The Different Formats In Pokmeon TCG Live

Hello everyone, and welcome to the Reasonably effective podcast. I'm 10 types as I show my uncommon fossil. Hello. Glad to be here today. Yep. And today we are talking about Pokemon THD Live and the different formats. Because Live actually has now a good chunk of different formats, including the brand new or pretty pretty new Build and Battle format, which is something we're going to talk about a bunch in this video here, this episode, depending how you're listening, watching. But it's definitely interesting to see how Live has developed recently. When I say recently, we have the Build and Battle format, which is very new, and then the Trainer trial Trails want, which is definitely a lot less new, but is still, you know, something that is a newer format that Pokemon DC Live is still, I'd say, experimenting with as well. Or I don't know, I mean, it's. It's not in a. We'll talk about it, right? Yeah, yeah. The trainer trials has been a little bit hit and miss. I would say. I'm pleased with the launch of the Build of Battle, which we'll get to. Do you want. Do we start off like with just talking standard expanded first or. Or what do you want to do? Or what do you want to do? Yeah, sure. I'll actually first before that. Or kind of related to that. Talk about there's like four tabs on the home menu. There is ranked, there is casual, there is Learn, and there is Build and Battle. Apparently there's more stuff in Learn. I was just looking through that. I've not done most of this. You haven't done the stuff in Learn, right? No, I haven't done the new Mega great Greninja Ex, but I have done everything. Yes. Up to that point. Okay, and have you learned anything doing that? No, it was good. No, I. You know, if you're a player of moderate experience, I don't think you're going to learn anything. I think supposedly they said you're going to get rewards from it, although I don't know that I actually got anything. But, you know, it's. The economy is pretty generous, so that's not been a big deal. But, you know, I like to just see what's there. Yeah. It's theoretically useful, obviously helping new players with like a tutorial type of thing. This. The basic and standard lessons, I believe are a pretty solid tutorial there, if I'm not mistaken. So that's cool. I guess it's not really a format. I wouldn't say at all. It's kind of weird how there's the four tabs and the four tabs don't really. I guess there's kind of four formats and the four tabs don't exactly correspond to the four formats. Yeah. The one thing I will say with Learning Lab, it's good that there for new players as they kind of teach you different mechanics and stuff. But within it they. They very prescriptive what you can do like when you need to click something. Like if that's what's highly to click. You can't like check a Pokemon or something, which is a bit annoying. I will say like to read you have to click what they say before you without looking at the Pokemon to understand why you'd click it. They'll explain after. But the other thing is the sequencing is. Isn't always good and some of the decision making is questionable, which, you know, it's not the point of the video they're trying to make. But it's still better to have just good decision making throughout the video to kind of reinforce that. So I wish that the general, you know, general play quote of it was. Was. Was stronger. Yeah. It's not a strategy thing really at all. I don't think there might be a little bit of strategy, but it's, you know, teaching you the rules of the game, which is useful. Definitely. I think it's. It's nice there. I don't know. I guess if you're a relatively new player, if you join since this has been in the game, then have you like used this? And also is it easy to find for new players? I don't know if it like directs you there. I know there's. I think there's a little tutorial thing. This is kind of expanding on it. So it is, it is good for a tutorial though, I'd say. Yeah, yeah. They didn't place it. Well, like you said, it's underneath these formats to play. But actually the tab should stay play. The tab you have to click to get other things is home. And honestly I was looking at. There probably should be like a play tab at this point. I think in the game besides decks, profile, shop, battle, pass card decks, you know, there should be. It should be clear where you click to play a game. But you know, that's I guess off topic. Yeah. And I think I haven't really had an issue with it. But it is, as you're saying, a little weird. But then I guess we'll talk about. I guess we're going through the tabs to get ranked and casual where you have standard there the only ranked format is standard, which I think is fine. We're going to talk about. There are obviously different formats here and the more formats there are, the more options there are for players. But also then theoretically the harder it could be to find matches. You need enough people in every format which as we've talked about off camera and off recording, we've talked about the build battle and how I guess on. On video we said we were kind of nervous about being able to find matches, but. Right. It's been, I'd say completely fine. I found matches faster than standard. Yeah. And even maybe faster. Yeah. The first day worked well for me, which I was glad. And even after a couple days I checked it the previous evening of our recording and it was still easy to find. The question will be, you know, in a couple months from now, we're. Will that change? Because, you know, for things like expanded and trainer trials, sometimes there are issues with opponents. But yeah, I mean, I, I think look, ranked standard is good. You know, is. Is obviously makes sense. Standard's the backbone of the game, so that should be ranked. I. Ideally I would like to see expanded is. Is ranked as well, just to give some variety because you do get rewards from playing ranked that you don't otherwise. So if you want to get those rewards in game rewards, you have to. You're forced to play standard more often at times than I might like to. Yeah. So how much do you play the other four? Like I, I play standard mostly and I play some trainer trials, but that kind of depends. Not, not too much. And I dabble in expanded, I guess. But again, that's going to be even less than trainer trials. And then with the build and battle, I've done that some and it's kind of cool. We'll, you know, dive into that. That's going to be the bul. This. But you know, I, I mostly play standard and I assume you mostly play standard also be. I will say with ranked, if we find like better opponents, I think the matchmaking is like, if you are a new player, I'd recommend casual. If you play ranked, you might just get rolled over. You might like not really know what's going on. But with casual you find at least an expanded. Because that's only casual. It's kind of weird. Yeah. Well, if you're, if you're a new player and you're having problems. Yeah, casual is good. Especially when the ranked lateral resets because people get moved down when the ladder resets. So if you're a new player, it's going to be tough at first. If as the rank ladder, if it's towards the end of the rank ladder, then I think you should be fine in rank because you actually might even be better in ranked towards the very end because, because the people that play are better, they're going to have moved up at that point. So. Although, but you're asking, you're talking about yourself, what you play. I don't play trainer trials very often. I do expanded more than you. So I Probably play expanded 20, 25% of the time lately. I would say so. I like that I don't ever when I play standard, it's always in ranked. I don't essentially almost never do standard casual. Maybe occasionally if I'm trying out some rankings, really horrible deck that I really, that I really want to play and I just can't manage to get even a competitive game in ranked. I might do casual, but that's very, very rare that I do that. Yeah. Yeah, same for me. So tell us in the, if you're watching on YouTube or whatever, tell us in the comments section if you play, if you're someone who plays both a lot of casual and a lot of ranked, what that experience is like. I don't know if that's, you know, something that people do, who people play both that much, but I'd love to hear that. But overall I think, you know, having casual is a good option there for standard. And as you're saying with expanded ranked could be good, especially just get more people to play it. I've, you know, kind of complained about ranked making the games feel a little more, I don't know, unfun and almost like toxic at times generally. Before ranked came out, a lot of people were asking for a ranked ladder in Pokemon and before Pokemon Digital Live with Pokemon T shirt online. People are asking for that and they got it. Is really what was it the main thing that live added? I'm trying to think probably for a long time that was. Yes. The only thing that they really added was the rank ladder. I suspect they've started to add some features obviously build in battle in a little bit. They've improved the deck builder too, which is nice. But yeah, probably the, the rank ladder that was the big thing that, you know, a lot of people wanted that they added. I, I would say now look to me you were concerned the rank ladder would hurt. I, I don't think it's, it's a negative thing now. I'm not typically getting up too high on the rank ladder. I'm, I'm not concerned about that, so I'm happy to play whatever decks I want, which therefore means, you know, I'm not getting the highest win rate all the time. So I'm happy being low. You know, I want to, you know, you know, get a few rewards and make with it and, and have some fun. So. But I, I think maybe things get more toxic as you get, get higher. Certainly the times when I've pushed, when I've wanted to just, you know, make that push to get to Arceus or what is now Master League. When you're getting close, then, you know, I can see where things get, get a little, get more intense. Right. Because every, every loss is, feels like you're getting further from the goal. But towards the bottom end, I, you know, people are just playing the games and the decks they want. That's my experience. Yeah. Yeah. I definitely wouldn't say it's been like an issue. I wouldn't say it's been like. I don't think the game is necessarily like, I don't see a big improvement from ranked. I've really heard people say that much either. But I think it's, you know, it's fine. I'm not gonna, you know, criticize it at this point or think it say it's like super good. I will say ranked. When I, when I talk about it, I'm talking about like the public or not like public, but like the, the visible, you know, rankings and tiers. Not matchmaking, not like skill based matchmaking. I think skill based matchmaking is important. You want to, you know, if you're like a new player, you don't want to play against like the best player in the world on your first match. And you know, and on the other side of that, you also don't want to play if you're like someone who's very experienced. You want to play against someone who's super new. You're generally looking for, for more even matches. But you can have that in casual and I don't know what the matchmake is in casual. Lives recently talked a little bit more about matchmaking, but like not that much more. We don't really know much about it. Right. No, I mean in, in ranked in theory. Well, even with ranked, you have your rank, which for me I haven't played a lot. Right now I'm, I'm in, in ranked. I'm it. Well, it didn't reset. It reset relatively recently and I've been doing some build and battle, but I'm at 63, so I've generally been getting players like around 50 or so. But then I think, like, occasionally I get a game where someone's like at 422. So it's, it's a little whether, you know, why that is, whether there's like some secondary hidden ELO system or if that's just depending on who's available at the time. I, I don't know. Even in rank, the matchmaking seems a little wonky and uncasual. I, I sometimes I suspect the re. The matchmaking is just whoever clicks it next is who you pair in against, which, you know, it's not ideal, but, you know, you know, the games are okay. I guess what I'd say in general, yeah. I would say regarding the, you know, just pairing against whoever that is bad for, like, that's bad for casual standard and certainly for casual expanded, where that's the only way to play expanded. Yeah. I think for something like building battle, I think it's fine. Yeah. I imagine you probably agree with that. Yeah, I think with. Yeah, because. And we'll get talk about. I think it also kind of fits with more what, what it's trying to be like being. It is a bit more random. The style, the feel they're going for there and within ranked. I know also there's players that want to play top decks against top players. So I assume if you get up to the high, was it Master League, whatever it's called, then I think, you know, you're only playing other people in Master League. And the matchmaking might, you know, you're trying to pair you more against other hot top players. So therefore you're getting the people that care about tough matchups. They have a place to play and those that are less concerned, you know, they have a place to play too, which kind of. It works out all right, I think. Yeah, yeah, I think it's, it's fine. You know, overall it's not, it's not bad. It's not like crazy good, but it's fine. And then talking about expanded now, obviously, you know, we're saying that, like, maybe it'd be better if there was ranked. Obviously there's the big elephant in the room. Whenever I was like, I made a post and I was like, what do people think about live formats? And I feel like, you know, kind of what I think I got like one response. But whenever I do this, it's always like, we need full expanded. Right. Expanded is so the full expanded format. Because expanded isn't something that like, people play in person very much outside of Japan, where it's played more. I don't know exactly how much it's played in Japan, but again, it is more there. But it was like a format that was played at like regional tournaments and stuff like that sometimes. And it's a format that is. It doesn't rotate. It starts at Black and white era and then it goes to the current format or, you know, the most recent set. And then it also does have some bands, partially because there's enough rotation. Also, cards aren't really designed for expanded when they're printed into standard. Yeah, really. I mean, they kind of are. But I don't know, you look at like the ban of like Flapple or the ban of Duskull, things like that. Those correspond to cards that were printed into standard. They're actually in standard now. Dusclops and Force Vitality. And those cards are especially dusclops. That's like very egregiously like super broken and expanded. And you know, Pokemon just didn't really care about that that much. They made a ban. They didn't care. Literally. They cared some, but not. Not too much. So regarding that, though, that's like what expanded is. And it's also a format that is in live doesn't contain well, so live. I was actually looking at the collection so you can look at, you know, your cards and it contains all the cars black and white on like, I have a black and white collection. I didn't realize that I knew I owned the cards, but I didn't know that it, you know, it like had that collection viewer there for black and white and X and Y. But you can't play with those cards. They're not like implemented into the game. And that's something that has it, you know, it changes the format there. So expanded is then sun and moon on in terms of what it is, you know, it's not quite the same as full expanded. There are definitely a lot of differences. There are definitely some similarities as well. And you know, I'd argue, I've said this before, that arguably the format is more enjoyable in terms of like a format you're going to see less pseudo control and like full control. And some of the broken cards are like not there. But ultimately, obviously the fact that it's not full expanded isn't in the game because Pokemon can't really seem to get it to work as opposed to them making a conscious decision to do it that way is kind of. Kind of bad. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah, I have very similar thoughts to you. I find the sun and Move Forward format to be pretty good because it gets rid of some of the really powerful things and the cards are probably a little more compatible with each other being the newer ones. So I, I think it. In some ways it's a better format. It's also nice in that. Or it's good and it's bad in that you can't find decklists for this format because they. Because this is not. It only exists in live and you can't even run like a tournament through Limitless because you can't actually pair into people. There is no matchmaking. There's no. You can't have do friends matches is what I'm trying to get. Get nothing in casual works for that which, which is its own issue. Right. It's truncated. I. You know, the fact that it's. It's due to lives unfortunately incompetence rather than a dis. An intentional decision is, you know, that's a bad. A bad look for sure. You can't do friends matches which would be good. I. I would like that, you know, be not. It'd be a plus if they could do. Even if they kept it in the truncated format. Promising to expand the format too. They. It never has happened yet. I supposedly before. Before the end of this year they're going to start to expand things and I don't know if they're going to kind of do it like expansion by expansion. What's going to happen. But in terms of playability, sudden move forward is a good thing. People do want the full expanded so I, I think they're going to need to provide that. And I don't think there's enough player base to have two different expanded formats, unfortunately. So I think this current sun and moon forward format is just going to go by the wayside because I assume eventually they'll get full expanded, you know, if we all live long enough, that is. And I don't think there's enough player base to keep to both formats alive. Yeah. Like in person, I don't know anyone who plays like I know a lot of people who play the Pokemon dcg. I know, you know, people play standard pretty much. There are some who mention GLC from time to time. Right. And then I don't know no new place expanded so. Or maybe like one or two people. I. I knew some people who played it a while ago but like, you know, people like don't really play it. Also regarding, like I do wish that there were French masters. I feel like that's something that should be in the game also. Yeah. As they're saying like by the end of the year they said they'll like start working on it. So I don't even know exactly what that means. As you're saying. Maybe it's expansion by expansion, which could be cool, I think and honestly get some like hype around it right now. It's just kind of like forgotten thing when you play expanded. I don't know if this is the same for you. You play more than me, but I mostly see. I guess the most common thing I'd see is like rotated standard decks, especially when rotation being recent. Ish. Yeah, like I saw Conquelder with. With Brute on it and I don't know. I see things like that. Yeah, no, because I was playing like an expanded B drill recently because. Because the new B drill Ex. Right. Which. Which is good. It's pretty good in standard, I think I haven't played in standards yet. And obviously what it needs is some single prize B drills that are. There's some good ones out there and expanded. So I. I was playing that and yeah, probably half a number of my opponents were just old standard decks or older standard decks or even sometimes current standard decks with maybe. Sometimes they're two standard decks. A lot of times they probably were a standard deck with maybe one or two modifications to it with older cards. So yeah, there doesn't seem to be a lot of people that. And I'm weak right now in terms of all what all the expanded cards are. They're not on top of my mind. But it seems like for a lot of. There's not many players that understand what the good cards in expanded are like. Like what are the good trainers and stuff for expanded. Because there's a, you know, there's definitely a list of cards of go to cards that you want to consider for most decks. And it's just seems that people just aren't aware of that. And yeah, I think what since like 2020 expanded has not been an official in an official tournament internationally. So the years keep adding up without it being a thing and essentially just it's become essentially forgotten. And I don't know, like you said it happens in Japan but you know, we only hear about like one tournament a year in Japan. I. Maybe there's more that we don't hear about or maybe just one tournament a year is all there is there too. I don't know. Yeah, that's in terms of major tournaments. I know there are some like smaller ones that happen, but it's, you know, it's not. It's not Standard there. And obviously it's played even less internationally. Also, I almost said, as the card that's like, oh, an expanded staple. It's not stand. I almost said air balloon, which is. It's back. Yeah. Also in like, full expand, it's not like, good because you got flowstone, but also. Yeah, you got something like quick ball. That's something to fit into that. And, you know, I guess you don't see people playing that too much, probably. No, not too often. Obviously it is good if you're playing something like the Den AGX and stuff, but once you, like, play the Dene, if someone puts into the gx, then they're at least aware of some of what's good in Expanded, right? I would say, yeah, like. Like when I put together the Beedrill Duck, I had to. I forgot, you know, netball, which I hadn't. I don't know if I actually had really played it before, so. Which is just awesome. Awesome for. For a deck, like. Like a grass deck. So, you know, but you just got to look around and find these things. But it's not easy to find these things either. You know, kind of searching for keywords works to some extent, but it's a bit hit or miss. Yeah, it is definitely something that, you know, you kind of have, like, if you have experience from when these cards are in Standard, you have some idea. And then if you have experience with Expand as well, you'll have some idea. But it's kind of weird. It's definitely, I'd say, pretty fun to deck build and play in Live Expanded. And it's pretty. Because the decks aren't, like, super good. This feels a little bad to say we can kind of just like. Okay, I mean, like, you can be playing bad decks and then you can be. I was gonna say, like, I played Megazire and I got, like, cooked by Conical there, but, like, I was able to set up, like. And you can use, like, more powerful cards than your opponents, which is just kind of. Kind of crazy. I think you're just, like, playing with better decks than your opponents consistently. Or better cards. Theoretically, you can be playing with, like, bad decks. They're just some, like, really good trainers. And so it's. It's kind of weird. It's definitely a very strange experience. Experience. It can be fun, though. Yeah, I guess if people play who. Who play Live Expand even more than you in the comments. Tell me if you, like, see regular, like, see a meta. Because, like, obviously in Live Standard, you see a meta and it's not the Same as the like IRL meta necessarily or like super consistent, but it's, it's a meta. It's like legitimately a meta. You're gonna see good decks and things like that. That's it for expanded. I don't know if you have more to add there. No, no. I mean it's, it's. It's the other. It's really the number two format though, right. In. In live at this point in time is what I'd say Standard is by far the number one format. Expanded I think is. Is. Is clearly the number two format, but. But well below the number one format. Yeah. Then we have the third format. This is not the new one either. It is. Well, I don't know. It's kind of weird, right? So this is trainer trials here. Trainer trials. Let me see. It's looking here. It's a. It says it's a rotating game mode and their unique deck building rules. So I believe they are only changing deck building, not like gameplay and. Yeah, so like I currently don't have an active deck and live is kind of slow. I wonder what happens if I press play without a deck. Yeah, I can't. Okay. So I own decks for the forum because the current form is actually last year's, the same format that was in the World Championships, which is just the form from a year ago. So, you know, you could just play old standex, by the way, if you want to play standex from a year ago, play them in the trainer trials, not expanded. That's what I'd recommend. But anyways, yeah, you see the trainer trial, which this is what it currently is. I'm going to quickly look here in another tab, which you can't see if you're watching it, but the current one is the world championship format, which is for what you said like a month and then after that it's going to be water type wallop, everyone's favorite now it's just standard water type, which is probably okay but not like super interesting. I mean a more restricted standard feels kind of boring a lot of the time than older ones where we saw. We saw like a fighting type one. We see like twin battles, which is two of every card in standard. And then we see glc which is probably the best of them, which is there was like an official or like an. A semi official GLC format which is the essentially like the expanded error card pool. This is not that because you know you can't play black and white and X and Y. And I would say GLC is worse. For not having those cards. It definitely makes decks feel less consistent and a little less fun. It's not like a huge change. Most GLC decks don't play too many older cards, unlike an expanded. Where a lot of older cards are very important to the format. But it's still disappointing that you can't play all those there. And as I said it would be. I think most people agree that Thor would be a little more like exciting and interesting with those older cards. Again, it's not a huge change, but I don't think they're really. Outside of maybe like Vileplume and Hex Maniac. I don't really like those cards, but some people do. But outside of those cards, I think, you know, most of the cards are pretty cool. From full expanded in or from black and white and X and y in glc. Yeah. I mean, because you have the single tin for aspect to glc, you really, I think, need those other. You need a bigger card pool to choose from. Right. To make the decks more consistent, to feel reasonably consistent. Right. Because. Because we have a certain level of that we're used to with standard formats. So we kind of. Anything that sets up worse than that, we think of as bad. You certainly can have a format where you set up a little worse, but if it sets up a lot worse than that, it's generally going to feel frustrating. Even if your opponent's in the same boat most of the time. We just kind of expect that. So not having those, the older cards is a big negative to glc. And I don't, you know, GLC is going to just suffer until that happens. I mean, we should just consider whether GLC should become a permanent format. But before doing that though, you know, we've got the current world championship format from last year. I, I like that in that people do play occasionally previous formats. A lot of times it is on the world Championships or you know, or whatever. They. They pick a set as the. The last set of standard to go with championship world championship formats, a common one. So I, I'm glad to see that that's not a bad notion. It's not the most exciting thing, but it's fine. Some of them like twin battles like you said was not really good things like where they around rotation. They had early rotation and late rotation kind of to help people prepare for events. IRL again, that's a good idea too. Now the solution to that really would be because this is for people that want to train. There should probably be an unlimited format or expansion where you can play against friends. That way you could do training with whatever format you wanted. That would be good. But you know, live is too buggy I think to allow for that because then you start to have tournaments. So I think that might be their logic there. They don't want to encourage too much play of things that get more disruptive. Things like twin battles, I would say have been pretty boring. The water type 1 water type wallop now seems okay as we're talking about because water type isn't that good. You know, there's like Mega Greninja. I've been playing that since that's out. That, that, that wouldn't be bad. The earlier one they did fighting type frenzy, which you know, you had mentioned wasn't. You didn't think was great. And I would agree in that fighting type. Like to me you start off with Mega Lucario, which is just very good and then you have some. A few other options. But fighting type is so good that in like you don't need non fighting Pokemon in those for the most part. So it's, it's. In a certain sense you're just truncating the, the standard format with fighting type. But with water type it, you know, it's. Water is not as good so it makes it a little more interesting. So that could be okay. You know, we'll see like for myself, whether I play it much. I, I don't suspect I will but you know, but 10 types. Do you think you're gonna play something like the water type wall up when it comes out? Well, I am, I am 10 types. So I like the different types and stuff that focuses on the types, I guess. I don't know. It's mostly my name to be honest, but. Oh, I don't. Maybe. I don't know. I mean, it's okay. Also we like mentioned trainer trials. I mean, kind of hard to find matches. I predict it's gonna be hard to find matches for that. It's kind of weird. I don't know. Maybe. I suppose. And leave in the comments if you want to see me make videos on that. If you're like, yeah, do do water type wallop or whatever. I can't imagine it's going to be that much hype for it. As in like any hype for it. I'm trying to think of interesting decks but like also as you're saying it is a format like standard where you just can't do everything. So it might just be not very interesting. You also mentioned with like GLC where you're kind of look used to your decks, like being able to search out, you know, like the cards you need set up in a certain way. And when you look at this format, you're going to have like worse strategies and things like that. So it kind of forces you to think out the box in a somewhat interesting way, but it's actually not, it's not like super interesting. It's just, just. It's okay, you know. Also they got like the, the alliteration on the fighting one and the water one. And I'm worried that they're gonna do survey type. We don't need a survivor type. It's like, you know, it's like fine, I suppose. But I'd say then overall the idea with trans is kind of fun, like conceptually, but I'd say implementation wise it's been pretty end of poor, but just like a little underwhelming. I was definitely hoping they'd like, you know, really go out of the outside the box. And I would say potentially the best of them. You know, GLC is pretty good, but also it's like a, like it's a bit of a cult following and like people, people know it even outside of that some. And it also, it's. It's probably like one of the, like the generally most interesting one as well. See, there have been a few others that have been interesting, some other singleton expanded ones. I think that's kind of cool in general. But outside of that, there was a format. It was, it was like tricks and treats. Tussler might have been Trick or Treat or something. I. I don't know. The name was kind of weird, I remember, and I think it was different in different places. But that one, the general format was bad, but they actually messed it up really badly. And then like unbanned all the cards and you could do like some stupid stuff and do like a bunch of aspects. It was really funny. It didn't necessarily create for a good environment, but it was funny. So that was something that I really enjoyed. Everyone who watched my videos, like really really enjoyed it as well. The people I played against probably didn't enjoy it, but it was like legitimately really fun and really silly. And I think it like, you know, brought something new to the game and that was really good. It wasn't something people really talked about very much and really see other videos on YouTube about it. None of my opponents really knew about it. I think I saw maybe one person playing with the deck that was like utilizing it and it was like, it was kind of weird, but it was really, really fun in my opinion. And that's why I want to see. Well, I don't want to see Pokemon DC Live failing miserably. I guess that's not what I'm hoping for. But I'm hoping for more crazy outside the box stuff which I think is really fun and is not what they're doing, that they're just doing boring stuff because the actual forms play expanded with four rare candy and four Switch, which is not very interesting. No, that was a strange one. Although, look, there was. I don't remember what the form was exactly, but it was a standard single prize format of some type that basically ended up being Festival lead mirror festival. Yeah, yeah, there's a lot of. There's actually like three or four formats that were like just festival lead apparently. Well, yeah, I mean they had the one that was pretty much any standard deck single prize that it was Festival league mirror and they liked Festival lead mirror so much that then shortly after that they made a grass single prize format. Right. That basically they've guaranteed it was festival lead mirrors even more so, which just wasn't very enjoyable. I, I don't quite, you know, they haven't done the best job of picking, picking formats for this. I will say that that's its own, own issue too. And sometimes I see suggestions in the forums for things and sometimes a lot of times they're kind of like make, you know, head scratches as to what people are suggesting. So, you know, GLC certainly is a fine format. It does need the other cards, but that one's, you know, I think it delivers consistency in terms of being a good format. Yeah. And you, you mentioned before, like if it should be a mainstay. Yeah. And you know, I think maybe I would personally rather it. I would prefer to stick with the trend trials if they were willing to, you know, think more outside the box and push more like interesting formats. But in terms of, you know, like people don't really play tranche trials too much. So having something more consistent could be good. Something obviously that's popular in some sense could be good. Good. GLC isn't like super popular compared to standard. I mean nothing is actually. We'll talk about building Battle. Building Battle is pretty popular as well. It's not, I mean, as popular as standard, but like it's something a lot of people know about. GLC and expanded. Those are formats that people don't know about that much. Which isn't like. Doesn't mean they're bad formats. They are both good formats. But in terms of getting People to actually like start playing them making sure that they're more known is good. And GLC is okay in that. I mean it's more known than like twin battle or something. I don't like twin battles. No because it was just basically standard format to too much of an extent. But it's like boring standard. Yeah, it probably is. Yeah it was, it was pretty much. It's just play dragapult basically some dragapult build is what it comes down to which isn't what we need. And you can't play an aspec. I guess that's the other thing because you can't play two. One of the things with trainer trials is GLC had been one of the trainer trials that had had come up very frequently. This time they've gone down to just two trainer trials throughout. You know two, you know, the World Championship 2025 and then water type wallop each for a month. So typically in the past they would have had more than two for that time period and they would have generally had GLC as as usual usually as is like the longest running one too in it. So I don't know if there they think that there's people are uninterested in GLC or why it's not there and why they don't have so many formats. That part of it is. I think less formats is just. There hasn't been a lot of interest in it. That'd be my guess. We never know what the numbers are. They know the numbers of plays. So I think just having less formats if people aren't doing it, why have a lot of different formats. I do find the removing of GLC to be. To be a little curious maybe that they want to pull it back to China, get people more excited next time they introduce it again. I. I'm not sure. Yeah, or maybe you know like it's still NGLC and Transit is like kind of hard to find matches and it's hard to find decklist. It's just like you know, it's definitely in a weird middle ground there. But then I think it's time to move on to the final format. The probably like the most interesting one obviously the new one here which is Build and Battle here. Build and Battle is a format that is like a mainstay here. This is not like a format that is going away though. The I guess format of the format is going to change. But Build and Battle is a format which is essentially the same as pre release. The difference is, I mean pre releases are kind of you Know they're before the set comes out. Build and battle appears not to be so far it is not. But we'll see what happens with that in the future. And it's a format where you play with 40 card decks and four prize games. And then you first are given a 40 card deck. And then with that 40 card deck you are also given four packs of the expansion. And then you. Which the Pokemon are. You know, most of the cards in the kits are from the expansion, but a lot of the trainers aren't. So that's what. What you will. You'll see there. But then within the packs we have four packs of that expansion. And you also get a promo with the kits as well, which is kind of cool, I guess. But then you, you know, you get four packs. You can make changes to your deck there. And then you play five games. And with those five games you. Depending on your wins and losses, you get stuff. There's a separate currency here called exchange tokens. Yeah. Or no event tokens. There we go. And you can use those to play. You can also buy some and you get some for free. And there are. Sometimes you can enter for free as well. It's a little weird. I was able to enter free yesterday. Like I think I've entered free multiple times, which seems weird. I don't know if that's right. I could be just wrong about that. But I'm pretty sure that's what happened. And I don't know if that's what was supposed to happen. But anyways, you can play. It's not like that hard to play. Theoretically. You kind of run out of the token the tokens and buy all of them from the shop, which is like 100 something. Yeah. But it's still something that is interesting that you can run out. We'll see what happens with that. But so far I played it, you played it. It's been fun. I think. I don't know. We'll talk about exactly how fun it's been. But it's been easy to find matches. Yeah, I mean the currency you get, they gave everyone 10 to start with. Your first game was. Was free. You didn't take one of the coins every time you're every. You play a set of series of five games. If you get the three wins, then you. For each game you get some trainer points. And if you get a win, you get a pack with it or. Or more than one pack. If you win enough games, I believe. And then you also get. If you get your third win, you get another toke coin or token so you can keep doing it again. So if you get three wins, which if you know you'll do a decent amount of the time, I guess slightly less than half the time on average. But if you're, you know, above average player, you'll get it more than half the time. And then you can buy them. You, you can buy a special thing I think of what 5 or 10 to start off with. I think it's 5 at a discount. Then you can buy 99 of them and then. But I think it uses. Then after that I don't know if it'll reset because for me like I, I kind of, I've enjoyed it in one sense. I wouldn't mind making a video on each of the decks, but if I to do that I might have to do 10, 12 or more times. Right. In which case within, you know, six months I could run out of coins. Right. So that, that would be a concern. So I don't know if it's going to reset or not. So that'll be interesting to see. But I've enjoyed it. It's been fun to get. In terms of the in game economy. Thinking now live is not monetized. And at this point I, at times I thought it would get monetized. I don't anymore at this point I don't think with the way Pokemon structured it's. It's going to happen the, the company with the international being separate from, you know, the Pokemon company. But comparing it to Magic the Gathering arena, which, which is highly monetized, this feels very much within the Magic the Gathering Arena's economy kind of like jump in some of the. If you're familiar with it, there's things because, because you, you get this 40 card deck with of all new cards and you get four packs of new cards and it has its own special currency and it kind of feels economically like the Magic the Gathering arena economy. I will say to me, I don't know, you started playing some arena as well. Do you kind of feel like it feels like that economy a little bit? Yeah, kind of. It's definitely interesting in terms of getting stuff. If you, you know, get the token back, it's essentially like free stuff. Yeah, it's still like, it's still good to do in terms of getting new stuff. Stuff. I suppose it's, you know, you can generally get new stuff that you want though. I'm actually going to quickly look to see if you can craft the promos. I feel like I should know this, but I, yeah, I Don't think you can Del Fox. Or maybe. Oh yeah, I think you can. Okay. I just, I just got one so. Oh, I added that to my deck. Did not. Okay. But yes, looks like you can. So that's like not a huge deal. No, you have to go them that way. But it is still cool to be able to like just get some cards I guess. I don't know. I don't really care that much about getting cards in live because I play with the regular arts and then also I also, you know you can like get all the cards you want. Yes. In the game pretty easily except for certain like weird promos which you can't even get through this. So it doesn't really matter that much in that regard for newer players. Could be good for getting stuff maybe and it doesn't require you to have anything. Right. So we didn't say. So you like enter and then you, you know, you play with the deck you get. And then you get the cards at the end. Right. Or maybe at the beginning. So you, you know you are playing on a theoretically same like similar playing field as all the other people. There are four different kit options. We'll talk about what they're gonna do in the future which actually going back to older formats where the kits are slightly different but you're going to see these different kit options. So they're not like perfectly balanced but they're like the balance is okay. Yeah, yeah. I mean they're designed for IRL play. Right. I mean that's what the building battle kits are designed for. Events that you go into to a store. Oh, we're talking about matchmaking. So with here it does feel. I think the matchmaking is rather random which is fine. And I think that fits with how it actually works IRL because the build and battle or the pre release events, they're more casual events anyway. So you tend to get a bit of more of a mix of experienced and less experienced players. So you kind of. That randomness of opponents probably feels more like how it actually works irl. Yeah, I think it's. And I think it's fine for that. Not that I've noticed like I mean you know I. There's definitely. It's a less skill expression in this. There's certainly some but it's not like crazy. There's less deck building as well. I will say a bit of a complaint especially with the newer prudence because this applies to the older ones as well. Some. I'll just quickly say the older peerless kits before the Mega Era had two essentially half kits. So then you have two types in your deck presumably or two types to start within your deck. Well, okay, right now the like there's a Dragon one with, with two types but like you'll, you'll see more types there, which means that you have like theoretically less consistent deck but also you'll have different attacking options which is a little bit more interesting. The decks will look different from each other a little bit more. And then also it's probably easier to put cards into your deck. Generally I'd say we haven't, you know, put too many cards into our decks. Maybe some trainers, maybe piece of the Evolution line if you pull it and then maybe maybe some other Pokemon but you know, not too many there. So overall the decks haven't been super interesting in terms of deck building. I wouldn't say adding on to them and their gameplay patterns are certainly somewhat interesting, but they're not like crazy interesting. Which is fine for this I think but with the older Prelude kits you'll see probably more deck building stuff there. Yeah, I mean you start off with a 40 card deck. You, you pull four, pull four packs, you may get a couple cards to put in. Typically I have, although there have been at least one. I, I've just entered my fourth event so I've done the. I played through three, got at least three wins on two of those. At two of those three. But just for I, the, the one time I actually did not change the deck because I didn't pull any cards that fit with it. But I probably added somewhere between two to five cards that, that got swapped out in my other other games just to get give a sense of, of where I, you know, where things are at in terms of how much, how much creativity in terms of deck building you can utilize. Yeah. And I did one where I, I pulled an Avalog line, a 32 Avalon line as well as a, an item card. I don't remember the name of the item card. It's the one that, where you recover the, the water Pokemon and or energy there. Yeah, it was translated as Big Catch Net. It's not, that's not the actual name but anyways that card so I pulled that. I never actually played it because I build it every time but I played with the envelog like a really silly stupid deck. One of my opponents quit, which I don't think they should have quit but that gave me, I think my third win there. And overall I would say that the format like can, you can try to create it but you're not. You're probably gonna end up with something worse than you started if you try to get like really creative. Not that that's really creative, but it's. Yeah. Something. Yeah. I mean when I've played opponents I. I've played what, 15 matches I think because I, I've done it three times, I've completed it and I think two of the games I saw some Ex Pokemon that obviously they're generally you. There's a good chance you want to play, but there's a good chance you don't have any to play. Like I think I have currently one Ex. I pulled a B drill but I don't, you know, I can't play it because I, I don't have the evolution line. I actually have the basic. But if I had a stage one, I might even slap it in a one on one line. It'd be a little dicey, but it also would be very good if I set up with it. I'll get. Do you have by the way actually the current one, I have Crobat, which I haven't. So this is my fourth time doing it and I've got a different set each time which is very N as well. So I haven't. Haven't played the Crobat and you know, I haven't looked to modify the deck. I probably will a little bit but what was I going to say? So, so. Oh, so you know, Exs make sense go in the deck. If there's some synergy, it doesn't have to be huge synergy but. But the one thing is in terms of mod modified decks, a lot of times people are putting in cards that just don't make sense. I. I've seen multiple occasions where opponents started to have like three or four different types of energies in the deck and pretty much that's just not going to work well because you don't have an optimized set of trainers anyway. So having a lot of different Pokemon with a lot of diff, you know, all these different energies, it just. You're just not going to set up. It's not going to work. So usually don't try to customize your deck too much would be my. One of my pieces of advice. Yeah, yeah. The starting decks are pretty fine. I actually made a video like talking about different like tips for prelates. You've done like super stuff as well. Yeah. So you can like check that. That stuff out and get subscribed so. So you don't miss more of that stuff in the future. But it is Definitely something that like you can go in with like a bunch of strategy and like knowledge and stuff that can help you navigate the matchups and things like that, which can be fine, but it's not something you need need. And while we're here, I guess I'll talk about what the, the previous one is going to look like in the future, so. Or there's like a schedule here. So it's chaos rising for two weeks here, I believe and then it's dust arrivals for two days, violent masquerade for two days in perfect order for 10 days there, which is definitely interesting and definitely not what I was expecting. It's just kind of weird right that it's. Yeah, I know, two days for just a couple of those formats. Definitely, definitely weird. But that's something that you're probably just going to kind of have to, you know, jump into, I'd say. Yeah, either, either try to either have it like written down, marked on your calendar to do it or just don't worry about it because. And because typically if they're doing it like in two days, you expect it over a weekend. I can see like having something for a week or a week and a half and then something's different on the weekends. But here they actually, they split the weekend. One goes through Saturday, one is, is on the Sunday. So that's just strange how those two are so short and like you said, I think it's the Mega Evolution, Build a Battle decks that are made of just one 40 card pre constructed deck. And the earlier ones, the Scarlet and violets are two 20 card packs put together. So whether, so you get a little more rip variety or a little more randomness which sometimes you'll get something with synergy, sometimes you get a pack with less synergy, probably more often with these with the Scarlet and Violet era I would suspect. But you know, hopefully, you know we'll take a look once, once we get that and can actually play those. Yeah, it'll definitely be interesting to see. I'm excited for that. I'm actually not very familiar with either of those pre releases to be honest. But I think it will be hopefully pretty fun there and I hope everyone is excited for it as well because like so far as I said I've been like seeing people and I've heard a lot of people playing it and stuff like that, which is super exciting to see. I don't know if we'll, I don't know exactly what we'll continue to see in the future that hopefully it keeps up. Right. Hopefully the people keep playing it. It's the new thing. So people always like the new shiny thing. So hopefully it stays. I will. Two things. One, I. I feel like three of the four decks are pretty good. I haven't played Crobat yet. I played against it though and it is, I think awkward to play against. The Fire deck is good, which is. What is that? Delphox? Yeah, it is pretty good. And I played the Gujra deck, the Dragon one, and that was good. I did. I also played the Lightning deck, which is Amfros. That deck was not good and I don't think it was just me. I think think that deck's not good. You can't one shot your other Pokemon, which you can do with the, the Fire and the Dragon deck. And also not only do you not one shot, but you also can't attack back to back turn. So it's a really. It's really rough. I would say the Lightning deck just in the secondary attacker wasn't very useful either. So I feel like three. There's three solid decks. If you get the Lightning deck at this point, you can, you can just concede. But you do get rewards for games if you lose. So just kind of probably just go match up and hit concede and you know, you may annoy your opponents or they might be happy because they just get a free win, but you, you know, you'll get, you know, you know, several hundred trainer points by just entering and conceding. So they probably. Well, it's not the intent. It probably to me encourages you just to go ahead, match in and, and concede. If you have a deck that just, you think is really unplayable. Yeah, I don't think it's that bad, I guess. I don't know. But I haven't played with it yet. I do like Hyensai stuff. I say this all the time. So I do want to play with that at some point. But yeah, we'll see. Like, it's definitely. It definitely feels like it's pretty. I. I just lost types. Okay. Okay. Yeah, it's just bad. There's not that much more to it than that. Yeah. So overall I'd say that the, you know, obviously you have some cool stuff with the, the different kits. I don't know how do you find the gameplay patterns of them? I think they're. Well, first it's a 40 card deck, four prizes. Your trainer selection's not as good as a standard deck. Not. Not surprisingly, they're not horrible. But you will play suboptimal trainers in them. So you're going to set up a little worse. But it. But your opponent's kind of the same and it's only four prizes. It's all singleton. So I find the games generally haven't lasted too long. What was that? Surprise. Yeah, you're right. I said. Yeah, I meant to say single prize. So, yeah, I could. It's not necessarily a single price, though. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Like a couple times I have seen Exs. I haven't got to play one yet, so I don't, you know, I haven't seen an Ex. That just obliterates things, which at some times, if there's, you know, in past pre releases, if you pull the right Ex or V Pokemon, you just kind of rolled through everybody hope, hopefully. I don't. I don't know if that exists in this current format or not. So this current packs. But yeah, I, I think, I think I. I've enjoyed it. I've enjoyed, you know, having to adjust to what you get. I think is. Is fun. And, you know, you. You can adjust your decks after every game, which, that, that's the big difference from an irl, which once the tournament starts, you can't change it. So keep that in mind. If you don't like it, you're free to change it after every game. So, you know, tweaking it, you know, big changes probably won't get you any place good, but tweaking it. Feel free to do that. I've. I've enjoyed it and I still. You've enjoyed it as well? I've enjoyed it, yeah. I don't know if I'm gonna like. If it's something I'm gonna enjoy, like long term. Yeah, I'd love to say that, you know, I'll be playing this like a lot, but I'll be playing it some. But I don't know if I'll be playing it, you know, in, in a week from now. Right. We'll see. Yeah. I think it's cool to have it changing up a bunch. I do like that. I like, I like change like a little bit of chaos. Not too much chaos rising though. Chaos arising. Imperialist format is fine. I'll say. Perfect order. They're going back to that. That one kind of. Actually, that's probably okay. I played it in person and there's a lot of mulligans which wasn't good, but other than that, it's kind of fun, I guess. Yeah. And I think, you know, there's sometimes just like sometimes one, one Kit feels really bad, but I, I don't think it's like or one kid feels really good. But I think you can have fun with any of the kits as well. Yeah. One of the questions I have is what one of the things back before Live with Pokemon TCG Online was theme format was, you know, that one had, it had legacy but that was kind of a dead format for a while at the end. So ignoring that there was standard, there was full expanded and there was a theme deck and theme deck was very pop. Very popular in it. Partly it was enjoyable. It was kind of relaxed and low keyed which I liked. But also the, in the way the economy worked it made it much more accessible because you could get you know, one of the top decks very, very easily. Whereas the top decks for like standard were, you know, they were expensive to acquire, I will say. But I'm wonder. But I, you know, I enjoyed theme format. You did as well. Is, is could this build and battle kind of become the new theme format as kind of the secondary, more casual kickback and relax format in live? I think it could, yeah. I think so. It's obviously different in the fact that you don't really, you don't choose what you play with but it is someone. The fact that you know, you are, you know, doing these decks that are. Yeah, it's pre built, you know, pre built. Mostly pre built. You have some limitations but overall I'd say it's, it's fun. I'd say the gameplay theme is a little more interesting. There's more deck options. I think as we get to the two kiss combined I think that's a little more interesting. I've kind of said that in the past and I think if it was like a format, if it was almost like a draft form or something where it's like more focused on deck building because this like, you know, deck building is a part of it in some ways it's the main part of it. But it doesn't feel like this thing that's, you know, it doesn't feel like deck building is super highlighted in this. It's just some like sometimes you can build something really cool but like a lot of the time you're not. Yeah. Well the other part of pre release format is it is a collecting thing and I, I don't, I wonder if they would make a change down the road where these pre release kits are the only way to get the stamp Pokemon right. That you can't. And I wouldn't mind that. Right. So then if you wanted Your four four crowbats, you just have to play a whole bunch of build and battle to get it right. Then that's, that's another aspect of the IRL world that they could incorporate into Live by restricting because that's the only way to get the stamp things is in these. Is in the pre release kit. So, so they could do the same thing here. I, I imagine a lot of people upset, but I wouldn't mind seeing that. Yeah, yeah, I agree with you. That's. Some people, a lot of people don't like it. People complain about like crafting the, like the rarer cards. I didn't really care that much about it but I understand why people didn't like it as well. Right now you have to wait six months to craft them. I mean I think the issue is it wasn't a restriction and it got added. Right. That's the problem. And since it's a free, you know, it's a free game, it's one of those things. Again, I thought that was a move to monetize things because then I can see wanting to, you know, if people are really that, that keen to get the new arts right away, make them pay some money and those that don't care about the arts, let them play for free. That honestly kind of made sense to me. But again monetization is just not part of Live. So it was a bit of an odd thing that did annoy people. So I, you know, especially when you have a game that's known for being buggy, you shouldn't be doing things to annoy the fan base. Yeah, yeah, it's definitely. I don't know. The game's in a weird spot, right? Yeah. Overall I think it's in an okay spot and I think Build Battle is a really nice addition. It's something that I saw and I was like, this is going to be cool. And I think it's been even better than I was expecting. I don't know what your thoughts were when you saw it and if you'd agree with that. Yeah, I was pleased to see it. I enjoy the format. I was not sure if it would work properly and so far it seems like it's working properly. It seems like you don't have to pay for your games. I will say I did like I made, I double checked when I played, signed up for this latest game that I did get charged for it. So you had a visual where the cost had a big line through it and then it seemed like it wasn't charging you. So I wasn't sure adding another currency in this whole other format if, if the programmers could handle it. It seems like for the most part though, it's working and that's good. And then the second concern is will there be the opponents? There is for now. Hopefully two months from now there's still opponents. That's like the next step to see what happens. But yeah, I think it's a really good addition to Live and potentially this could certainly become the number two format in live. Like I said, right now expanded Casual is the number two format. But a. It's a huge drop off. I think Build and Battle could surpass expanded for the number 2 4. And I'm pretty sure since the last few days since Building Battle's been out, it has been the number. The second most played format in live, probably by a big margin. Yeah. And that's cool to see. As I said, I do think it will fall off. Hopefully it won't fall off too much or I guess hopefully it won't fall off. Right. But hopefully they, you know, keep doing a good job with it as well. It is interesting seeing them like go back to older stuff instead of getting a Twilight Masquerade and Dustin Rivals. Maybe this would even be how they introduce the older cards. I don't know. That seems kind of weird and a weird connection. But it could be the case. I mean it would be nice to from my standpoint, expect you to have build the Battle packs from before we were playing the game. So it'd be a different experience than we've had. And then for a lot of players too. Right. As you go back every year older, fewer people will have actually played that irl. So it's just a nice way to open up a new experience to people that they never got to have before. Yeah. Also I just realized it started with what's the format it started with with Fate Squad, which is only like three sets before what they have in the game. So it's actually not that much older. So kind of described what I said earlier. But yeah, okay. But yeah, so we're both pleased with Built in Battle format. A good addition. Hopefully it stays strong in the game. And yeah, so I mean live is. It's in a pretty good, good spot. It's weird with these. They release these letters. Sometimes it's very positive. Sometimes it raises more questions. You know, they did what they intended to do here with building Battle so that, that's a good thing. So hopefully just a sign of strength going forward. Yeah. And this was actually, I believe there was add to the game. Pretty soon after they said like that there's some stuff going wrong with the game or that they were like struggling. It was like, oh wait, we got something good, so that's cool. And they didn't like overhype it. I think, you know, hype is good for a game, but also, you know, if you over hype it, it's a problem and I think they've avoided that here, which is good and people are happy with it. So overall, as you're saying, I think Live's in a pretty good spot right now. I am looking forward to seeing what's going to happen in the future, hopefully with like more cool format stuff. Maybe like more cool trainer trial stuff you mentioned potentially full GLC is something that we could see, more expanded stuff. Obviously a pretty big thing there as well. But anyways, we hope you all enjoyed the episode here today, but tell us your thoughts on the state of Live and the different formats, what formats you've been playing, stuff you want to see as well, and what your predictions are for the future. If you think things are going to continue going well, you think they're going to start falling apart a little, but we hope you all enjoyed. Make sure you like subscribe, hit the bell, all the good stuff and check us out on YouTube at Uncommon Fossil and 10 types and you can listen to us on podcasting platforms. But if you are commenting, make sure you do that on YouTube so we can see it there. We hope you all enjoyed and as always, we're excited to see you in the next episode. Take care.