the effort if you like. Like, if someone who knows I'm only going to play in one or two majors a year, it's probably worth it to try to go to more locals, to try to get the like 150 points from locals to have a shot to get the Ace trainer at the end of the year. Yeah, for sure. Didn't they say they were going to do more with that this season? They did, right? They did say that they did. They've done nothing. Sick, man. Sick. See if that's still where they said. Yeah, I swear, like that was like they talked about the HR program. They were like, we're going to be sending your stuff out early January. This system is. Or this is going to continue to exist in the next season and we plan on doing more with it in the future. And as we're two seasons deep and it's just. It just feels like there's so much potential there. I don't know. And that's kind of like one of those things where it feels like people are still like really much enjoying the game and loving playing the game and obviously the big events are selling out, but more to play for, I think. Would there still. I still feel like there's a little bit of that void of like things to play. For sure. I don't think they're bringing back like state championships or anything like that. Like smaller level tournaments between cups and regionals. So expanding upon the Ace Trainer system. Oh, there is. They did. They did add something. Oh, what are they in you. You get Ace Trainer rewards, deck box and sleeves. Okay. Live. Oh, all right. I mean that's something. It is something. Yeah. Yeah, there's something. You're gonna rock your Ace Trainer deck box now. I mean I might. I like using like the newest sleeves that I have available. Just like switch it up like visually like make things look different. Also like the easiest ones for you to click probably too. Right? Just up at the top. Well, yeah, I could just like not change them and just use the default ones. Like I've never been much of like a Skins guy. Like when I play League of Legends or anything like that, I don't like get expensive skins ever. But I will say it is nice to like switch up what you're looking at if you're going to be doing it a lot. So I do usually use like the newest sleeves and deck box and whatever on TCG Live just to kind of switch it up. Change up the my go to's are the Breakpoint Reward like League Reward Chikorita sleeves. I use those all the time. I don't even know what those look like. You read it a PTCG Live sleeves. If I just google that, will they come up? I'm googling it right now. Dude. People do not care enough about this to like. Yeah, for there to Be a Google image. Yeah, yeah. Find. I don't know. Yeah, nothing. I couldn't find anything either. They exist though. Nowhere's now. Nowhere's now. Bulbapedia list of trading card game live gameplay items. Oh boy. I bet you it's in here. Look at this list. Do you think there's anyone out here who has everything? Wow. I just. Hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on. What did I even just type? Okay, there we go. Try and search Chikorita or something. I just clicked on a button that led to my center screen being shared, which is the one with the document pulled up that shows like what we're looking at. Like the, the Google Doc. Anyway, I'd like control left and like that led to who knows what happening in obs. Anyway. Chicorita. Oh, there's no picture. Someone update this on Bulbapedia. Add it 2016 Worlds Collide Season Break Point 2 Participation Code Card. The silver ice. It's not silver though. Oh, no, wait, hang on. Where's my phone? I'll put it up on my phone. This is worth doing. Don't worry. It's. This is worth like a, a two minute detour from the podcast because they're great sleeves. I don't see a Google image. But you're. Oh, you know, the, the red Finne. Feel like you've used these red Finnegan sleeves in the past. I feel like I see you using those or maybe you did on ptcgo. That sounds familiar. Yeah. Is it just those with the chikorita? Yeah. And they're green. Is it like silver behind the Chikorita? Yeah. Here you go, Rice. Okay. Yeah, I, I, Yeah, I've used those before too. There's the deck box. Oh, well, yeah. Do you have the sleeves as well? Yeah, yeah, I've got both. Okay, so say the celeb sleeves. I'm not a big as a fan of. Those are. Yeah. There's the Finnegan coin right there. Or the finicking coin. Yeah, nowhere's know about a Finnegan coin. No Finnegan coins. No Finnegan coins. Okay. Yeah, there's the sleeves. I wonder what the technical rarest. It's. There's got to be some like super rare stuff from PTCGO on PTCG live that you like can't get in live that you could only get if you had PTCGO that like not a lot of people have these days. Dude, I don't know what you just said. Oh, wait. Super rare stuff that people have on TCG live that you can only get on tcgo Is that what you just said? There you go. Okay. Yeah. What is the. So good, so good, so good. New markdowns up to 70 off are at Nordstrom rack stores now. Stock up and save big on shoes, tops, dresses, accessories and more must haves for summer. Join the nordiclub to unlock exclusive discounts. Shop new arrivals first and more. Plus, buy online and pick up at your favorite rack store for free. Great brands, great prices. That's why you rack. This episode is brought to you by Prime. What if you had one more chance with the one that got away? Sam, you came home. Based on the best selling novel from Carly Fortune. Every year after follows childhood friends Sam and Percy as they reunite in the dreamy, nostalgic lakeside town of Barry's Bay. Love can be hard to find. So if you're lucky enough to find that person, never let go. A second chance at first love. Every year after now streaming only on Prime. And I'm just like. I'm just like, wondering. This is great, good content. Okay. I was just wondering when we're gonna start to get leaks for the next Japanese set. And it drops at the end of next month, so probably not for a little while. That's it. I was like, wondering what the timeline was like, looking for, like, for the. Like. That'll be the requisite set, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I am extremely interested. No, what these cards will do for sure. What their equator does. Yes. All right, well, we can keep it rolling here and talk about the results of the North American International Championships. 3752 players entered. We'll talk about the metagame and stuff. But first off, gotta give our flowers to James Kowalski. All out Blitzel International champion Azul did make fun of this deck and then he won the tournament. What is it you said, like, this is like the deck that you'll be like, top 64 and. Oh, yeah, whatever. I wasn't. I didn't know what deck it was. He just Blitzel tweeted out something like, I don't know, like some win streak or rating. And it was like, not. He was like, I gotta bring us to indie, right? Or something like that. And I then I responded to his tweet, once you're six and three, well, I should just play Dragon ball. And it was funny because at Indy he did. He was 6 and 3 at some point in the tournament run. But yeah, I'm just meming on him for, like, thinking that there was a deck that beat Dragonfold. But I'm glad that he found a deck that he likes That I think it's probably favorite again, Dragapult. And not only did he play to Indy, he brought it to Naic. Got the dub. Definitely very, very cool to see James all out. Blitzel Kowalski getting the victory. Definitely was rooting for him. Once he made it into into top cut and you know, get a pretty nice path set up, there were some potential obstacles. The slow king, the Crustle were in there but managed to dodge those and you know, do what the deck does best. It's actually insane how lucky this guy got to dodge crustle as long as he did. It's actually crazy. He did hit one eventually, right? He did. But like let's see. Arcanine pairings. Round nine. Okay. There's only three, nine zero players. It's James and two crustles. So what happens round ten, the two crustles play each other. ID Cooper Cole who was 801 was also playing crustle. So there was four possible opponents that James could have hit that were three of them were playing crustle. He hit the one that was not Crustle. Man. I expect that much. Crustle up at the top. I thought like one of them would maybe have like a good tournament. But Crustle actually was like up there at the top tables. Like we thought crystal was going to win the tournament at this point in the event. That would have been terrible. That would have been awful. I would have wanted to see that also. By the way, this was going to be the stream round one. But they id'd. Oh, they id'd. They did id because the same 60. They didn't want to knock each other out. They felt good enough about the matchup value there, isn't it? I don't know, man. It's pretty because you just want to go x and 2 to make cut. Right. Because it was x 12 also makes it but you don't want to. But that. That's two non wins. The mirror has got to just be so cheese though. With the. Their list as well. Yeah, but just. Just run it. But I heard there was a pretty Cooper played against Carter on stream at some point and that was a pretty interesting. Like it was actually a pretty interesting. It was. But Carter's list is just so much better for them. Yeah. Also they had the. The hand trimmer. Right. Which has got to be. You can find it more trimmer and double eerie. And Cooper had no eerie. Yeah. So that. It's just the games were kind of entertaining but like Carter just should win that best of three always basically. I mean if you can get three games in, right. That'd be the question. More so than it was three games. Oh, really? Was there any concedes or was it just the knockouts were flowing? There was concedes in game one. Cooper was kind of winning. I wasn't casting this game. We were just watching it backstage. So I don't know. Like, I wasn't super locked in watching it. Right. But like, Carter played a zarosic and Cooper scooped on the spot, like towards the end of the game. Yeah. So, like, he was just like gonna lose too much, so. Yeah, he wouldn't. He hit rahul in round 11 though, right, James. And he did hit Rahul, but then he hit no other crustles the rest of the way. Didn't hit Carter when he could have hit Carter. So lucky. Yeah, he dodged, dude. Carter was probably licking his chops. The whole event for James. That's that PDCG live streamer client in effect. IRL right there for James. Could have hit him right here too. Oh, no. I guess he couldn't hit Carter right here. Right? Dude. And then how did Caleb scam a tie against Carter as well? Like, what happened here? That's got to be an insane scam. I don't even know if three P's getting in there early on. 40 damage. To be fair though, there was a lot of people up here that were teched for crystal. There was also hail up here, by the way as well. There's kind of a lot of them. But like, I mean, Nettie was gonna be okay against crustle with dusknoir. It's not great still, but like, it's like. Okay, Right? Yeah. Actually cord was ready for the crustles with the ruffian handle. Fans got to be obnoxious as well. A bond And Henry had the. The chi you like, they were ready for him. Yeah, yeah, there definitely was. I guess it's like something we saw kind of get up there. Like the couple of the players who were tech for cross soul or upsell alongside there alongside the crossfit players and eventually, you know, did event. Did eventually hit them and take them out. Yeah. Which like. Yeah, right here. A bond beating Cooper. Yeah. Or beat across all on the winning. And I think tort hit back to back crosses in his last two swiss rounds. Actually, I think that is correct. There's actually a funny story too that I heard that toward played ruffian in his deck because he kept hitting someone playing crustle on the ladder at high elo who kept eerieing away his tool scrapper. So he played ruffian because his tool scrapper kept getting eeried and the person he was playing against constantly was Carter at high elo. So that's kind of like a cool little metagame that can develop up at the high ladder. Like before these ics when people are grinding, you're gonna play against people who you're. If you're like someone who's expecting to be up at the top end at some point in the event, if you're up at 1850 plus Elo, you're probably gonna play against other people who are going to be up at the top end at some point. Right. So then there's a question of. There's a certain point we should stop playing TCG Live so you don't get teched against four and then lose the winning end to the guy who put Ruffian in his deck because he played against you on PTCG Live. Yeah, so Carter played a little bit too much TCG Live. People thought there couldn't be enough, but apparently there is a limit. The limit is when the Ruffian gets added to the Zorg deck over the Tool scrapper. I forgot how many games that is. So Carter needs to go back and like think about how what his break point was. Series of the tool scrapper. Yeah. Be funny if at a certain. A certain. If that would. I imagine it gets so metagamed up there that at a certain point you just start throwing against someone on purpose to make them think that the matchup is better for them. Actually. You've heard the story of like the Great Tusk Mill medicine. Yeah, I have. Yeah. Where it's like if you play against someone on ladder up at the high Elo and you want to see their decklist, you just queue right back in with Great Tusk Mill and then mill their deck so you get to see their 60. I think that's been. I think when people see their opponent flip over a Great Tusk, they concede though. I don't think there. I don't know, man. People got to keep that. That precious Elo they've worked so hard for. Can you really. Can you give it up? Can you give it up? You give up 10 Master League Arceus points. It's probably more than that up that high though, isn't it? Well, I think it's just. It's relative to who you can you're playing against. So any Elo, it doesn't really matter, I don't think. Yeah, but it's harder to gain it back in theory as well, though. Sure, sure. I'm not gonna let them see my full 60 though. What I'm conceiving you can have the dub. I'll boost you so high up that we won't even play against each other again. Wait. Tusk to the moon, bro. Oh, man. But yeah, let's look at the meta game for the event. I mean, no real surprise. Still leading the way. It is a little bit higher than it has been. It's been like 30 and I guess it should make sense, like the biggest tournament of the year. Like more people are going to take it serious. On average that more people would gravitate towards dragapults. Yeah. So it becomes 35 of the day one meta game. Yeah. Nothing else too crazy there. We got the sixes. I guess Raging Bolt's like the big fall off there. Right. But it's like everything else is just so low in percentage. Like it's always kind of hard to quantify or like discuss too much. But I think the thing that stands out is the Raging ball fall off and then Ogre Pond Meganium, I think taking its slot. Although not that much more over Al Kazam. Kind of a little bit more Mega Greninja than I maybe would have thought, to be honest. True. But once again it's only 3%. Right. It's like so hard to. Not a great conversion rate for the. The Mega Green Ninja, actually. Let's take a look at that. That's probably like a more relevant number to look at or we could look at. Let's just take a. Take a look at the day 2 meta percentage real fascia so we can show off what was Lugia's peak in day two? It was like 50. It was. It was like this. Yeah. Yeah. About the same difference though. The difference though is that all Lugias were like the same 54 cards probably. Yeah. Right now we got the pulp variants are. They're. They're wide. There's different text. You get to choose what you want to play. So Hammer pult is like 35. Oh my God. 9% and pull chicken three, which ended up having a pretty decent tournament, honestly. John Webb getting top eight with it. And then I really liked this list from Jackson Ford. There's a lot of cool stuff going on with this one. He got 12th place, top 16. Yeah. The clefairy and the least pearl. And I really like the least pearl because it does feel like often like clefairy attacking with clefairy just doesn't really change the price trade in the mirror match too much. Like you Get a fast two, but then they get a fast two back and it's hard to even line up the clefairy sometimes because it's like you need to be attacking to a non damage dragon ball. But the air balloon I'm sure helps a ton with that because that's one of like the issues is mobility. You do have the Blaziken but it doesn't get that much energy in play. Especially when you have to like worry about your blaziken getting gust trapped all the time with your energy attachments. But the air balloon kind of solves that problem, which frees up your energy to be able to get into a more aggressive clefairy I assume. And then you can utilize it more aggressively when you're behind because if you're behind, your opponent could just trade out through the clefairy and they just still just won the prize trade. But with the Lily's pearl it gives you like that price trade edge, I assume. I think the card I kind of low key like the most in this decklist is the air balloon. Yeah. Just like so often people try to. It works a little bit less I guess against Blaziken than other Pulse variants because you can get three energy and play in a turn right through the use of Blazing and plus Crispin. Yeah. Though this deck does only play one Crispin but the air balloon just helps you man like not have to commit an energy to retreat whenever they try to stick something for a turn to get back into a game. Which happens so so often. And also of course like with secret boxes, the A spec like just having two different ways to get value from the secret box tool card. Yeah, I just. I really like the way this list is constructed, to be honest. Yeah. Boss Blaziken unfair stamp is a situation we've seen come up actually quite a few times post rotation where it like loses the Blaziken player at the game. It just gets stuck returning the game's over grim for the attach the air balloon or it's like another out to move it afterwards that's a little bit less costly. The air balloon is very, very cool. Also with the Lily's clefairy. And when I interviewed Jackson, one of the things he talked about was how with Pidgeot Charizard, one of the things he liked doing back in like the Radiant Charizard days was making like a one prizer board with Radiant Charizard. Right. And with Lily's clefairy with the Pearl you can do the same Thing. Yeah, yeah. Definitely do some more options for. What's it called? Price trading. Yeah. So overall, decent tournament there for the. Compared to, you know, the 6% of it or whatever it was in day two. Blaziken or. Sorry, 3%. Yeah. Let's look at the conversions real fast is the last thing I want to take a look at. Put the variant grouping on. If there's any outliers. Ogre Pomeganium did not have a good convert. Interesting. I mean, there was a lot of mole trace though, right? A lot of yes in the blade in the dragon Pulse. Yeah. I also saw some people saying like that the high drapple deck was like just a fab that had faded already. Like. Yeah, I could see that as well. Lucario had a bad time. Mega Greninja, of course. I mean, maybe a little bit more predictably. Had a bad time. Dude, the B. No, not the B drill. Okay. Got Michael up there though. 941. It's not terrible with the aroma. This is the build I liked the best at the end was the aroma build. The hyper Aroma. Garrett's got 842 hit the box. The rare candy. We got Brennan Legacy Energy. This was one of the first ASPECs I tried. And then as soon as they got it crushing hammered, I removed it. Just not worth it. Max rod. And then let's look at the Greninjas 471st place. 8 and 6. I feel like this is pretty standard for Greninja as well. Right. As far as the list goes. So most people are doing to don't spars. Both Greninjas. The easy's tranquility. Yeah, Yeah, yeah. Just not enough going on for this deck right now, I guess. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. I feel like the card's really, really good still. I think it'll. I think it'll come around eventually for it. I feel like this card is just missing something right now, you know, like, I mean like this deck. Yeah. GX coming out. That's pretty good for it. So maybe that'll be the. The tipping point. Maybe if like a Starmie type card comes out or something like that. Yeah. Maybe a better way to like move energy because like energy recycler is like putting in the deck is just kind of mid. But it might be the best thing to do at that point. You should just play the great hall net though. Is Recycler even legal? Yeah, it just. It just wishes like superior energy retrieval was the legal. I feel like aggressively recover a Ton of energy. Commit less space here. Basic energy in general, I guess, but we don't have that, unfortunately. Study and play come together on a Windows 11 PC and for a limited time, college students get the best of both worlds. Get the unreal college deal. Everything you need to study and play with select Windows 11 PCs. Eligible students get a year of Microsoft 365 Premium and a year of Xbox game Pass ultimate with a custom color Xbox wireless controller. Learn more@windows.com studentoffer while supplies last ends June 30th terms @aka this episode is brought to you by State Farm. You know those friends who support your preference for podcasts over music on road trips? That's the energy State Farm brings to insurance. With over 19,000 local agents, they help you find the coverage that fits your needs so you can spend less time worrying about insurance and more time enjoying the ride. Download the State Farm app or go online@statefarm.com like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. The Great hall net not enough. More people are playing energy retrievals instead of that. Yeah. And then alakazam, you know, 20%. I mean decent conversion still, decent play rates, but no top 32 finishes for the Zam after a win in Indy. Yeah, see, I'm kind of struggled at this event. I felt like for sure did not have the best of best of times. Some good players there playing at Diego Cal still, you know, top 64 is cash, right. So I mean, I think that's like a decent bar. Like if someone comes away with 2K on the weekend they had, I'd say a successful weekend overall. Right. I was about to say I saw that 0% at the bottom, but it was other. I was like, what the heck, 0% for 44 decks. What. What classifies as other? Oh, this deck. Auntie Dustin or his other. What? There's something it just sometimes happens with like a deck where like there's some weird like the cincinno being in here probably makes this not a matang or whatever. Yeah, right. For sure. This is a funny one though, this one. This is like definitely someone who's just trying to like trigger as many opponents as possible with some cincinnato cheese. Yeah. Make them attack the chino, flip the coin, see how it goes. But yeah, we've talked about the metagame, we talked about James's list. Let's look at the rest of top cut. It was an 11 player top cut, 6 dragapults and then 5 unique decks besides the dragapult variants. Let's look at the like non Dragon ball decks first I guess. And then after James we got Ross Cawthon there with a top four. Surprisingly Ross's first ever IC top cut. But you know he's one of the greats in the history of the game. Obviously doesn't like put the time into the game that he did when he was younger. But still showing, you know. Hey, I mean he got second place at a special championships this year as well. So he's showing, you know he can still make deep runs at these tournaments. This is I think probably his most impressive, impressive finish. And he even mentioned it as well since maybe like he got top cut at Worlds in 2016. You know he got top 16 at Worlds in 2022 but this deck took him to a top four at an AIC slow king. Yeah. What went the Slow King which actually I think ended up being like not a great play for the tournament. There was way more shaman than I thought there was going to be at this tournament. I didn't think like. Like I remember like looking next to me or something. Maybe it wasn't like my first round but I saw like a shaman next to me or maybe my opponent was playing a shaman across from me in round one. And then I look up at the stream and Daichi has a shaman on his bench. And I was like what the heck? Why is there so they're like people are doing the shaman thing. So it definitely felt like Slow King was a. Actually a pretty mediocre play for the tournament just based on how many shaman people actually rolled up with. But Ross is able to slip through. I like his list as well. Like super straightforward. Like his list was like I feel like Brennan took a step with how straightforward his list was. You know, just narrowing it down to like two attacking options. But I feel like Ross almost went a step further and was just like only Cipher. Only Lily does have the zero aura. So like did mix another attacker in there but like no Lana's aid two night stretcher on the recovery like is keeping it super simplistic here. 3 Kangaskhan planning to attack is you know a few times, like two times with Slow King and then like Clefairy cleans up. Yeah. Maybe a third slow King does happen or yeah, the clefairy gets involved also no smoochum as well. Which I found kind of no smoochum or badoo which up against like crushing hammer dragapult specifically can be like I don't. It could just be tough to ever like to be able to get to a Kirum before they set up because they're going to do you so you can't wonder as patch. You don't smoosh them enough energy into play or do them to stop them from being able to use crushing Hammer. They can pretty easy like stop you from attacking until they get the Dragon Pulse online. And like you never get the Kira online now you don't need to attack with Karen to actually win the prize right in that matchup. But I feel like you generally want to attack first against Dragapult. If they get to attack first then it's like really really scary. So that is a interesting omission here from from Ross's build. The top four game against Nettie I think is the all timer as well to be honest where Ross took the super early lead in Game 1 when Nettie was bricking and then Nettie like climbed back, had a crazy six to one prize come back, took all six prize cards in one turn. And then similarly in game number two like Ross started Kyure did nothing was so slow. Nettie was item locking him. Ross just could do nothing. And then Ross popped off on the turn that Nettie broke the Item lock and KO'd everything on Nettie's board and set up to just KO the Dragapult to end the game. It was a pretty sick set to be honest, but does ultimately end with Nettie getting the win as well. Moving on to second place. We'll look at the dragapult decks in a minute but congrats to Ross. I think cementing himself still is one of the greats. I mean it really shouldn't have ever been questioned but for anyone who did question it, you know, one of the greats in the history of the game. Yeah, yeah. Goddess. World's invite of course again this year even before this top four finish, I think he probably had it locked up. But that also gives him the auto invite as well. Then we've got Rahul with back to back deep runs, got second place at Indy. Ran it back with the crab. The Crab. I almost said crab Omnibo. I was trying to say crab the crustle with some new tricks this time around. Him and Carter playing the same 60 again. Carter losing the win and end of Tord. We talked about that a minute ago. Where did he. Yeah, he ended up top 32 but yeah, same 60 with this list. I think the big standout for sure here is the hand trimmer as a new addition to their list. There's a couple interesting cards in here as well. Heavy on the stadiums. I think they just had the one stadium in there. But like Watchtower becoming really popular in Paul Moore. I think it's like the. That's like the one step that crystal players need to take. Going to this tournament is like, okay, how do I beat Pult more consistently? Because you really want to, like, dominate the Dragon Ball matchup as crossword. That's like your thing. So you got to make sure that your build does that. And they're also doing it without the psyduck, which is the street did not include the Psyduck, but I'm sure that was one of the focal points of like the Han Trimmer and the Zara. I didn't realize they had both, but you mentioned that earlier. I think. Yeah, they have both in there. Not tech for Alakazam. They were. They're willing to take the loss of the Zam though. Yeah. Maybe they just think Big Kang and then these two cards is like enough. Yes. Oh. I mean, maybe that's what their reasoning might be to. To be honest, maybe you just set up trying to set up two Kangaskhans or just the one. And then you have Zarosic plus the hand trimmer and the double Eerie, which is like something we saw potentially be impactful when Rahul did play against Keras in the finals of Indy recently. So maybe they felt like that was enough. They didn't have to go the full Rockets package or anything like that, which would have been a pretty big commitment. Then we've got Yuho Kalama with the Rockets Mewtwo. Now this deck was like kind of totally off the radar. I feel like heading into this tournament, but did get a new card in the mix. Prism Tower being played in this deck. It's so funny. Like, you know, all these powerful rocket supporters and then this deck is like, like built to play through these powerful rocket supporters. And Team Rockets factory is like what the game designers envisioned. But no, the way players are going is four Determination and two Prism Tower. And this build here from Yuho I think is definitely like there's a little bit of innovation from what we had seen previously. I mean, we've seen the lucky helmets. It felt like Max Belt was kind of necessary now to like deal with like Hydrapples and Laserkins and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, no Archer, which is something we had seen previously. And actually Yuho has like been kind of sneakily innovating with Team Rockets Mewtwo the last couple year of European events as well. Not Turin, but before that I actually almost played his list from Utrecht at Melbourne. Because I looked at it, I was like, oh, I kind of like this list. Even though I hate Explorer's Guidance. I like the idea of Explorer's Guidance in the Mewtwo deck because you just need to like cycle the bad cards out of your deck. But that's what Prism Tower does now for you. Not at the cost of your supportive return and not at the cost of playing a bad supporter like the Explorer's Guidance. But I almost played this list at Melbourne before I ended up on the. The Honchkrow. So he's been. He's been innovating. He's been playing the Mewtwo deck for a couple tournaments in a row now. And it's the top cut here at naic, which is cool to see. And that's actually one of the few decks that I played with today on Stream was. Was Yuho's deck. And then I played with towards as well. And it seems to flow. It flows better than any Mewtwo deck I played with recently. So I think it's definitely the way if you're looking to pick up Mewtwo again. It was gifted with a couple zorks on the way up. Quite a few. Yeah, a couple. And then even the crystals as well. Get those matchups in there because the deck does have a lot of like really good matchups like the Zoroarks, the Crustles, stuff like that. All very, very good for the Mewtwo deck. Did you see this guy? Taylor Cook's Sarah Ledge. I'm definitely gonna try something out with the. The cat dude. Look at how clean the two lines. The legendary two row decklist. There it is. This guy said this was this guy's first tournament of the year. Like he had played, like he had not played a cup or challenge. I don't think he even said. I think he said he played a challenge, right? Oh, maybe he did say he played a challenge. Okay. Challenge before this. So, yeah, very cool build. I like it. I like the idea of the catchers instead of just playing bosses. The. The deck is so much more. You don't have pal pad, you get to play so many less tricks. So you may as well lean into that as heavily as possible and go with something like this. I did wonder watching his game against Natalie play out if like Repel just accomplishes the same thing. There's got to be moments where you want to chase that tube riser for sure. Yeah. Pops or something. Yeah. But is there enough of them where you couldn't go like 2 repel 3 boss or something like that. I guess there's maybe 3 catcher to repel. You could get rep. I mean the deck misses iron bundle for sure. I think like you wouldn't hate to have iron bundle back but we don't got him so maybe a couple repels do. People were not playing the bundle. I didn't know they were noers. They definitely were not knowers. The bundle was definitely very good. And then looking at the rest of top cut we've got rounding it out toward rec 11 yet another IC top cuts does lose in top 8 or top 16 I guess in ASM he tweeted that he was pretty upset with himself. He that he threw two unwinnable or unlosable games but ends up 10th place all the less with in Zoark. Yeah. And I mean there's not too much more you could. You could play like a reshiram in here but obviously it basically has everything as far as the Zork deck goes and then it course can make it all function because of the tomes. Right. Transformation tome is the car that is carrying the deck in terms of being able to go from an unplayable board state where you can't get, you know, your monkey dory and your Darmanitan on the field to be able to fix that in the mid late game and getting those powerful attackers or options into play like the Evital when you need them. So what made you not want to play a Tome Zoark build versus the one you ended up playing? I said I hadn't played enough with it. I tried Eric's build from got top 128 in Turin but it was basically that build was basically Tomes plus Marcos Fuentes's build. And I was like the tomes have no value like such low value here because the Marcos of Fuentes build is basically as straightforward as possible. And there was kind of like Tomestone in there which is like they're cool but like not that good. So I tried that build after Turin. Speaking of Fuentes, have you seen this deck yet? Yeah, yeah I have seen the Sylveon deck, the Sylveon wall deck, the like I couldn't find crystals so I wanted to play Sylveon instead Deck. That's what I. I don't actually know. That's what I questioned about this. Like it's like is this actually better than Crustle? I think it has a more narrow matchup spread. You get to use just synth. Yeah. But like is that. I guess I just don't yeah. Is that worth it? It could be. I said I just don't know. Yeah. Not sure either. You're doing less damage, right? You. How much damage does it do? 100. A hundred? Like, not killing stuff like monkey dory is like pretty bad, right? So I feel like that's like a big. Because like you. You hit. You didn't care. The monkey dory. Now they retreat or. Yeah, they retreat. The monkey door is 100 damage and play. Now you gotta chase it again. Yeah, I'm not sure. I'm not sure if this is any better than Crustle or not. I have no clue. This stream game was so comedic, dude. It was so fun to watch. Yes. Because I mean, I'm not trying to flame anyone. Okay. But after seeing it play out, there's no way this deck should ever beat Garchomp. Really? The matchup seems so good for Garchomp. The gab bites. Just hit too hard. The. Yeah, yeah. It just does too much. This deck is too slow as well. There was maybe some questionable plays from the Garchomp player, but you know, he had no idea what was going on. Like what his opponent's deck did. Yeah, yeah. And that is the benefit of playing a deck like this. But it did lead to some hilarious moments in game three. It basically became Fernando's win condition to just wall with this feasandipity for like forever. And it almost happened. It like actually almost happened. Oh, can it not get one it ko'd? I guess it can't, right, with the cape. Oh no, it could because you could. You go Garchom. Big attack, right? Yeah, but it's a risk. It. There was some questionable decisions from when the attacks were done. And like with the. There was definitely not some proper math being done on the Garchomp side of the table that led to the guy discarding his energy when it wasn't even going to get a ko. Oh, like the one Ako. Oh, no. It's not even your side. I thought it was both players for the energy feather. It's just your side. Oh, okay. So when anything. Yeah, well, Fernando was not attacking. He was not attacking. Oh really? Why not? Because he didn't want to give the guy damage for spirit. Yeah. Oh, sure, sure, sure. The guy also would not leave himself a bench spot for Spiritomb. Is he playing for deck out then? Like, what were you. It was. It was comedic, the game. To be honest. That was another all timer. Oh my gosh. It was. It was a funny one. It's worth going back to Watch. Definitely a very interesting deck. Oh, wait. Does he beat beating Dragapult by using the Espeon Ex over and over again and just de evolving the board? Maybe. I don't know. It could be a win condition, theoretically. This episode is brought to you by Palmolive. Family time isn't just the big moments. It's weeknight dinners, sitting around the table, everyone talking all at once. So when the plates are empty and the sink is full, use Palmolive Ultra. Palmolive's most powerful formula removes up to 99.9% of grease, leaving your dishes sparkling clean. And the new convenient pump makes cleaning even easier, so you can spend less time tackling dishes and more time together. Shop now@palmolive.com this episode is brought to you by Redfin. You're listening to a podcast, which means you're probably multitasking, maybe even scrolling home listings on Redfin, saving homes without expecting to get them. But Redfin isn't just built for endless browsing. It's built to help you find and own a home with agents who close twice as many deals. When you find the one, you've got a real shot at getting it. Get started@redfin.com. own the dream. It doesn't play Grass Energy. Are you just gonna get mind bended, though? It can't. It can't use that attack. Oh, so it is for the first attack then, I guess. Yes. It cannot use Amazes. We'll be psyching out. We're psyching out, buddy. True. And did that get over the top eight? Yep. I got all the top eight non Dragon Ball decks. Now it's time for the Dragonfall decks, led by Nettie Kosik with the Pult Nor with the Hammers and the handheld fan. He had it all. Yeah. Pretty strong into the season here for Nettie as well. Got a. Was it a top four? Top eight with Garchomp? Yeah, Top four at Prague. Now gets a top cut here at Naic. And yeah, kind of just like leaned a little bit more into the Hammers in the pulp build. Similar. I mean, they kind of expanding on what we saw from Justin Newdorf recently. Right. With the Pult Nor with three Crushing Hammers. Now we're on a four Crushing Hammers and a handheld fan. Only two boss, though, which is definitely very interesting to see one less boss in the deck. But you have so much re. Oh, only two Dragon Ball DX as well. Interesting. Gotta fit this stuff somehow. Very interesting. But I guess we have that much reach for your opponent's bench with crushing hammers industrial. Obviously the boss become like less necessary but those seem like two pretty powerful cards for the mirror match the boss and the third Dragon Ball tx. That's actually pretty curious to me for sure. You're really hoping that you can break your opponent's item lock. That is one of the things with the bolt nor build though is you can like pop clops on their purdue and then itchy palm them to get through that get through their side of the item lock aggressively. So that is something you can do to gain access to your items sooner and put the pressure on your opponent. Yep. Yeah Nettie played extremely well to be honest. Throughout the course of the weekend the games I saw top four and finals I guess the main ones on stream but. The you gotta you had to feel bad for him in game three of the finals man the double dreepy prize. He just like he just couldn't do anything. It was so sad to see. There was just like no like yeah he just got run over. There was no no plays. He started me out like his hand was dead. It was just he got run over. Nothing he could have done. It was pretty comedic when he like realizes like his best out is to also cruel Arrow alongside James as he's using cruel Arrow his only out to do anything is missed the also cruel arrow back but obviously it was like it's way too slow. Not enough. And yeah that one was over. The game three was over pretty quickly. I didn't actually see any of the. I don't think I think I only watched game three if I'm remembering correctly. So I only got to see the the cruel Arrow game. Yeah but it was definitely. Oh James was in game too as well so yeah yeah I can imagine it's pretty good attacker in the matchup for sure. It was playing candies so you don't have to risk the the candy pulp coming out of nowhere. Yeah but congrats to Nettie on a pretty sick run. Leading the dragapult charge on the weekend. Justin Newdorf back to back top fours just got top four at indie with Pult Hammer Dusknor dropped the dusknoars for the denunsparce which is pretty interesting to like have a big shift like that just a couple weeks apart. I mean the format did technically change right. But ye not a lot really changed. Going with a more I guess neutral build. I mean this is obviously only a couple cards different than what Hedrick has been playing and winning with when we saw him at la but has like the roses over the third Crispin gets a special red card involved over the judge Third night stretcher over an energy, I think. Yeah. Then obviously it's the Risky Ruins build the roses popping up a lot more as well in non Dusknor builds. Like that's normally where we've seen it is in Dusknoir builds. But Justin had it here and then also a bond and Henry had it in their list. I have to imagine it's gotta be as a response to crushing hammers. I'd have to assume like. And this is a really interesting list as well. The Alakazam line, the 06, the chi you like. I don't even fully know the Abra Risky Ruins combo to like generate damage and play is kind of funny. Yeah. Also what we saw from Henry in a game was he used Abra to get out of a confusion situation over treat into it. Yeah. And then he wasn't. He didn't have to flip from the monkey dory to like when that actually comes up a decent amount when you're playing like pulp with it. And unfortunately dust nor to have that to get into to cycle out to remove the condition. Also only three Ultra ball but I just had two dawn. So I guess that's. You have still plenty of outs to find your. Find your stage twos. Yeah. This was the most innovative build I feel like on the weekend for sure. No hammers as well obviously. I mean it's kind of. It would be kind of hard I think to fit hammers in here with the other stuff they got going on. Yeah. I have to imagine like the. I assume the routes you take with this. I mean you have like the two monkey doors. You can get that up set up more aggressively to kind of win the Badoo war if you want. But like sometimes you get into those stalemates. I assume the 06 is kind of break the stalemate against other Pulse but then also strong against the Al Kazam matchup. And I don't know all the use cases for the Alkazam as well though. That's an interesting inclusion. I mean kind of similar to what we talked about with Jackson Ford and his Lily's Pearl. Lily's Clefairy. Right. You can make a pretty good one prize board state like with people aren't playing judge in their decks right now. So like you're. You generate a lot of cards in hand with this deck as well. So Alakazam is going to do a pretty decent amount of damage. Honestly. Knockout just comes through Alakazam and they have a bunch of Dracloaks on the bench chilling with some energy. It's also draw power when your poke pads like when you're. You already have your cloaks in play. Pokepad feels like it becomes useless a lot of the times. I mean I guess that's where the dunsparce comes into the mix normally but gives you more value for dawn as well. If you want to play through dawn in the mirror match more aggressively with item lock and such. Yeah, this was a pretty cool list. Definitely. We got John Webb with the pulse Blaziken. We took a peek at this earlier, but he's got Blaziken. He's got the chi you as well tech for the crystals. He's got the shaman text for the slow kings. He was kind of text for everything, you know. Yeah, he had. I had all the text in here. Did rock the double Crispin. I feel like most people have gone down to like the one Crispin more recently. Had the clefairy try to make that work in the mirror match. Area Zero Watchtower. I would see more people adopt like the Area Zero chin pow thing that we saw Cato doing over at the Japan championships. We didn't see anyone rocking anything like that. Miguel Angel Marin with the straightforward Pult hammers. No to Dunsparce but did have the moltres and evil tall. Yeah. And then interesting stadium split ruins jamming. And the Watchtower saw the jamming from Nettie as well. I have to imagine the jamming from Nettie was a crustal tech though. Yeah. Deal with the heroes cape. Right. This one in here. I don't know about the jam in here. I guess. I mean still affects tool cards obviously. But what are we specifically going I wonder. We're specifically going after with that. Maybe the handheld fans up against the Alakazam deck Extra stadium just for the Alakazam matchup as well. Right. To get rid of those nighttime minds. Have a better chance there. Yeah. Reasonable. Could see it. And then a bond. We already looked at his list and then we got Caleb Rogerson rounding it out looking like this is exactly what Justin was playing. Right? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Same 60 here. And I think Hedrick was also playing that 60 if I'm not mistaken. There's the crew. Yeah. Yeah. Not a bad showing for sure. There's a pretty funny moment I see David Cohen's name on this. For those who don't know the 2011 world champion. It's gotten back into the game the last year or so started playing again. There's a funny, funny picture that I saw David and Ross sitting next to each other in a round. Yeah. So of course David beat in that World Championship Championship final match. Pretty funny. Fifteen years later, there they are. Yeah, still rocking. Everyone comes. Dude, there's so many people I saw who were playing this weekend who I haven't seen in a really long time. Everyone comes back. No one ever really quits. They just take very long breaks. Very long breaks. Sometimes not very long breaks. Some people quit and they're back halfway through the next season. But it's not a bad thing. It's not a bad thing. It's a good game, It's a good community. Can't complain. I'm just gonna say, anyone who you see posting something like, I'm not gonna play very much next year right now, at the end of the season, just. Just keep your eye on them at the start of the year. You know, just make a mental note. How many tournaments do they go to before the end of 20, 26. Maybe it's more than the year before. You never know. And then as we look down to the rest of Top cut or top 32 here, I mean we see still plenty of Dragon Pulse. And this is where we see some more of like the Ogre Pawn decks in the mixed Mace with a slot box. Heroes Cape Petch Yuvitol Package Double Monkey Dory. He's been playing this for a little while as well. I think he played a slot box deck in Prague, right? Yeah, he's been playing it for a long time. Got top 32 with the same 60 as the. The winning deck here. It was pretty. I mean usually like post big tournaments, like this is a lot to like look at and see. But like when I was like, like what my. My goal for my stream today was like to play, you know, an AIC decks. But honestly this was just a lot of dragapult. The metagame is still like pretty. There's not that much. I think the coolest stuff to come out of this tournament was Zoroark decks. Even like all about Blitzel's deck, you know, kind of aware of it. You know, Emma just got taboo with it recently. But then there's like Liam's work, you know, there's towards orc. Liam's orc here. Very interesting. Drapion Purloin Absol on the transformation tomes as well. So very cool build here. A lot of things to take away from Zorok. I feel like moving forward for sure. We've seen a lot of cool ideas from any dude. Drapion has doubled in Price since NAICS what $0.07 to $0.14. There it is. Drapion. Investors going crazy right now. Yeah. So yeah, that's the main thing. I feel like. I feel like there's like cool things to take away for Zorark. More stuff to try out there probably. We'll see what comes of that. But everything else, you know, I mean a lot of pulse, a lot of the pulse were expected. Slop stuff was expected. More crystal I guess in top cut than or in contention for cut than I would have predicted. But it's not a huge shock. Yeah. Unless high grapple. There's a couple here in top 32 still. A couple of slow kings still up here. Decent amount of crystals. Honestly up in the what, four of them in the top 32 or three of them. Yeah, three of them. Top 32. Yeah. Hale lost a winning in as well. Carter and Hale both lost winning ends. We were very close to a lot of crystals in cut. Spade off in this one it looks like then. Yeah, I definitely would have not predicted Russell to have gone to be. Have they been this successful? I thought like yeah, I was like maybe one will like just find their way through but quite a few on their way to the winning and. And we're more probably in contention for quite a while in the tournament as well. Gavin chin on the Ethan's typhlosion. A couple of these popping up. Yeah. Yeah. I feel like there might be something there for eating cyphosion as well. I kind of said that after playing with Yasmin Kiss. Yeah, Yasmin's list from. From Europe. Like playing against some Dragon balls. I was like, man, you can play this. It's okay if this like ends up going pretty slowly for you early on and you can still like make the comeback as typhlosion in that matchup. It felt like pretty consistently. So obviously like it's got a good trade into all the two prize slot box, whatever you want to call it decks probably pretty decent against Zork for the most part. We actually saw Gavin versus Henry in the last round on stream for like one of the feature matches, which that was actually a cool thing we did throughout the weekend for those of you watching at home. We did see a decent amount of the feature match games between rounds. Not like a full set but we would get like a game one or we'd pick it up in game two. So it just like got to see more of the tournament which was cool. And we saw Gavin versus Henry. They weren't. It wasn't a winning into cut but still like, you know, there's still stuff to play for. They went in into top 16 or whatever. Gavin in game one prized double Cyndaquil. So didn't really stand a chance, unfortunately. Look at Gavin's. You haven't hit two beedrill though on the. Oh, and a lot of high draft and three high travels. Cleaning up the grass grass fellas on the way through. Look at this run, dude. This crustle guy was definitely not happy. Almost got the 60 in day two as well. Yeah, just stopped by Henry at the end there. Yeah. 601 even made cut. This is another one of those tournaments where 612 was the. The. The ASIM cut off, which I think was fine. I think it's fine. Like we'll. We'll get that extra round if they just give us more space. And I think, I mean we're going to talk about that a little bit later. I think they plan to give us more space next season for sure. Any other lists you want to look at here from the top 64 ish. I wish there was, but it was honestly a pretty boring like. Yeah, it's not that the decks that came out of the tournament were not that exciting, which is. It's fine. This is kind of a product of the format or the metagame, whatever you want to call it. Dark decks were like kind of the cool standouts, I feel like. But then besides that, it's just a lot of dragapult and a lot of kind of the same stuff that we've been seeing previously. This was surprising. Funny to Mega Lucario. Still second most popular deck in juniors. Oh my gosh. That win rate though. 36G's not good. It's not good. That's not good. But it's like a G. It's like it's a junior's deck, you know. Yeah, yeah, for sure. I agree. Definitely less popular in seniors. I'm sure. We did show this, I think on the stream. The. Yeah, we did show the junior senior metagame breakdown. I want to say I feel like there was talks of it. I feel like we showed it. I don't know. Yeah, pretty sure got shown in some point. Well, let's recap our predictions. So we actually. We forgot to make our predictions on the main podcast last week, so. Oh yeah, apologize to anyone who was looking forward to hearing what our predictions were going to be. We did them on the bonus episode that was like not intentional. Not trying to paywall our predictions or anything like that. I did think about like making our Clickbait for the bonus episode. Our secret predictions for Naics. It was a total accident. That's all really. Like literally at the very beginning of the boat was like we forgot to do our predictions. But anyway, yeah, we still did them and we wrote them down. So we'll share with you what they were. The first one was how many non dragapult decks would there be in cuts? Azul predicted five, I predicted three, and Azul got it right on the money. It was. Wait, was it? Actually, I didn't even like real. I didn't count. Let's go exactly 5 non dragon. I got faith. I got faith in the Dragon Ball haters. Let's go dub. The next one we did was what would be the highest placing non special red card, Chaos Rising card. And we both said beedrill. But I think once we realized what other cards existed in that set, we probably would have both picked Metagross because it's in Slow King. I probably would have picked Tome. Honestly, expecting some Zorg to be up in here. Yeah, I would have predicted. I would have predicted the. The Metagross for sure. I forgot that Metagross was in Slow King, which is a Chaos Rising card. Yeah. And the answer was, of course the Metagross not be drill. They were lucky. Oh, we haven't checked this yet though. How many new entries will Brennan's Slow King list have? Azul said five, I said eight. Let's take a look now. I'm excited to see this. How many? Oh, wow. Not that many. Oh, wait, it's fine. It's. No, it's four. We're not a junior. All right, Are we gonna count the junior one? It is an entry on Limitless. All right, we'll give it to you. 5 you5 pretty good, buddy. Pretty good. And then we did a fourth prediction. As always, we did pick a player to make top cuts. I went with Brennan Cameraman and Brennan did not go to the tournament. So it was not a good pick. And then Azul went with Pedro Pertussi who got like 70th something. So had a decent tournament. Was Pedro playing? Pedro played Pult Hammers. Let down. Not the P. Had the shaman for the Slow Kings. They were ready for Brennan to show up. Did not show up. Too many. Brandon knew there was gonna be too many shamans. He's like, nah, I'm gonna sit this one out. Not worth it. Well, there were some announcements made at NAIC as well. The first thing they showed was that NAIC next year will be in Chicago. So that's a pretty big move. Totally opposite, you know, side of the country, I guess north to southwest, right? Not opposite side, but you know, I don't know. Yeah, pretty far away from New Orleans, but still like pretty centrally located, like you know, Midwest, whatever. And a very big airport, very easy for people to fly into internationally. Most people flying. A lot of people flying to this tournament had connections canceled in Chicago. You know, they were just so like a lot of people have to fly through Chicago anyway to get to this tournament from different parts of the country or different parts of the world. So yeah, I think Chicago gonna be a great spot for NAIC and also becoming a pretty big Pokemon city. They've got a lot going on there. There's a Pokemon fossil museum exhibit currently in Chicago. They just had Go fest in Chicago a couple of weekends ago. I don't know a lot of stuff going on in Chicago. Yeah, I'm definitely excited for Chicago. Even when I lived in. I've never been there. Even when I lived in Indiana. I went up to like the Illinois area, a couple shops in Illinois to play in some league cups but I never made my way into Chicago. But like everyone I know who like has ever lived in Chicago is a big fan of the city. So I'm excited to go to Chicago for the first time. Check it out. And they got a pretty big convention center I think. So I think we can be expecting big upgrade in terms of the number of players that will be able to competing at NAIC next year would be my guess. And we'll probably be there for a couple years as well. I mean that's what they've been doing pretty consistently, like two, three years. So I'd imagine we'll be in Chicago for a couple years as well. Which I think makes sense for them with their contract. When they like sign the contracts and stuff with these convention centers. It's just mutually beneficial for both people to commit to a long term deal. But we'll see. Yeah, Chris Brown, who is the director of Global Esports at tpci who you've if you recognize that name. Besides you know, being obviously like the. The singer Chris Brown. Not that Chris Brown. He also is you regularly in the Pokemon Presents videos. Like whenever there's something big coming out that Pokemon's announcing and like they want a spot about organized player, the world Championships, Pokemon xp, whatever it is. He's usually the one in there talking about it. He actually did an interview with Game Rants which they posted and there's a lot of information in here about the Move about worlds and about kind of like some of the just like little thought processes behind what they're doing in the future and stuff like that. So I mean I think this is a really good read. You know, people should definitely check it out. But he does talk in this about how growth was a big part of the reason for moving to Chicago. You know, here's one of the things. We are also looking to grow this venue. Talking about New Orleans, we had a three year deal and I think I shared some of the growth metrics we've been able to grow from when we moved into this venue for the first time three years ago to where we are now. We're up 150% in terms of what our attendance is. The shocking thing is we actually kind of reached our three year goal in two years and so this year everything sold out. We weren't really able to grow that event. So like they weren't able to grow NAIC more past like what they did last year because that was kind of, I think broad term what they were like looking for in a three year span. They did it in two, basically. Yeah. I think this is like hopefully a lot of people like take away from this like, like that like they care and they want bigger events, but like this is, they sometimes have to sign a three year deal with a convention center. Right. And they kind of lock some in in that third year to be a little bit smaller than they want. Like they want the bigger events and they're not working to not do it. So I think it's just always kind of silly. And like I said recently, this last episode, the episode before, we kind of look goofy as a community when we complain about everything without adding any kind of little bit of nuance. So like these kind of articles and this interview from Chris Brown, I think it's really nice to shed some light on the workings and the ins and out. And I, I think, I mean it should be pretty obvious but hopefully we can all understand that. They want the events to be massive, but it just like takes time. They have to like build up towards it. They got to make sure the infrastructure is there, the staff is going to be there. They got to make sure they can actually sell out the space as well. They don't want to get a convention center for 5 or 10,000 masters players and only 5,000 show up. Right. So there's got to be a little bit of back and forth. We got to build it up with them. We got to keep selling out events and they'll keep giving US space. And sometimes there'll be this unfortunate, you know, back to back Naics where they're the same size. And obviously this year we could have probably had 5000 masters players easily in at the event easy. Probably 6, 000 to be honest. So let's see what they do with Chicago. I don't know. I'm excited. There's also cool announcements about stuff around Worlds and the world Celebration tournaments that will be happening the week before Worlds at local Play Pokemon stores. They did this last year as well. You can win this winner stamped Pikachu promo card. There's also a normal version. They've done this card the last couple years where it's like Pikachu battling whatever the last year world champion card Pokemon is. It's kind of a cool one. And also world's accessories that you can win. TCG players will get card sleeves and a deck box while VG&GO players get a screen cleaner. But the deck box, dude, honestly, like I gotta go win one of these things. I want to go. I. This is a sick deck box. This is what they say the weekend leading up to Worlds. Yeah, that's right. It's cool for them to do more stuff like that. And they're also doing like what else are they doing in the downtime in the off season? They're the mid season celebration or off season celebration or something like that. Yeah. So it's cool to see them filling this. This void or this time with more stuff for players to do. It does kind of feel bad someone mentioned this or talked about this when I was at naic. But like we're only getting one tournament or I guess there's like two majors total in this format. Right? Like the continuation of this format just getting. Getting cut off completely. Yeah, but it's true every year. Like. Yeah, it is true every year. Yeah. But it always would be cool to see more. But yeah, I mean obviously there has to be a cutoff point somewhere. So there's always potential for more in every format. But we got to go next at some point. There's also an exclusive promo card for Pokemon xp. This is the same artwork as the normal Ascended Heroes Rayquaza. So that's a little bit of a bummer. I think that it's not like something a little bit more exclusive, but it's got the Pokemon XP stamp on it, which is cool. I like that stamp as well. I don't know. For some stamps on some Pokemon cards, I feel like it just. I don't vibe with it. But like, that's a good stamp. Pxp. And then they did reveal the Paradise Resort promo card as well. A lot of references in here to San Francisco. Right? You got the big iconic windy road, Archaladon, kind of like as the Golden Gate Bridge. Charjabug in here as like the trolley car seal or a spheal as like the, you know, seal. Sea lions at the Fisherman's Wharf. Right. Lots of stuff going as Psyduck's always there. Yeah, he's got to show up. So then we got the competitor kits. I saw someone zoom in on this and like you can't read the words on the hat and stuff. They're like, oh, no, it is fine. Oh, I think someone was just like, like, dude, I'm just gonna. I gotta get off Twitter. Never again. You're trying to like make it look like it was AI generated. I think, dude, I saw someone take a picture of this and say AI question mark. But I don't really see anything here that makes me think this is AI Me either. I did see some pictures floating around on Twitter that like the hat, like the words on the hat were like all gibberish. One thing I will say it looks fine is I am so glad it's not a big change. But they have changed the backpack design. The backpack has been the same ever since London Worlds. It's been the exact same backpack, just reskinned to each worlds the internationals. It's been the exact same like pocket design layout. One of the coolest things I always felt like of the world's competitor kits was like the unique backpacks or bags that it came in every single year. And then for the last few years it's just been copy paste the exact same one. Now it doesn't look like it's a big change, but they've got this like pin window up top, which I think is pretty cool. And the rest of it, you know, who knows what it looks like on the inside, I guess, but there's a water bottle holder on the outside. I don't even know if the current one has that. That's like mesh. I feel like the one that we have currently is like a pocket as opposed to mesh. So I don't know, I just want it to be different. I don't want the same backpack every single year. You can click over to the net literally the next image. Oh, yeah, there you go. More backpack shots. Yeah, there you go, Chip. There's your backpack. Oh, champion. I hadn't seen this stuff yet. I think I saw the Mat actually the champion line is what they call it. Exclusive to the person who becomes world champion. Very nice. I do like that they started doing that. I think it's pretty cool. But they start doing it in Japan. No, it's. So it's one of those things. I think we start doing it in London. They've always kind. They've always had some stuff like this. Like I think that there's always been like a jacket. But this is like they've started promoting it and like showing it. Yeah, it was like kind of something they did, but now they're like showing it. Yeah. Very cool though nonetheless. And then we got King Pikachu. What's the next Pikachu? That's Space Pikachu. That's the Pokemon XP plush of course. Yeah. Very, very cool. Believe it or not, I was out there, I walked out on stage and announced this stuff. The first time I saw it was when like after I said the words like I had not seen any of this until I was like out there on the stage. Actually I was going to ask you that after you said is that. What else did you announce? Was it just this? And then Chicago. Yeah. Tomorrow morning is knocking. Stock your fridge now. How about a creamy mocha Frappuccino drink? Or a sweet vanilla smooth caramel maybe? Or white chocolate mocha. Whichever you choose. Delicious coffee awaits. Find Starbucks Frappuccino drinks wherever you buy your groceries. Okay. Yeah. Revealed all this. I think that was it. Am I forgetting anything? I don't think so. The worlds this stuff right too. So yeah, very cool stuff going on. I think that's it for Naic stuff. Azul. Unless there's anything else. Any other thoughts? No, not that I can think of. Just once again excited for Chicago. I'm excited to see they got to give us like 5k masters at least. Right? Like for sure they're gonna give us 5 kms. I hope. Definitely. I think it does make a lot more sense too as well. He was like, yeah, we just kind of games growing too quickly. Right. We reach our, our three year goal in two years. Otherwise we probably would have seen like 5K at this event or something like that. So I, it's. I think they probably have a better understanding like moving forward and of course. But they have to. But they have to also like hedge right against the plateau. Right. So like they want to be able to meet the, the market. They don't want to have. They don't want to over what's it called. So we're still probably going to Sell NAIC next year. Some people are going to miss, but hopefully the number is quite a bit bigger from where we are right now. Well, it is time. Azul4 Guess that flavor text. Everyone's favorite segment of the podcast where each week Azul or I picks a card, reads the flavor text from it, and has the other host try to guess which Pokemon is featured on that card. And I did score myself some points last week. Two points. So I'm closing the gap a little bit. 45 for Azul, 42 for me. Again, we are going to the end of the season. Then we're going to reset for the new season with Guess that flavor text. Yeah. For each. If Azul is to guess the Pokemon correctly without any lifelines, which we have three of, he gets four points. And then for each lifeline he uses, he loses the potential of one of those points. The lifelines are what set the card is from what stage the card is. And read an attack name. And I do indeed have the card picked out. Azul, are you ready? I'm ready, Chip. It is normally peaceful, but will attack any who get between it and Honey, its favorite food. I mean, I think it's just Teddy Ursa. I've seen Teddy Ursa with the. It definitely is. There's artworks of Teddy Ursa with like Honey are reaching one more time. It is normally peaceful, but will attack any who get between it and Honey, its favorite food. Locking Teddy Orza. Locking it in. This guy's going crazy. Four point potential here for his little. You're sure you're locking it in? Yeah, sure. Why not? All right, well, I'll read off some of the lifelines for those of you playing along at home. The set the card is from is from Neo Destiny. There could be a Teddy or show in there, right? I think it is a Gen 2 set. Teddy Ursa is a Gen 2 Pokemon. It is a basic Pokemon. Easy to predict, though, as expected. Now, should I give you the attack name I was gonna give you or give you a different attack name now that you've locked it in? Give it. Give it something different for the people or give you the same one I was going to give you? You give me the same one you're gonna give me. You know. Okay. Guessing Tackle Eddie or she could have tackle. It could, but. So this is not a Teddy Ursa. I feel like there's some people out there listening who will have gotten this one. Putting the pieces together. Some video game knowers for sure. Another attack name for one last shot. For anyone listening along is charging horn. Charging horn. Not Tauros. It is, of course, Heracross. Heracross. No hair crosses about the honey like that. Yes, sir. Yeah. One of the ways you encounter Heracross, if I'm remembering correctly in like, the old games, is headbutting trees. Because it lives in the trees, because it likes honey. And then also, I think in diamond and Pearl, when you lather honey on trees, I think Heracross is one of the Pokemon you can encounter because of lathering honey on chi trees. Yeah. I was never getting. I was never getting to Heracross. I thought there was a decent shot of that. Yeah. I almost all lined up for Teddy Ursa, except for the fact that it wasn't Teddy or so is there arbers of Teddy or so with a. Like a. With honey? Am I not sure? Maybe I'm just trolling. I feel like there is. I could be wrong, though. I mean, obviously. Probably he's a bear. Bears like honey. No. Oh, there he is. This is what I was thinking about. Probably if it finds honey, it's crescent mark glows. It always licks his paws because they are soaked with honey. Okay. All right. See, that would have been Teddy Ursa. But it's a good guess, though. Well, I mean, it was wrong, but if I knew Teddy Ursa's lore, that was a good guess. Like a good guess. Look at this little guy. He's looking at honey like he just. Someone's about to give him some honey for sure. The little bear. Pokemon. Dude, the categorization of Pokemon is so ridiculous. It's like this guy is worth. It's like describing the card. Reverse holofoil. $40. Oh, man. Dude, imagine if you just like, you know, hundreds of those just new back in, you know, 2007, when you were, like, wiping your butt with these Teddy Ursas, like, would be worth $40 each. Yeah. If you just. If you just, like, bought Pokemon cards with every cent you had since you could buy some. I just kept it all sealed away. Or if you just, like, bought bitcoin back in, like, you know, that'd be a big dub as well. Just buy the bitcoin Google stock back in like, 19. Whatever. I was too busy, like, you know, going to kindergarten or something. It's a pretty big mistake on my part. I've said I have to just hold a three point lead for one two. It's still like eight weeks, right? Like, you got. There's. We got a couple months. Yeah. All right. All right. I'm gonna make sure I'm feeling Pretty confident here after the. After the Sandile points, I'm feeling like I'm gonna get you, buddy. All right, we'll see. We'll see about that. Season one, which is really season four of just that flavor text or season five. I don't know when we start this thing March of 2022. Right, so 23, 21 to. Or 22 to 23, 24, 25. 24 years of this thing, buddy. Yeah. Coming to a close here with our first four years. Whoa, what. What's coming to a close? Well, our first four year season, I guess that flavor tech. There was a time where you, like, started a competing podcast with your own podcast, and then that was. It was different. There was a different. Wasn't even a podcast. All right, we got one final thing to talk about here. AI. It's officially entering the Pokemon TCG space. Officially. But it's not the AI you think it is. Look here to find out more. Yeah, so this was a big announcement I saw this morning. I actually, like, when I saw this announcement, like, I was like, oh, this is some, like, unofficial off the wall thing, whatever. Didn't pay much mind to it, but, like looked into it a little bit more and was like, oh, no, this is like very official. Like tweeted by the Pokemon company in, like, this is not tpci. This is like the Big Daddy Pikachu, the Pokemon company over in Japan, the AI battle challenge. And so they released this video, this thing on here. What the heck? There we go. I was just. I'll just show this thing while we're talking about it. But basically similarly to how in the past, you know, there's models that like, play chess, your computers that play chess and tell you the perfect move in chess for a given situation or in poker, there's like solvers to tell you, like, what the perfect decision point is based on, like, all the various factors. They are holding this competition for people to design their own AI models to perfectly predict, to perfectly. To basically make the perfect decision for a given situation, given all the available information, is basically what they're trying to do, which is something humans attempt to do. We always talk about trying to play optimally, but we are human, we cannot do it. Computers, though, in theory, could. Yeah, I think a lot of people see AI and automatically nowadays, it's like a big buzzword and, like, there's a lot of bad things, quote unquote, going on in the world of AI and ethics questions as well. And from reading some of the stuff about it, this is not Generative AI, which is like what? A lot of that comes from the like ethics questions and stuff like that. This is very much more machine learning AI, more like. And listen, I'm not going to pretend to be an expert in this field at all, but it's, it's like playing against the computer playing chess like 10 years ago. That's like the kind of AI. Yeah, this is like pre. Any kind of real. Not. I guess, I mean, I guess it is still technically AI, but it's not like the AI that. It's not the AI that's going to take over the world. Right. Whoever makes this, whoever wins this, their model is not going to, you know, put us in the Terminator timeline or anything like that. This is a competition being held by the Pokemon company where people can earn actual prizes for their models that they submit. And it talks about all the challenge points that differ between like the Pokemon TCG versus all these other games that are mentioned. Chess, Shogi and Go. The sheer scope of the cards, different tactics, reading the opponent, the Pokemon and deck matchups, dynamic options based on the draw and adaptability to unpredictable developments, AKA what's in your prize cards, what you're going to take out of your prize cards, so on and so forth. There is technically a statistically correct decision to make based on the fact that, you know, there's a 1 in 6 chance that when you draw a prize card this turn, it will be one of these six cards and it changes based on like what's prized and stuff in theory. Right? And yeah, $30,000 first to eighth place and then in the second round, the winner of this thing is going to get $50,000 altogether, $300,000 plus in prizing. And I saw like a lot of people talking about like, is there like an official like mission for like your team or is there certain people on. People you can have on your team? Yeah. So developers will submit AI agents, bots that must determine what actions to take during Pokemon TCG match than building a game engine. Developers will design players that analyze in game states and choose optimal plays in real time. For example, the AI will need to account for an opponent's deck, hand board state, potential strategies and potential card combos, all dynamically similar to a real player making decisions on the fly. For this competition, the card pool will consist of around 2000 cards from the standard format. Pokemon will provide the battle environment, official rules and a simulator for training and evaluation. The competition will run on Google owned Kaggle, one of the world's largest machine learning competition platforms. Submitted bots will face off in automated matches, forming a virtual Pokemon TCG ladder as developers compete to build the strongest AI player. According to organizers, the challenge is designed to explore how AI handles games that combine strategic depth with uncertainty. Unlike Chess or Go, the Pokemon TCG hidden features, hidden information, random card draws, and evolving board states that require AI systems to make decisions under incomplete information. I wonder what the end goal is is for this. Is it just like a. Like, is the end goal to just like hire the team that does this and then use them to build something? Like, what is the possibly. Yeah, I did see someone joke like, we've not been able to figure it out, so we're gonna see if you can figure it out. Yeah, like, I mean, what if the end goal is of this is like some. It was like taking the winners and having them design like the next TCG Live or something like that, with like a higher level of AI capabilities of who you can play against, like creating some kind of simulator, an official simulator or something like that. If you got tired of him, if you got tired of him yapping on Twitter, or if you wanted more of him, you could go to the Poke Beach. Comments Because Jake Gearhart is here too, where he provides a little context for anyone wondering. This is not about generative AI. This competition targets the same type of machine learning that has been used to play games like chess for decades. And follows up, I think literally the top comment was literally confused about that off the rip and I saw some like, similar responses on Twitter until like people realized that it. That's. Yeah, the, the word, the term AI is like, hold a lot of negative connotation or whatever with it. Yeah, just in the last like three or four years. Yeah. Changed a lot from what it used to be. That was my initial response too. I was like, oh, there's no way this is Pokemon Official. Then I saw the Twitter account. I was like, oh, it is Pokemon Official. But it's like this isn't like AI. AI. I feel like Pokemon would be like one of the last companies to implement AI in any type of way into like what they're trying to do. And no, it is not that AI. Oh yeah. It'll be interesting what they do with this because it is, I don't know, like if these kind of competition, like maybe it's just like a big deal because it's Pokemon, but do these kind of like competitions around this kind of machine learning AI stuff happen often in other fields? And I mean, we're only hearing about it because it's Pokemon related or it's maybe only this big because it's Pokemon related. I don't know if anyone is is actually Nose can maybe leave a comment down below on the YouTube channel. I'd be very curious to know like if this is just kind of something that happens generally in the. In the space. This Poker beach comment says they've given up so hard on live that they're straight up asking the community to code it. That's what I'm wondering is like that the. Is that what this is leading to? For anyone wondering though, this has nothing to do with TCG Live. Like this is tpc, which tpc, the Pokemon company has nothing to do with TCG Live. Yeah, but it could lead to an eventual TPC being like, all right, we're making our own simulator now and then it's true. Kind of just pushing TPCI out of the space. And that would include TCG Live. That's what we need for there to be a really good working game client, to be honest. Yeah, that might be part of the end goal of this. Who knows? The competition rules state pretty clearly that Pokemon just straight up gets the winner's code. So yeah, the twist is TPCI are the ones running tcg. Also unclear if maybe the Pokemon company is working on their own sim or what. That would be like really weird if two sims existed as well. That would. I assume TPC would just like be like, all right, the PTC July project is done. We're now moving forward with this. I assume that's the way things would go for sure. But I could be wrong if that even happened. I don't even know where this is. The end goal of this is, but Marvel Television's Wonder man, an eight episode series now streaming on Disney plus a superhero remake. Not exactly what we'd expect from an Oscar winning director. Action. Simon Williams audition for Wonder Man. I'm going to need you to sign this, assuming you don't have superpowers. I never work again. If anyone found out, my lips are sealed. Marvel Television's Wonder man all eight episodes now streaming only on Disney. Chronic Migraine is 15 or more headache days a month, each lasting four hours or more. Botox Onobotulinum toxin A prevents headaches in adults with chronic migraine before they start. It's not for those with 14 or fewer headache days a month. It prevents on average 8 to 9 headache days a month versus 6, 7 for placebo. Prescription Botox is injected by your doctor. Effects of Botox may spread hours to weeks after injection causing serious symptoms. Alert your doctor right away as difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems or muscle weakness can be signs of a life threatening condition. Patients with these conditions before injection are at highest risk. Side effects may include allergic reactions, neck and injection site pain, fatigue and headache. Allergic reactions can include rash, welts, asthma symptoms and dizziness. Don't receive Botox if there's a skin infection. Tell your doctor your medical history, muscle or nerve conditions including als, Lou Gehrig's disease, Myasthenia gravis or Lambert Eaton syndrome and medications including botulinum toxins as these may increase the risk of serious side effects. Why wait? Ask your doctor. Visit botoxchronicmigraine.com or call 1-800-44-BOTOX to learn more. Is definitely interesting. I mean it's much more. I feel like it's fair to say that the Pokemon TCG is much more complex than chess. For some, like a computer like this to. Oh yeah, by a lot work through. There's just so many variables compared to like everything is a known quantity in chess, right? Yeah. Now that is interesting though, because I think most people would say that chess is a harder game than the Pokemon trading card game to be successful in chess, the Pokemon tcg, it's harder, it's easier. I think it's easier to reach the ceiling in Pokemon tcg, it's hard to reach the ceiling in chess. But that also just might be due to the infrastructure that there isn't chess. Like there's kids getting tutored it for chess at five years old. Right. So is the reason that is chess is harder to get, it's harder to succeed at is because of the infrastructure or is it because of the game itself? Just wait, buddy, because like the, the like. I think playing a game of the Pokemon TCG is easier than playing a game of chess. But showing up with the best 60 cards is like another layer added to that because you have to show up with the best 60 cards and then play it perfectly. Whereas chess, your pieces are predetermined. Right. So you just have to play perfectly. But the plane is it. I would say it's harder. It's harder to play perfectly in chess than it is to play perfectly in Pokemon. But showing up with the perfect 60 or like coming up with like another innovative 60 and then trying to play perfectly with it, is that harder? Theoretically, in a field of players who are able to do that on like another, like, like if you had 60 towards like what is the outcome of that? Right. It's hard to say. Yeah. I did see some people making jokes about like, what was it like? There was the iconic moment of. Yeah, here we go. I found it again. Kasparov plays against the Deep Blue, a super computer made by IBM. It's like an iconic chess moment. So, like, this is what we're waiting for in Pokemon tcg. Pokemon is the chance to do the coolest thing ever having toward play against these AI bots. That'd be pretty cool. Toward takes down the robot army. Yeah. I will be very interested to see what comes of it. It's all going to happen before the end of this year, so it's like pretty soon. Honestly, like, not a lot of like, when is the first round? Let's see. I saw someone like, it's gonna. It concludes like three months from now, I think is what I saw. Somewhere on Twitter. Yeah. This says that. Yeah. The final stage is scheduled for September 2026 in Japan. Yeah. Yeah. Competitions are split into two stages. I literally just read this from June through August of 26. Yeah, it's gonna be. Yeah, it says it'll. In Japan. It'll make a streamed event. Okay. Okay. It'll be interesting to tune into for sure. Yeah. It probably is going to be a limited card pool. It's not going to be like the full standard formats. Well, that is. You also read that earlier as well. Yeah. Well, it just says 2, 000 cards. I don't know how many cards are. Do you know how many cards are in standard. It says 2000 cards from the Standard format. I don't know if that. That number 2000 is all of the standard legal cards or if it'll just be some selection of the standard legal cards. Do we count full arts? I don't know. Probably not. Right. It's probably like 2, 000 unique cards. Yeah. I don't know how many are currently legal. It actually might be less than 2,000. You might be right. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Of around. So maybe it just means like the current standard format. Maybe that's just what they're kind of implying. Yeah. So it's just gonna be all. There's no way. Besides Dragon Balls. It turns out Dragapult's broken. But did they talk about like, will the bots build their own decks? No. Right. I have no clue. It almost sounds like they're just to like you're gonna give them 60 cards to play. Come down to the players to come up with 60 cards their bot will be playing. I don't know. I feel like that should be part of it though, is that the bot decides based on the card pool and knowledge of the game. Like what is the best deck to play. Yeah, that'd make things more interesting for sure. It will be an interesting story to follow for certain. Well Zul, I think that's it for our episode this week. You got anything else you want to say before we get out to our bonus episode? Well thanks a bunch everyone for listening as always. If you enjoyed, be sure to leave us a like review rating comment subscribe all those things help us out a bunch. Let us know you're enjoying what we're doing here on the podcast and helps more people discover it as well. If you want to stay updated with me and as well, the best place to do it is over on X. You can follow myself at Chipper, you can follow Zool Edazole gg. You can also follow the podcast at Uncommone Underscore Energy Also, we should have talked about at the beginning, but we just put out a brand new episode of the Evolution series over on the second channel. Started it off with sword and shield base sets. Editor Pig absolutely killed it with the intro. It is honestly incredible. I have no real other words. It is so sick. You should go watch it right now. And Azul's coming to my house this weekend to record more videos, more episodes of that Evolution series, so be sure to check that out if you have not. Yeah, go check that out, Uncommon Energy and then we'll talk to y' all next Wednesday, 7am Eastern. The right Window treatments change everything. Your sleep, your privacy, the way every room looks and feels. @blinds.com We've spent 30 years making it surprisingly simple to get exactly exactly what your home needs. We've covered over 25 million windows and have 50,000 five star reviews to prove we deliver. Whether you DIY it or want a pro to handle everything from measure to install, we have you covered. Real design professionals, free samples. Zero pressure right now. Get up to 50% off with minimum purchase plus get a free professional measure@blinds.com rules and restrictions apply. Yep.