Episode 39: OPENING THE BLACK & WHITE TIME CAPSULE ft Johnny Rabus

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. And this week, John and I plan to do that with the help of our friend, Johnny Ravis here, by doing a jump into the past in an extended version of our typical time capsule segment, where we're going to take a look at previous black and white involved formats, including the 2012 and 2013 years throughout their city championship, state championship, maybe some regional championship decks, and then culminating in potentially the world's formats for those years, depending on whether or not we've already delved into them separately. But before we get into that, we're going to give Johnny the chance to introduce himself to everybody, you know, explain how he got involved with Pokemon, what he's done in the game, and what keeps him coming back to the game and why he's so interested in it. And we'll also catch up with John and see what he's been up to. So first, Johnny, I want to yield the floor to you. Why don't you let everybody know who you are? Appreciate that, Aaron. Yeah, I've been playing on and off for 20 plus years now. Got my start living about two minutes down the road from one of the top judges right now, David Tusky. You know, he ran all the events throughout Virginia for years and years, and living so close to him, just rode with him to a bunch of events and got my start there. I've always been a very competitive person. So my initial losses just made me keep coming back to try to do better and better. Doing quite well in the 2013 season, 2014, 2015 also were very, very kind to me. Keep coming back because, one, I just love the people I've met, the experiences I've had with everyone. And the community has been phenomenal with that. And then the travel, just traveling to new places and seeing everything. That's always been a huge plus. Perfect, perfect. So one thing I know I failed to lead you in there, when did you actually first get into the game? I got in around 2004, right before the first World Championships under Nintendo. Okay. Or whatever they're called, right? Yeah, yeah. Well, at the time, I think it was still Nintendo. I don't think they were formally, you know, Pokemon Company International. True, true. I don't actually know when that moniker came along. Yeah, I know they just switched over from Wizards. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So would you say, you know, over the course of that time period then from 2004 to now, I know you mentioned before we started recording that you did take a little bit of a break, but you've been playing throughout the majority of that time frame. Yes. Do you have a favorite format? And is it potentially not one of the formats that you performed the best in? My favorite format was probably 2006. Okay. I didn't play too much competitively, but I was able to watch enough online with, you know, results and whatnot. Unfortunately, streaming wasn't big as it is now, but seeing just the vast amount of decks really, like there was no real best deck. Everything was just good, and your skills as a player just kind of carried a lot more weight. No, that's fair. Totally fair. I think it's interesting now, like if we had had the same resources we have now that we did back then, I'm wondering if that would have stayed the same. I know you can see a lot of people that do still play retro, and they'll go back and visit that format. That's definitely a fan favorite, but I do think that the field has narrowed significantly from what Worlds was back then. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Like the card qualities and whatnot. But no, I do think that everything would kind of change because I've seen other retro events. The Ruby Sapphire through Power Keepers I know is making a huge splash, and in that format we never really saw Stantler, and now Stantler is like the best card in that format. Oh, that's crazy. So it's so funny that you said we didn't see Stantler because if you were in the Southeast there were a couple of players, and for the life of me I cannot remember what his actual name is, but his Pokegym screen name was Muckman. Yes, yes. He was a diehard Stantler player from day one when that card came out, and he would pair it up with literally any, you know, insert random stage 1 or insert other basics, and played essentially a control deck, because that's what the Stantler from Unseen Forces is used with. Absolutely. I think the attack is called Push Away. It is called Push Away. Yeah, removes either a card, I don't remember if it's a trainer card or just any card from your hand, and then Cessation Crystal locking your abilities, preventing you from doing things. And so it's funny that you say the card was not played back then, when I'm pretty sure I lived with that card being a perennial inclusion in the tournament format, because he was a very good player, and he would make frequent trips down to Florida to play in events as well. Yeah. Again, it's all about the area you lived in. Information wasn't as wide as it is now. Sure. So, yeah, no one in my area ever really played Stantler, and I never really saw it too much online. Fair enough. Do you have much experience with 06, John? No. Is that Magma? Is that when we won Worlds that year? No. That was 04. Oh, that's before that. 04? 06 was like early Guardian Days, or no? 06 was like Ryeggs. Ryeggs, Meta Knight. And then LBS, Luda Cargo. Okay, I've played LBS once. I think we played one game, me and you, 06. Was Mewlock in that format? Yes. Mewlock, but the problem was... With Mewlock? Nobody... Well, no. He played Mew Trick, which at the time was like a really underplayed deck. But it was, again, like Johnny said, super wide format. Like, there was random Stage 1 decks, like Meta Cham, Banette, or Meta Cham, Houndoom, or Insert Stage 1 plus Houndoom, dot, Trainer Lock. I played Arcanine. Yeah. Arcanine EX was a deck. There was a Mewlock deck, but it didn't see much play because it was not very good, and they took it out of the game. So, yeah, I played Arcanine EX. I played Arcanine EX. I played Arcanine EX. I played Arcanine EX. I played Arcanine EX. I played Arcanine EX. I played Arcanine EX. I played Arcanine EX. Yeah, no, living in Virginia with Michael Pramuwat, he was very big on that deck. Played it a lot of events. He never seemed to win the events because, like you said, with the time, he just never could get there. But he was always in control. Sure, sure. So one of the reasons that we brought Jo- Well, actually, sorry. Before I jump into that. Jon, what have you been up to this week? Yeah, all good, all good. Yeah, it's been a fun week. I played in a cup on Saturday. I did okay. I went 3-1-1 in Swiss, and then I made top eight. And then I lost to the only person I lost in Swiss, who was a guy named T, and he's been pretty good this season. I'm playing Guardi primarily. He made day two at NAIC, so, you know, shout outs to him, I guess. But he, I don't know, the game, I was kind of breaking it down after the fact. We played in Swiss, and I lost to him. I was playing Dragapult Dusknoir with a Luxurious Cape. So I never found the Luxurious Cape to prevent him from getting the easy monkey damage over to the Bidu and knock it out, and then take a two-price turn, or two more prize cards to win the game from there. So I got really shy of playing Bidu in our top eight set. And that really, I think, I won game one in our set, and then I'm like, okay, I'm just not going to bench Bidu, that way he can't do that play. And you know, turns out Bidu's pretty good against Guardi, especially if you can get it early enough for them, before they get their Gardevoir out. They can't use Vir Candy, they can't get energy in the discard pile, stuff like that. And I would have prevented him from using a Secret Box, Arvin for Secret Box turn, game two, and then from getting set up with a Rare Candy Guardi turn two in game three. So I shot myself in the foot, and I recognize that, but it was still fun to play in a cup. I hadn't played in a while, not since May or so, and definitely not at a high competitive level. It's always so interesting to see. I don't know if you guys have been to, I mean, Johnny, you were at the tournament I ran last night. I ran a tournament Monday. But it's always fun to see how many people show up for the first few League Cups and League Challenges of the season. And you get all the competitive players, I'd say, want to get all their League Cups and Challenges out of the way sooner. So you'll get people, we had people from Northern Virginia coming down and playing in this League Cup. So we had pretty good turnout, like 24 players total. And then I had a challenge on Monday, and we had 20 players total for that. So it's always fun to see the big numbers and turnout, and it feels a little more sweaty, more competitive. But it was a lot of fun. And then, yeah, today I had really good news. I got an email this afternoon asking if I wanted to staff the World Championships for this year. So I will be a side event judge for the World Championships this year. So that's the big news I got. Breaking it. I put it on Facebook already, so I can't say I'm breaking it here. But that's the highlight of my week, for sure. So definitely we can redeem ourselves on trivia. Yeah, I'm going to lick my wounds and refuse to go. Fair enough. Xander is asking way too many VG questions for me to be comfortable going to that. True. That's fair. But anyways, yeah, I'm really looking forward to this. This will be one of the... I haven't really gone to Worlds since before COVID. So this will be the first time I've gone to Worlds since it was in D.C. in 2019, right? Oh, wow. 2019. Yeah. And then, yeah, the first time I've ever judged a Worlds. And then the first time I've participated in a Worlds directly since I've played in it. Oh, I guess directly being a loose term. You know, playing side events is still participating. But yeah, I'll be... I played in the Worlds in 2015, and so it's kind of cool to see like a full circle moment 10 years later, staffing this one. So anyway, that was my week. Had family in town for Fourth of July. That was fun. And then, yeah, just kind of did some grilling and made some cocktails and had a nice little fourth. But anyways, enough of me yapping. You guys don't pay or, you know, watched to hear me just talk about my life. I was going to say, nobody's paying us right now, Joe. Yeah, fair. But Aaron, I mean, how was your fourth before we get into it? You know, everything good on your end? Oh, it was good. It was good. My father-in-law and brother-in-law like made an emergency trip to a local fireworks store, even though we already had fireworks that we were going to shoot off. And they dropped another $1,200 between the two of them. Jeez. And a lot of stuff... A fourth is just different. A lot of stuff in the store on the fourth was buy one, get one. So they came back with all sorts of things, including these two giant boxes that I think each of them had a 480 like in-series fireworks that they would shoot off if you lit the one fuse. So that was a lot of fun. My son was very adamant that he's like, I'm old enough. I want to light some of these. So of course, with supervision, he was allowed to set off a couple of things and he had a pretty good time. Like it was a nice, pretty casual day, nothing super crazy. And then yeah, I actually got on and played some TCG live this week. Did not go to any in-person events, unfortunately. You know, I'm not, again, like I mentioned on a previous episode, I'm not super duper set on going for a world's invite this go around. I'm expecting, again, that I'm going to be able to play in, insert Florida city regional, whichever one it is, whether it's Daytona or Orlando based on that one map from the preview video. And then hopefully the three ICs, depending on whether or not I can get through registration for them, because I expect to already be in the area at the time that those events are happening. But other than that, so I don't, it's like that, all that being said, I don't see a need to hardcore grind for locals upfront, but you know, I think I do still have a challenge at a store that's like five minutes from my house. So I have no reason not to go to it. And I think that that's either this weekend or next weekend, but I'm not positive. I need to look it up and confirm, but yeah, I mean, that pretty much sums it up for me. I know last thing before we jump into things, I didn't realize Johnny that you have been playing in locals for this format. So that's the one thing I do. I am interested in doing locals in this format in particular, because I do actually currently enjoy the destined rivals format quite a bit, despite not having played on TCG live for the past, like three weeks, aside from like the two games that I played over the weekend. So Johnny, what first, what deck did you choose to play at NAIC? And then did you bring that same deck to this challenge that you played this last week? Oh, you got to bring me down, man. I missed ledge for NAIC. I didn't go. Oh no. Oh. I lost. Oh no, I ran into you in Atlanta. I could have, I totally mixed it up. I thought that we ran into each other in New Orleans. My bad. My bad. I lost round zero for NAIC, so we ended up just not going. Yeah. Well, that's unfortunate. My apologies. What deck would you have played, and what deck did you play? Yeah. There you go. Yeah. I have put zero testing in this format, so I have no idea what I would have played. Grimmsnarl looked the most appealing, so I probably would have put some time into that. I can say that I would have shot towards that. My last couple challenges, I just played Joltik Box, because I didn't feel like evolving. I felt just going something consistent, straightforward. You got Galvantula. Do fine. Hey, sure. I got an A with Galvantula. We cannot... Own this behavior, John. Do not. I'm so sorry. I know. He's just submitting to... Hey! No, no. I, I... Listen. I, I... Gosh, what was it? I think three days before I flew to New Orleans, I decided to sleeve up Joltik Box in case I had a crisis of faith moment and just wanted to kind of pick the deck that I was like, this will set up every single game and hopefully that's enough to get me into day two because that was all I theoretically needed to do to get my world's invite. And I'm glad I didn't do that because I enjoyed the deck that I did play a lot more and it still was able to achieve the desired results. So worked out a lot in the end, but I think it's enough pre, pregame yapping more or less. People would probably want to hear what we're actually going to jump into. So the, before we talk about the decks proper though, one of the topics that we're going to discuss here is, or one of the formats rather, is the HeartGoldSoulSilver to Noble Victories format. And that format is well known and kind of infamous for being the city championship format of the 2012 to 2013 season. And so for those of you who are newer to the game and may not know, city championships are effectively the same thing as what league cups are now, but the tournament format was set up in such a way that instead of having league cups that happen once a month or sorry, once a quarter at a given card shop, you instead would have these tournament sets where you would have battle roads, which were more or less the same thing as league challenges that would happen in the fall, which would then lead into a city championship season that would occur spanning from late fall through like early midwinter effectively. Like what was it? I think like end of November through beginning of January or something like that, that would culminate in the state championships that would happen in the February to March period. I think that there was like late February to mid March, it'd be about a month there. Essentially that would evolve to have a regional that would happen in the fall following battle roads, but before cities, and then a regional that would happen after states, but before spring battle roads, which would then happen before the national championships. And now we've gotten to a more fluid and kind of a circuit that just flows better together and things that have shifted from individual tournament organizers that would then coordinate things with card shops, but you would have specific individuals who would set a tournaments at a series of stores. Now you've got individual card shops that coordinate everything on the backend through pokemon.com and it's all done, you know, kind of behind the scenes instead of just money changing hands and people trying to coordinate things that way. But one of the advantages that we used to have in that city championship format is that people would set up things that we would call marathons and you would have a series of events, kind of the most famous one, the one that really started everything off was in Georgia. So I think the first one that I can remember playing in, in Georgia was probably in 2008 or 2009. And so we would go up, it would always be the week between Christmas and New Year's. And so it would be the Christmas night. We would, everyone would pack up from Florida, drive up to Georgia. And the day after Christmas, you would play, start playing a series of tournaments where you would go from city to city for about a week and just play in a league cup in a different city in Georgia every single day. And the interesting thing about that is that over the course of the week, you would get an idea of how the metagame was developing or what specific players are showing up and what decks you would expect them to play. And you would see tech inclusions or just deck choices evolve and shift as that metagame was able to develop. And you could see what was winning a specific event and people would either hard target decks that made top cut or hard target specific individuals that they expected to do well. And that's something that you don't get to see as often in the modern format where you just say, okay, you know, you can kind of target an individual if you know, say, I know Johnny's going to show up to the event and he's been playing Joltik a lot lately. Maybe that means I need to bring out Raging Bolt in because I'm only concerned about Johnny in the room. And so you would see choices similar to that, that would pop up in over the course of these events. And I know that that eventually spread. There was a year that we had a Florida marathon, which was the year of the gold, silver to noble victories format. And that one was a little kind of infamous because it was coordinated by Jason Klusinski with a lot of stores down in the South Florida area. And we ended up having probably one of the most stacked rooms of players for a city championship season with, you know, we had Jason, we had Sammy Sakum, we had Puka. We had Michael Pramawat. We had Alex Brousseau, who longtime players would know he's shifted now. He plays for Arcana instead. We had Justin Sanchez, former national champion. And a whole slew of other people. There were people that were flying in from, you know, different parts of the country to play in effectively league cups at the time. Yeah. And Sammy was from England, right? Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah, crazy. So eventually, like you said, John, you participated in the Georgia marathon one year. And I think, did you guys ever have a marathon up in the Northeast? There was a couple. There was one or two in Jersey. Yeah. Okay. In New Jersey. Jersey was pretty big. Okay. So I actually went to the Jersey marathon before I went to New Jersey. Really? Yeah. Weirdly enough, I was up there visiting my sister and I spent like, and we went one day to the 2012, 2011 city marathon, I think, maybe. Yeah. 2011 to 2012. Yeah. I went to the 2012 Georgia marathon and the 2013 Jersey marathon. So from the description that I just gave, is there anything that I missed out on that, like any other information that you guys think is important to share about kind of the environment that you encountered in these marathons? I don't think you're describing the vibes that I had. Oh, really? So I remember being a college kid, fun fact, I worked at GameStop for like one Christmas season in 2012. Okay. And I remember as soon as I heard about the marathon, I quit my job at GameStop and like rode with like a car full of, like I drove up to Ryan and Kyle's stable house. Dylan Dreyer drove down and then I think we had one other person in the car and we drove all the way out to Atlanta from their house in Greenville. And we didn't really have a place to stay. Like you just kind of showed up. Kyle and Ryan were infamous for doing that. Yes. Yeah. In 2012, I didn't have a place to stay. 2013, I think I had like more people I knew in Atlanta at that time. So it was a little bit more planned out. Like at least I had like somebody that said, sure, you can crash on my couch for a week or whatever. But like 2012, literally like me, I think it was me and my brother at that point. And we literally just like, hey, a random person I just met at this tournament, is it cool if we like, you know, crash at your place for the night? And it sounds crazy. Like you would never do this now. But this was just the spirit of it pretty much. Like it was a true levels of like get grassroots kind of just playing and meeting people and pure love of the game kind of vibes. But yeah, I think it was just so fun because everybody was just like the locations like sometimes it was at a card store, but sometimes it was at a pizza place where they can eat pizza for the whole day. Sometimes it's like just random like libraries or something. Huh? One of the ones we went to in Georgia was like a CC's type place. Yeah. Stevie B's. Stevie B's. That's it. That was, oh man, I ate as much pizza as I possibly could. I got the nickname pizza dad from that. So that was, but like the, just the amount of friends you make from these events and like the lifelong friends, like I'm still friends with a lot of people from these events, like a lot of people from Atlanta that I never really interacted with before these marathons like Connor Finn and, you know, Xander Bennett is from Tennessee now and like just a bunch of people from Atlanta that, you know, you just, you meet and you play against and then you just kind of hang out with outside of the venue or just hang out with and play games outside of like what TopCut's going on, you're waiting for your friends to finish up, stuff like that. So you, and you're like seeing the same people for seven days straight and nobody's really sleeping well. They're all just staying up till 2am every night playing games of Pokemon or Mafia or whatever have you. So just, I don't know, like it's, it's, it's almost like Pokemon summer camp vibe or like a, like a, like a sleepover camp or something like that where you're just making like kind of friends you'll have for the rest of your life. So like, I don't know if we really have that anymore. I mean, we have kind of like people hanging out at Worlds or NAIC for a couple days, but even then it's just so much bigger that you don't really get to know everybody and you don't really get to like, like nobody can hide, you know, at NAIC you can easily fall through the cracks, but at Cities it was just like, if you showed up for a couple of days, like people knew what you were playing and knew your name and all that kind of stuff. So sure. Yeah. I mean, like you said, the, the, the environment is definitely a little bit different than it is now, but given the game has grown, so you can't really expect it to still be the same, but I still wonder if it isn't possible to set up something like this at a, you know, in a similar timeframe, if everyone in a given area, like a multiple card stores that are somewhat near each other, agree to coordinate their League Cups, like between the week of Christmas and New Year's and say, okay, you're going to be the Saturday League Cup. You're going to be the Sunday one, the Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, et cetera. If that could attract enough players to make something like this still possible. I think so. I mean, it's tougher because you don't have one organizer that can just like coordinate with six different card shops, right. You'd have to like get each and every organizer to coordinate all their Cities together. And that's a little difficult, like to convince an organizer to host the Citi Championship on a Tuesday, you know, might not always be intuitive, but you have to like kind of sell them on everything as opposed to an organizer who can plan that and like advertise it and push for it a little bit more. But I'm sure like, I think I've seen since Pokemon came back from COVID, I've seen a couple attempts to do this, to have like a Citi Marathon or like a Cup Marathon, but nothing like super big, like we had back in this era, but yeah, it should happen. I think it'll happen again at some point. It should. So I know you mentioned like the board games and stuff, John, did you have any other fond memories from the Marathon sessions or seasons? Oh man, so many. Some of my favorites are just like, there's a picture, Dylan Dreyer, who is from Maryland. He's a really nice guy. He doesn't play Pokemon anymore, but like all of us, except for him and our car, want to Citi's like from the Marathon. So we have a picture where like, we all just like, you know, stand around him with our medals and like he's in the middle, just slumped over, kind of sad. It sounds really mean and it probably was a little mean, but you know, just kind of like the gloating or whatever. What else? We just had so many memories of, I don't remember, like eating Jets pizza, like one of the houses I stayed at, one of the guys worked at Jets, which is like a Detroit style, like deep dish pizza. But I had more pizza than I've ever had in my life in one week. And like, yeah, you know, your 23 year old body can handle it, but like, I can't imagine doing it now. I don't know, but like, just, it's really hard to get into all the minutiae. It's all just like a lot of little memories. It's one of those kind of like, you had to be there things, right? It definitely feels like that. Yeah. And I'll share, I'll recall some stuff as we get into some of the decks. I think a lot of the memories I have center around those. Yeah, that's fair. You get to have like, you know, oh, this, like I played this card and it was super impactful and it like unlocked something in your brain when we discuss it. But before, last thing before we jump into it, Johnny, did you have any specific marathon memories that you'd feel like mentioning? Oh, absolutely. So I got my year wrong. It was 2011 that we were at Georgia Marathon, but on New Year's Eve, we got to go to a cake concert. So that was phenomenal. We missed the cities the next day, unfortunately, but seeing them in concert was definitely the highlight of the trip, along with the events. That's not even Pokemon related, man. But still, no, it's still very cool. Very cool experience. For sure. It's part of the trip. It's part of the experience. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think that we've beaten around the bush enough. Let's go ahead and talk about some decks, right? Sure. And like I said, the thing we're going to start with here would have been one of those marathon formats, and that is the HeartGold to SoulSilver through Noble Victories format. So this does encompass all of the HeartGold, SoulSilver sets, as well as the first three sets from the Black and White era. So at the time, we would have already gone through Worlds, where we had that emergency rotation, and we saw Raybor one, along with Ross's Truth deck that came out from that Worlds. Then the Emerging Power set was released, and we had Pokemon Catcher that hit the scene for the first time. And at the time, it was just Boss's Orders, but on an item card, because someone approved that decision. But then Noble Victories came along and tried to balance things out. We had the introduction of cards like N, which was I Oh No, Except You Shuffle Your Hand Into Your Deck, or basically the reprint of Rocket's Advent. We saw the introduction of some other pretty impactful cards that we'll get into in a second, the first deck. And Jon, we've talked about a couple of these cards before, like the Chandelure line here, the Vileplume line here. The Chandelure line was notably introduced in that Noble Victory set, so Chandelure does have that Eerie Glow ability, or sorry, Eerie Glow is the attack, wow, Cursed Shadow ability that says once during your turn, if this Pokemon is your active Pokemon, you may put three damage counters on your opponents active in any way you like. And admittedly, super, super slow way to take prize cards, but the whole purpose of this deck was just trying to control the game, prevent your opponent from doing things, and slowly win this war of attrition. And so you saw on the image that I presented before I pulled this specific card up, that Vileplume from Undaunted was in this deck as well, which would lock down the item cards of your opponent. And you had several other attacks that would mess with your opponent, like the Lampent's Luring Light, you could drag up a high retreat cost Pokemon, like a Magnezone Prime that had three retreat with no energy on it sitting on your opponent's bench, or something else that they also similarly would not want in their active. And because Switch could not be played due to Vileplume's item lock, you could sit there and then evolve this Lampent or retreat it into a Chandelure and just kind of ping things along the way. Your setup was aided very greatly by the fact that they had also released this promo Litwick with Call for Family to help set up your bench. if you happen to start with Litwick, or you had the option to utilize the Pichu from HeartGold SoulSilver with its playground attack, which even though it also allowed your opponent to set up, it was a bit more one-sided in the sense that a lot of the other fast decks that were basic focus were already really good at getting their basics out. So you more so cared about just setting up and trying to play the long game and just getting over the finish line because you didn't care if your opponent took a prize lead as you were aware that you could just win things eventually as long as you were able to weather that storm. And so the way you were able to bounce between those Chandelures to kind of get that damage stacking up was the Dodrio, also from Undaunted, with its retreat aid ability. As long as it was on your bench, your active Pokemon had two less. Conveniently, Chandelure has two retreat. So you could just bounce between two Chandelure turn after turn, and even if you didn't have enough energy to attack, you could refill your hand with that recently released Tropical Beach Stadium card from Worlds that previous year. Allowed you to end your turn but draw up to seven. Super duper powerful. I mean, powerful enough that we see people include Cleffa in their deck intentionally now, and it's basically the same effect. And then you had ways to heal your Chandelures via Blissey Prime. It forced you to discard all your energy, but that was okay. You could stack up energy on evolved Pokemon and then bench the Jirachi from Gold-Silver Unleashed with the Stardust Song PokéPower that said when you benched Jirachi, you'd flip a bunch of coins. Well, three specifically. And for each heads, you would get a Psychic Energy from your Disco Pile. And if you were able to get enough Psychic Energy, you could essentially TM Devo your opponent's board, if you want to use a modern term, with this Time Hollow attack that just allows you to select an evolved Pokemon from your opponent's field equal to the number of energy attached to Jirachi, and then remove the highest stage evolution for each one. And so you would stack up enough damage that you could then Time Hollow, remove those highest stage evolution cards, and close out games quickly by taking multi-price turns, assuming that your opponent's playing an evolving deck. And everything else in here is just setup-based, essentially a Pokemon collector to go find three basics. Super powerful cards, solid play from the time it was released. Sage's Training is kind of an interesting inclusion, as there weren't a lot of great draw options at the time. And I actually wonder, looking back on things, if there's a chance that Professor Oak's new theory might edge this card out? Or like even Charon or something? Maybe. But Sage's Training, I don't know, I would still say Sage is a little bit more powerful than Charon, just because you got to look at five. And often you saw enough resources that you were okay with discarding some number of cards, so this would be discard three, specifically. So kind of like, you know, recently rotated Colerith's Experiment, except instead of loss sending the cards, you were discarding them, and you only got to keep two instead of keeping three. But just kind of powering through your deck to find your combo pieces, set up your field as efficiently as possible. You were okay with discarding excess copies of cards, because you just wanted to set up what you would consider to be an unbreakable board. And then you were, because you were playing from behind so often, you would play multiple copies of Twins that allowed you to just search your deck for two cards, any cards you wanted to, quick search twice, as long as you were behind in prizes. And then the recursion you had for your Chandelure line, because you couldn't play item cards, you couldn't play something like a Super Rod, you would play Rescue Energy. And if a Chandelure that you had active was knocked out by damage from an attack, which at the time most attacks were damage-based rather than counter-based, you would return it and all cards attached to it to your hand. And so this just kind of bounced around, you wanted to play this really long strategy-focused game, kind of hindering your opponent's setup where you were able to, focusing damage counters where you were able to, and also admittedly at the time, 130 was actually a relatively difficult number to hit for a lot of decks without the aid of plus power. And so when you're locking the item cards and preventing that card from being played, it makes it all that more difficult. I know I was a huge fan of this deck. I think I can pretty confidently say I was one of the first people that played this deck. Although I know that there were a couple of other European players that also really enjoyed playing the deck at the time as well. But just super fun to play. If you have never played this format, I would highly recommend going out and picking this deck up, and just proxy your Tropical Beaches. You do not have to buy them. No, please don't spend money on Tropical. Unless you really have money, just look to spend it, because it'll probably be a good asset to have. But yeah, one other card you didn't mention was the Blissey Prime. So like you said, it's really hard to knock out Chandelure. Blissey Prime allows you to heal up your Pokemon. You can remove all damage counters from all of your Pokemon, but if you do that, you have to discard energy. And that wasn't a huge deal, because a lot of times you're just using Chandelure's ability to place damage counters, and you don't really care about the energy too much. It's nice to be able to attack with one or two Chandelure throughout the game. But yeah, just to allow you to kind of keep your Chandelure's alive was pretty nice. Yeah, and there were a few other tech cards that this deck saw over the course of its existence. At one point, we had cut four Psychics for four special metals, and I don't remember what card it was cut. It was probably the Jirachi, just because you're playing fewer Psychic energy. And we played a single Cobalion from Noble Victories. We'll talk about Cobalion a little bit more later. But had a pretty powerful attack. It was 120 HP basic metal Pokemon, so a special metal. Got incredibly tanky, and would be able to be given free retreat thanks to Dodrio. And its attack was three energy for 80, and the defending Pokemon cannot attack next turn. So just again, really good at stalling. And just anytime your opponent takes a knockout, you're promoting a Chandelure. You're placing some number of damage counters. And over time, you would eventually be able to build up and do this Eerie Glow and confuse your opponents active as well. Which just confusion when you can't play item cards becomes all that more powerful. So just a really annoying deck to play against for a lot of decks. There are a few decks, including one that John is going to talk about here in a little bit, that were pretty annoying for this deck to play against. But definitely powerful in this format. And I know I'm a huge fan. Did either of you have any, you know, things you liked or did not like about this deck? We had a guy in our area from Myrtle Beach that came down and played a lot with it. It was just always like a cool deck to watch, because it just it required so many so much setup and so much skill to pilot and stuff like that. So it was always just one of those decks that just felt like fun to watch. It's just because you're using like alternate ways to win the game, other than just attack, attack, attack, attack. Sure. You know, you're having to maneuver and pilot and stuff. So I had pretty fond memories of it from that. But I don't think I ever played it. The Beaches and, funnily enough, the Litwick promos were really hard to find. It's only gotten harder if you try to build this deck. Those are the two things that are just going to be really hard for anybody to find for any reasonable amount of money. I think the Litwick promos, I don't know if you click on it, maybe it'll pull up. I think this is just a static picture. But they're like pretty expensive still. Yeah, this was a check lane blister at the time, and I remember having to go to, I think, five or six different targets just to track down four copies of that blister pack to be able to get them. Yeah, because there wasn't like card stores that had them like, you know, today maybe. Troll and Toad was your only option, and that took forever. It still takes forever. And you know, in terms of retro card experiences, this was definitely one of the more expensive cards if you wanted to buy it as a single, where when we say expensive at the time, you're talking like eight to ten dollars for this card. And people were like, whoa, what are you talking about? Yeah, it's like, that's unreasonable. And now it's like, yeah, let me look it up right now. I gotta know how much it's going for. But while John's pulling that up, I know that the next deck that he wanted to talk about, it's not this list in particular, but it does allow me to highlight that Cobalion. So just to pull that up while John's still looking up that lyric. So Cobalion's Iron Breaker was the attack that was utilized. Sometimes that Chandelure. And for the life of me, I cannot remember what specific matchup this was good into, but it was good into something, or good enough into something. And honestly, it may have been Mirror, funnily enough, just being able to put out 80 damage and be resistant to Psychic and also be a basic, so you don't have to worry about Jirachi. And you can just retreat out of the confusion. Burn didn't work quite the same as it does now. So just some combo of Energy plus Press plus Iron Breaker actually might have been decent into Mirror, especially when you had potential recursion for the card, given the rescue energy was in the deck as well. Yeah, just to give you an idea, the Litwick now is 15 to 20 dollars. That's ridiculous. Oh, I mean, everything's ridiculous for sure. Yeah, I mean, depending on the condition, if it's a higher, like, let me see, Nearmint. Nearmint's probably 30, 40 bucks. No, it's 20 bucks. So that's just the top end of it. 20, 21 dollars. But anyway, yeah, it's not impossible to find, but it's definitely harder than you would think it would be. Sure. Yeah, but this is one of the decks I wanted to talk about. So to me, this is a fond memory. This isn't a list I played or anything like that. My list was a little bit different. It ran Alphalithograph, which is like a weird item card. I don't know if you want to pull that up real quick. Yeah, I'll get it. Because we definitely need to show the people what this thing is. It's such a weird card. But anyways, Durant was one of the first times I ever got exposed to alternate win conditions. So normally in Pokemon, you take six prize cards. Durant seeks to mill your opponent out of cards, out of their deck. And this deck was one of the first decks that I felt like was really, really successful at doing that. Yep. This is not the one we're talking about. This is looking at your opponent's hand. Oh, so there's like different ones. Yeah. I just saw the word luck and thought I found the right card. Listen, reading unknowns is hard. It's hard. Sure. All right. But yeah, just to go over the strategy real quick. Durant is just a little ant dude. 70 HP doesn't seem like a lot, but it was a decent amount of HP at this point in time. Especially when you put special mentals and Eviolite. So Eviolite's a tool. So this was an item card, but it's attached as a tool. So just kind of played a little differently than current standard rules. But if it's attached to a basic Pokemon, it reduces any damage done to it by 20. And then special metal reduces damage by 10. So if you have an Eviolite and two special metal, you're reducing by 40. So Durant then goes to like 110 effective HP. And just really, really hard to knock out, unless you're a fire type Pokemon, of course. But that's the main weakness. This is the one. Yep. And even damaged holofoil, it's $28. So that is crazy. But this is a weird secret rare that came out in all the HeartGold SoulSilver sets. Most of these were like kind of jokes, like kind of just bad. Like the one Aaron just showed you, just like look at your opponent's hand. There's one that's just shuffle your deck. I don't know. There is one that is just shuffle your deck. I forgot about that. Yeah, they're not that good. This one's probably the best and saw the most play. It's just named Alphaliftograph. But it's from Triumphant. And it says, look at your face down prize cards. And so kind of a weak effect, but you didn't have to shuffle after looking at it. So you can manipulate with Rotom there. Yep. With Mischievous Trick. So you can just once during your turn, before you attack, you switch the top card of your deck with one of your prize cards. Just playing Alphaliftograph, you can look and see, okay, yep, here's where my Durant that's prized is. I can then use Rotom, take the top card of my deck, put Durant on top, and then draw a card or whatever and put it in play. Because that was the main way you milled. I don't think I said this. Devour just says for each Durant in play, discard the top card of your opponent's deck. So the moment you get four Durant in play, you just start going through your opponent's deck and you start discarding. Pretty much turn one. And in this format, it wasn't that hard to get your Durant out turn one. You had Collector, I think Aaron already talked about. And then you had Duel Ball. This is a notorious card for this era. Depending on who you are, you either, well, I think everybody just hates Duel Ball. Everyone hates it. Yeah, everyone. Everyone played Duel Ball, but everyone hates Duel Ball. Yeah, everyone played it and then everyone hated it. It was just flip two coins for each head, search for a basic Pokemon. But that could, that always, it should have just read search for a basic Pokemon most of the time. And then in some rare cases, just, you know, put this card in your discard pile and then carry on. I would love for the text of the card to be search for a basic Pokemon most of the time. Yeah, it was just why not, why not just give us that Pokemon? But yeah, no, Pokemon loves coin flips. And you ran a lot of other coin flip cards in this. You ran Catcher pre-coin flip, but the main notorious one is Crushing Hammer. Flip a coin if heads discard an energy attached to one of your opponent's Pokemon. And this is how you shut down a lot of decks in this format. There wasn't a huge amount of energy acceleration. We won't talk about it, but Typhlosion was probably the main one. And then I guess we had Emboar from black and white base set. Both fire decks. So you already lost to those primarily, but anything like the Chandelure deck we talked about, I guess, item locks a factor, but if you're able to, let's see, I guess Cake. Forget Electrode Prime, man. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But yeah, you really don't worry. Oh, I know. They did your job for you. Yeah, basically. So yeah, you were just able to get rid of and disrupt a lot of your opponent's board. Like if a Magnezone was just building up electric energy turn over turn, you'd get rid of those and prevent them from being able to take knockouts on your Durance with that. And then the even worse part was you had access to Junk Arm and you ran four of them. So you could go Crushing Hammer, Crushing Hammer, Junk Arm, Crushing Hammer, Junk Arm. So you just, it got to the point where it's very, very annoying for your opponent to try to keep energy on the field. They would sweat through the first two Crushing Hammer and then you would just hit them with that third Crushing Hammer and get that energy. And yeah, it was cruel. Junk Arm, overpowered. I remember this deck fondly, mainly because I was a new player. I started playing in 2011. And this is like a full year after I started playing, but this is the first time I ever made top cut at a Cities. And I played Durant in that. And the reason I remember it so fondly, my friend Alex William, who's like a graphic designer, I don't know if you guys know what the troll face is, like the are you mad bro face or whatever. So he made a t-shirt that had the Durant head just cut out, and then just said you mad bro underneath it. Very like 2012 style of humor, like early memes, if you will, just to make myself more dated. But so me, my brother, him, and like two or three other people from our league all played Durant and all wore this t-shirt. And we were like the menace of this league cup. And then unfortunately, we got hard countered by another local that caught wind of our strategy and played Typhlosion restroom and just ate Durant all day, feasted. And then unfortunately, he hit another Typhlosion restroom in top four, and I hit Durant mirror in top four. And then I hit Typhlosion restroom in the finals and promptly lost. You know, just no way to really get around being weak to fire. That has to be totally unwinnable, right? It's pretty close. You have to draw abysmally like the whole game. You have to discard all the restrooms. Yeah, you basically just pray you discard like anything that's gives them. Like even then, like restroom, honestly, can just like still just win you the game sometimes. But I don't know. It was it was yeah, it was unwinnable, to be honest, because even if you're discarding stuff like they're just accelerating energy from the discard pile, like not from their hand or anything like that. So it wasn't hard to just. Yeah. But yeah, this is I wouldn't call it like a fun deck, but it was a successful deck. Very, very successful. Won a lot of cities, even I think into states. It did really well. So, yeah, I think if you were playing in the city's metagame at this time, you had to be prepared for Durant or just prepared to be take a loss to it, essentially. Yeah, I think it won a regional as well. Yeah, I wouldn't surprise me. That would not surprise me. This honestly, in my opinion, this is probably the best straight mill deck that has ever existed in Pokemon. Oh, easily. Now, Grant, that's a product of the format and some of the cards that were available to it. But Devour was just a strong attack. If I remember right, I think it was Jason that won a regional with Durant. That wouldn't surprise. I keep so through that throughout that Florida Marathon, I think Jason played Durant almost the entire time. Yeah, he he loved it. I frustrated the hell out of me for sure. But, you know, with the recursion you get from junk arm plus crushing hammer. It's like you said, John, a lot of energy acceleration wasn't super prevalent at the time. Typhlosion was not all that popular. The fact that Pokemon Catcher was countercatcher for the deck, but you didn't even have to be behind on prizes for it to be live and you could play four copies of it, plus get them back with junk arm. I mean, the deck was so I mean, the card so strongly, this list only has three catchers in it and was OK with that because you played four copies of junk arm to recover them. I mean, just absolutely absurd. And then it's kind of understated. But like you mentioned at the top, special metal plus Evia light, just making your Durant's harder to knock out. You know, it's essentially what great Tusk Mill is in the current format, except you had access to good supporter cards, right? Yeah, you're not bound on playing just ancient supporters every turn. You're right. Able to play. And and was really, really disruptive. There wasn't a lot of like on board Pokemon recovery, like hand like refresh. There's no pheasant nippity. There's no, you know, a barrel. If you go back far enough or anything like that to really just build your hand back up after you get into a low hand size, you had to just basically draw out of it. So it just felt miserable to go, OK, I'm about to win. And your opponent's like, ha ha. And to one and then devour, devour, devour, devour, devour, you lose the game. And there's not much you can do about it, realistically. Or even like if you go through all like all the all the Durant and they're just like, OK, cool. I've milled out all your resources and all your catchers and stuff. I'm just going to use Cobalion and Iron Breaker. And you can't really win the game anymore because you're only attacker you got able set. You're able to set up, you know, can't can't get around this guy. So, yeah, yeah, just just a toxic deck. But like, it's interesting, like it had a lot of interplay. There was some, you know, this kind of taught players how to play against mill decks at this point in time. I think if you played in this format, you understood like, OK, they're going to try to go after my my basic energy here and they're going to try to do this and that. I have to save my resources. I have to like play my items if I want to, you know, get Pokemon out of my deck before they're milled out. It taught you not to over bench, like always have a way to retreat whenever you put down or attack with it. You know, just told you how to you had to play differently when you're playing against Durant. And that's a strategy that like I think you carry over to the modern era when you play up against like a control deck or anything like that. And that's something like I took away from this format was just learning how to play against control decks. For sure. And, you know, one of the counters that eventually arose would be Lake. And so this this deck saw a few different forms. Electrode EX combined with Big Basics essentially was the concept. And the first form was called, I believe, Coke. It was just Cobalion, Kyurem with Electrode. And instead to counter the Durant menace, several people, including myself, I was fed up with Jason winning tournaments. So the third day of the Florida Marathon, I brought a similar list to this. I think I still had like a Tarakian and I might have still had a Cobalion in the deck as well. But so Landorus was the card that I deemed capable of defeating all of the Durants. And so, like you mentioned, John, with all the crushing hammer onslaught, Landorus is able to kind of get around that thing. So it's abundant harvest attack allowed you to just accelerate those energies back onto itself, even if they were being discarded by crushing hammer and then Gaia hammer conveniently does enough damage to knock out a Durant, even when it has a special metal attached to it. And for any Durants that do not have evil lights or special metals on the bench, they get softened up enough that even if they get an evil lighted afterward, you can hopefully still do the 60 damage would be enough to knock them out as long as they do not have access to both an evil light and a special metal. And so the, you know, deck ended up being successful enough, especially in Durant and Magnezone heavy metagames. You know, at the time we haven't talked about it yet, but Magnezone Prime was a very, very powerful card because the electric, which is literally a literally an identical card to the electric that we were getting next week in Black Bolt White Flare was released in Noble Victories as well and saw a lot of play with big lightning basics like Zekrom or cards like Tornadoes Thunderous. And then also alongside Magnezone Prime, which had the attack. You know, if you saw the Raybor deck that won Worlds in 2011 had Magnezone Prime and it was able to fill your hand up to six and then had the attack that did Lost Zone any number of energy from your board. And for each one you lost and you do 50 damage. The electric was able to accelerate a bunch of energy into play and Magnezone would Lost Zone all of them for big damage. And so that's not super effective when you're having to Lost Zone three energy to KO a basic that only gives you one prize, though. So Landorus is able to take pretty heavy advantage of that fact in just one shot, a Magnezone. So you're trading a basic for a stage one. It gets a lot of stuff into play. But three energy is kind of a pretty big cost, right? And the deck was able to get around that by utilizing Electrode, who did at the time what Electrode does best, knocked itself out to put energy on your field. So Electrode had the energy might poke power. Once during your turn, you may use this power. If you do, Electrode is knocked out. You look at the top seven cards of your deck, choose as many energy cards as you like and attach them to your Pokemon in any way you like. Discard the other cards. And so the big thing here. Electrode gave up a prize, which notably allowed you to utilize cards like Twins or put yourself behind to give your opponent a smaller hand size for N, and then also milled cards out of your deck to hopefully make your follow up Electrode, if it was necessary, more likely to be successful as well. But the big thing was just if you were able to power up kind of two or three attackers off of your two Electrodes for the game, you were typically more than set. And so the main attackers, like I showed previously, the Landorus and then the other big one and pretty powerful card at the time was Kyurem that was released in Noble Victories with its Glaciate attack that did 30 damage to each of your opponent's Pokemon. And it doesn't seem super powerful when you think about the modern HP numbers. But at the time, when you look like this basic Electrode has 40 that were baby Pokemon like Cleffa and Pichu that only have 30 HP that were hanging on a lot on a lot of people's benches. And even the big basics at the time often ranged anywhere from 110 to 130 HP. And so Kyurem was also, again, difficult to knock out. 130 is not the easiest number to hit for a lot of decks. And if it was not one hit KO'd, you could outrage in response and just knock things out that way. So it was very difficult for people to navigate a lot of times. And I don't recall ever playing Jirachi on my list, but apparently when you're playing the rainbow energy that you had access to at the time, which was just unconditional counts as every energy. And when you attach it with energy might, you do not have to place the damage counter on your Pokemon. If you have access to that, why not TM D.Va some of your opponent's Pokemon after you stack damage on them from the effect of Gaia Hammer and Glaciate? We also have access to Eviolite because we are a big basic deck. And then again, Pokemon catcher just picking off weekend Pokemon or pulling up a high retreat Pokemon to then glaciate the board and spread damage everywhere. And then a lot of again, a lot of these supporter lineups are going to look super standard. There weren't a ton of super powerful supporters at the time. And obviously, Professor Juniper, which is the same thing as professors research in the modern game, was just one of the best cards ever printed. There's a reason that it's been a mainstay index since it was first released. And then and at the time would fluctuate depending on how aggressive you expected your deck to be. You would range anywhere from two to four copies of it, depending on if you expected to stay at six prizes, like with something like Chandelure or if you were trying to go fast and you just maybe needed a way to disrupt your opponent later on in the game. We did notably also have access to judge. So that was a consideration as well. But this deck, another deck, a lot of fun. Definitely really good at beating up on Durant. Like one of the weaknesses of the Cobalion version of the deck is just that you Kirim is often weak into spread. Strategies as a whole are not super strong into Durant because you could choose to selectively delay benching your Durant so they aren't all getting knocked out in one fell swoop. You could stagger them until you were able to attach the damage reduction cards to prevent that spread strategy from being super successful. And instead, this tried to go around that by saying, I'm just going to beat you over the head and KO you're active every turn. I don't care what's happening on your bench. But definitely interesting and highlights a fun card. Electrode's a really cool addition in my book. Yeah, I didn't play too much with Electrode. Did you, Johnny? I played a little bit of Lake and Cake, and I really enjoyed both of them. Electrode reminded me a lot of ZRE back in 2004, so I really wanted to play that again. Yeah, we've seen, you know, most, not all, but most Electrode's that get printed have the ability to do something similar to this, even dating all the way back to base set. Yeah. And then I think we've got one more deck here for our gold, silver, noble victories format. And this was just a last minute inclusion by me to give to show people that aggressive decks also existed. And so ZPST is probably the closest modern equivalent would be just an aggro Meridon deck with electric generator. And so we had a Pachirisu that was released in Call of Legends that had self generation. When you put Pachirisu from your hand to your bench, you can attach up to two lightning from your hand to Pachirisu. So effectively, if you have Pachirisu and two lightning, you just hit your generator for two and it went to your bench. And this Shaman is definitely infamous by this point, but Celebration Wind would then allow you to shift those energies around and move them up to your big basic attackers of either Tornadus or Zekrom. And so Tornadus, I believe that this actually might be identical to the Tornadus that we're receiving in a couple of weeks, except maybe the HP and damage number are a little bit different. But all of the text on the card is exactly the same that I'm sure of. So Hurricane would do 80 damage, which was, again, good at knocking out small, basic Pokemon. And then you could preserve some of the energy on your field by shifting them back to your bench. And Zekrom was the thing that you would push up to take bigger knockouts when you needed to. Because this was an aggressive deck, we weren't playing a ton of Pokemon. We had a room to include cards like Plus Power. You could include it in a small quantity because, again, we have Junk Arm available. And then we just have straight aggro supporter lineup. No end necessary. We're just going to power through our deck with four Juniper, four Oak's New Theory to refresh our hand if we need to and draw up to six. And then Sage's Training to round things out and mill dead item cards out of our deck later on in the game. And this is pretty much as simple as it gets. Yeah. As far as deck construction is concerned and ease of play is concerned, too. So if you are new to this format, this is a deck I would recommend putting together just as if you just want to hit the ground running, more or less. If you are a current Joltik box player, this might appeal to you. Is that a thing? No, not necessarily. I played Durant back then. Fair enough. Fair enough. Actually, during the Georgia Marathon, people would switch to this because I had a very good Durant matchup. Makes sense. So that's very funny. It's funny you say that, because I actually I played this to the first city championship in the Florida Marathon and actually lost to Jason's Durant deck in top eight. I don't I think that I opened shame in both games, which definitely didn't help. No, it didn't help. It I and I cannot for the life of me remember what the total course of events was, but both games I just eventually ran out of energy and was unable to close things out with a Zekrom. But there are other decks of the format like we saw this this and this isn't a fully comprehensive list of everything that was available, but there were eel based decks. Vanellux is another very frustrating strategy that we saw. Like John mentioned, there were some Typhlosion decks. I know Magnezone. Typhlosion was a big Puka favorite. That was the tournament that I ended up winning with that Landorus deck I actually played Puka in the finals and he was playing magma zone Typhlosion So again Landorus came in really clutch in that matchup along with Kieran being able to potentially one-shot Typhlosions But there's a lot of interplay here There is no one clear best deck and I think that it's a good format to go back and revisit And also is on the cheap ER and as long as you avoid those tropical beach laden decks Right, yep, definitely a fun format. I've built a couple decks for retro for this And yeah, definitely one. I like to pull out and play from time to time This is like their last black and white format before we got exes. So I think that's kind of a nice thing Yeah, yeah so states this year would introduce next destinies and that's kind of what people consider to be the beginning of the end as far as 2012 is concerned because that's like CMT or wrote like rose up Eels Mewtwo rose up and then the set after that we got Darkrai and all hell broke loose Yeah, so we've talked about a lot of those 2012 world's decks including eels Mewtwo and I'm not sure if we mentioned speed Darkrai But there's really not much to talk about there More interesting Darkrai decks are gonna come up in the next set of decks that we'll talk about and then we've also talked about that Chandelure control strategy that John mentioned that utilized again vileplume along with some lost zone shenanigans Utilizing new prime. So I guess before we jump into 2013 Were there any other 12 2012 decks or 2012 memories that either of you had that you'd want to share? Um, I know I played in the cities with rush explosion Went to the finals Against pram he was playing the six corners and I Realized now or I realized like the day after the event There was such an easy way for me to win that and that was just to ignore Reshiram and just attack him with typhlosion because typhlosions attack discarded energy and He had no way to accelerate energy so I could just continuously knock off his energy while getting it back with my afterburner So I could just always stay ahead of him. But unfortunately, I just attacked into his outrage people and easily lost Well live and learn right new live and learn Yeah, six corners was another kind of interesting deck. It wasn't super long-lived like this was something I remember being around at the beginning of this format, but not really hanging around all the way to the end and This just utilized You know, typically I don't see a cobalt Ian on here, but I remember this deck having Every single one of these big basics along with cobalt Ian and that was where I'm six million as well Yeah, that's where six corners came from because you could hit six different types for weakness And so it's a callback there used to be what was four corners back in the like 2006 2007 era where you would utilize Four different stage ones I believe that would hit multiple types for weakness And hopefully you had this toolbox type deck that could cover all your bases as long as you were able to pilot it correctly And so this sought to do the same thing through purely manually attaching to your big basics and hoping that it worked out. Yeah Yeah, this is funny doesn't even have six corners But yeah, I definitely could volume is pretty good in this meta game for sure for sure Yeah, and I just played the best cards and just hope to get there through manual attachments So again, like if you if you want to play 2012 I would recommend playing this city's format far more than I recommend the world's format I think this is a lot a lot more interesting 100% So now we're gonna jump into 2013 and like I said We're gonna start kind of at the beginning and hopefully work our way up to worlds And I know that you guys had a couple of decks that you wanted to share to lead things off Yeah, so 2013. I'll go ahead and share Was a marathon event that was the first marathon I went to I think I went to 2013 in 2014 and 2014 I fell in love with Let me find it. Yep. Here we are a deck called dark rye hydrigan and this deck So this is the XY era. So we started seeing the Introduction of EX but not X wire. Sorry. This is the EX era. So we started the inclusion of two prize big basics that Were really really powerful and one of the ones that just died was the one that was the one that was the one that Basically since it was printed until it rotated was dark right EX with 180 HP really big basic Pokemon that Has a really good ability that gives anything that has a dark energy attached to it for a treat and then has a really good attack Which is night spear does 90 and then 30 damage to one of your opponents bench Pokemon and you can power that up with dark patch fairly effectively Just you know, anytime you play this you can accelerate a dark energy from your discard pile to Dark right and This deck really dark right by itself was really powerful But this had a really nice utility factor of being able to move the energy around with hydrigan Which was a stage 2 Pokemon with 150 HP a lot of a lot of HP for this era Has the ability dark trance? This is as often as you like before your turns over You can move a dark energy attached to one of your Pokemon to another one of your Pokemon so you're able to just kind of power up dark rise and Then move all the move all the energies over to different attackers or even to hydrigan itself dragon blast for psychic too dark and a colorless Does 140 and discard too dark so you could definitely take some knockouts with this if you set up some Like softened up some stuff with dark rye and then follow it up You know, you can KO with hydrigan late game One of the setup Pokemon slash just best Pokemon in this format was Sableye Sableye is just a 70 HP basic with two attacks that are decently both ones really good ones good and the other ones broken Confuse ray is just for a colorless energy just 10 and then flip a coin if heads a defending Pokemon is now confused So I can buy a turn and then junk hunt One of the most broken attacks ever printed it's just put two item cards from your discard pile into your hand so At any point in time you can you know, recover your your Pokemon catchers You can recover your dark patches you recover your max potions anything like that max potions are really powerful item card It has the text heal all damage from one of your Pokemon then discard all energy attached to that Pokemon So normally this is a huge downside you have to discard all your energy but because you have hydra gone you can move all the energy off the Pokemon use a max potion and then move all energy back and start attacking again, and sure enough like You know, you just ran some really good attackers in this deck besides dark rye and Sableye You had Keldeo who you didn't really attack with but had a really good ability in Russian and it's acted as a pivot for free With with a you know, dark cloak ability you can use Russian and then retreat and put anything else up in the active But a secret sword could work really well in a pinch in this deck You ran prism energy which are a basic type of energy that can only be attached to basic Pokemon But count as rainbow energy one of the reprints we're getting in the new black and white set You ran Mewtwo EX. This was never like The best attacker in this usually you wanted to use dark rye But it definitely came up clutch like if your opponent just built it like a big Mewtwo of their own you you could use this As a response to knock that out or you know clear off something that had a lot of energy on it Sableye or Sigilyph was a 90 HP basic with safeguard So it prevented EXs from attacking you so you could set kind of set this in the active and set up behind it or even just attack with it with psychic and then The last attacker on this deck is Terrakion which just you use to counter your own opponent's dark rise For retaliate 30 plus 60 more if you had one of your opponent you had one of your Pokemon knocked out during your turn So just to go over some other aspects of it you get a little bit more access to better supporters in Kholrus we got in this era and then Let's see This is Kholrus is a little bit later of an include. I don't think I played this in the city's format Kholrus wouldn't yeah, so this might be an older list maybe for the state's format So I probably just played like Pond or something like well, I don't think we had Harkless liver stuff at this point stuff. So it probably just played Like more Skyla more and yeah, probably The big thing was that we had a specs back or yeah newly introduced at the time So with with the induction introduction of boundaries crossed We had the introduction of a specs and namely computer search and dowsing machine Those are the two biggest ones computer search is just discard two cards from your hand and then you can search your deck for any one card And then shuffle your deck afterwards. So this was nice just added consistency like just an insane card And then yeah, you compare it with Junk hunt to get it back and search for whatever you needed the next turn stuff like that Yeah, it was just a really good consistent deck I like this deck a lot because I liked having max potions and it max potions felt really broken a lot of times Because nothing really took one shots except for maybe a big new to in this format There was nothing that was like hitting for 180 every turn Not this early maybe Blastoise and Keldeo later on you could get up to those kind of numbers but early on in the city's format, it definitely was Not in the case You ran a tool scrapper because we'll talk about another card later on maybe but carboater was a big thing That's just shut off all abilities and you wanted to have access to those in this deck And yeah, blend energy is a cool card. I wish they would reprint this and the new black and white set I think that'd be pretty cool it's just a Special energy that provides four different types of energy And only only four so it's dark psychic fighting or fire and grass So I thought it was just a really cool card But yeah, I think that's pretty much everything everything else. We've either covered or I don't really have to go back over Yeah, this was the deck that I won my first city championships with the deck that I Really enjoyed playing at this point and played a lot of cities with this one I think Don fan maybe later on in the cities. I remember correctly When did Don fan come out was it Don fan would have been rotated by now because this format was black and white Oh, no, it's not a prime the spinning turn the plasma. That was later Sorry, okay. So yeah, this was this was that one that one that I played hydra gun I think that was probably yeah this was this is why I wanted to talk about it just because as the deck I won my first cities with and I felt Like that was like a good nod to have But yeah So I'm trying to remember what I played around now because I actually do not have a lot of memories of this format in particular See, I'm right there with you, but John reminded me that I wrote a six prizes article And apparently has my entire cities run in there Okay What other decks were kind of big in this format then, um So like what I played I played ho-oh at one. Oh I do remember ho-oh. Okay. Um, I played Kind of a big basics thing like dark right Iraqi or dark right Landorus and me too and Looks like rails blast hoist Kel do Dark right hammers Mm-hmm hammer time. Yep. Yeah, those are kind of big. I want a cities with probo pass Do you want to talk about that Do you have a list for why I don't even know what probo does It's all my article Okay, so for listeners, we will have a link to Johnny's six prizes article in the description of the episode um so probo pass for to Carlos does 30 and you move an energy from the active to one of your opponents badged okay, you played Garbodor to shut off Hydreigon and Most people in my area were not playing tool scrapper because Garbodor wasn't being played because Floatstone hadn't been released yet So I just took advantage of that fact I Shoved a bunch of energy on the one Pokemon threw down a mewtwo knocked out that one Pokemon and now they have no energy So so was blast voice Kel do still being played here Interesting, yeah, I just I do not have the best memory of this This format at all, I guess so this would have been just like like you said like big basics Yeah radios was around Mm-hmm. And so then after this We would have gotten the release of the first plasma set and that would lead it into a state championship season That I think John remembers very fondly Yeah Obviously, I mean I'm again biased. So like 2013 is very memorable. It's kind of the year I transitioned I guess From like an okay locals player to like a better You know regional player maybe it was the One states I actually won was with a cheesy cling-clang deck very fondly fond memories of that I went, I played it at like North Carolina States and South Carolina States and did really bad uh just because the metagame was very different uh and was I was just in denial about like my list and like the room being like it just yeah I was just not prepared for it honestly I think I hit like uh Embor Rush Room or something like that one round and you know just never really took off but in a last ditch effort to uh make the most of playing Kling Klang I drove up with my brother to Maryland States which was a huge drive for me uh at like you know no money college kid age coming from South Carolina so very very long drive um and we uh I played against an insane number of Blastoise uh which was just a favorable matchup for Plasma Kling Klang um by the end of the day I had like a game plan on how to play against it all the top players were playing Blastoise at this event so it was my first introduction to a lot of players now that are known uh like Raul Reddy was there, Gene Nizam, Jimmy Pendarvis played it and then yeah just a lot of players that um if you look back at like you know past regionals they've had a lot of success um but was my first introduction to them and I just kind of came out of nowhere and played really well with a Kling Klang deck um and Plasma Kling Klang um I don't have the deck pulled up but I'll just it's uh just has like the plasma shield ability or plasma something yeah um basically prevents any EXs from being able to damage any of your Pokemon that have mental energy attached to it um and so you could shield a lot of your you know Cobalion's primarily Cobalion EX wasn't a really good attacker I hit for 100 but it had like a shred effect where it just went through anything and then the first attack just did 30 damage and discard a special energy so that was somewhat times relevant but most of the time it was just 100 100 100 um and that wouldn't be enough but you could again like Hydreigon um there's another Kling Klang you could play uh Shift Gears which moved all your metal moved all your metal energy around so you could move all your metal off heal Cobalion EX with an Eeveelight or whatever have you um move all the energy back and then just keep swinging um and you know there wasn't Junkarm at this point that had rotated out um but there was just I think Dazzling Machine was still in format so I think I ran that but you just ran four max potion and a lot of decks like if you can't attack with an EX you're kind of capped at how much damage you can put out Blastoise had to use Blastoise as their attacker and they weren't really hidden for more than like 120 to 140 max if they put like six or seven energy on it they had like a Hydro Pump you know do 60 plus 10 more for each water or something like that I forget what the exact attack is um something similar to that though not doing a whole a bunch of damage so you're able to play around that and then I remember beating an Empoleon player that um I think kind of like I I used max potions a lot in that matchup and was able to just stay alive I guess that I don't think it was a good matchup um yeah I think I bullied their like Dusknoir and never let them set that up um Empoleon is a cool deck but uh my brother played a lot and um but yeah I beat them in top four and then yeah I beat a Blastoise in the finals to win that one so just a really cool tournament um kind of like gave me the confidence that I could like okay in the next year I'm gonna go for a World's Invite or I ended up getting one in 2015 but like that 2013 cities or states era uh I guess 2013 to was it 2013 yeah 2013 states era was kind of my breakthrough for that so yeah definitely fond memories of Klinklang it's it's a pretty goofy deck looking back at it and that format I'd say it had some redeeming qualities but definitely one that I don't think people really go back and play all that much no at the and so similar situation to you back then I was in my senior year of college so I particularly around states time I was like partially checked out from Pokemon I just felt like I had like other things going on at the time well actually at the time I definitely had other things going on because I would have been getting married like three months later oh wow um that aside from that um just the format was not super interesting to me I was never a big Blastoise person all through the whole city season when Boundaries Cross first got released I was just adamant I'm not gonna play Blastoise this doesn't interest me I'm gonna play insert other wacky deck instead you know right before Boundaries Cross got introduced there was a so at the time again like I mentioned at the top of the episode we had a fall and spring regional events that would happen kind of to cap off a format more or less so you would have a major event for the first set that was released a major event set that was for the second set that was released for states a major event set for the third set the spring regionals and a major event set for the last set of the year for nationals and worlds and like in the spring regionals or sorry the fall regionals I had played like Garbodor with Accelgor and like we mentioned earlier Floatstone did not exist yet so I had no way to retreat those Garbodor but somehow that managed to make like top 16 at that regional with that deck because I didn't I hated Blastoise so I played like a 3-3 Garbodor and like six tools in my deck and said no you're not doing rain or deluge this game and that that kind of carried through the rest of the format one of my favorite cards throughout this entire era was Accelgor from Dark Explorers with its deck and cover attack and we'll get to that in just a minute because that's one of the cards that I specifically want to highlight from the nationals format but actually now that I'm saying that I think we're gonna get there a little bit sooner because I think Johnny you had a deck you wanted to highlight that also utilized that card oh yeah the Empoleon yes yes uh so Empoleon Accelgor so we got my or a Empoleon Accelgor my little baby so you have the Emolga to set up everything with that call for family attack and I love that we have that call for family you know actually used to see play you had you know you showed the Pichu earlier but that's kind of been mitigated nowadays we don't really have too much on the setups we have the call for family you play a bunch of Research or Juniper Empoleon had that diving draw ability discard to draw two and eventually you'd set up an Accelgor put down the Mew to copy those attacks put that double Carlos on use the deck and cover they're paralyzed and poisoned got two three cards left in deck next turn you draw you diving draw use that Mew again like I was telling Aaron unfortunately you can't manipulate the damage like you could later on in formats so a lot of it was just one for one trading but it did get the job done because your opponent could not attack you too much so as long as they didn't get too big a lead early on you were usually fine and usually with combined with N it does make it uh you you'd hold the end to make sure that when you do take knockouts okay well I'm gonna play the end right before it to give you as few cards as possible going into your next turn yes and then what was the max potion used for just for Empoleon because it was very hard yeah everything everything attacked for one energy so you can just max potion the Empoleon had you know 130 140 hp so you heal that all off um a lot of times you'd be deck deck and covering either into the Emolga or the Accelgor because they had free retreat um and then the Empoleon was just there to kind of assist and you have a couple switches in case you have to uh move that Empoleon and so your game what was your game plan into something like Blastoise where they would have access to rush in from Keldeo to get out of your lock uh you're once Blastoise kind of got popular so Blastoise wasn't too popular because of the need for tropical beach sure um if they could only find one Keldeo you could deck and cover that if they found two you would uh try to attack command the Blastoises hope they can't get a second one out but that was easily this deck's worst matchup makes sense yeah yeah it's very straightforward it's interesting looking at this it's like super straightforward you know other than maybe like the max potions there's not a lot of i mean but there's like a lot of cool strategies you can use with the attackers um and yeah attack command such a cool attack yeah and and we mentioned how little draw there was and you know we're seeing Cheren being played as a four of which would be on that's mind-blowing to me yeah it would be unheard of in any other format yeah right and you know thankfully the the set after this format so this should have been that spring regionals format right right so the set after this we did get another draw card that saw quite a bit of widespread play and that would be that Coleris that john had highlighted earlier and i'm only going to highlight one deck from this nationals format really quick before we jump into some of the more worlds lists because the metagame did evolve to counter this deck pretty heavily heading into worlds that year but kind of the under the radar not really a secret but the under the radar deck that ended up doing surprisingly well at u.s nationals in particular for 2013 was got the tell excel gore and so this is the first place list from edmund kuris from u.s gnats that year some of the standout things from edmund's list in particular are that he played three catcher i know most commonly at the time most people you know myself included i ended up getting top 16 at this event by punting a game against a darkrai deck by pushing up a 30 damage shell mit and just letting it die to laser in like game 3 of top 16 just i don't know i don't know what happened there but it was bad and unfortunately that was the reason i didn't go to worlds that year because i'm i think that i had a pretty free matchup locked in for top eight which would have been a nice free auto invite to worlds but the big thing here three catcher which definitely helped him in the mirror match that he ended up playing in top four in particular um and it's kind of just one of the nuanced things so the goth hotel for people unfamiliar has magic room which is just very similar to what we're going to be seeing with the jellicent coming out here in a couple weeks as long as this pokemon is active your opponent cannot play item cards from their hand and so super powerful especially when you can couple that with an attacker that lets you push up a new active pokemon every time you get to attack along with also paralyzing and poisoning whatever you are hitting and so like johnny mentioned with that empoleon deck though the problem that you often would run into with excel gore is that yes you can lock something in place as long as there's no keldeo involved in the board but your opponent eventually will have a reprieve when that pokemon gets knocked out except we had dust noir from boundaries cross that was also available to us with its sinister hand ability that allowed you to manipulate damage on your opponent's board however you wanted as many times as you wanted to during your turn so you could set it up so every single time your opponent's active would be knocked out from poison coming back into you and you could lock a new pokemon and for whatever reason you didn't like whatever they were promoting you could just play a pokemon catcher and bring up something else instead and so just pure consistency in terms of supporters here we have for research for n for skyla to go find your tropical beach or your rare candy or your float stone which was a new tool which really tied everything together this deck was largely available to be used prior to this format but the lack of floats so made it a lot clunkier i know one of the things that i told johnny that off camera or off recording i should say is that i attempted to play a version of this deck at spring regionals that because floatstone was not yet legal utilized dark right ex along with blend energy grpd and keldeo so you would rush in with a blend energy keldeo and then retreat to your excel gore or mu and use deck and cover that way but because your bench was so cluttered you didn't actually have the room for dust noir so you still ran into the same problem that that empoleon deck ran into where you were often having to just hope that your gothitelle lived a hit at some point throughout the game that made things a little bit more difficult but that things get a lot more streamlined here so we're able to use mu so we don't have to go find excel gore every turn necessarily or you can also advantageously attempt to play with some of the reversal math or not reversal resistance math to make sure that the numbers are always lining up in your favor and you can also thanks to that sinister hand ability from dust nor manipulate the damage to take out key things on the bench that are problems for you as well while you keep something unimportant stuck in the active and this is just a really really mean deck going into nationals where everybody was just kind of disrespecting the deck more or less they were playing low supporter counts a lot of item cards a lot of decks that just were unfavorable into this and so the way that a lot of people sought to counter this once worlds rolled around was just playing two keldeo in basically every single deck and once whoever you're playing against has two keldeo on board you just can't do anything essentially with the deck if they have one keldeo in play you can just catch her up the keldeo and lock it and you're not worried anymore you're good to go but with two keldeo things get significantly more difficult and it often gives them enough turns of getting out of item lock to really just permanently remove item lock from the equation and just kind of tearing your deck apart from there but definitely an interesting deck one of my favorite decks ever i still have this deck built and i do not see myself ever taking it apart a big barrier entry obviously it's tropical beach but again you can proxy those if you do not have the physical card no one's going to judge you Yeah, that's the one card where no one's judging if you're not a proxy in those beaches Even mu vx is expensive in this one. Yeah. Yeah for real. Well this art in particular. I don't well, okay I didn't even remember what this one is from So I know yeah black star pro. Holy cow $80 that's crazy. Yeah, but yeah, I think all arts all arts of this mu are very expensive 40 plus. Yeah I think though the Radiant collection one is like stupid stupid expensive for what it is because it wasn't like that expensive when I came out It was like a two or three dollar card and now it's like I think over a hundred. Yeah, it's like 120 But it is very pretty. Yeah, it's pretty cool I'm not like I always just thought those look silly when they came out and then People just love them like the card store I help out at people are always asking for those ones like the rating Well, the rest of that set has gotten absolutely ridiculous reason. Yeah, so I was I put together just random like bulk lots to give to kids at local leagues or I have a listing on like Facebook marketplace for like here's five bucks for like 50 cards or whatever and it includes, you know Blah-blah-blah-blah-blah and oftentimes had some number of radiant collection cards and I've had to go back through and Double check if I put any of the EVS from that set and those things because for some reason that's a $30 card now Oh my gosh That's crazy. Yeah, like the restroom from that like was super cheap Like I played it in my I think it was cheaper than like the black and white base set ones for a long time And now it's like yeah chase car. It's like a hundred dollar card. It's crazy. Yeah, it's crazy But anyways, we're just talking about Very cool deck. We all think we all I think finally remember a sell gore Just one of the coolest attacks ever made. Oh, it's great tech This this is honestly one of my favorite cards that has ever existed because I think that it's Very versatile and rewards creative deck building. Yes in particular It's not the easiest of now this deck It was very easy to utilize and then this evolved eventually once once Trevenant came into play when X and Y came out and Got even stronger from there because you didn't have to use a stage two to get everything set up But that still fell out of favor because people knew how to play against it. Once this deck had hit the scene But it still was just a really cool card throughout its lifecycle for sure Yeah nationals this felt oppressive for sure. Yes, and so we saw at the time I think this deck had the most copies in top cut starting in top 64 and I think once you made it to top 32 or later, it was more than half of the remaining decks Yeah, it was just ridiculous. And then we fast-forward to worlds in the deck is a non-existent Because again, everyone learned how to counter it. So we've got a few decks here to highlight from worlds We have previously talked about John Bristow's ray eels deck But the first thing that I'm going to talk about here or bring up is Jason Krasinski's world's winning Darkrai list and there's Not a lot really to say about this So we've talked about how powerful Darkrai and Sable I are previously and the reason that there's so strong we do see the to Kel Dio like I mentioned to just Make sure that you're not susceptible to the item lock or the retreat lock rather Comboed with the item lock from the Gotha teldex as well as just Kel Dio being a good card to get you out of sticky Situations in general we have a lot of consistency in our 4-4 supporter count dark patch is really good catcher is really good Hypnotoxic laser is one of the best cards ever printed and then just random receiver to keep your things flowing along In tandem with junk hunt to go find item cards to recover everything energy switch made it So it was not at all unreasonable to have a turn one night spear come out from this deck and you see the added kind of turbo nature of Jason's list with the inclusion of something like bicycle Alongside all of these other item cards to really just thin your hand down redraw up and hopefully just night spear out the gate Except you did have the ability in some particular matchups to sit back and play that junk hunt game plan alongside something like hypnotoxic laser when utilized in conjunction with Burbank City Gym and Enhanced hammer to really you know plasma in particular comes to mind where you're just gonna enhance hammer away Most if not all of the energy on their board and really try to slow them down enough When that those that laser damage can build up so that a night spear can come in and get a one-hit KO on a two-prizer While leaving your dark ride relatively unharmed in the process But just options for days more or less and kind of the That's just the history of dark right? I guess in general Yeah, just a versatile card just a really all-around good like attacking card and then yeah paired with with sable I just kind of ran the rule ran the room for a while for a long time And yeah, I think this was like dark. I was featured in probably like 2012 worlds 2013 worlds Was it 2014? I don't know what was finals in that. Yeah. I know that was all Dino Yeah, 2014 was the Genesect had come out by then So things are a little bit different. Yeah, this is right before plasma blast came out But I still think 20 like 2014. It was still like played just not as heavily Yeah early on it would have been just later in the season. It got phased out But I'd say like maybe other than like recently guard of war there hasn't been a card that has just kind of earned as much or Seen as much play as dark right during its heyday Like yeah, you've all told dark cry for a long time to later on in the X&Y era But yeah, this is a just a really good if you're trying to like get an idea of what this format was like for worlds This is definitely like the more like it's all basic Pokemon really turbo Kind of similar to 2012 worlds, honestly Yeah on it, yeah, this is very very similar to that, you know, so still random receivers Yeah, like the only thing you're missing is smear goal sky arrow. Yeah, but you have random receiver and then Yeah, you don't need sky or when you have dark right? So there you go Definitely and then the next thing up so we talked about blasts a lot it's been a very strong card from the time it was or was a very strong card from the time it was released in boundaries crossed And in particular was initially utilized in conjunction with Kel do this is the one deck where Kel do was actually used as an attacker Was the primary attacker for the deck for a very long time? And so secret sword for Kel do did 50 plus 20 more for each water energy. Blastoise had the same ability as Backscalibur So you could rain down water energy on your Pokemon for days We had superior energy retrieval that was released in the same set. So you would just load up a Kel do So you would just load up a Kel do smack stuff for price for prize cards until Kel do got knocked out Okay, you just bench another Kel do superior all those energies back and do it again and then later on Blastoise got access to black Kiram ex which was kind of like the iron hands for You know if you wanted to put things in perspective to make this similar to like the modern qian pao deck The the Kel do plus black Kiram kind of gave you the combo of iron hands plus Chen pao qian yet Wow plus qian I mean, it's not one-to-one for Obviously, but but still the thing that's to knock out the small guys plus the thing to knock out the big guys And black Kiram was able to do that Notably was weak to dragon which there weren't really other dragon attackers available that were not named black Kiram Aside from a Kel do that had a billion energy attached to it You know Kel do's base image is 50. So to reach up to knock out that black Kiram you need to have seven water energy attached Just really unreasonable numbers and the thing that kept this deck consistent the whole time the thing that really like You know was the engine of a lot of stage two decks or slower decks in this format Was that tropical beach stadium card? You know was the engine of a lot of stage two decks or slower decks in this format Was that tropical beach stadium card and honestly, this probably has to be one of the biggest mistakes pokemon has ever made Oh, that's the reason the reason why we have not seen a playable world's promo since the release of the card Yeah, they made they made the mistake of making the world's Championship promo the one that's only given off the players and staff members of the world championships One of the more like playable stage two like every stage two deck wanted to play four copies of it, but you just couldn't like I remember in my cling clang list we go back to that. I had I think one copy of Uh tropical beach and then I didn't have another copy. So I think yeah, I either played like uh I played another stadium just to have for some reason. I think I either played like battle city or Uh Something equally terrible. Uh, but like if I had two beach, I would have played two beach. I'll tell you that so Yeah, and I I wonder like is it a card that? Did it only see play because ross played it in 2011? Or do you think people still would have discovered it eventually eventually? Yeah, I think someone would have but seeing ross Have the success he did with I think he only played one at that one. Yeah, he only had one at the time. He only played the one so uh He probably would have played more had he uh Had access to him but seeing that Really opened people's eyes to it Yeah That's all it takes is one person Yep, absolutely And then you know the other big thing that the deck had going for it was the same set of blasters and keldeo Where really skyla also came out which gave you an a means of searching tropical beach or searching for again? You're a spec card or that rare candy And then blast face also had the advantage of being one of the pokemon You could search with heavy ball that only could find pokemon that were three retreat or more Again, this goes back to that cling clang deck that john was talking about, you know A lot of pokemon in that deck at three retreat, but this could find blast voice along with black kiram So gaining access to another asset that you could find just making the deck a little bit more versatile Allowing you to kind of cheat card counts here and there to fit everything in While still maintaining as much consistency as possible It was just a really strong deck and a lot of things just couldn't handle back to back to back black ballista to close out games, you know similar to if you and other formats could just Uh chien pow ko things back to back to back in tandem with boss, you know, what's your opponent going to do? Right another card that got printed relatively like recently for this deck was a superior energy retrieval um, so This just kind of was a turbo charge. We had energy retrieval before this And early versions of last voice caldeo, but this allowed you to use black here more effectively Because it has such a high discard effect of the three energy This allowed you to just kind of keep powering stuff up over and over again effectively a lot of lists ran Ex like an execute from the plasma set Um that allowed you to just propagate put it back in your hand And then just discard it with like superior or ultra ball or what have you? um this I know james just hated egg because he Hated starting it and like getting donked by laser bank. Um and understandably, uh, yeah, so it's just Yeah, this was uh, this was uh, by the way james goods list. Um He's uh was one of my friends I guess at the time. I haven't really kept up with him too much. Um, he's moved on to like um Doing a lot of sports card stuff, but he played pokemon pretty much for like 2012 2013 2014 Around that era and this was like his top four worlds list. Um, kind of his peak of his playing era Um, so very cool To see him featured here. I know this list means a lot to him Um, and he worked really hard on it, too I would still advise heavily that people put an execute in the deck though. Yeah, I think it's really good It helps with a lot of resource management Execute is just such a strong card when half your cards just discard something. So yeah And you play enough basics that you shouldn't start with it that frequently. Sure Yeah, I mean it's like the gambler's fallacy or like whatever like when you lose one game because of it, right? You just like start to change your whole deck list around it It's like I just I just don't want to lose because of that and it's like okay Well statistically it shouldn't happen. But the one game it does happen. You remember more than any other game, you know, for sure Yeah, yeah and that feeds we've had top discussions about that before where a lot of pokemon players like the Large percentage of the pokemon player population is very heavily resort results oriented And you know as humans we are biased to remember negative experiences so we can hope to avoid them in the future you know Losing is definitely considered to be a negative experience by most people So for sure, I you know can't blame him And then the last deck that I had pulled up is one that I think that our guest here is going to fill us in on So this may look very familiar to you, right johnny. Oh very this is what I played at nationals at the uh, the last chance qualifier at nationals and then at worlds Uh, it took me to an eight and one record at nationals And then I lost to alex hill in the top 128 in a mirror match Then I played in the lcq where I needed a top 16 finish to Even make the world championships Uh, I actually played against a goth tell excel gore in that uh lcq But since it was best of one and he prized both of his excel doors. I was able to I was able to move on So you got to explain to the people that are um younger, uh listeners perhaps what is an lcq like So lcq Is a last chance qualifier. So for this year Was the first year that they said if you hit X amount of championship points, you would get an invitation to the world championships I do not remember what that number was. I think it was 300 or 400 or something but I was Just shy of it i'm like, okay. I just need a a good finish at nationals When eight one feel going really good. Lost the first round of top cut. I'm like, okay, gotta go through this LCQ now. Ended up go getting top eight in the LCQ. Nice. Yeah, it would have been top 16. But Puka also made it with me. And he also just needed a top 16 finish. So he just scooped. So I just I did the same to my top eight opponent. Because we were all just ready to leave at that point. And there was no like additional prizing. Sure. Um, but not played this exact two worlds as well. Real quick, before you get into the list, it is worth noting for people who may be heard that 300 championship point numbers that Oh, so easy to qualify for world that the championship point values at the time were also scaled very differently to what they are now. Right? Yeah, we also did not have. Yeah, we did not have three ICS to go to. We had a regionals to go to you don't have there was one nationals. You know, winning a city's didn't give you early cup that didn't give you, you know, 50 points. So no, everything was scaled back proportionately. Yeah, wasn't just Oh, I want like 40 league cups for cities, whatever. I got my I got my invite. Cool. Anyway, continue. Yeah. No, so I played this exact 60 at worlds. I decided to not tech any for the cocktail. So we're a matchup. Because I felt like I was hoping that everyone else would to be honest. I would have to add to Kel do's, I would have to add some float stones. And that to me just felt like it would take away the consistency. And it didn't even really guarantee that I would win that matchup. It would sure, you know, more favorite, but it wouldn't guarantee anything. So I would, I just went with the same 60. I felt very, very confident in it. I actually did play James good in the Swiss rounds. And I did beat him before his run to the top four. But, you know, I ran through I ran through a clink clang in a top 16 in a very fun matchup. Where game one, I swept him game two, he sweeps me. And then game three, I sweep him again. And then top eight, I lost to Simon the road who got second to Jason, all the way to to Jason, also using the plasma in a very, very close set. And disappointed I I didn't bring home that top four finish, but I was very excited that I had gone so deep in my first world championships. Sure. And so some of the card inclusions you have here are not necessarily ones that people would consider to be standard, especially when combined together. So you want to maybe talk through some of the accounts some of like why we see Lugia and Kiram in the same deck. Absolutely. So I am always a fan of cards that allow us to do things we are not supposed to do. Lugia having that ability, knocking out Pokemon, you get one more additional prize, you know, the deoxys adding to your damage. So, you know, you have three, four deoxys down, you're doing 30, 40 more damage, you're 120, all of a sudden becomes 150, 160. You know, you're knocking out Sableye for two prizes. Now you're knocking out Kirams, the absolves for two prizes, instead of just the one. So you're still keeping up a two prize race rather than a one for one. Kiram is such a strong card, just setting up damage, the blizzard burn, hitting really, really hard, frost spear 30, 30, blizzard burn, just a straight 120. Again, that deoxys just being the instant plus power for every team plasma Pokemon, beside itself, but every team plasma Pokemon, it just takes those small numbers to such big ones. Colriss machine is such a ridiculous card, just accelerating energy for a item card, as long as you have the, you know, plasma energies in your deck. Yeah, plasma energy is just a colorless energy. But the fact that you can just put anywhere, just because it's an item card is insane. So you're getting these attacks so quickly. The biggest inclusion that was always my favorite was frozen city, my stadium. So whenever, whenever someone attaches an energy to a non team plasma Pokemon, that Pokemon takes 20 damage. So if a blast hoist could not counter this, and they went to deluge, that Pokemon would take really anywhere between 60 and 80 damage just from a stadium that softened it up, up enough to where my Kiram's frost spears would do enough to kill to KO the Absol with the mind jack would be enough to KO. But it really also softened them up for that Lugia plasma gale to take those additional prize cards. And then one of my favorite cards, the A-spec scramble switch. You switch your Pokemon, and then you can switch any energy that was on the active Pokemon to the new active Pokemon. So if I blizzard burn a turn, oh, I can't attack with the next turn, I can scramble switch to a Lugia, all of a sudden that Lugia has got three energy, you know, attach that plasma and take whatever prize cards I can with Lugia. And obviously, the four catcher made that super, super helpful. You could ease you can make a lot of use with the with the max potions. Just you have these big, big Pokemon, you know, max potion was very big in the darkrai matchup, because they would be, they would hit you for the 90-30. They would do an additional 30 with the verbank laser combo, they would do an additional 20 with the dark claw. So that would do 140 to your active 30 to a bench, leaving 30 damage left on your 170 HP Pokemon like thunderous and deoxys to where they could Pokemon catcher the other one that they hit for 30 and then take a four prize turn. So max potion would prevent all that and then you could use that thunderous ride and knuckle to start getting your energy right back, which was another thing for that scramble switch. The following turn, you could get that blender prism off, maybe back onto a Lugia or a Kyurem, attach your energy for the turn like the double carlas or the plasma and just begin swinging one more time. It is crazy that like colorless machine existed if you really think about it. Like being able to accelerate energy with an item card from your deck to where you could just like get the turn one Lugia KO on something for two prizes. It was just disgusting. Honestly, like this is good. Funnily enough, I missed a switch to hit turn one Lugia in game three of top eight to win that I ended up Yeah, Simon played what deck again? Yeah, he played plasma a very similar build, but he had Burbanks and laser rather than frozen city and he had a computer search as well. But he had the max potions he had, I think one double Carlos, he still had Lugia still had two Kirams but very, very similar overall. No Skyla, no Bianca, I think third chorus but very, very, very close on our builds. I gotcha. Yeah. And also, I actually didn't realize that I didn't realize Simon played. I didn't realize Simon played Lugia too. I could have sworn maybe I again had probably checked out of the format once I you might hang out with Brian and Kyle too much. Maybe you're probably I could have sworn that Luke like when people played Lugia, it was definitely more like its own deck. It's more own more of its own like core strategy, but I can definitely see the utility of having it available for sure. Oh, yeah. Just taking extra prizes is insane. Yeah. Especially when you have like you guys have mentioned the relative easy access to plasma energy through either the chorus machine or the right and knuckle to recover it. If you've discarded it, whether naturally or through just, you know, using Plasma Gale to discard it. I think it the crazy thing here was the amount of Gothitel hate that Simon had in his list. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Kelly with with three float stone. Yeah. Now, I guess notably you had to get the float stone down before the Gothitel was in the active. Correct. Yeah. That you had to play that. This is pretty much what you had to do and I just chose not to like I said, you had to hit it super super early in order to even have a shot. But enough people did it like you had hoped that Gothitel did not see any play anywhere near the top of this fort like no, there's there was the biggest thing was there was so much Darkrai. There was so much Blastoise Keldio had a great match up into it. Ray Eels just threw two Keldio in it called it a day. Yep. And you know, that was enough for the downfall of that deck and we did see an interesting Gothitel deck that came from Ross Coffin of all people. Of course, you know, of course, always has to play something interesting or creative. He had a kind of Gothitel control deck that instead of utilizing a Selgor sought to just discard all of the energy from your field by using a Celebi that lets you use basically the same ability as the current Relicanth that we have. Okay. You could use a previous evolutions attacks and so there was a Gothita or no Gotharita that had a crushing hammer as an attack and you would go through and with a Victini that allowed you to reflip coins attempt to discard all the energy to the opponent's active and lock something while your opponent also couldn't play item cards. Yeah, it's wild. As you can see, Simon also did play the two max potions. Yep. I'm assuming for the same reason for the for that Darkrai match up because that that dark the Darkrai math was just way too good. Cool. So, like the plasma, definitely another really cool deck and and the grand scheme of things as far as retro decks go, it is relatively cheap to build. Oh yeah. Um especially considering that you could pick up a cheaper version of Scramble Switch by buying a modern one and just slot it in. Yeah. You know, thankfully, it got reprinted. Um the the biggest difficulty is going to be, I think also notably, I'm pretty sure like the Lugia, Thunderous, and Deoxys were all available as promos as well. They were. So, there might be cheaper versions of all of these cards that are available. So, pretty easy to access and again, relatively fun to play. You know, this is definitely. You mentioned having the Gothitexilgore built. Obviously, I still have this built for a very good reason. Yeah. The I think this format is one of the few formats where I have I think six or eight decks put together and it's definitely one that is fun to revisit from time to time. Okay. Again, not not that it's similar in terms of quite how wide 2006 was but there were was a pretty wide variety of decks available. Oh yeah. To utilize that could still be considered viable. Oh yeah. No. If you look at the top eight of that year's worlds, I'm almost positive there was like five different decks. Yeah. Yeah. I know we've had Ray Eels, Ray Eels, Blastoise, Darkrai, Plasma, and Insert Deck five. I don't remember what it was but I'm pretty sure there was. I'm pretty sure there was a fifth variety. I know there's there's two different Darkrais cuz. Yeah. Oh yeah. That was Justin Zimmerman. So, yeah. Sable Igarbo. There you go. There's deck number five. Yeah, I know there was a Japanese guy on Darkrai Garb. Mm hmm. And he uh he actually lost to the Blastoise which was hilarious. Crazy. That's wild. He was undefeated at that point. Wow. So, yeah. Uh this has been kind of a deep dive time capsule episode for everybody listening. Uh we are coming up on a little bit longer of an episode here. So, we'll probably try to wrap things up here pretty soon but I do wanna thank Johnny from coming on giving his perspective on some of these older format decks being another player who has been in the game since, you know, quote unquote back in my day and so big shout outs to you. Thank you very much for doing that and one of the last questions I had for you since you have still been engaged with the game so long, what changes have happened between then and now that you have either liked or disliked? You know, if you had to pick one or two things in both of those columns. One of the things I've liked is Kind of the tournament structure. Um going from the best of one to best of three has been a phenomenal change and much much needed. Um you know, for those that don't know, back in the day, it it was just a best-of-one up until right after that world championship. That's when they started the best-of-three and that was definitely a very welcome change. One thing I dislike would still probably be the time constraints because there definitely is not enough... I still feel like there's too many crucial games going to time. We just saw the top four of NAIC toward lost to the Gardevoir on time in a game that I feel like he was in very much control of and had a very good shot of winning. Okay, that's fair. That's fair. Any other things to call it that have changed or haven't changed that you do or don't like? If not, that's totally fine. If you want to just move on, we can totally do that. So like for me, obviously I don't play as much anymore, so moving back to the top X make the world championships instead, that kind of rubs me the wrong way just because I'm only going to maybe four events, four big events a year, so really if you like you said you're going to all three ICs, all of a sudden you're, to me, your chances of worlds are skyrocketed because of the point caps from those ICs are so high. Yeah, and we have seen we have seen a little bit of an effort to kind of somewhat combat that by bumping up the values from top 64 up through ninth place from the regional level, but definitely still, you're definitely still advantaged, assuming you go to five majors, if three of your best finish limit are from ICs, absolutely. And I know the answer is just, you know, do better at the ones you go to, and that is always the goal, but unfortunately things don't work out that way sometimes. Yeah, we all can't do Pokemon for a living or do it as much as we would possibly want to do. Yeah, no, like you said that, you know, we last talked in Atlanta, Aaron, and I was doing, I was like two and one, three and one at that point, next thing I know I'm three four, I dropped out of the event, like, and to be fair, I didn't put allowed testing in the meta, so it showed, and I felt it during the games, my deck choice wasn't the greatest, so it is on me as well, but definitely it's more disheartening that I feel like I have to top 16 or better every event I go to just to have a shot at the World Championships. Yeah, that's tough. Especially as somebody who has had success on the world stage previously, so you're like, so you know, or you have to feel that, you know, if you had the time to put in the amount of prep work necessary, which admittedly, you know, coming back to the game after the break that I took, I feel that to be successful at an event, you have to definitely put in more prep work now than you did back, back in the 2010 to 2012 era. Oh, easily. By far, by far. With Decklist as widely available, it's, it's insane how, how much the average player has skyrocketed to above average, or even just the lists have gotten so refined and so consistent that everyone's just kind of gotten better on that aspect, where back in the day, you know, the first two, three rounds was, you wouldn't really know, but sometimes it would just be some mess, and it wasn't too rough. Yeah, yeah, and you wouldn't really start seeing real decks till like, you said, like round four, round five of an event where you're only playing seven rounds at the time. Yeah, yeah, you're only playing seven rounds. It's all best of one, but now you're playing up to 27 games on day one. It's like, oh my, just, yeah, it's, it's a grind for sure. It's such a culture shock. Yeah, it definitely is harder. I mean, we talked about the, you know, the cities of that format where you had so many top players playing, but like, definitely just to have deep runs now. I mean, there's people that like, this is their full time job. This is all they want to do. This is all they spend their time and money on. For sure, like you see, you saw, you saw Henry Chow. He won, you know, three regionals. He got second to another. Like, he, he has put in the time and effort to do very, very well. So if you're putting in that time and effort, it does get rewarded, but it feels bad when you don't have that time anymore. Yeah, and that's, that's part of life though, right? And that's where we've, we've talked previously, now that we have the introduction of things like the Ace Trainer program that hopefully gets expanded on a little bit this year, it allows players to set auxiliary goals outside of, I want to qualify for Worlds. Correct. And still allow you to engage with the game in a competitive sense, and hopefully derive some amount of enjoyment outside of simply just going to the tournaments and participating in them. Yes. And so a little bit of a silver lining that I'm hoping becomes a little bit brighter as that program continues to exist and hopefully evolve and expand. Yes. Yeah, me too. Hopefully. But again, Johnny, thank you for coming on. Did you have any shout outs or anything, like any socials or anything you wanted to plug? I don't have any socials, really. I just kind of exist in the world. But, you know, thank y'all for having me. Obviously, I always enjoy my playtesting group, Greg Sweeney, you know, Carter Copeland, you know, the people I grew up with, David Tusky, his entire family. They've been such a help and such a journey for me. Yeah, all good locals. You got to get Greg and Carter to come back out to League at some point. They used to come early days, and I think I haven't seen them in quite some time. So it'd be good to see them all again. I still talk to Greg all the time. I shot Carter a message literally today, but he actually hasn't responded to it. So he's off doing his own thing. Yeah, that's fine. But you know, they're all it's cool. Like, you know, that's why I love Pokemon. I think we can end on that. But like, basically, like, just the memories you created these cities marathon to the tournaments we play, like, you know, doing well at the tournaments means something for sure. But like, now we have lifelong friends that will have till the day we die. Yeah, me and people, me and Nate go back 20 years means to find go back 15 years like, no, I wouldn't have it any other way. Yeah, and that's, that's really special. And it's good having you in the community, Johnny. So thanks for coming on once again. And I hope to see you around at the events I run, you know, that's a, you know, unplugged games, just a shameless plug for that, I guess. But thanks for coming on. And you know, good seeing you. Good seeing y'all. I appreciate having y'all having me. Great, great. So there you have it, listeners. Hopefully this was, you know, interesting enough for you that you stuck around with us here to the end, and have a little bit of a homework assignment for you. Now that you've heard about the tales of lifelong friendships and whatnot, your assignment is at the next local you go to make a new friend, you know, go find somebody that you maybe haven't talked to before. Or if you're new to a league, you know, we've talked endlessly about how friendly most of the people in this community are. So do not be shy, do not be afraid to go up and talk to somebody, I'm sure that you can find some sort of common ground. If you're both at a Pokemon event, obviously, you both enjoy Pokemon, and you can find a way to, you know, forge that new friendship that maybe you didn't know was available to you. And, you know, that's the big thing that we always come back to is just everybody that interacts with Pokemon enjoys Pokemon to some degree, and is a very welcoming community at large. So we'll have all of the socials for the show. And again, I'll have the link to that six prizes article if you're interested in Johnny's Probopass Garbodor deck in the description of the show, along with links to all of the deck lists that we featured outside of that one, if you are interested in looking those things up and learning more about these formats. So we hope that we will see you guys again next week as we journey further into the battle frontier. Have a good week. Have a good week.