Episode 2-1: CHANGE IS INEVITABLE

Hello, and welcome back to the Battle Frontier podcast, where we aim to help you level up in your journey as a competitive Pokemon TCG player. I'm Aaron Curry. Here with me as always is my co-host, Jon Orgel. And we are back for Season 2 of our show, as we gear up for the 2026 season of Pokemon. And that brings with it a lot of changes. So some of the stuff we're going to discuss today are things that we didn't have time for on the season finale or our last episode, including Pokemon XP and the details of that as far as when registration will be opening, pass prices, how to discern between those different pass prices, and some of the activities that you can expect to participate in as part of that program. Then we will hit up the first episode of Blaine's Quiz Show for the season. And we will close with some changes to the Professor program that are hitting, that were announced right around when Worlds is happening. And they're pretty big, I would say. So it'll be interesting to get your perspective, Jon, as someone who is a large participant in that program. And I'll give a little bit of input as somebody who is more so on the outside looking in, even though we did discover prior to recording that I have more current Professor points than Jon does. So I'm either, he's spending his way too quickly, or I'm a hoarder. And I'm not sure which of those is true. But we'll figure that out later. So I'm going to open things up with it. How are you doing, Jon? How's your week been? Good. Yeah, my week's been nice. Last week was a little tough coming back from California. Just getting the sleep schedule readjusted. But sorry, my nose itches like right there. So I apologize for all the viewers watching if I just, I'm aggressively itching my nose right there. But yeah, we celebrated my wife's 35th birthday over the weekend. So that was fun. We went out to like some wineries Saturday. And then Sunday, we just had a nice dinner with some friends. So you know, nothing too crazy, but just had a nice little weekend. And then this upcoming weekend, I'm getting ready to go to Montreal, which was a trip I booked before I realized I'd have to spend more PTO to go to the World Championships. So my PTO is going to be like, kind of bad for the rest of the year. But hey, like life's short, you know, go ahead and do it and figure it out later. You can't take it with you, right? Yeah, right. So, you know, but that'll be fun. It'll be good to just, I mean, it has been pretty nice weather wise in Virginia the last week or so. It was like mid 60s, like low 70s this week in the morning and then humidity has been better. So it's been pretty nice. But it'll still be nice to go out and somewhere a little bit cooler and just kind of experience a different side of North America. We don't really get, you know, like Montreal is kind of cool in that it's historically a very French city, very European feeling city. So I'm very excited to like, kind of get away from the US-ness of Virginia for a little bit. Not that it's all that bad, but it's nice to have a change of pace. So that'll be something I'm looking forward to this weekend. And I haven't really done a whole lot of Pokemon. I went to my league last night and we just had kind of open play. I was able to give some local players some sleeves. And then I sold some stuff I picked up from the World Store just locally and trying to like, you know, share the wealth with my ability to go there. So it was like fun to give people the opportunity to get those kind of things that they wanted to get from the Pokemon Center there. And then, yeah, I just helped my friend Ben get ready for Pittsburgh coming up. He's been playing Dragapult, Dusknoir. So I've played a lot of Golden Go against him. And that matchup seems interesting. So I don't know how that shakes out in the long run. But yeah, Golden Go is pretty good, still pretty good. Still playing that deck a lot. I think if I were to play a tournament tomorrow, that's probably what I would pick. But I'm not playing a tournament. I'm kind of chilling for a little bit until we get to Pittsburgh. And we'll come up and talk about that as it gets a little closer. But enough about my week. How about you? How's your week, Aaron? I've been off the Pokemon tournament grind and gearing up for the baseball tournament grind as we are coming up now. So I mentioned on the podcast before that my son does kind of, quote-unquote, competitive baseball or as competitive as you can be for an 8-, 9-year-old team where we've got tournament weekends coming up. Starting this weekend, two weekends a month going through December. And that will be like two games Saturday, two games Sunday. So it's a lot. Pretty nervous for the kids because it's going to be the first tournament that they're playing where they've got other kids pitching to them and where they're pitching to other kids. So we'll see how the mental pressure kind of gets to them on both ends, on offense and defense. And I think that it will hopefully be a lot of fun, though. Unfortunately, the weather has not been super cooperative with us down in Florida where we're getting the late summer like every afternoon or, in the case of this weekend, every late morning it's been raining. So we were supposed to have a practice on Saturday and Sunday last weekend because some of our weekday practices got rained out. And, of course, it rained like all day Saturday, all day Sunday. And unfortunately, we ended up having to cancel the first practice after we were there for like half an hour. And the second one we got most of the way through but then had to call things a little early. And we'll see how things go, you know, heading into this weekend. But it should be a lot of fun. On the Pokémon side of things, I did get to go to my LGS and participate in a local tournament this past weekend. Decided to play a straight-pulled list. And, you know, it was just a quick like three-round thing. Did go 3-0, won some store credit. Played against some less serious decks. One of them was Conkeldurr. I did play against somebody that was playing the like Joltik Goldango deck. And the—I don't remember what the last one was, to be honest with you. But got some store credit. And for whatever reason, one of the guys working at the store convinced me to buy starter decks for this game that I'm really heavily considering taking the decks back to the store and returning them. Because I just—I'm like, I don't know why I bought these. But hopefully, you'll give me the store credit back. What game was it, just out of curiosity? It's—what is it called? I literally see it sitting on the table over there. It's called Cookie Something. And it's based on an IP from Korea. And I guess in Korea, the game is super successful. They're up to like their 9th or 10th set. And they've expanded it now to like a global game to where the first English set is comprised of the first two sets. And the way he described it is that it's—and it's really hard for a game to not say this, but it's got a mix of mechanics from Magic and Pokemon and like Lorkana or Versus system to where your kind of like mana system is not based on any specific card or you can turn anything into a mana. But you're like fielding units in the same way that you kind of would with Pokemon where you can have two guys on the field at a time. And when one of them dies, it goes to your—instead of prize cards, you have like a reverse prize card system to where when a thing gets destroyed, it goes to your—I think it's called a break pile. And when your break pile gets to 10, you lose. And so you'll have guys that are worth 1, 2, or 3. And you have to kind of decide that like the ones that are worth 3 points are more powerful, but they're obviously worth more points for your opponent when they get destroyed. And so you're having to balance out like, okay, well, what am I putting out? And you also get kind of the Yu-Gi-Oh and still kind of a magic thing where you have trap cards or things that you can play on your opponent's turn to kind of try to counteract what they're doing. So maybe it's something that could be fun. But honestly, if I was going to invest any time or money into a different card game, I think I'm going to wait till October or November when Riftbound comes out. Because that does seem more interesting, especially because that's a game that has built in like more than two-player game modes in it. And that seems like the social aspect of that seems really interesting to me. Gotcha. I know we were talking beforehand about kind of the social aspect of Pokémon and how that can be applied to non-standard formats. Because since we did some cubing at Worlds, I've been looking into constructing at least a Scarlet Violet block-based cube for myself and trying to comb through the Scarlet Violet card list to decide what cards are kind of fitting. Like, oh no, Tarapagos is too powerful. We're going to exclude that. But give cards that maybe haven't had a chance to shine that are still reasonably good cards like the Quokkaval from, I think, Surging Sparks, the one that's got like the Claydol-esque ability. That's a solid card and would probably be really good in a draft-type format. And so being able to play with underplayed or underutilized cards seems like a really fun thing to do. So I'm hoping to get some more time into that later on down the line. Nice. Just looking online real quick. Is it Cookie Run? It might be. Yeah, that's the only one I'm seeing that's coming up. The starter decks were like $10 each, and I bought two of them. And I figured, worst case, it was something that I could do at my kitchen table with my wife. We've got a couple of Lorkana things, but that was more so... That was a game that I was actually at one point interested in, but the product was so scarce when the game first kicked off that I eventually got to a point where I felt like I was just way too far behind and did not want to invest the amount of money that I would need to to catch up. And so we'll still kick around like kitchen table things instead of like busting a board game out. We'll take out a few, like a couple Lorkana decks that are just... They're not good by any means, but they're slightly modified theme decks with cards from the first three or four sets that you can still have a decent time with, even though it's not hyper-competitive by any means. So maybe this is just another thing that could fit that bill. Yeah. Yeah, it's always fun to try new games out. It helps you in Pokémon even to see different lines and think of... Yeah, it can be. That's cool, man. Yeah, I'm glad you got to play some locally. Kind of flex on them after your world's run. You know, I'm sure everybody was coming up to you asking for your autograph. Absolutely not. But it was a lot of fun. Like, I did get some congratulations and whatnot. Cool, man. It is what it is. I'm still... I feel better about it than I did at the time, and I think that it will continue to hopefully improve. I don't know, something like that. But enough about that. I think we're going to jump into our first bit of news here, and we'll be pretty brief on this, because I do believe that a lot of other podcasts and or content creators have already kind of covered the nuts and bolts of what this is. But they revealed during the closing ceremony of Worlds last week that Worlds as a whole has been kind of becoming this larger and larger convention, in a sense, rather than just being about the tournament, you know? To where we had, like, the museum and the panels and the big trade zone and other things that are there for people that are not necessarily participating in the tournament. And so Pokémon has seen fit to essentially separate that into a different product, and they have framed that as something that they're calling Pokémon XP. And so they're still listing this event as occurring at the same location, the Moscone Center, where the main event for the World Championship will be located. But the interesting thing is that instead of doing the registration for these passes, you know, mid-summer, June, July, leading directly up to the World Championship, they're actually releasing them in September of this year. And so if you scroll down a little bit on this page, you can see that registration opens on September 17th, and there are a few different levels of passes that you have available to you. You have the multi-day pass, which includes just entry to the Moscone Center and participation in various activities that they have available, as well as entrance into the Pokémon Center. And, you know, we've got pricing here for adults and youth participants. But I've seen some confusion about this, where we have the Pidgey and standard pricing, and some people didn't necessarily understand what Pidgey pricing was. I think it's just the Pokémon company trying to be cute with what they're calling early bird pricing, like a Pidgey, little bird, early route bird. And that's probably my best guess as to what that would represent. And then for an additional $30, you can upgrade to also include the Arena Pass or entrance into the Chase Center to close out and watch the finals in that large arena experience, which I do believe if you're going to be present on Sunday for this event, I would definitely recommend that you go ahead and pay that extra $30, because I think the arena experience is one of the coolest things that you would be able to participate in throughout this weekend. Yeah, it would be cool. Yeah, it's going to be... I thought that it was really cool this year, and I imagine that it's only going to be better as they continue to iterate on it. Oh, for sure. It's a much newer facility, a brand new state-of-the-art facility. So like the one that was in Anaheim, it was very, very cool, but it was just an older building and had some limitations. So it'd definitely be cool to see what Pokémon does instead of almost just a blank palette or a state-of-the-art canvas to work with. Sure. And just having more than twice as much real estate to work with as well and more than twice the seating capacity, it is going to be a massive deal, I think, when we get there in a year's time. But just to look at it, we're going to have typically the standard fair that you would expect from Worlds from a spectator perspective. The Play Lab is going to be present. The Pokémon Center, which thankfully will be for badge holders only next year, I think that that's an improvement, and we'll have to see what other improvements they're able to make to that experience for people as they go through it, because not everyone was as happy as the person in this photo was. No. But hopefully it'll be improved. We'll have more of those panels that we talked about, artist signings and other autograph potentials that are available, and then different workshops. I know for Worlds this year, they had the Bandai Namco model building as well as a few other kind of art things. I know in Hawaii, they did that mud ball. Or what was it? It's not just mud. It had an actual term. I think it was like a genko or gecko or something. I don't remember what the term is. I believe that it is a Polynesian word though for something about water healing. And that was like a really cool experience to where you were able to build something and it was attempting to remediate waterways in the local environment. So trying to give back to the community in the area where the event is happening. So hopefully something like that would also be available here. And then special guests. I don't know if you'll necessarily meet Mr. Ishihara, but you could be somebody close to as special. I know that we've had people like Ken Sugimori has been present at previous world championships and other high tier artists like Arita or Fukuda and a bunch of other upper echelon artists that people would be very excited to meet and potentially get autographs from. So a lot of things to look forward to here. The one thing that really sticks out to me is just the fact that the registration is coming up so quickly. You know, I don't think I can understand the rationale for releasing things this far in advance. Yeah, I don't know. Maybe you can gauge interest a little bit better and then like adjust more than you would be if it was like you're doing it three months in advance. Sure. But like you can release more passes. If I could say, oh yeah, they have like 20,000 people registered in the first week. And then yeah, you're able to open it up more than you would have anticipated. I don't know. It'll be cool to see exactly how big this gets, like slash terrifying. Like worlds has been getting big. Everything Pokemon has been getting bigger the last few years and worlds is no exception. It's nice to see Pokemon go in like the different directions saying, all right, well, we're gonna keep the world championships. That's important. But not everybody at the world championships needs to like be a part of the tournament. I mean, you can have that tournament kind of run in its own area and then have like a world's experience separate from that and allow that to be its own thing. And I think that's fair for the players too. Like in the past, there wasn't as much to do. I think after COVID, like basically after COVID, worlds changed from a tournament first and like a fan experience second, to now probably more so about the fan experience. Like there's more spectators than there are competitors. Absolutely. By a huge margin. Yeah. Like, I don't know how many, I don't know the figures, so I'm kind of guessing, but it's at least two to one, if not more than that. Oh, I definitely think it's more than that. I'm pretty sure that there were at least five times as many people last weekend, well, two weekends ago now, as that were there just to experience the event or be there as a spectator compared to people that were there to participate. And I think some of that gets a little bit skewed when you figure for a lot of the juniors and seniors players, it's kind of one-to-one, they are bringing a spectator with them. So then, or if let alone, if they bring two, because they do have access to two spectator passes. So actually I guess that's a good way to look at it because you figure every single competitor gets two spectator passes from the jump. Yeah. To give away. So if you qualify for worlds, I guess it doesn't, I don't know if we've found out, but would you just get a spectator pass for the tournament or would you get like access to the XP thing? I believe that there is language somewhere on here that states, oh goodness, I need to find it out. But I know that I've read somewhere before that if you purchase a pass right now and you qualify for worlds, you will get your pass refunded. So the way that I'm reading that is that the pass for Pokemon XP also gives you access to the world championship area if necessary. And then obviously if you're a participant, you would have a competitor badge and then the spectator badge would just not allow you to be in that, maybe not that direct tournament area. I'm not sure how they're going to coordinate off. It kind of depends on what space they're working with and just how they decide to handle that. I know this year, it seemed pretty, it was pretty free flowing. Like if you had a spectator badge, you could basically go anywhere you wanted to, except going to actually sit down at one of the tables to play a game. Right. But I know as well that they have stated, again, the same thing that says that if you do earn an invite that you would get a refund or have the ability to get a refund, that you would also be able to get refunds for your designated spectators once you have named them as well. Okay, so that's good to know. Yeah. So good to know for competitors. And then, yeah, just, I think it would be great. I think like my wife who doesn't go to Pokemon tournaments and has no interest in the competitive side of stuff, like this is great for her. Like she can do so much more than just, you know, watch, you know, for lack of a better term, like sweaty TCG players playing Pokemon. I mean, there's not a whole lot, like the TCG side of stuff, I enjoy it, but I understand that like, you know, somebody that doesn't really know much about the TCG is not gonna really find a lot to appreciate, except for like maybe a championship Sunday where they have it on that floor and like the hype of the arena is contagious. Well, that's definitely different, but you could also just send her over to watch Unite. Like that's, I don't care if you know nothing about that game, it is exciting to watch. For sure, for sure. Yeah, even, you know, VGC and Go, like even if you don't, I mean, Go is a little harder to grasp if you don't really understand the game. But yeah, I think it'll be a cool experience for a lot of people. And I'm excited to see just how big it gets, man. It's gonna be, I don't know what staffing looks like for us yet. You know, I mean, a lot of us were doing side events. They hired more people to do side events late into the process this past year. And thankfully they did, because it was like the staff was needed. So I imagine that they'll have more and more staff. And I don't know what the overlap will be. If, you know, your staffing worlds versus staffing XP, if they get the same kind of staff support or something like that. So all that will kind of come out as we get more details. And I don't, I mean, it's still early days, you know. But yeah, I guess, like you said, you know, mark it on your calendar, September 16th, I'm guessing at 12, 12 p.m. Eastern, it looks like. 8 p.m. First wave will go on sale 9 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time. So yes, 12 p.m. Eastern Time. And obviously adjust that to your time zone as necessary. And then a second wave would be the same day, but in the evening, well, pretty late at night for us. So 8 p.m. Pacific Time or 11 p.m. Eastern Time. And I guess you brought up a good point. The one reason I could see for doing this so early now is that they actually would have the potential with enough knowledge this far in advance to potentially introduce new activities or new experiences. Or acquire more space to expand some of these activities, because that's something that happens every single year. Like if you have something like the drone show that they're showcasing in the background of this image, they had that present for Japan, and I believe also for Hawaii. But it was a lottery-based thing. And so only like 200 people per night got to go experience it kind of in that direct area. And otherwise, I mean, you could obviously probably watch it from your hotel room window in both of those circumstances, but it's not necessarily the same thing. And now this maybe gives them an idea, oh, we need to acquire a larger area, more real estate, as it were, to be able to make this work. And having that information ahead of time obviously makes logistical sense. It just, from a financial perspective, feels rough to commit to something almost a year in advance when you feel that in a lot of instances it were, sorry, as they've shown in the past, most of the time this is non-refundable unless you have a reason for them to refund it, i.e. you being on staff or you being a competitor. Otherwise, you're just kind of flushing that money away if something comes up and you can't attend. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's non-transferable, which is tough. Like you can't, like a sporting event, like even if you can't go to the sporting event and you can sell the tickets or like transfer them to a friend, Pokemon historically, I mean, I'm not gonna say like with certainty, because it might be different, but historically, like you can't transfer spectator passes to somebody else. You have to show up and then kind of figure it out. Which I do think in this instance is a good thing. Otherwise, my concern is these would be like just bot-waved to all hell and no actual person would acquire a pass and they would be on eBay the same day that they become available. Yeah, I think that's fair to say. Like you need to have some accountability for purchasing these things. Otherwise it will just become like everything else, Pokemon right now, where that happens. Scalp it to hell. Yeah. So, all right. But yeah, definitely looking forward to more announcements and more developments with that. There's a long road we got till the next year's worlds, but it starts now. It actually started for a lot of players and I'm excited to see how that kind of shakes out. But we'll cover it here. And hopefully, I think one thing I wanna talk about before we go into Blaine's quiz show is what are your goals for the season? I know that you're looking to maybe not go as hard as you did this past season, but with a new season, now a new season of the show, maybe your goals have shifted a little bit to more content creation or something like that. I'll let you think on that question then I'll go ahead and go into what I have for the season. I just had to write down some goals of mine for a professor program. So my goals, I still wanna stay high. I wanna stay at a high level as a competitor. So I kinda wanna play in one regional this year as a competitor, just to keep that edge and keep that mindset at the forefront when I'm judging. Because there are times where I've seen judges that were at a high level and don't play anymore. And that does show somewhat. And I mean, that's fair. Like it's tough. Like if you're judging every tournament, like if you get to a certain level, it's very hard to step out of judging at a head judge level or something like that. And then say, okay, well, I'm gonna skip this one and play. Because one, like you're not really guaranteed to do well as a player. Like it can be very tough to come back to playing after a long absence or not keeping up with it as much as you should be. And two, it's like, well, at a certain point, people will kind of expect your name to be there, to be on the staff sheet, to be in a leadership position. And so there's like an added pressure of that. So you have to like really just make it a priority to keep playing. But I think I want to try to make that effort. And we'll see what that looks like. I don't think I'll be doing it in the first two tournaments of the year. But we'll see after that as we get more announced. Maybe I'll try to flex one in or something like that. And then, yeah, I just want to keep the judge grind going, I guess. I like judging. I really feel like I'm able to still be effective and still make a positive impact on tournaments for the most part. And I've had really good feedback from other judges on the EUIC, well, the NAIC and the Worlds level were really, really positive. And so I really been motivated by that to kind of take on leadership roles and then try to just keep pushing myself and those around me to higher levels. And I think that's going to be really exciting to see that happen. So yeah, I should be able to do that at least from an early onset. It's looking pretty good. And beyond that, I don't really know. I haven't heard anything about LAIC yet. So some of the stuff went out, I think over the weekend, some of the staff calls, but I think it might just be like the first wave. And then once they get that established, they'll be doing more and more. So we'll see. But yeah, that'll be my two main goals. And then just locally, just kind of helping my league stay relevant and trying to respond to the demands of the players in my league, like make sure I'm listening to what they want to do and what they want to play and not just like kind of saying, oh, I like competitive Pokemon. Let me just do a tournament every week. Like, well, maybe that works for me, but maybe some players don't want to do that. Maybe they want to do a retro format or a cube or whatever. So just responding and ensuring that everybody's heard and felt as appreciated is just a huge thing. So that's where I'm coming from this season. And they're pretty like general with the exception of maybe like the leadership stuff and playing in a tournament. But yeah, that's where I'm at. What about you, Aaron? I think, and I've been pretty clear about this, I feel, is my primary thing this season is casting. And I think that that is definitely a main goal of mine. I'm going to be casting, hopefully, as long as time allows, every single League Cup that happens at Versus Games in Oviedo. I'm trying to set up some other stuff as well. And then the other big thing is that as long as all of our events are happening, I will be one of the casters for almost all of the Masters Cup events throughout the season as well. And so we're, like I said on the last episode, we're still trying to figure everything out for those events. But I'm pretty sure we've got things squared away to have Brazil be ready to go. And we should have some more announcements involving that sometime, hopefully, in the near future, maybe get a little bit more PR ahead of that compared to what we were able to do for the NAIC event this past season. And then the other big thing would be just from a competitive perspective, I am going to set a higher goal than what I had done last season, which was just like day two-ing a major event. Now I want to cash something. And so I want to walk away from an event with a profit, or at least, you know, breaking even financially. And I don't think that it's unreasonable. You know, I think that- I mean, you came close a couple times. Especially the way that I closed out the two biggest events of the year. You know, I showed to myself, at least, like I can go on a fairly deep run. And if Worlds had been an IC, I would have gotten some amount of cash from it. It still wouldn't have necessarily been the result that I wanted to end up with, but it would have been something. soften the blow. And so I think that rather than, you know, not necessarily saying I want to shoot for top eight, even though I would do feel like I was incredibly close to that at worlds as well, I would, you know, starting the bar a little bit lower seems more reasonable. That's good. Yeah, I think that's a reasonable goal with your expected level of like competitiveness going into the season. Yeah, I'm really hopeful and excited to see, you know, you grow as a caster and see you step into so many roles there. So that'll be fun to see. Yeah, I appreciate it. I do think, you know, from the competitive perspective, too, the progression that I think that I've established from, you know, where I said at the beginning, or I guess it was midway last season when we kind of established those goals, because it was around New Year's on the calendar year that we talked about this last. I think that I've established a better prep process for events, and I feel pretty confident, even though as silly as it is, most of it is literally just grinding TCG live ladder games. You know, we've seen from like, you look at Justin Newdorf, that is a testing process, and it is something that is effective enough to yield solid results, as long as you are being mindful about how you were going about it, and not just grinding games for the sake of playing Pokemon. So if you're actually paying attention to your outcomes and taking the data, the appropriate data away from them, it can definitely be an effective testing tool, and something that should not be overlooked by any means. I know somebody reached out to me last week and asked me, you know, hey, like, can I join your testing group? And I was like, I don't really have a testing group, man. I just, I reach out to friends every once in a while to play when we have time, but like, a lot of us work full-time jobs. I've got a kid. I've got other people that I do sometimes play with have kids. So we mostly just talk about stuff, and then we'll talk about making list changes, and one of us will go try them out and be like, no, I didn't like it, and everyone will kind of just take their word for it. Or, you know, if I have the time to do it, I'll put my due diligence in and test out the changes that we're discussing myself, and see what I do and don't like, or kind of formulate my own opinion from the data that I'm able to gather. And some of it is obviously going to be a limited sample size, but I do think the biggest thing you can do, and the biggest disservice you can do for yourself as a player, is just taking the word of the data on a website like Train or Hill or Limitless as gospel. And you really, if you can, need to put in as much of the work as possible with the deck that you're planning to test to see if the matchup percentages actually align with what you're experiencing. Because it could just be the case where maybe you're just way better at a deck than all the people that are playing in these online events. Or maybe you're way worse with the deck than, you know, it kind of goes both ways. But being able to figure out for yourself what is and isn't working is definitely an important skill, and something that you can actively practice and get better at. Yeah, I think that's kind of the new wave of players since COVID is, you know, the Henry Chow's and Justin Udorfs, and just so many players now just saying that live is their main way to test and get ready and prep for tournaments. And truthfully, like, if you're trying to just get the most bang for your buck, it makes a lot of sense. Like, yep. I mean, playing a lot playing against somebody in person is helpful in its own way. If you're not experienced at that level of competitiveness, you know, if you're a new player coming into playing original for the first time, definitely is very helpful to get practice shuffling practice those skills. But you know, that that pales in comparison with just the deck knowledge and the deep matchup knowledge and the just all routing and just all the skills you learn playing live from prize checking to prize mapping to all this stuff that we've talked about kind of over the course of this last season on the podcast. But like, you learn faster and you're able to like glean. If you're able to like really process the data and process what you're experiencing, like when I play live, if I'm trying to be very good at it, I write down notes for my matches. So I'll say, okay, you know, this card was helpful in this matchup. Or I have got, you know, open this in my hand and lost quickly and stuff like that, where you're just kind of making notes on the deck, the deck list, how the matchups go, that kind of stuff. But you're not really going to see that if you're just playing the same person in a testing group. I mean, that the testing group can be helpful, like, to help kind of finalize opinions or bounce ideas off of but if you're just trying to get games in against unexpected meta, live is your best bet because you're going to see a wider variety of decks, a wider variety of skills, people will be better than you. When you get to the higher levels of ELO, you'll find opponents that will match you or surpass you and challenge you that you won't really find at a local level. And that's just the facts of it. Like nobody's locals are, you know, I mean, sometimes when you get to the higher levels of testing groups, you do have like, the branders and all that kind of stuff. But I'm guarantee all of them still play copious amounts of live on top of being in a testing group. So right. I mean, you're local not to go down this road in New York, Liam Halliburton and Henry Chow. And I know for sure those three are duking it out for the top spot on ladder most seasons on TCG live. I wish I had a ladder, like, you know, one, I think we're getting closer to it. Yeah, they're hinting. They're definitely hinting that it could exist. The other thing to like, mention real quick about like physical versus digital testing is if you do a lot of physical testing, and you're not stuck, but you are only playing with one or two people, it's really easy to fall into a rut or a form false opinions of something. Because one of you could just be playing the matchup wrong, and not necessarily understand. And so you form an opinion on Oh, this is the outcome I should expect, because this happens, and you kind of get this expected flowchart. And suddenly, somebody at a tournament does something a little bit different or askew from that. And your whole game plan goes out the window. So like john said, if you're able to play against a varied pool of players, whether that's on different decks, or the same deck, and just playing a different person every time, you can kind of see how do these different avenues play out. And a good in person testing group would also help you explore that. But it's definitely faster and just more accessible to do it on your phone or on your computer when you have time available to do it. Yep. So that's our two cents on that. And yeah, I mean, detour, though. Yeah, I don't mind that. That's a good conversation topic. But yeah, I think you got Blaine's quiz show on deck. I do. And so I actually didn't write points. That's what I was thinking about. So I did not run this by you ahead of the show. But I think it's only appropriate to start season one off by saying, unfortunately for you, john, I won season one. And I think that we can go ahead and go into season two on a clean slate here. If you're amenable to that. Yeah, that's fair. I don't think it'll get any better for me. So you know, why not try to make a new start, you know, new game game to you. Well, here we go. So let's let's get to it. So for people who may be joining us freshly at the beginning of season two here, Blaine's quiz show is a mostly weekly quiz show that john and I do where we go back and forth asking each other three multiple choice questions. And each correct answer will award john with one point he has one hint available for him this week that he can utilize on any of the three questions. However, if he chooses not to utilize that hint, and answers all three questions correctly, he will earn a bonus point. And so john, I didn't really have a good topic for this week. So you kind of got miscellaneous and we'll have to see where we can go from here. But are you ready for your first question of season two? Let's get to it. Okay. So of these four Pokemon, which is the only one that has not been featured as a team rocket, dark and team plasma card, and your choices are goal bat, Porygon to scissor and wheezing. Oh, so all three? Yes. Okay. Three of these four Pokemon have been featured as all three of these categories. One of them is the odd Pokemon out which one is it? Oh, I don't know scissors been a team rocket Pokemon maybe back in the day, definitely not in the new iterations. I know. And I think plasma might be the because there's not it. I don't think there's a plasma scissor at all. I can't think of one. Yeah, no, I think there's been there's obviously plasma goal bat. I think there's plasma Porygon to definitely plasma wheezing. Oh, man, I'm gonna kick myself if it's like, I think it comes down to the plasma thing because I think everything else has been rocket and dark. I don't remember plasma scissor. I remember there was there was a scissor in this era. I just use my hand here. And like, yeah, let's use my hand. I don't think I'm gonna go perfect this week. So let's just go ahead and do a hand. So your hint for this question is that it is a all four of these Pokemon are in stage ones. But the answer to this question does not evolve. Okay, so obviously, okay, so it has to be scissor at that point. So I'm gonna go lock in scissor. Okay, so you're locking in scissor. It's I don't know about obvious, it could have been wheezing, right? Yeah, you you were correct. It was indeed scissor. So you called out correctly, all four of these cards have been team rocket and dark Pokemon. I don't know the sets for all of them scissor in particular, I know is a dark Pokemon and Neo Destiny, as well as being a team rocket card during the team rocket returns expansion where there was a team rocket scissor EX. But it was in fact not a team plasma Pokemon. I chose Golbat and Porygon2 one to make all of these stage ones, but also because Golbat and or Crobat and Porygon Z were pre released promos. And so I was like, maybe that would trip him up a little bit to use the stage ones instead of the stage twos. But you saw right through those two. Well, I just thought it would be like, okay, it's got to be like, whatever is not plasma because there wasn't a lot of plasma Pokemon. Yeah, there's only like two, there's three sets. But yeah, they're like the all the like brackets and dark, I think there's more chances. Okay, so going into question two, Skeledurge and this stage two Pokemon have had the most unique cards printed in the Scarlet Violet block. So your choices for the other stage two Pokemon are Quokkavile, Meowskirata, Annihilate, and Crobat. And so for a little bit of background, this includes regular and EX printings of these Pokemon. Is it another starter? I mean, there's been a lot of Annihilates, like a surprising amount of Annihilates. And a lot of them have been good. I don't think it's Crobat. I think Crobat, I think it's got to be a Scarlet or Violet Pokemon. I think we can kind of cross out Crobat from here. I don't think Quokkavile has had quite as many as Annihilate and Meowskirata. I'm going to stick with Annihilate. That was kind of my gut reaction. Okay, I'm going to lock in Annihilate. And good for you. Annihilate is in fact the correct answer. So Skeledurge had four cards available, as does Annihilate. And I think that was largely due to having an additional promo on top of three set printings. Crobat, Meowskirata, and Quokkavile are close behind with three cards each. Surprising for Crobat, given that it is, like you said, not a Scarlet and Violet Pokemon. But they did give it the Team Rocket EX treatment, as well as the one that interacted with Janine in the Shrouded Table expansion. And there was the one prior to that that takes two additional prize cards when it knocks out a Pokemon for three in a row. And the final question for this week is, what was the seventh most popular deck in the Masters Division during day one of the 2025 World Championship Tournament? And your choices are Joltik Box, Straight Polt, Charizard Pidgeot, or Nzorak. Wow. This is tough. This one's hard. So which of these four decks is leading the charge on that best-of-the-rest graphic that we never got to see? Yeah, yeah. I'm trying to remember what's on the six ones on that one. I can, like, you know, it's Dusnarpolt, Garde, and Golden Goat, top three. Then you go into Raging Bolt, I think, is up there. I think I'm putting Joltik Box in the top six. Straight Polt might be also top six, but I'm not sure. I think I'm leaning towards Straight Polt. Nzorak saw a lot of good, like, day two conversion and did pretty well. I mean, he had two in top eight, but I don't think it was, like, heavily played. And I don't think it's Charizard Pidgeot. Although that was pretty popular for Worlds. It was kind of like a sleeper pick. Man, this is a tough one, Aaron. I'm gonna have to just guess at it. Maybe I should have saved my hint for this one. But let's go Straight Polt, just kind of throwing it in there. Okay. I hope for the best. So, Straight Polt locked in. We will, I'll let you know, none of these four were part of the top six decks. The top six decks were Golden Goat, Dusnarpolt, Raging Bolt, Golden Goat, maybe I already said Golden Goat. So, Golden Goat, Gardevoir, Dusnarpolt, Raging Bolt, Grimmsnarl, and Eevee Box were the top six decks. Oh, Eevee Box. Okay. And number seven was, in fact, Straight Polt. Way to go, John. You went three for three this week. Dude, starting strong. I think that might be a show first. That might be. I don't think I've, I wish I hadn't used it, because I had it without the hint, too. You did. I could have got four points this week. That's fine. I would have used it on this question, so I wouldn't have felt too bad. What a way to start things off. So, just to also clarify, these four were the next four most popular decks, and the order of them was Straight Polt, Joltik Box, Charizard, Pidgeot, and N'Zurark as numbers of seven, eight, nine, and ten. And Zoroark was still up there. Top 10 is pretty good. Now granted, once you kind of get past these four, like, what other decks are we really talking about? You've got, like, Krustle and Typhlosion and the decks that people were playing in just really, really low numbers. But yeah. Again, congratulations, John. Way to close things out. 3-4-3. Definitely a solid finish. All right. This is the year of John. You know, we'll just call it. Call my shot off to kind of cook up one for you next week. Or I guess we won't have a... I won't be on the show next week. I'll be on vacation. So the next time we'll have Blaine's Quiz Show, I'll have one cooked up for you, Aaron. Hey, sounds good to me. Sounds good to me. And just for everyone's awareness, I will still be trying to put an episode together, hopefully being able to pull someone as to guest host as John was kind enough to do for me on a few episodes closing out through the summer. But to speaking of closing out, we did have another piece of news here. And so I'm going to pop this up on the screen and let John lead us off with talking about some changes coming to the Professor Program. Yeah, so we hinted at this last week, for those that listened. Right before Worlds on August 12th, Pokemon released a brief update to all professors about just some changes coming to the Professor Program. So historically, we've had the basic stage one and stage two designation for professors, with basic just kind of being the entry point for all professors. Now, a couple of things have changed. They've consolidated. It used to be you had ProfU, thisprofessorprogram.com, like short PCOM, I guess is the kind of the in-house abbreviation. And then you had like the Pokemon.com website where you took some of the tests and had to do some stuff over there on like your player account. So now everything is going to be done through PCOM, which is good. I think it's nice to have like a solid landing page for everything. And then that way now you have like staff calls here. You have the directory so you can look up where. So if we're looking at this web page, this is a nice this is the page that we're on, PCOM. You have a lot of different things here. So the RPC network is kind of like your regional coordinator for your local like your area, like your group of states. Usually if you're in the US or your countries, if you're in the EU, a directory just shows you it'll be more flushed out. I think this is kind of just starting up, but directly will have like a listing like, hey, who are some of the professors in my area I can kind of coordinate stuff with or ask questions about or see, like, if if I'm hosting an event, can I get somebody to help me judge it? Something like that. Staff calls will be like whenever they have a regional posted, you can look it up there. Forms are exactly what they sound like. Events similar to, I guess, in the past, we've had like professor cups. That's where we would talk about them and put them on their professor stories. Professor story. The professor university is just a learning portal for everything professor. And it's a very good resource for if you're newer into the game or just want to refresh your skills, definitely go there. But just to go into the details of the program itself, like I said, you'll be moving away from the basic the stage one and the stage two. So the ranks will be changing. You'll no longer have that. You'll have different ranks based on colors. You'll have red, gold, diamond and violet, with red being the lowest level and then gold being like, you know, similar to stage one and then diamond being the highest level. And then violet is kind of like a special recognition thing that will be assigned by, I think, I don't know who they said, but like it's it's it's given by. Somebody on the professor's side, I forget what they said exactly, but it's not something you can apply for, it's it's a it's it's a recognition award, more or less. And so the basic entry point is red, and that is kind of a cross between where we're at. So the ranks, as these are listed, are less focused on depth, maybe, and more focused on breadth. I mean, I think that was kind of one of the main focus points for the switch up from basic stage one, stage two. The focus is now, OK, red means you like if I say I'm red, it's like I can do one game and I can do it pretty well. I'm good enough to be a judge at a local level, that kind of stuff. Gold says I know more than just the game. I know how to organize. I know how to like do a little bit more. Diamond means I have like a really good grasp of all the different facets of the professor program just with wise. So like I've done VG, I've done TCG, I've done go. At least I have like a really good knowledge base to work off of if I were to ask to do those things. And with these, like you have some certifications you have to take to achieve these. These aren't grandfathered in meaning. I mean, so when I went to look at this stuff today, I had already completed the Professor 101 and the TCG certification based on what I already had through the old professor program. But now I have to take the professor to one and then I have to take any other one certification. So I think I had the TCG one. So I'm going to apply for the two on this month and then hopefully get the red certification by the end of the month and then go from there. And yeah, just there's some different facets you have to do. So you have to do the certifications and then there's also a minimum level of activity that's required of you. Which can you zoom in a little bit, Aaron? Yep, absolutely. Oh, yeah. Let's back that up just a tad. Oh, my gosh. No, the website is broken. Okay, we'll just work. Is that better? Yeah, that's much better. All right. So it says held a staff role in at least four play Pokemon events within the previous 12 months, and those are pretty small level. They're not like regional level stuff. So if you're running a League Cup, there will be an expectation you're judging some of these things, not just organizing everything. So you can't just run the stores you are running. You'll be expected to help judge or yeah, mostly judge like a cup at another store. That'll help qualify for these things. And then the next one just adds Professor 301, and then you need three certifications. So that's TCG, VG, Go, and I think organization. So three of those four you'll need to have for the gold rank. You have to have held at least a staff role in at least six play Pokemon events within 12 months, and the diamond is 301, 401, 201, and 101. And then you need to have now all four listed Pokemon certifications and then have at least 12 play Pokemon events within the previous 12 months, including two leadership roles, head judge or assistant head judge. So that's, I guess, the end goal for a lot of players or a lot of judges rather. But, you know, as it was explained to me, I went to a kind of what they call it, a drop in session on the Thursday, I believe, before Worlds, where one of the people from Pokemon who is part of the professor like program Daryl Ellenberg spoke. And I think he would say that we can share this with professors, but I don't want to go into all the details as I don't know how much of this is open to the public. But this should be all public knowledge, at least on some level. And I don't think we're really spilling the beans too much. But he was just going over, like, the philosophy of it, and it goes into a little bit of it further down. But the ranks aren't there to kind of create like in the past they've had. They moved away from the stage one, stage two in the basic because they were strongly and created a hierarchy where if you were like a stage one judge, you could hang that over the head of somebody that's a basic judge saying, oh, you're just a basic judge. You wouldn't understand or something like that. Now, these divisions are more meant to just say, like, where are you focused on? Like, are you focused on the breadth of your tournament? Are you like you're you know, I could be a regional level judge and just stay at the red level. Like, that's perfectly fine. But like, I think the expectation is like it lists it a little bit further down as to, like, what are the perks of achieving these ranks? They're actually up here. OK, so this is kind of like what you're striving towards if you are at these ranks. So red is just your entry point. And you're eligible for professor cups. Gold is you have improved consideration for regional championship staff roles, eligibility to become an area mentor and ability to host Sycamore Symposium. So gold being kind of like the next step up as far as you're just like more involved in the community is my kind of take on it. And then Diamond is another step up as you're more and more involved in the community or improved consideration for international championship staff roles and eligibility to become a regional professor coordinator, which is like the regional manager of the professor stuff. And Violet, you know, it's kind of its own special thing. So I think most judges will probably stay at red and then some will move up to gold and then very few move up the diamond. But it's not supposed to. Like, I think the whole thing is just to gauge where your level of involvement in the professor program is. And not everybody wants to be doing as much as a gold member would. And I think when I think one thing that turned some people off from this was the whole like, oh, well, if I want to get accepted as a regional judge, I now have to be a gold judge. And so that might have been a sort of anxiety for a lot of judges. But it clarifies with like the asterisk there that there are several factors involved in a professor's consideration for staff roles, of which rank is only one. So if you've done regionals in the past, if you've staffed stuff like a lot, I would probably say and I don't want to speak out of turn, but I think, you know, other than if you're just saying I'm going to be a stick in the mud and don't want to ever like improve my skills and reach the level of gold eventually, you know, but like to start out with, like at the beginning of this season, don't worry about it too much. Like, I don't think Pokemon is going to care if you're gold by like December, you know, but if if you're if you're not showing the willingness to learn some new things and challenge yourself from the like information that's available readily, I think that kind of speaks somewhat to what you want to be doing. Like. I don't know, like I wouldn't freak out about it quite a way, like I think, you know, I saw some people responding to it aggressively in the first couple of days of this being posted, and I think it's it's fair to want clarification and want more answers and want, you know, the expectations lined up before we go ahead and do all this stuff. But I don't think it's expected of judges to like stop everything that they're doing and then dedicate, you know, every waking moment to being a Pokemon professor. Like that's just not realistic for a lot of people and not really needed by the program. It's always like this. A lot of this is volunteer work for me. My league that I run every week, like I don't really, you know, get a whole lot of benefits from that other than like the joy I get from helping spread the game and growing the community and all that stuff. So I think the expectations of volunteers is never going to be like the same as, you know, an employee. And I think this is all just kind of that mindset of like, we're hoping to develop you and expand your ability to appreciate other games. And, you know, if you're going to regionals, yeah, it would be helpful if you know how to judge VG or you know how to judge Pokemon Go. So I think that's kind of the gist of it. There's a little bit of FAQ stuff at the bottom. Going over, like why they changed it from basic to stage one or the rank system they had, and then, yeah, Diamond rank, talking about that. But, yeah, if you want more information, if you're a professor, just go to Professor University or sorry, it's ProfessorProgram.Pokemon.com and you'll have to log in using your trainer ID, your like play ID, I think. Yeah, the same thing you've been doing, your play Pokemon account credentials. Yeah, basically. So the same thing you've been using to log into live or log into Pokemon.com should be the same thing. So that's the bulk of it. I will say that I don't expect it to stay at this. I think that there will be more and more stuff added to this program. This is just like a change in philosophy and a beginning point. And I think Pokemon, the professor program will definitely be adding more and more to this. And I think that's a good thing. Like the system as it was kind of felt dated. It felt stuck in an older mindset, perhaps. This one seems a little bit more focused on ensuring that professors are obtaining a higher quality of staffing, like having to take more classes on, having to do more judge roles. You had to do a certain amount of judge roles to get to stage one. But I don't know if I think it counted like everything you organized and not necessarily didn't. You know, you could get away with organizing stuff. And I think you had to judge a couple events at a higher level. I don't remember exactly all the requirements, but yeah, definitely will be interesting to see kind of how it progresses from here. And I'm excited to see some of that come to the forefront. I don't think Pokemon made this decision lightly. Like they're doing this to try to make organized play better and try to, you know, and the whole making it more community, making it more. for like, I think one thing that was talked about at the drop in session was that there was a lot of clicks formed amongst the different games. So you had a lot of Pokemon TCG professors hanging out, a lot of VG kind of hanging out and go hanging out. And there wasn't a lot of like cross pollination. There was very few professors that would hang out from one group to the other and vice versa. And that's not good. Like you want everybody to feel included and you want that cross pollination because it makes for a better judge at the end of the day. And I'll say I'm guilty of it too. Like I've been hanging out. If I go to a Pokemon regional, that's something I need to break the habit of. And it's tough because those are the people you're working with the whole day. You know, those are the people you form bonds with through those experiences. It is tougher to kind of bond with people you're not really working with hand in hand throughout the event. Well, and you know, theoretically you have more in common with the people that are working in the same game as you. Yeah. Because you just have a better understanding of that game. Right. So you may not be able to have the same conversation about, you know, some judge in the VG area may bring up something about a player's EV spread on their Pokemon. And you may have an understanding of what that concept is, but you wouldn't necessarily understand the impact of why, you know, Wolfie took 12 points out of his speed stat or something and why that makes it important that his Amoonguss is slower than someone else's Tingloo. I have no idea if those Pokemon speeds are anywhere near each other. But that just goes to demonstrate, like, because I'm not super involved with the video game, I don't necessarily understand everything as to why, like, I was just thinking about this earlier. I don't know what judges do over on the video game side of things. And I'm sure that there are specific things, like, I know one of the things the rulings has to do with timers or game malfunctions and things of that nature. But I guess you also have to make rulings outside of, it's weird because in a lot of ways the game itself is the judge to where, like, the big example I can think of is if a Pokemon uses a self-KO move and it happens to knock out all the remaining Pokemon, then I think the way the game is currently programmed, the Pokemon that used the move loses, whereas in previous iterations of the game that Pokemon would win or vice versa, something like that. But you know, that's not, that doesn't require the input of a person. And so it seems to me in a lot of ways that the VG judges from an outsider's perspective are more so tech support than they are actually judging something. And you need to be more aware of how the connection works between the two devices and being able to troubleshoot those things for players rather than actually understanding specific game situations. Yeah. I think, yeah, you're definitely more of a, oh, this happened, the game crashed and we both can't finish our game or connectivity was lost or something like, yeah. So it does more of a tech support role. But it's also just like, okay, well, do we restart the game or how any Pokemon, like, it's not fair if we have to restart the game and they had only one Pokemon left to my four. And there's only like two minutes left in the round time or something like that. I don't know. I mean, that's one thing I need to like, to be honest with, I don't really know either if I'm honest. And that's why you can come up with your VG judge certification. And truthfully, I'm kind of excited. Like I did a little bit of pocket at worlds and I got kind of my toes wet with that. And I learned a little bit about, because it's similar to VG where you're not really doing anything like, okay, you can't really enforce like, you know, play game states or misplays or rewind stuff. You're forced to figure out like what, you know, then you have the situation of, okay, we got to a sudden death. We both tied in the game. How do we resolve this? And it's like, okay, well, here's the rules that we've lined up for this and just kind of informing the players of that and then letting them do that. And it will be interesting to see, you know, if we have players kind of cross pollinate in, I think that's the end goal. And I expect TCG is hard if you're not really into TCG, like if you're just into VG or go, I can see it being difficult to get a feel for like the interactions that go on with slow play or something like that. If you're really not able to read board states effectively, but I could say that I guess the same thing, like, you know, even if you have a rudimentary knowledge and are able to like, kind of force your way through one of those things, it still makes you a better judge, right? Like if, oh crap, you know, VG swamped or okay, TCG swamped, we need someone judges to pull from this area just for like a first few rounds and then we can kind of go back and fix it. So it'll be good to like have flexibility. And especially if you're working side events, like this is great. Like being able to learn, go and VG, like there were times where I'm like, I don't know what the heck is going on, but yeah, I'm going to trust that the players do. And cause I got sometimes like we were so busy Saturday, I just got, oh crap, a VG pod just got thrown into my area. Okay. Do you guys know what you're doing? No. Okay, great. All right. Let me read the rules real quick. Here's the rules. All right. Have fun. Like it was like that kind of thing where I'm just like, you know, I'll help you the best I can. But I'm learning with you guys. So yeah. And that, that would be good to have that knowledge to pull up. So I have two questions. Go for it. First one would be, if you have a larger pool of people who have now gotten this larger breadth of understanding of multiple games, do you think that this potentially leads to a world where they actually have fewer total staff members for an event because they have the ability to pull people from different areas into other areas as they feel it is necessary to do so. Maybe for like some things like side events, I could see them trying to get away with less staff for that. If you're trying to say, okay, well, if we trade every judge that does side events to be able to do all the games, but even then, like just the sheer numbers of players that, you know, are just interfacing with judges, you need like for the regionals with 3000 players, like having more players from go, like, I don't, I mean, there's goes running the same time that TCG is running VG is running the same time that goes running. So it's, I don't know, I think it's very realistic to expect somebody that's judging go or VG to. Okay. Well, you guys are kind of slow. This at the start of the round for you guys, there's not much going on, go bounce over to TCG because they're not necessarily right next to each other. And it's not always helpful to just kind of come into an area and not have like your AHJ that you can report to. And you're reporting to an AHA you don't know, or like you're stepping on toes with that. So from a coordinating coordinator perspective, I don't think it would be very helpful. But from a side events perspective, and I think it seems like a world where that might be the case a little bit, but I even like, just depends on how many people are playing side events. I think if you're at capacity, you're going to need all the judges you can get. And I don't think that, you know, being flexible allows you to run 16 tables instead of just eight at the same time. Okay. It's just, there's a certain amount of work that you can realistically be expected to do as a judge. And then that doesn't change because you're able to do other games. I think that just, that's just a capacity, like, that's just a realistic level of capacity, if that makes sense. Yeah, no, absolutely. And then the other one was, what the heck is a Sycamore Symposium? Oh, good question. So that's another thing that went over in the drop-in. And that's kind of like taking the professor seminars that we've had at regionals for a while as professors and making those more of a local thing. So Sycamore Symposiums will start more of a grassroots perspective. So instead of having to say, an organizer say, okay, well, or like TPC, I, or somebody from a higher up level perspective saying, all right, we're going to do a professor seminar before we do this regionals. This allows stuff to happen more at a local level. So if I'm like in Richmond and I say, okay, you know, I want to just create a little get together for all my local professors in my area, and we're going to go over like three different topics, have a couple of different guest speakers come, maybe do an activity together and have this opportunity to just like network and learn and take that time to kind of sharpen each other and make it available to where everybody from all these different disciplines learn something new. I think that's kind of the mindset is that we're taking the approach that was taken at professor seminars and bringing it to the local level. And there's more information out there about it. If you're really interested in it, if, you know, again, if you're a professor, I think this is the Sycamore symposiums have like their own writeup on somewhere on this website. I can't find it at the moment, but yeah, I think that's the most of it. And if you guys are interested in it, you know, the best place to start would probably be this website reading up on it. But yeah, I think it'll be good. We had a little bit of this last season with some of the drop-in sessions we had with RPCs, which are like the regional professor coordinators. So I remember going to a drop-in in Chantilly, which is Northern Virginia, hosted by Dave Tuskey, who's the RPC for like the mid-Atlantic Northeast region of the U.S. And we had people from like New York City coming down and people from Pennsylvania and Virginia and all that stuff. And he had A.J. Schumacher, who's a long-time judge, long-time like head judge, high on the program, speak and talk about, you know, just different things, you know, talking about how to work together as a team and like looking at how you process things, like what are the best strategies and how to like kind of implement that, just basic leadership stuff. And then we did like a build-in battle tournament. So that was kind of fun, just like an all-professor tournament after that. So it was a good time. It was like two or three hours on a Saturday. This will be a little bit different with more of a seminar approach, but I'm sure there'll be activities and stuff you can do. And Pokemon's supporting it with booster boxes and promo cards and stuff like that. Oh, cool. So it'll be like you're getting a little bit more support than just go do this. It's now like, okay, well, you know, here's a booster box for the store owners so that they don't feel, you know, slighted that they have to like close off their tournament area for a whole afternoon. You know, here's booster boxes for the presenters. Here's a, you know, if you're an organizer, here's like, we're going to help you with publicizing it on their website. Our website and how that is like, all right, here's all the different Sycamore symposiums going on. So stuff like that. Well, that was my other question was like, how are you, John, going to convince people to come to the cocktail party at your house where you're going to do a PowerPoint on your TV? But it sounds like it is still supposed to be, you know, based in a store for the most part. Right. So they want to primarily at, you know, league locations or stores that host leagues, organized play areas, but they are realistic in that that might not be real, you know, if I host mine at like a small shop, maybe they have to do a secondary location, but the coordination of it might go through the shop still or something like that. Similar to how we've been doing tournaments this past season, where a shop can have a secondary location for a tournament that isn't the main point of business. That's been a new addition. So I think that would be an option, but like you'll have to get it all approved. There will be an approval process for like what your topics are. So that takes some time. So don't expect to be able to just like, oh, I want to do this. Let's do it next weekend. You're going to have to like kind of have a longer lead up to it. Hopefully I did a good job of explaining all that. I didn't really take notes. And Daryl did a really good job of answering a lot of different questions for a really long time. So Daryl was pretty great for all that. And so reach out to the helpline or I guess the support ticket. You know, if you really have any questions that aren't answered here, those are always good options. Or like look at the forums, maybe I think that would be a good option. Or the professor discord that can kind of be its own overwhelming thing at times. But it's also very like you have a lot of people trying to be very helpful. So all those are great options. You know, the nice thing about the professor program, even up, you know, is now more than ever is we're more connected. We're more in support of each other. I've felt as a judge this past year, you know, that I've never been alone. Like I've never had to like figure out something on my own entirely. You know, if I have a question, there's a compendium or there's like the SOS channel and the professor discord. There's plenty of resources now to where if you're a professor, you don't have to do anything alone. You don't have to figure it out on your own. So feel free to reach out to me or even, you know, other professors, you know, in the area and they can at least if they don't know the answer to it, they can point you in the right direction. For sure. And then obviously, if you are in the professor program, make sure that you are staying up to date with all of your certifications and things. One small detail that John didn't cover. It's hidden here is kind of a footnote at the bottom is that you have to renew all of these certifications annually, because at the time that you complete a course, it is valid for 12 months from the date of completion. So you need to make sure that you stay up to date with all of. And if you're interested in becoming part of the professor program, you can also do that through the, I believe you start on Pokemon.com and it will redirect you to the appropriate channels as necessary. It can definitely be a very rewarding experience if that is something that you are interested in. And for kind of, I guess, younger individuals, so you know, somebody who maybe is at that 18, 19 years of age who just graduated high school, it is something that could be considered kind of like a community service or potentially get you into a leadership position as you go to these events. And that could help you at some point in your life, even outside of Pokemon. So if you were looking for like a public service thing, but don't necessarily know where to go and you want to try to keep it focused in an activity that you are very passionate about, this could definitely be an avenue for that as well. But like John said, I think that that just about wraps up everything on the professor program for this week. Yeah. Just as a reminder, you do have to be at least 18 years of age to be a professor. So definitely if you just graduated high school or something like that, that's when you can start. But yeah, it's been rewarding for me. You know, my day job is good, but I don't feel like I get challenged as much as I have truthfully at these larger tournaments in some ways. Like my day job is nice in that I know what I'm getting into. Pokemon kind of provides like the challenging aspect, at least in this part of my life at the moment. So hopefully my boss doesn't hear that and then think he needs to give me more work, but we'll see. I don't think he listens to this Pokemon podcast, so I think we're safe. But yeah, it's been a really rewarding. I'm going to need John's boss to comment three times that he listens to the podcast if he listens. But John, if you only see him comment once or twice, you're safe. Good, good. All right, cool. Yeah. I won't say his name just because, yeah. You don't want to tip him off too much, right? No, we're good. We're good. But yeah, it's been a good experience and I would encourage anybody that is curious, just go ahead and look into it. The Pokemon has been a great... The program has grown a lot too. It's changed a lot. It's become bigger and more supportive of the judges over the last few years, especially since COVID. So I've seen that and I've made a lot of friends and had a lot of great experiences through it. So definitely would recommend. Perfect. So again, if you are interested in any of that, the professor program website is available for you, or you could always reach out to John. I'm sure he would be more than happy to answer any questions as you have them if he is able to. So I'm sure that his DMs are open for those professor-based questions, or like he said, you do have resources like the professor discord or the professor forums available as well. But I think that that just about wraps up everything that we had for this week. So I guess from John and myself, you can find all of our socials in the description of the episode. And I will see you back here next week for the second episode of season two of The Battle Frontier, and we will welcome John back for episode three. All right, everybody have a good week.