Episode 31: SIZING UP OUR RIVALS

Hello, and welcome back to the Battle Frontier podcast where we aim to help you level up in your journey as a competitive Pokemon TCG player. I'm Aaron Curry, here with me as always is my co host John Orgel. And this week, we're going to be doing what I guess has become tradition for us and looking at a set review for the upcoming Destined Rivals expansion. Which will have pre releases starting this weekend. But before we get into that, we're going to have John lead us in a time capsule segment. And then we'll go through the first half of that set review, doing the grass types to the psychic types. And we'll take a little bit of a break to go through Blaine's quiz show, you know, give everybody a breather, a nice, you know, airing of the cards between halves of the set, where we'll pick things up with our fighting types and continue on through the trainers. But without further ado, let's get into it. John, I want to know what were you up to in Pokemon this week? Pokemon was fun this week. So I did do the Professor Cup Saturday morning. Okay, I played Dragapult. And I just took out I think I played that top four list from the Puerto Rican player, his name escapes me at the moment. But the basically, the one we were talking about last week, where it was just thin duck snore line with Hawlucha and Monkey Dory, okay, and Illumina synergy and all that. And I took out the league headquarters and put in Magikarp and then took out the switch and put in the what's it called? Tauros scenario? Sure. Just as a way to remove Magikarp to help alleviate some of the wind conditions. So I played I think against like Dragapult mirror, maybe round one, I'm trying to remember it was pretty quick. It was like a quick buddy game. It was the seek game and I won with taking a K with Magikarp. Nice. So that was pretty fun. So I won round one, round two, I paired into probably my worst possible matchup and Blissey and I got a really slow terrible start and they were able to just like heal any damage I did. Yeah, so it was basically over after a few turns. Yeah. I was just kind of delaying the inevitable. Like once they establish like, you know, they got the turn two or turn one even TM turbo energized with like three Monkey Dory on board and two Blissey. And at that point, you just I just can't do much. So that was tough. So that was, you know, what it is what it is, I didn't get any like duck snore established to be able to take a one shot on a Blissey. By the time I like was able to stabilize, they were able to just, you know, board wipe me out of any dust nor pieces. So that was okay. So I lost round two. And then round three, I played against a Guardian player. And I didn't really set up against that guy. And there was was the hide condition where you just have to hide your Magikarp. So it was just basically just playing standard. Yeah, there wasn't a whole lot of added like challenge or difficulty elements to it. So yeah, it was kind of like, I think Blissey was a good call. I don't, I just kind of dropped out of the tournament at that point. You know, after two losses, I think I was at a top cut. Okay. And yeah, I think that's the case, because my friend Ben played to the end, he ended up with two losses and got like, 18th or something. So I quit that and was just like, Alright, I still want to play Pokemon. I just don't want to do this. So thankfully, there was a league challenge right down the road for me at modern tabletop. And I played in that and I did okay. I won the first two rounds and then I played the third round and my opponent was a really nice guy. We had a really, really good game and he gave me his prize support afterwards. After the really grindy match we had, he was just going for the points and said he didn't need it. So that was really nice of him. So shout outs to Nick Allman for that. It was a we all agreed before the game started or before the tournament started that we would do a prismatic evolutions ETB. So it was really nice prizing for that one. That's sick. Yeah, man. So that was really cool. I was like, you were so it's so over to we're so back, you know, the whole just like flip the script kind of thing of the day. And that was fun. And yeah, the rest of the weekend. We just did a bunch of yard work and housework Sunday. You know, just homeowner stuff. Yeah. So hopefully one of us can still make it, but it will not be me this time. So, um, and that's to say that I was disappointed, of course, but it's not like my whole season rides on me going to one event, right? I still feel like I grew a lot as a judge. I learned a lot of different areas and different aspects of the game. I have a more holistic approach to judging like I'm able to see it more from a judge's perspective than just a player's perspective that is a judge. Sure. I learned a lot and I still accomplished a lot. I went to, well, I will be going to three ICS this year international championships. So I'm really happy with just the level of performance I've had everything else that I've applied for I have achieved. So that was pretty cool. Like, um, so yeah, it's a bummer not to be going to worlds. We did like start to plan a vacation and all that. And so we're having to pivot and possibly do something else. But that's okay. You know, I'll still be involved in Pokemon. I'm just not involved in world championship this year. So, uh, but I'll still be at NAIC as a floor judge for the master's division. So that'll be what I'm looking forward to next, but that's enough yammering for me. What about you, man? How was your weekend? I heard you went to some tournaments as well. I did. I did. Um, so it was funny. You messaged me about the initial results of your professor cup run. And for some reason in my head, I've had totally forgotten that that's what you were doing. And I thought that you had somehow participated in a different tournament that had already started and finished that many rounds. By the time I was about to walk into the store to register for the league cup that I was playing in that day. But I did go to a league cup in the Orlando area. And I think we had 19 masters. So played five rounds of Swiss and played in the top four, started out 2-0 playing EV box, saw the room or expected the room to be totally full of bolt based on the regionals results from a couple weekends ago, and noticed that EV box is a pretty good bolt matchup. And so played against bolt round one, he or I started my turn first turn, like got the Rotom did everything. He goes ogre pawn pass, no other basics, I get turned to flare and kill it. And so I have a nice 28 minute or 25 minute wait between the start of round one and the start of round two. Then played against a guardi deck and did a lot of angel lighting managed to win that game as well. And then ended up like punted a game in round three against raging bolt then turned what I think would have been a win if I had played properly, just took the wrong things wrong things off of rock scouting and we ended up tying that round instead. So ended up having to play out round four against an Anzor Arc deck where my opponent managed to prize both of his Dharmanitans. And he just told me that that was the case. And I guess I mean, I took his word for it. But so he got his Reshiram out, I bossed it up and KO'd it. He KO'd something, recovered the Reshiram, KO'd something. I counter captured it up, KO'd it again, he still had doesn't have a Dharmanitans. So he starts using flare with his Xerarcs. And it just didn't go well for him from there. So ended up 3-0-1 there, ID round five, played against Brandon Salazar playing raging bolt in top four. Oh, wow. Friday this week, there's a cup that I'm going to go to not going to be playing much Pokemon this coming weekend, because my son has a baseball tournament that is going to take up a good bit of the day on Saturday and Sunday. So just not going to be much Pokemon going on there. And then on on Sunday, this week was Mother's Day. So I went out with my wife and my sister in law and my parents came up to we went out and had kind of early lunch, not really brunch because we went to like a local shrimp place. But just early lunch for that. And then hung it at home for a little bit playing some board games with my parents until they had to leave. And then we went over to my sister in law's house and played some more board games. So nice, just a nice, fun, calm, casual day. And yeah, it's a good weekend in my book. Yeah, man, that sounds great. Congrats on the cup one. Yeah, playmat. You showed me that thing. It's a sick playmat. If you guys haven't seen it yet. It's the artwork from the journey together box. And I think it's Iona, right? No, it's it's n it's n in Zurich. Iona ones are the I think they're for regionals. Yeah. Gotcha. Yeah, so that was really cool to see. So that's one I don't know if you if you don't know if you don't want it, you know, I might have to find my hands on that one. We'll see. We'll see. We'll figure it out. Um, yeah, maybe I might have to trade you I pulled a certain bulk today at the card store. And I pulled a card out for you. So for the next time I see you, it's a Chinese white cocoa. So that one's pretty cool. And then I pulled out some other cards for me. How the heck does somebody even have that? I don't know, dude. This is for my brother. Shout out to Patrick. So this is a Chinese. Sudowoodo. And they have some cool like hollow patterns. Oh, that one is cool. They have like this ultra ball. Sorry, if this just becomes story time or whatever. Sorry for our audio listeners to you have to go to YouTube to watch this. And they have a bunch of different quack sleeves with different hollow patterns. Interesting. That one. Then that one was like little stars going on. Huh? Yeah, I know. The Chinese sets are kind of all over the place. They're not really like one to one with anything that we have printed over here. And they just kind of seem to rent like I know the Tara arcanine from the base scarlet and violet set got an illustration rare in China for some reason. And that's just an artwork that doesn't exist anywhere else in the world and likely never will because why would they release that at this point? Sure. You know, yeah, a set from two years ago. But yeah, interesting. Those are super cool. I thought they were pretty sick. And they're not that expensive. I mean, it was like, I think the ultra ball and the fake cooker like $3 on eBay. So okay, it's like, it's a cool thing. If you collect. I don't really collect that much, but I thought it was interesting. I thought you might like to play cocoa. So I pulled that aside. And I'll give it to you in New Orleans. Yeah, yeah. We love our title characters here on the battle frontier. Yeah. But other things we do love is the time capsule. And I wanted to feature a deck similar to what just won our most recent regionals. And also, akin to a deck we might talk about coming up. Sorry, there we go. In our set review is the mute Tuesday deck. This is similar to that. This is a bicephalon GX deck. I think I talked about baby bonds at one point on this podcast. Don't fake check me. This is kind of another parallel universe to that one. So this before we had baby blounds, we had both cephalon GX, and my brother played this deck a lot. So I had to play against him a lot. But bicephalon GX is a two prizer. In this era, they had GXs before we had EXs, lowercase, we had GXs. So this was kind of like the second, well, I guess we had Vs too. So EXs, Vs, and then back then before that is GXs. This is the sun and moon era. So bicephalon is a 180 HP basic Pokemon that's an ultra beast. This was the gimmick of the time. They were just like a alternate kind of like our ancient and future Pokemon similar to that. It had three different attacks. Stupid ads. The first one is bursting burn is just for one fire your opponents active Pokemon is now burning confused. So it was a really good kind of stall attack. It had GX attack, which was similar to the V star mechanic where you can only use one GX attack per game. And this one was one that you used a lot in the early time of the game where you could save it for later than take your last prize. It's simply discard one of your price cards if it's an energy card, attach it to one of your Pokemon. So it's essentially just taking a price card for free with the added benefit of maybe some energy acceleration if it is an energy card. And instead of going to your hand, it just goes to your discard pile. But probably what's the most important thing is the second attack listed here. Mind blown. it's 50 times it says put any amount of fire energy attached to your pokemon in the lost zone it does 50 damage for each card put in the lost zone in this way so we did have the lost zone mechanic in this era and similar to Mewtwo and Raging Bull we have the discarding energy essentially this is a little bit less good in that it puts the energy in the lost zone but we do interact with our discard pile and with this deck in a lot of other ways we have other pokemon cards primarily neganadel which is a basic or a stage one pokemon that has the ability charging up it says once during your turn before you attack you may attach a basic energy from your discard pile to this pokemon so this is just the way to accelerate energy out of the field neganadel um blessephalon gx can discard from anywhere so a lot of times you are discarding from neganadel or i guess keep saying discarding put fire energy from your field to the lost zone essentially i'm just saying discarding because that's what i'm more used to saying but sure that's not exactly how the mechanic works but anyway um turning point is also a relevant attack here um it says if you have exactly three prize cards remaining this attack does 80 more damage so 160 so you could use this as a mid game um attacker potentially um you didn't really get a lot of times to use it for the extra damage but 80 for three was somewhat relevant there was some you know math that that worked on yeah um just to go over the rest of this for pokemon um point pool is just your basic that evolves into neganadel um yeah i don't think there's a whole lot to go there uh ditto prism star so prism star is another gimmick they had during this time prism star it just has the prism star rule it says you can't have more than one prism star card with the same name in your deck if it's a if a prism star card would go to the discard pile you put it in the lost zone instead so if this gets knocked out instead of going to your discard pile it goes to the lost zone you can't recover it but ditto is probably one of the most powerful prism star cards if not the most powerful one printed it has just the ability um it has no attacks but that ability is probably one of the most strong ones we've seen it says the ability is called almighty evolution it says once during your turn before you attack you may put any stage one card from your hand onto this pokemon to evolve it you can't use this ability during your first turn or the turn this pokemon was put into play so it just counts as a basic of any ilk like you can evolve it into anything and that that is good because then you're allowed to have some more flexibility um if you were just to run the poiple and the ganado then again it'll line here uh probably wouldn't run ditto you might just to get a third or like a fifth potential basic this only runs a three three um but we do run another evolution line here and that is in the alolan muck line um alolan muck is the stage one that you want to evolve into um it is like a soft counter to a lot of things um it has the ability power of alchemy it says each basic pokemon in play each player's hand and each player's discard pile has no abilities um so it does shut off your own ditto but if you were able to evolve this from ditto you know it didn't really matter it shuts off your opponent's ditto on a lot of matchups which is relevant and then it shuts off a lot of uh basic um uh pokemon coming into play so like tapu lele was a really big card right now and i think we have a bunch of other prism stars that had some really good abilities if we look at this era we had um yeah like brushy zard and pikeram run the tapu koko prism star and volcanion so all those kind of decks run a lot of basics that run abilities so this just neutralizes all of that um similar to like a garbodor garu toxin but you don't have to have a tool attached and it only affects basic pokemon um it has a hefty for retreat cost which was annoying um so there are some ways to deal with that um but yeah i mean realistically if your opponents they could stall this up there um but you run primarily the main way to switch in this format is guzma and we'll get into that in just a second um to finish the pokemon line real quick i have a really impactful pokemon called marshadow it's just a psychic basic pokemon with 70 hit points but it has a really strong ability and let loose it's um when you place from your hand onto your bench during your turn you may have each player shuffle their hand into their deck and then draw four cards so it's judge as an ability on a basic pokemon so it was really strong turn one or turn two to just disrupt your opponent's setup by playing marshadow or if you needed to potentially dig for something you could like maybe try to get a supporter like a lily's turn one you could use the let loose um the supporter line here is pretty just consistency focused um you run a four lily for cynthia lily's just um this is kind of the era where we didn't have as much strong draw support as we had had in the past uh we had like professors this was before professors research and so we were running stuff like birch's observation or something like that um so definitely a little bit weaker than we have right now um this card probably i don't know if it would see play in our current standard um but it is pretty decent at the time you could play supporters going first as well couldn't oh true which you could so you know and the way that this card is worded i i have no doubt it would see absolutely zero play currently just because it's useless going first or i guess it would put us into a format where everyone is always opting second and it's still you'd have to like the feels bad of on the coin flip you have a card in your deck that's just draw till you have six which is yeah not super great no just to read it real quick it says draw till you have six if it's your first turn you can draw till you have eight so basically yeah pretty lackluster draw i'd say the other one the other draw supporter we had that was probably played in the most decks um is cynthia it's a supporter that says shuffle your hand into your deck then draw six so definitely not as strong as we have with currently with professors research and iono so this deck definitely uh used a lot of other things to have consistency um but making up for that inconsistent draw is probably the most consistent best boss supporter we've ever had is guzma your boy uh it's switch your opponent's benched pokemon with their active if you do you switch your active pokemon with one of your bench pokemon so basically not is it just a boss it's also a switch card and that was really really helpful moving some of your stuff that might get stuck in active so this was just like a two for one in that regard um and the reason i chose this list over some other lists of ocephalon is i really like the inclusion of welder here well there's a supporter that says attach up to two fire energy from your hand to your pokemon if you do you draw three cards so this deck can struggle can struggle to get out of the gate sometimes um if you're not able to discard fire energy or if you're at a point where you're just trying to you're reaching for the ko with mind blown but you're just coming up a little bit short because you can't get you know extra energy out welder kind of helps you with that um especially early game later game um b string takes over b string is an item card that says you can only play this if you have exactly if your opponent has exactly three or four prize cards remaining it says search your deck for up to two basic energy cards and attach them to your ultra beasts then shuffle your deck so this was kind of the jet fuel that made this deck much more stronger than it would be normally normally you would have to just discard and hope to rely upon naginadel however you want to say it um to power up your pokemon b string was definitely like a little extra boost for sure um especially mid-game you could just load up your board and make it really really hard for your opponent to do much you could spread your energy out get multiple with cephalon and play and play towards an end like a checkmate board state pretty easily um our ball search is ultra ball which y'all should be familiar with this card and then search deck for pokemon um and then we have mysterious treasure which was really really strong on this deck um it says discard a card from your hand if you do you search for a psychic or dragon pokemon or feel it put in your hand then you shuffle your deck so able to get the point pool in the ganado the muck line or marshadow um so pretty strong um everything but the ditto essentially and the blessephalon um in addition to the ball search we have the stadium ultra space which we just run as a one of in here um it says once during your turn you can search your deck for an ultra beast card reveal it put in your hand and then shuffle your deck so just like at other gimmicks we have other like this stadium is a gimmick stadium that allows you to get all your um attackers and all your uh nagging adults to set up we have an energy switch to help power up a blessephalon in one turn a field blower which uh tools were really important um we had a skateboard was pretty prominent in this format which is similar or not a skateboard was it rescue board the rescue board we have now we do have escape okay i was right escape board is what we had in this format so and then we also run life sander labs to shut down one of the cards that was most important in this format was the stellar wish jirachi i think it's stellar wish right i'm trying to remember yes uh yeah i think let me look at this right yeah jirachi so stellar wish which it basically uh was run as a pretty good consistency card this was life center labs and field blower which shut that down last interlabs is another stadium that just says all pokemon tool cards in play both yours and your opponent have no effect um so it just negates the rescue board effect um and then a really really powerful prism star stadium we had access to uh was heat factory it says once during your turn each or once during each player's turn that player may discard a fire energy card from the hand if they do you draw three cards so just an extra way to supplement your draw which was really nice um and yeah this is just a build up a board and swing for lots of damage deck you run 15 fire just so you have enough energy to close the game out and just to show you the last trick this thing had was beast energy this is a colorless energy but when it's attached to ultra beasts it provides every type of energy it also has a secondary effect of allowing your ultra beast pokemon to do 30 more damage to your opponent's active pokemon so just a extra damage and uh any type of energy on a special energy and the way this interacted with placebo on is mind blown did do extra damage before you discarded it checked to see how many what you were discarding it calculated the damage total and then discarded that damage and then applied all the damage so that was the order that this happened so if you had a beast energy and a fire you would in mind blown discarding or putting two energy in the lost zone you could put the both of those in the lost zone and you would do uh 80 or sorry 130 damage so that's the principle of the deck um some disruptions some um just raw power and then yeah a lot of um just good hit hard hit fast um not a lot of i mean the only hand disruption we had is marshadow in this and that was pretty common there wasn't a lot of there wasn't n or iona as we have in this format so marshadow is as close as we had a hand disruption yeah and there's a card that people pretty universally hated yeah yeah marshadow definitely did not uh i mean it just kind of made it to where a lot of your games if your opponent used let loose turn one before you had even drawn a card like if they go first let loose turn one it just feels pretty bad um because you're not able to really play a full game where you're able to set up a lot of times yeah you know you're really just drawing four maybe and then five with a card for turn and so you're really just limited as to what you can do as opposed to the eight or six or so seven for turn um that you would get before getting let loose um but this was a really strong deck um ian rob uh won this tournament that i'm looking at this is his list from um not milwaukee uh madison 2019 and this deck had a long shelf life i'd say um if we go back and look at it oops sorry yeah it existed for a long time i know notably at one point shintaro ito got second at worlds with it and but that was a slightly different version of this deck you know by that point we had cards like neganadel gx and the dane existed like once the tag team started coming on the scene yeah so it definitely changed a little bit as it went on um and definitely uh but i mean yeah this this deck was i'd say had a really long shelf life and was really strong for most of that um it had like the kind of same reputation i'd say that like a raging bolt had where it was seen as more of a straightforward deck than some of the other ones in this format um but i don't know if that was as well deserved as raging bolt and raging bolt's kind of pivoted now to be more of a um with with the the knock towel line you can search a lot more this had some counterplay but yeah it was a little more straightforward i'd say than raging bolt is currently sure um yeah so this this was like the if you're this is your first tournament and you're trying to be a competitive player go ahead and play this kind of deck of this format i'd say if i remember correctly um but yeah i just wanted to share that with you guys uh that was my pick for the time capsule this week cool yeah i mean decks like that can be a lot of fun obviously we've seen a lot of people do gravitate to decks like the eel deck that i talked about last week or the this blisseflon again it'll deck or raging bolt or presumably when this new set that we're going to talk about here in just a second comes out the team rockets archetype It's just people like doing big damage numbers with a big basics It's just a very popular strategy that people have and you know I think that's as good of a segue as any to go ahead and jump into Our set review and so we're gonna look at all of these translations coming to us courtesy of Justin Basil So Justin Basil's website with the Destin Rivals card translation section, unfortunately from the images We're gonna see all of the card text on the cards themselves are in Japanese, but we do have these nice Well written English translations to work off of and so Destin Rivals is notably going to be a combination of cards for us comprised of the Heatwave arena set as well as the glory of team rocket set from Japan and the Marnie and Steven Battle decks from Japan which notably are also being released separately for us as battle deck items I believe those actually come out this Friday Yeah, that's correct. They come out a little bit earlier, but the legality of the decks will still be the same as the rest of the set so they still are like the set numbers for those are included into Our Destin Rivals set right so the set legality is always two weeks after the set release The set release is not this Friday coming up, but the next Friday, so it'll be two weeks after next Friday It'll be let's see The 30th of May or sorry, no, that's incorrect. The 6th of June will be when we have Legal that's right before NAIC. You got it. Awesome Awesome, love brand new formats with cards that released two weeks before travel super good But yeah, yeah, so hopefully everybody can get the cards this time around Yeah, we've we've seen a little bit more availability I think journey together was more accessible than some of the other sets we had Yeah Yeah, hopefully scalpers don't steal all your seal product or that you're able to buy the singles you need in time for any I see Yeah, so like we said with the combination of those two sets We do have the continuation of the owners Pokemon mechanic. So in addition to the Marnie and Steven cards We're gonna see cards here from Ethan or I guess it's the protagonist from gold and silver the male protagonist from gold and silver Also Cynthia team rocket and Misty are the other trainers that will have access to so the first card up here is Ethan's pincer Which just does vice grip for 20 for one grass and then one point return is For three colorless is 70 damage attack But if any of your Ethan's Pokemon were knocked out by damage from an attack during your opponent's last turn This attack does it 100 more damage? and so notably there is a form of energy acceleration that is available to Ethan's Pokemon that can make this three colorless cost a lot more manageable and 170 on a grass type is enough to knock out grim snarl high dragon and Charizard so a single prizer that's able to Return ko a bunch of these big beefy stage two Dark types is something that you may want to keep in mind if you are planning to play an Ethan's deck moving forward Yeah, definitely. Good good to keep in mind Yama's pretty skippable, but Next card up would be Jan mega EX Yeah, so it has a decent ability. It says Bug boost is the name of it It says once during your turn when this Pokemon moves from your bench To the active spot you may search your deck for up to three grass energy and attach them to this Pokemon Then shelf your deck so not when it evolves when it moves from the bench to the active so much more Accessible as an attack or as abilities go and the attack is okay It's jet cyclone for 210 it does for grass grass grass colorless It does 210 damage and then move three energies from this Pokemon to one of your bench Pokemon. So you're able to have some Synergy with that 280 is a good decent chunk of HP for a stage one I think that's pretty typical for stage 1 exes at this point. Yeah Yeah, so it'll be interesting I don't know how much this will see play but the fact that you have energy acceleration for grass is nice There's not a whole lot of energy acceleration for grass at the moment as far as I remember So definitely something to keep in mind is a stage one, especially it's kind of nice You don't necessarily need to use this attack you could potentially power this up to get energy in play and then maybe discard it with something else if you wanted to take advantage of that with like a I Don't know raging bolt or something crazy like that Potentially that would be an option. Yeah, if ogre if ogre ponds not your speed for some reason, right? Yeah, I guess that's fair the cool thing in Like the way that this attack is costed just being three grass and a colorless it interacts really well with cards like jet energy so you get the jet energy provides the colorless cost and then you go fetch the three grass and suddenly your young Meg is able to Attack and so the kind of I guess the thing that I would think you would pair This with would be something like iron valiant where you're already looking to do a bunch of switching effects Anyway, and you could also notably when you use jet cyclone pass those three grass energies back to something like iron hands on your bench And just give you a means of accelerating to that. Is it better than Joel tick? Probably not but it's just another option. And again, just a stage one grass type with a Relatively awkward HP total for some of these dark type stage two exes to hit into is something that might be worth considering moving forward Yeah, I mean and it's nice to have as a grass type that is weak to lightning as opposed to weak to fire Yeah, so if fire is ever a super prominent type that could be relevant Next one. I wanted to look at was the Cynthia's Roserade from yes a little bit further down Yeah, right here, yep, so just Not a good attack, but the ability is nice So just you know kind of continuing gimmicks we've seen with Pokemon where all the trainers Pokemon play off of each other Similar to like the Snorlax we had in the hops deck. This one has an ability glory Oh, it says your Cynthia's Pokemon's attacks to 30 more damage to your opponents active Pokemon before applying weakness and resistance So it is on a stage one, which is a little less Optimal I'd say than Snorlax But it is a little less, you know burdensome to try to attack with it only has or to keep in play It only has the one Retreat cost as opposed to Snorlax is I think three or four. I can't remember. I thought my right Right and notably this card will be very easy to get out as well And that's something we'll get into a little bit more when we talk about some of these other Cynthia's Pokemon I mean at the end of the day when you see the Cynthia's archetype as a collective whole It's really a callback to the dragons exalted fluffy chomp or Terry a guard chomp Where the Cynthia's archetype is all about just swarming all of your Cynthia's Pokemon and then amplifying the damage with this Roserade sitting on your bench Yep Next big impactful card. We can expect to see a lot of is shaman and this won't necessarily go into every single deck But a lot of our evolving decks like your guard chomps You're not guard. Well, maybe guard chomp, but dragapult guard of our charizard Just decks that are trying to evolve get your big stage 2 attacker or stage 2 Backline Pokemon into play that has a vulnerable Basic as part of its evolution line has really been missing this bench barrier effect The shamans gonna provide with its flower curtain ability that just says prevent all damage done to your bench Pokemon Without a rule box by attacks from your opponents Pokemon and I think this is a neat twist on Something like what we saw from man if he previously, you know, man if he was Arguably almost too good at what it did and just being able to protect literally everything on your bench And now that we have like a lot of the rule box Pokemon or Tara Pokemon anyway but notably not protecting things like pheasant dippity or Squawkability and making sure that those cards that are intended to be liabilities on your bench remain liabilities and they remain accessible to your opponent I think it's really good game design We also see that shaven notably has 80 HP so you cannot search it with a buddy Poffin And just good card cool card and I expect I see a lot of play. I agree with all of that Yeah, it's definitely good game design All right. Next one. I'd say It's crustle. It is 150 HP Stage 1 Pokemon always got a soft spot for crustle. It's a gen 5 guy that doesn't get a lot of love But it has a really strong ability It's mysterious stone house It says prevent all damage done to this Pokemon by attacks from your Pokemon your opponent's Pokemon EX So just another safeguard ability We see once again, and then optimally I should mention Dwebble does have a really good colorless ascension attack which ascension similar to we've seen in the past So surgery deck for a card that evolves from this Pokemon and put it onto this Pokemon to evolve it then shuffle your deck So definitely an opportunity to get crustle out turn one if you go second Or turn two going second. I'm pretty quick Yeah, I think this is Could be something good. The attacks not that great. It just does 120 damage, but it does have this shred effect of not being affected by Any effects on your opponent's active Pokemon so it can go through cornerstone, which is nice and it does hit for weakness on some stuff, so Definitely could see a world where crustle gets like thrown into a rogue deck or even as has a deck just featured around it itself Yeah, I don't know I think if there's ever a time where the main few decks in the format don't have an answer to a non like I Don't have a good non rule box Pokemon attacking Or a non EX I guess is the better way to phrase it Crustle could have an opportunity to do pretty well Yeah, I just hate walls man. Like I guess I don't think this card needed to be printed But I know somebody out there enjoys this this play pattern and so I guess this will appeal to them I think the thing also having an ascension basic is kind of crazy but yeah, hopefully the Japan results are indicative of the strength of this card and we will not see a ton of it because It's just abysmal to play against something where your opponent's entire game plan is haha, you can't hit me Yeah, we've seen it before Unfortunately, or fortunately, I guess if you do like this play style There was like a quad Sigilyph. There's been quad Hoopa decks. Yep. Just Pretty abysmal to play or you just let me you just look at the modern walls decks like the melodic for rigorous cornerstone stuff and Well, it hasn't been successful currently there were times even earlier in this season where like the Neuvern cornerstone deck popped up at Baltimore and The whole game plan was up. My opponent cannot hit me So I'm gonna win the game that way and sometimes that can be a good enough plan Yeah, I mean, yeah this right now. I don't see a world where you play this over Mimikyu For the most part as Mimikyu has a lower retreat cost is a basic and then has pretty much the same ability at this point I guess the shred attack is nice. But yeah, I guess once Mimikyu rotates this will be our main safeguarder We have some other ones. I believe we have like the Fergirath But this one's they're all just kind of like toolbox II I mean the most direct comparisons for this card are like you said Mimikyu or the Aegis slash from yeah I think it's paradox rift has literally the same ability text and but that cards on a stage two So it's just quite significantly less accessible than this Mm-hmm Well, yeah, definitely one of those cards you just keep in the back of your mind for sure And for sure, it'll come back into play at some point It'll pop up when you least expect it and you will not be happy Yeah coming to a League Cup for a challenge near you Absolutely, or just your other just to ruin your ladder experience on TCG life for sure I mean, that's the thing though. Like if people aren't gonna respect Safeguard is an ability like there's definitely a world where somebody just takes advantage of that. Absolutely. Absolutely Gonna make a brief pit stop on Team Rocket's blip bug not because the card is good but because I think the card is funny for a single colorless energy blip bug allows you to look at one of your opponents faced on prize cards and It's just an effect that I don't know if I ever recall ever seeing that at the game before But I think it's funny that it exists Yeah, I don't I can't ever think of a scenario where this is relevant But it's definitely like the game designers were just bored one day and one day throwing blip bug into the set Cuz like why does Team Rocket have a blip bug wig? What is it doing in this photo? It's just like he's stealing pokeballs I mean, I think the funny thing is you're trying to make a blip bug evil like he just yeah, it's pretty funny What is a blip bug It's like a caterpillar. I mean it turns into orbit, okay, which is I guess yeah Some beetles smart. Yeah, I know that I don't know what an or beetle is like what kind of right insect it is But it's like a supercomputer, I guess hmm Next relevant grass type though would be the Team Rockets tarantula and Team Rockets spied ops So tarantula notably a couple of pretty big breakpoints on the card that are worth talking about just that it's one only has 50 HP So it is very vulnerable to both dragapult and dust clops And also for a single grass energy can do 30 damage and one hit KO a Bidoo if it does not have a Bravery charm attached to it. So pretty interesting there And of course the tarantula is necessary to get the spied ops into play and so spied ops is a 130 HP stage 1 Pokemon With the charging up ability which is identical to that and again Adele that John was just talking about So once during your turn you may attach a basic energy from your discard pile to this Pokemon and then for a grassland colorless Rocket rush does 30 damage for each of your team rocket Pokemon in play So it's a pretty serviceable attack on a you know a one prize Support Pokemon that would otherwise be sitting on your bench to kind of fuel energy into play You can do some cool stuff with energy switch involving this card but the big combo is gonna be with the Mewtwo EX which we'll talk about in a little bit here and You know, I think that there are definitely some matchups where Rocket rush for 150 or 180 is Just good enough to kind of get you through some obstacles that your Mewtwo may not want to hit into directly Yeah, and it's really good into just stuff that, like a Mimiky or something like that. Yeah, exactly. Like we just talked about Safeguard, this is definitely a way to deal with something like that. And yeah, it hits for weakness against some of those bigger Dark-type Pokémon like Zoroark and Charizard. So it definitely can reach for doing a lot of damage. For sure. Yeah. So we wanted to give a quick shout out to ArbolivaEX. We didn't think it would see a lot of play, but it does have an interesting attack called Oiling Machine Gun or Oil Machine Gun, sorry. I'm sure the English name will be very different than Machine Gun, but who knows, maybe we'll have an interesting name. But the effect of it is choose one of your opponent's Pokémon six times and do 20 damage to it. You can choose the same Pokémon more than once. So just a spread attack, but I don't think we've ever seen one that's warded this way. Or if we have, I guess we have, but definitely... There's notably a Raichu in Expanded that does something like this, but it's not this easy to do. There's a lot more setup involved in that, and you have to like discard a bunch of lightning energy to do something, but just... So just for one grass, I think if this had more hit points and like was... Like if you could heal this, like for one grass, that's a pretty good attack. If Shaman wasn't coming out in the same set, I'd maybe say that it'd see play, but I don't know if I will see much from Arboliva. Don't call me an Arboliver, you know what I mean? For sure. It's tough when you have something like this and you kind of compare it directly to Dragapult, even though Dragapult, for one additional energy, you do, instead of 120 damage, you're doing 260 damage, and you don't naturally have a weakness. Your opponent has to play Clefairy for that, and you get access to Dracloak, and it's just a... It's a tough sell for Arboliva. I mean, I don't know. You'd have to... I'm trying to think of the scenario where this card is really just broken, and it's really tough, because if you look at, you know, if I split my oil machine gun shots between two Pokemon evenly, I do 60 damage to both of those Pokemon. And that breakpoint is just not quite enough to knock out two evolving basics on the same turn. Now, you can get something like Hawlucha involved, for sure, and take out two Ralts or two Dreepies or two Charmanders or what have you, but... But as a stage two, it's really not easy to get that into play, and then, like, to get the turn two stage two out into play, and the Hawlucha, you know, it could... You know, and if you're playing against a Gardevoir at this format, they're definitely playing Shaman, or, you know, it doesn't really quite work out a lot of the time, unfortunately. Right. Yeah. But, you know, definitely cool attack. Yeah, I just wanted to give it a quick shout out. Sure. Let's get into some of the more heat, or heart of the set here, and Team Rocket's Moltres EX. Yep. And so Team Rocket's Moltres EX, 220 HP basic EX Pokemon with the Flamescreen attack for Fire Colorless Colorless does 110 damage, and during your opponent's next turn, this Pokemon takes 50 less damage from attack, so effectively becoming a 270 HP basic when you're undamaged, and being able to boost that with cards like Bravery Charm, or Hero's Cape, or what have you. You can really kind of tank your Moltres if that's something that you want to do. And then the more interesting attack on this card, though, for Fire and Three Colorless is Evil Burn. You discard a Team Rocket's energy from this Pokemon, and if you do, you discard your opponent's active Pokemon and all attached cards. And so, just as a spoiler, I guess, the Team Rocket's energy is the only special energy in the set. It provides two energy cards at a given time, and provides both Dark and Psychic simultaneously. And then a lot of these Team Rocket cards specifically interact with Team Rocket's energy as a card. So not only is it providing two of these colorless costs, but if you discard one of them, you just discard your opponent's active. You know, you don't take the KO, but you get that Dragapult out of your opponent's active, and they have to suddenly set up a new attacker. Yeah, definitely good against setup decks, or stuff that you don't have an answer for. You can definitely throw this in there. And we might break down a decklist from a Japanese tournament that we've already seen this deck featured in, or this card featured in. But yeah, this was included in one of the Mewtwo lists from a couple of the Japanese tournaments. But yeah, I think it's just a good attack, like just a really strong attack effect. Pretty costly, which is a good balance. But yeah, pretty cool to see. Hopefully we get to see more. I like, I love the theming of Team Rockets. I think it's probably one of the coolest, like, if you're going to have owner's Pokemon, definitely cool to see Team Rocket get some love. Yeah. Yeah. And then being so expansive compared to some of the smaller pools of Pokemon that some of these other owners have access to, this definitely gives you more options as well. Yeah, I mean, they made the whole Team Rocket set in Japan. So we're definitely seeing the dividends of that in this set. Moving on to Ethan's Pokemon, though. We have Ethan's Typhlosion line. Just Ethan's Cyndaquil is a basic 70 hit point, importantly hits for 30 damage, and you discard an energy, so you're able to knock out a Bidoo. I guess you're already hitting it for weakness, so it doesn't really make too much of a difference. But Ethan's Quilava is pretty strong. It has a strong ability, Adventure Bound, so that once during your turn, you may search for Ethan's Adventure, which is a supporter. You reveal it, put it in your hand, and then you shuffle your deck. And that combos with Ethan's Typhlosion. For one fire, it does Buddy Blast, it does 40 plus 60 more damage for each Ethan's Adventure card in your discard pile. So you get to do potentially 280 for one fire, if you're able to get four copies of that card into your discard pile. So it could be relevant. I don't think we've seen a whole lot of results from Japan with this specific card, but definitely something interesting, and especially for pre-releases, seems pretty good. Oh yeah, I mean, notably, Ethan's Typhlosion is one of the pre-release promos. Interestingly, the pre-release promos for this set don't have alt artwork. They're all just base set artwork with the Destined Rivals set stamp in the corner. But Ethan's Quilava as an engine for finding those Ethan's, and I guess again, not to scroll all the way down to the card, but Ethan's Adventure has text that says, search your deck for three in any combination of basic fire energy or Ethan's Pokemon. So getting one Ethan's Quilava allows you to get an Ethan's Adventure that allows you to set up a whole board of Quilava to go find other Ethan's Adventure. Or you can find the fire energy to power your Typhlosion attack. And we've also, we have like some of the partners for Typhlosion that we have seen out of Japan are Goldengo, just because Ethan's Adventure can find three fire energy even under item lock and allow you to do 150 damage that way. And you also then have access to a one-prizer in the form of Typhlosion to get around a one-prizer that doesn't have an ability, notably, so you can get around Cornerstone. Or 280 for one on a one-prizer is just a big number, you know, but we've also seen Typhlosion paired up with Victini from, I want to say it was Surging Sparks, but it might have been Prismatic Evolutions, that has the ability that allows your fire type evolution Pokemon to do an additional 10 damage. Or maybe it's 20. I think it's 10. Okay. I know that there's a, there's a way, I think it maybe it involves Defiance Band plus a Victini that you can get up to one-hit KOing Dragapult with Typhlosion. And you could also use Black Belt to get to that threshold too. So just, the card has the ability to be really good, but I think that the difficulty is going to come from being able to maintain your hand when your supporter for turn is kind of a search card, or that's kind of the crux of your deck is drawing or searching your deck for what you would want to do. And then not necessarily having the space to find and or play kind of those niche or tech supporters like Black Belt, or having time to Iono your opponent when you're busy trying to get these Ethan's Adventures into your discard pile. And then also notably really prone to prizing them, which can cause a lot of difficulty. This is one of the only decks that we've seen that, um, it's not Refresh Ticket, but that other card that was just released in Journey Together that allows you to shuffle- Reverse Ticket? Reserve Ticket. Reserve Ticket. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Yeah. It's where you're able to shuffle your prizes into your deck and put the top X number of cards into your prize zone equal to the number of cards that you put on the bottom, not shuffle in. And the risk you run there is if you still have Ethan's Adventures in your deck, you might just put them right back in your prizes. And so, but the problem is that that card is so important that if you prize more than one copy of it, you're just not doing enough damage if Typhlosion is your main attacker. So you kind of are shoehorned into having to run that card. Yeah, I can see that. Um, but I mean, it could be good. Like if item lock still is dominating your area, and you're just saying, I just need a way to build up my board and do things, you know, Ethan's Quilava will definitely help you with that. And then building into the adventure and all that stuff. So that's good. Also in Ethan's catalog of Pokemon, we have Ethan's Macargo, which evolves from Ethan's Slugma, which does have ADHP, which is a bummer. But we're able to get it with Ethan's Adventures. So it's not as relevant as potentially other stuff. Macargo though, has a really good kind of attack and ability. The ability is Melt and Flow. If this Pokemon has no energy attached, it has no retreat cost. And then the attack is Lava Burst. It's 70 times, you can discard up to five energy from this Pokemon and it does 70 damage for each card you discarded this way. So capping at 350, which is definitely enough to really deal with any stage two in this format. Yeah, it's pretty strong, I'd say. And then the fact that if you discard all the energy, you're not stuck with this Pokemon as a liability and you're active is pretty nice. Absolutely. And I will say, we're not going to talk about it now, but we do get Inferno Fandago and Emboar in a new set coming out pretty soon. So I could see a world in which, you know, granted it is a stage one, so it might be a little harder to set up than some other stuff. But I'd say this would be a good option for that. If you wanted to maybe think about that, it would be kind of cool. I don't know. Well, the next card that we'll talk about kind of gives you something to tide you over in that realm as well. There you go. And that would be Ethan's Ho-Oh EX, so notably also searchable with Ethan's Adventure. So fire type basic Pokemon, 230 HP, has the ability Golden Flame. Says once during your turn, you may attach up to two basic fire energy from your hand to one of your benched Ethan's Pokemon. So you can bounce back and forth between two Macargos while the Ho-Oh powers up whichever one is currently on the bench, then you promote it to your active. If you have two Ho-Ohs, you're going to catch four energy in a given turn. So you could see something similar to kind of like Bax Calibur Chi-En Pow, only you put a pair of Ho-Ohs on your bench, you get your Macargos set up, you superior for four energy, and you're doing 280 that way, repeatedly, which again, it seems like a lot of hoops to jump through when we just talked about how Typhlosion can do that same number. But you know, I guess the idea would be that Macargo could theoretically do that 350, which Typhlosion has a little bit harder of a time breaking through. The other interesting thing with Ho-Oh is that that Golden Flame does not have to go to a fire type. So that Pinsir we talked about at the very beginning of the set review can also be powered up with Ho-Oh. And right now, unfortunately for Macargo, Ho-Oh hasn't seen the most play with Macargo itself. There's been people trying to play these turbo Ho-Oh decks, because Ho-Oh also has an attack for four fire energy, Shining Feather does 160 damage, but you also heal 50 damage from each of your Pokemon. That's a lot. Yeah, yeah, definitely. You know, you look at something like Frostless Monkey Dory and you say, okay, good luck winning this game. Yeah. Yeah. Decks that don't one-shot you, you definitely have a lot of options to just tank and heal. So yeah, definitely something kind of a cool card. I mean, I like Ho-Oh a lot. He's a cool guy. Sure. So cool to see him get some love in 2025. So further down, I don't know, Blaziken is okay. I don't think it's all that good. Well, real quick, first, notably for people who were fans of Blaziken that we did get and journey together, we have a better Torchic now, just because it's 70 HP instead of 60, also has Collect as an attack. And then this Blaziken, I mean, it does pair with that Blaziken. So kind of in the inverse of what we would have seen in the old school, like Ruby Sapphire Blaziken Blaziken EX combo, we now have a one prize Blaziken that for Fire Fire Colorless has Inferno legs. You discard two energy from this Pokemon and you do 120 damage to one of your opponent's bench Pokemon. Now, like we've mentioned previously, it's unfortunate that this is also being released in the same set of Shaman, but if you Inferno legs, you discard two energy. Your Blaziken EX can get one of those energies back to Inferno legs again and a different turn. Oh, sorry. I did miss the fact Inferno legs also does 120 damage to your opponent's active. So it's kind of like a souped up Flame Body Cannon from that N-Star Manatan. I guess like the really awkward thing would be the fact that you're getting your engine Pokemon in the form of the Blaziken EX and your attacker kind of built out of the same evolution line, which while also being very powerful because you aren't playing multiple stage twos and basics that you have to combo with also kind of is a resource thing that you have to balance. But it's just interesting to have the option. I like when they have these evolution lines where you have options on what you're evolving your basic into and that when both of them are kind of viable final destinations for that basic, I think that it makes things a lot more interesting. Yeah, it definitely feels like old school Pokemon for sure. That was a really popular thing when back in like EX. power keepers and all that kind of area, right? Like the Ruby and Sapphire, right? But I will say the one thing about that era compared to this era is not a lot of stuff one shot in that era. Oh, that's fair. That's fair. So at this point, it's not all that hard to hit to 170 in one turn with a lot of Pokemon. We just talked about doing 350 for one. So it being a stage two and your resources being taxed a little bit more, trying to set up multiple stage twos from the same evolution line, it'll be really hard to keep chaining these guys. So that's why I'm not too sold on it, but it is a cool card. I'd almost want it to be like a Rocket's Pokemon, because then you could do like a 4-4 of this and then a different line of the previous other guy. You know what I mean? We haven't really seen that quite come to fruition, but I feel like that's a missed opportunity maybe. No, that's a pretty cool idea. We go back to Team Rocket with Team Rocket's Articuno. I think one of the better Team Rocket's cards in this set has the ability Resistance Veil. It says, prevent all effects of attacks used by your opponent's Pokemon. Done your basic Team Rocket's Pokemon. So this is really key when we're talking about the Mewtwo deck with the Tarantula. Or what is that? That's what it is. With it having 50 hit points, this prevents it from getting one-shot by Dusknoirs, effectively. Or not Dusknoirs, sorry. Dragapult. There you go. The secondary effect of the attack of Dragapult. So you would just run it for that. Yeah. And the attack, I mean, notably, it is another attack that interacts with Team Rocket's energy, causing it to do additional damage. But I don't think I've seen any deck that plays this card that plays Water Energy. So you should not ever be attacking with that deck. Nor do I think it would be possible to. That's fair. Cynthia's Melodic is not worth talking about. Another kind of meme or interesting deck or exploring the concept of two different Pokemon evolving from the same Pokemon. And Pokemon likes to do this with this Clamperl line in particular. Like normally, the Huntail and Gorbus either do something very similar to each other, but kind of diverging in opposite directions. Or they combo together very well. And this is the case of the latter. So we have the Huntail first that has the Diver Catch ability. Whenever one of your Water Pokemon is knocked out by damage from an attack from your opponent's Pokemon, you may put all basic Water Energy attached to the Pokemon into your hand instead of your discard pile. And that goes with Gorbus directly with its Crescendo wave attack that does 30 damage for each Water Energy attached to this Pokemon. But before doing damage, you may attach any number of basic Water Energy from your hand to this Pokemon. So you get a Huntail hiding on your bench. You have a Gorbus up active. You Crescendo wave. You dump a bunch of Water Energy onto it. You do a bunch of damage. The multiplier is not super great, so you really need to get up to 8, 9, or 10. Like somewhere between 8 and 11 energy to be hitting kind of relevant breakpoints. I mean, technically, I guess 7 knocks out a Pheasandipity. That's still 7 Waters on one Pokemon. But the interesting combo is that if that Gorbus gets knocked out by damage, your Diver Catch on your Huntail lets you put all those energies directly back into your hand. And before your opponent has a chance to interact with them via Iono or something, you can push another Gorbus active Crescendo wave and immediately dump them all back down and swing again. Yeah. This makes me wish we had the Melodic that prevented your opponent from being able to disrupt your hand. That'd be really cool in this combo. Because otherwise, all your opponent has to do is just play Iono before they take a knockout. And I feel like, oh, no, I guess it goes back to your hand. Yeah, it goes back to your hand when you get knocked out. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, that's pretty good, actually. Maybe, meh. This is kind of a cool meme. Yeah, OK. I'm coming around. Yeah, I mean, it's really hard to try to just, I guess you can just boss Huntail, but that's not dealing with Gorbus. So you don't really care. So if you can keep your Clamperls alive and you have ones that stays as a Clamperl to evolve into whichever Huntail or Gorbus you need to, the big downside then is that Huntail or Clamperl only has 60 HP. So it's Dragapult fodder or Dragapult food. But I mean, this is not going to be a tier 1 deck by any means. Just the fact that I'm going to put my Gorbus up, one, hope you don't have Dusknoir. Two, hope that it gets knocked out by damage specifically. And three, hope that I could get 11 energy down to one hit KO your stage 2 EX. Yeah, definitely less intuitive. But I mean, it's still cool. I don't know. It's cool to see something like this come up where, yeah, I could actually, I can see this being featured on our regionals at some point in the early rounds on day one or something like that. This, to me, feels like the United Wings of this set. Yeah. Unless that title belongs to the Misty Gyarados, I guess. But one of those two. And fittingly, they're both within the water type. Yeah. Competing with each other. A little better than Gyarados. Sure. Sure. What else we got? We've got another Rotom. So like we said, another type to add to that gadget show deck that somebody might be working on. This would be the next one. So another callback card of sorts, we have the Satitan EX. And so longtime players would remember the Primal Groudon EX from back in the Primal Clash era that had an ancient trait that prevented it from being interacted with while it was on your bench. So your opponent could not Lysander it up to your active, Lysander being the same text as boss. So Satitan has the ability Snow Cover that whenever your opponent plays an item or supporter from their hand, prevent all effects of that card done to this Pokemon. So your opponent can't remove energies from Satitan. They cannot move it from the bench to the active. They cannot do anything to it, essentially. You can't even dangerous laser this guy, for goodness sake. And then for three waters in the colorless, Satitan has the Crush Press attack that does 140 damage. And you may discard a stadium in play. If you do, this attack does 140 more damage. So again, that 280 number that's been coming up a lot with this set, but Satitan is able to do that as long as you can discard a stadium from play. It does not have to be your stadium. You can discard your opponent's stadium or yours. So you can play something like, Satata's got 100 HP, so you probably want to have Artisan in something like this. And so you put the Artisan down, you get your Satata army set up, and then Satitan dumps that Artisan once you no longer need it and does 280. Knocks out anything that is kind of a stage one EX that isn't Satitan, notably, or lower. And just the big struggle for this would be just taking down those stage twos, I guess. Yeah, I mean, you could run something, I guess you could, yeah, I was about to say you could run like Gravity Mountain, but if you're discarding it, that doesn't really work as much. Notably, you can run Heavy Baton with this. It does have four retreat. So that's a nice additional thing to be able to pass the energy back to your benched Satitan. So, and especially, you know, if we do get to a removal in the future, this will be immune from that. So that'll be nice. So it could be a nice rogue deck. 300 hit points on a stage one is a lot, especially when you can't bring it to the active and like start whaling on it. And then if you can push it to the bench somehow, you know, you can definitely keep it around a lot longer and heal it or something like that. So, yeah, I think this is kind of a sleeper pick if I had to say, I don't think it'll get a lot of play, but it definitely is like more interesting than on first glance you might see. Sure. Yeah, I mean, and I guess notably, like going back to that Groudon, which was very similar in a lot of ways, like we had a strong, like set of locking cards that kind of went with that as the frontline. And with this to do a similar strategy, you'd be putting like Clefky's up front. And I don't know if that really slows decks down the same way that something like the Wobbuffet did back in the day. So you'd be looking at, I mean, I guess notably, like you do have a colorless cost on your attack, so you could play Monkey Dory with this. Like 300 is still gonna be difficult to knock out. So you then your damage threshold goes up to 310, maybe 340 if you can get two Monkey Dories in play. I mean, we do have Scramble Switch in this format. Yeah. Just saying. We did have that with Groudon. It was a really strong attack with that, or really strong A-spec with that. So, you know, this could be time to hit the button, Aaron. Maybe, maybe. So Titan's got a lot of options like that. Like you said, Heroes Cape could go on this, have your 400 HPs to Titan. Oh, man. Cannot have the tool removed. Same thing, Max Belt lets you hit 330. Yeah. Yeah, there's definitely some interesting ones. I don't know. Again, I don't think that this card is particularly strong. We haven't really seen any results come out of it so far in any major tournaments or even city leagues, but I think that it's an interesting card. And at some point, maybe not right now, but I think at some point during its lifespan, this card will probably see play. I think that's not unfair to say. I mean, it's, especially if we get a good wall Pokemon to set this up behind, or like some easier ways to accelerate the water energy with like a supporter or something like that, or like an item that accelerates water to bench Pokemon. I could see that. Yeah, just the attack cost is a lot to set up. Sure. You can run like Crispin to like maybe cheat out an extra energy once or twice, you know, if you're running dark and water potentially. But yeah, I don't know. I don't think it's really that easy to set up. And it might not even be worth it at this point, but definitely something that could be a good feature on. Ethan's Pichu, we finally have a Bidoo counter for all the people that saying we need to ban Bidoo. Here's your hard counter to Bidoo. Similar to how, when we had Cleffa running amok back in the day, we had Tyrogue. Now we have Ethan's Pichu to save us from the big, bad, terrible Bidoo. So Ethan's Pichu is a 30 hit point basic Pokemon with free retreat and has a, I don't know, you would call this colored out. Yeah, zero energy cost. Yeah, zero energy attack for no energy. It does 30 damage and you draw a card. So all the people complaining about how Bidoo's ruined the format, now you can stop talking and just play Ethan's Pichu in your deck and win every time versus Bidoo. So there you go. To be fair, John, those people already had access to Elekid and they were still complaining. So, I mean, I guess now you can also do your Elekid and draw a card, but. Yeah, there you go. You counter it entirely. You don't need to play items when you're drawing cards. So I don't need to hear, I don't want to hear about it. Sure, sure. The next kind of callback card. So this set has a ton of throwbacks to anyone who has played through several different eras. So we already talked about the, like, so Titan would be a callback to the Primal Groudon from the Primal Clash era or the big EX era. Omega, Ruby, Alpha, Sapphire, I guess is the best way to describe that. With them, next up would be Team Rocket's Ampharos, which goes all the way back to the Team Rocket return set back in, what, 2005, I believe is when that came out. Maybe 2004 even. And- Hopefully the Plants Quiz show is not asking me about Team Rocket's return, otherwise we're done. So Team Rocket's Ampharos has the ability Darkest Impulse. And this is kind of, this card is, I think, one-to-one with the original Dark Ampharos from Team Rocket returns, but it's just power scaled or power crept to keep up with the times a little bit. So if you have Team Rocket's Ampharos in play, whenever your opponent plays a Pokemon from their hand to evolve one of their Pokemon during their turn, you put four damage counters on that Pokemon. And notably, the effect of Darkest Impulse doesn't stack. So even if you have two Ampharos in play, you will only be putting four counters on a Pokemon when it evolves. And the attack on Ampharos is not relevant. It does 140 damage for three energy. That's way too much for an attack that has no effect for that little damage. The big combo here is going to be with a fighting type that we'll talk about later, but in conjunction with TM devolution, notably. So your opponent evolves, they put four damage counters on the Pokemon, you devolve them, they have to evolve again, they get four more counters, you devolve them again. And in a lot of instances, something like a Dreepy would then be knocked out. Or, you know, if they had a stage, a lot of stage ones, like Gimme Ghouls would be knocked out if a Goldengo had to evolve twice. And I, unfortunately, I think the fact that the other card that this combos with is Team Ragas Tyranitar. So we're looking two different stage twos we have to set up to get our full combo going. And neither of them is an engine that really supports the deck and keeps it consistent. I think that that's gonna be kind of the downfall of this strategy, even though it's one that is kind of near and dear to my heart in particular. I loved, the deck was called Rock Lock back in the day. And that gives me an idea. Maybe I'll talk about Rock Lock on next week's time capsule, because I think that's a really cool deck to feature. But the whole crux of that is that you're devolving your opponent's Pokemon constantly, forcing them to evolve. I think that the problem now is we have too many decks that either they just don't have to evolve everything, or these Pokemon are too vulnerable to maintain their status in play. And the combo just becomes too easy to disrupt to really put enough pressure on your opponent to close games out. Yeah, I don't know. It seems like a cool combo, but definitely one that might be a little bit more difficult to pull off in a faster format where stuff is just getting knocked out too fast for you to really set up two stage twos. Exactly. And that's really, oh God. You also have to get the Ampharos and stuff online before your opponent evolves their Pokemon, or you're committing one of your TM devolutions just to try to start doing damage and hoping that that's enough to set your opponent behind enough that you can really get everything going. Yep. And then we also, the other thing that this deck did not have to contend with back in the day is Monkey Dory. And he will continue to be a thorn in the side to anything that attempts to be doing this long-term chip damage sort of strategy. That's a good point. Yeah, your opponent can just move that damage back over to your side of the field. Right. We have Zeraora, which seems pretty good for like GLC. Oh, actually not GLC. It says Pokemon EX. All right. So for three lightning, it says discard all energy from this Pokemon. This attack does 210 damage to one of your opponent's benched Pokemon EX. So like. a Fezidippity counter, perhaps, for some decks. You know, maybe once we get the, what is it called? The electric? Electric back, yeah. This will definitely be something worth playing. Absolutely, this card will be broken once we have Dynamotor. Yeah. Well, broken's probably a strong word, but it'll be significantly stronger than having to rely on Joltik or Electric Generator to power it up. For sure. So yeah, that's gonna close up the Lightning types, and that'll close out the front half of our set review. So we're gonna take a quick pit stop here and jump over to Blaine's Quiz Show. And so this week, it is my turn to ask John some questions. Currently, the scorers are set at myself with 26 points and John with 20 points. And, you know, John, I was feeling like it's a little weird to just go back and forth, tossing three points this way and that way. And so I've updated the rules ever so slightly for this week. So as is normal, we will have three multiple choice questions. Each correct answer will be worth one point, and you have one hint available that you may exercise at any time. However, if you can answer all three questions correctly without utilizing the hint, you will earn an additional point for the week. And I don't know, this is something I wanted to test out. I think that it adds a little bit of a dynamic, maybe a little bit of tension instead of, you know, we've had it several weeks where whoever is answering questions just waits till question three to use the hint and it kind of makes the hint seem like a little bit of a waste, especially if that question is something that the person already knows anyway or has a good idea of the answer. And so if you're really confident on whatever the topic is or the questions that come up, you have the chance to earn yourself one extra bonus point throughout the week. And so with the scores currently at 20 to 26, you have the chance to get up to 24 points this week. You know, I know you're pitching this as like a way for me to catch up, but all I can really think about is how much more you're going to be able to take advantage of this more than I am. So I will happily participate, but I will just make that known now. So like three weeks for now, four weeks from now, when you've ballooned the lead up to like 18 or something like that, we can look back at this and laugh. Ah, fine. Well, in keeping with that, the topic for this week is just miscellaneous. There is no given theme to any of these questions, but I believe that you are well within your capabilities of getting four points this week. Let's go. Let's go. And so for our first question, John Eng won Portland Regionals last season with Lost Tina. But what I want to know is what deck was his opponent playing in the finals? Was it Lost Box, Mew Genesect, Lost Tina, or Charizard? Ooh, that's a good question. Don't think it was Lost Box. I don't remember at all. Is it Lost Box? Is that why you're laughing? No, I'm just laughing because you said you don't remember. I mean, notably, I just don't remember much. Like in one ear, out the other, a lot of Pokemon stuff. I'm going to just use my hint because I don't think I'm going to get any closer to this, but I think I can get there. Okay. So the deck that is the answer to this question is a Lost Zone deck. Okay. So it's either the Mirror or Lost Box. Was it a Mirror? I mean, now that I've said it and you laughed, I'm just going to say Lost Box is my answer. Well, see, now I feel bad because I influenced your answer because it was in fact a Lost Tina Mirror in the finals. And kind of an interesting fact, does not come up in the rest of these questions. Portland, I believe it is now two seasons in a row, has had a Mirror match in the finals. And so that'd be something that I'd be interested in seeing keep up as we continue into this season. And has a strong possibility with decks like Dragapult and Gardevoir hanging around. Sure. So moving on to question two, which player is currently listed as the most successful Dragapult player based on limitless points? Your options are Justin T, Nathan O, Andrew Hedrick, or Vinny Fernandez. It's definitely a senior. Because Omar was like third based on limitless points. Well, with Dragapult specifically? Yeah, yeah. Okay. With Dragapult. At one point, I don't know if he still is, but yeah, like earlier on in the season. I want to say Justin Templar because he's like won two regionals with it. So I definitely want to go with Justin Templar here. And you are absolutely correct. So Justin is currently sitting at 102 limitless points. Nathan has 86, Andrew Hedrick at 66, and Vinny Fernandez at 50. There were a couple of other players that were actually above Vinny, but I wanted to include him as an option just because he is such a strong and notable player. But Justin, Nathan, and Andrew are the top three, I believe, currently. Yeah. Okay. So moving on to our last question. In the Journey Together format, which deck has earned the most money from tournaments in the Masters division so far? And your choices are Gardevoir, Dragapult Desnoir, Raging Bolt, or Straight Dragapult. This is tough because Gardevoir definitely is like finished in first in the most events in the Journey Together format. But it definitely was like not the most represented deck in all of like day two money caches. Yeah. Raging Bolt's up there. So I really think it's just the choice between the Dragapult variants. And this is like so close. Dude, I don't know. I think, is it better than Gardevoir, maybe? It could be Raging Bolt, honestly, which would be wild, but this is a hard question. All right, I think I'm going to go Straight Dragapult just because it's had better finishes. It might just be slightly better than Dragapult Desnoir. Now I just made my Dragapult bias showing. Locking it in? Or Straight Dragapult. Yep, locking it in. And you are absolutely correct. So Straight Dragapult is number one with $44,000 earned, specifically in the Journey Together format. Things get a little bit weird if you kind of allow Limitless to toggle for full format. Right. But just in this format, Straight Dragapult has earned $44,000. Oh, sorry. Notably, this was only in the Masters division. I believe I read that when I read the initial question, but it doesn't change the numbers very much. Straight Dragapult stays number one in both of those categories, but the second and third place shift a little bit. So currently, Straight Dragapult has earned $44,000. Gardevoir has earned $39,000. Dragapult Desnoir has earned $31,000. And Raging Bolt, the lowest on the totem pole, but still a respectable $20,000. I think it's a little funny because that includes a regional win. Yeah. Half of that is a regional win. Yeah. Yeah. So that'll close out Blaine's Quiz Show for this week. So John, you did answer two questions correctly. So we'll close the week out at 22 to 26. So once again, say thank you for playing, and we will come back next week to see how our scores change. I'm happy with it. You know, two out of three. Think you were making me throw over the first question, so that's fine. Oh, I was not trying to. I totally, that was a complete accident. I'm giving you a hard time. Oh my gosh. Oh my goodness. Now we can- You're good at poker, I bet, where you're just like, oh, I have such a bad hand. I don't know. You can talk to some, like I haven't played poker since college, but so. You could talk to some of the people I used to play poker with, and they'd probably say that I'm pretty bad. Yeah, that's fair. It's weird. I think that I actually get better playing with specific people the longer I play with them. One, because I think I'm pretty good at picking up on other people's tells and habits. And I think it becomes easier for me to mask what I'm trying to if I need to. You know, I don't know, something like that. So yeah, now we can jump back into our set list and pick things back up with our psychic types. And so another callback here, Team Rocket's Hypno is a callback to Dark Hypno from Team Rocket Returns. Not gonna talk about it because it's a bad card, but just if you can look at those two cards and they're very similar to each other. But the first psychic type of note is Team Rocket's Mewtwo EX. So a 280 HP basic Pokemon. Massive. With the power saver ability, which spreads this Pokemon cannot attack unless you have four or more Team Rocket's Pokemon in play. And the eraser ball attack, which I believe has been translated in English to deletion sphere. Okay. That's the official name of the attack, but for two psychic and a colorless does 160 base damage and you may discard up to two energy from your bench Pokemon. This attack does 60 more damage for each card discarded in this way. So again, if you discard this two energy, you hit that 280 number that this set is really trying to hammer home, which I guess is a very important number if Mewtwo is going to be an important card in the format. Yeah. Yeah, definitely the big bad of the set, the poster child, if you will. The ability, it seems pretty prohibitive in a lot of ways, but it doesn't really, we'll get into it a little bit more. It's not as damaging as it might seem to be in the first glance. Sure. Well, I mean, you figure if you have, like this goes back to the Spydops that combos with this card really well. So kind of like the Placephalon and the Ganondale you talked about in time capsule, we have Mewtwo Spydops. I get my two energy that I siphoned back with Spydops. Mewtwo discards them. I get them back with Spydops, Mewtwo discards them. So if I have two Spydops and a backup Mewtwo on my bench, I Mewtwo can attack and it's fine. There's no problem. So I don't think that it's super crazy. It's not a crazy threshold to get over. And we've seen abilities like this in the past with like team Magma's Groudon as an example. And they're never super prohibitive. The ability is not the reason that the card is not successful. That's fair. Yeah, I can see World War yet. I mean, I guess that's not the biggest thing. The biggest thing I could see is just powering it up continuously. And then, yeah, the 280 cap is not too bad for three energy and then two on the bench, but it definitely is like, I mean, it feels okay. It feels very fair. It doesn't feel like completely broken, like a raging bolt somewhat, you know what I mean? Yeah, definitely. It's like, because it's not limitless in its ability to do damage, I could definitely see a world where this may just fall by the wayside. And that's where like, we haven't seen the most success with this card in Japan so far. I mean, Tord took it to the most recent Champions League and I believe that he went X3 and didn't actually make it into day two. And one of the kind of prohibitive things, and we'll get into this. So Team Rocket has a whole trainer engine associated with it. It's something we can kind of preview before we get into the full trainer section. But one of the caveats associated with a lot of these stronger trainers are that they only interact with your board or your hand in a positive way if your whole deck is Team Rocket's Pokemon essentially. And the problem with that is that Team Rocket does not have an onboard draw engine to really keep your deck going. And so that just makes things really awkward. If you ever wanna like put a Clefairy on your bench or put a Pheasant Dippity on your bench or put a Squawkabilly on your bench to just kind of catapult yourself into the game, all of a sudden you're locked out of a bunch of extremely powerful cards or you're diminishing the returns that those extremely powerful cards can provide to you. Yeah, for sure. It definitely, I mean, like even running like Pheasant Dippity can be prohibitive if you're trying to play with some of those other supporters and trainers and such. Moving down the list, we're gonna mention Team Rocket's Wobbuffet for a psychic and a colorless. So nicely fulfilled by that Rocket energy we talked about. It has Rocket Mirror. It says, move all damage counters from one of your benched Team Rocket's Pokemon to your opponent's active Pokemon. So I think that's a kind of cool attack. We haven't really seen too much. It reminds me of there was a Mewtwo, Mega Mewtwo that allowed you to move like damage swaps, which is the damage from your active with your opponent's active. But this is a little bit different. I think it's okay. I don't think it's gonna win you a whole bunch of games, but it could be good. You know, if you can counter catch your, attach your Rocket's energy, retreat your Mewtwo. Sorry, and use Wobbuffet to just knock out something and then have a one prize on the active and then have the Mewtwo powered up or on the bench with no damage counters on it. Yeah, that seems pretty good. So I don't know, there's definitely some potential there. Yeah, and Mewtwo has an extremely large HP pool to work with, so definitely a possibility. And that can be further expanded again with Bravery Charm, with something like, I don't know. Hero's Cape's a bit of a stretch. I think that there are other A-specs that fit a bit more easily or reasonably into the deck, like Max Belt or Prime Catcher or something. But, you know, there will be easy ways to have access to the Wobbuffet that will become more apparent when we talk about some of the other Rocket's cards, including specifically the Trainer section. Next up, we get our first look at some Steven's Pokemon and they are bad, so we can keep going. The first one that's worth talking about for Steven is Steven's Carbink, so Psychic-type basic with the ability Stone Palace. It says, as long as this Pokemon is on your bench, each of your Steven's Pokemon takes 30 less damage from attacks from your opponent's Pokemon. The effect of Stone Palace does not stack. And so this all is gonna kind of build up to the fact that Steven's marquee card is, of course, Steven's Metagross EX. And the whole strategy for Steven seems to be keep Metagross alive. And unfortunately, like Carbink is probably, it's a really good card in the sense that you have a basic that sits on your bench that's somewhat difficult to interact with. It's not like, you know, Full Metal Lab, as an example, where your opponent can just play a Stadium and remove it. You know, if they wanna take the Carbink out of commission, they have to KO the Carbink. And otherwise it sits there and repeatedly reduces the damage that your Steven's Pokemon take. But I think the problem comes from the fact that the archetype as a whole is a little bit too weak to really see the fruits of this card being successful. Yeah, we'll showcase Metagross a little bit, but yeah, definitely a little more underwhelming when we talk about owner's Pokemon. That is Team Rocket's Mimikyu. It has another two-energy psychic and colorless attack, a gem mimicry. It says choose an opponent's, sorry, choose an attack on your opponent's active Terra Pokemon and use it as the effect of this attack. So similar to some other Mimikyus we've seen in the past, this has like a copycat attack, but it's specific to Terra Pokemon. Yep. It is nice that you get to just choose one of your opponent's active attacks, so you're not bound to whatever they used on the opponent's last turn. You can, you know, boss something up and then just copy that attack. So if you have like, if they have a Wellspring Ogre Pond, you can just, you know, use this attack, discard the energy. I think it says shuffle two water in, so I don't know if you can get the secondary effect. It just says shuffle three energy in, actually. Oh, okay. So yeah, definitely you can still use this for the secondary effect of 100 and 120. So yeah, definitely some cool combos you can pull. Has free retreat as well, which is relevant. So definitely something that's nice as a pivot option. So yeah. And then I guess, you know, we talked about Blipbub. Here we go. Here's Dottler. Wait, real quick on the Mimikyu before we move on. Oh, sorry. I got a little excited. I do, the card one fits really well with the like kind of Spite Ops Mewtwo deck as a whole, because you are already running that Team Rocket energy. But the big thing, I think, is that this card slots immediately and very easily into Gardevoir, which is a little ridiculous almost in the fact that one of the most powerful things we've seen for Gardevoir in the Dragapult matchup specifically is using genome hacking with the Clefairy on your bench and moving damage counters over to KO a Dragapult and a Dracloak in the same turn. And now you're telling me I can do that with a one-prizer? Yeah, yeah, that's a fair point. Yeah, that seems pretty abusive, truthfully. Garde is just getting stronger. And Garde fans are just living good. Now, Mimikyu only has 60 HP. So if your opponent is able to put a Phantom Dive together and get your Mimikyu back to the bench, they can take it out pretty easily. If you're playing the Rocket's deck, though, if you have that Articuno in play, your Mimikyu can't be interacted with from Dragapult's Phantom Dive and you're totally safe. So I think that, again, interesting game design where it's better in some decks in some ways and better in other decks in other ways. And I don't know, just an interesting card, even though this effect seems extremely powerful. Yeah, for sure. Very good effective attack. And we've seen this kind of pop up from time to time in other formats. Sure. But now you can gush over Dottler. Sorry, so I do want to say something. Cutler Radar is the first attack for one colorless. It says, look at the top five cards of your opponent's deck and put them back in any order. So there is the option for maybe a control deck to use this. It's a colorless, just one colorless. So you could run it with just like a Pidgeot control in theory. So there, I don't know. I mean, I'm not saying like, if we ever get to a point where there's a deck where you can just discard your opponent's entire hand, then you can just keep using Dottler to adjust their deck and kind of basically lock them out of the game, essentially, if you can keep using this attack over and over again. Yeah, I don't know. I don't think it's going to go crazy, but it definitely seems like it could be something relevant. I think it's a stretch, but notably the Dottler does evolve into Team Rocket's Orbeetle, which is another interesting card in that it has the Rocket Brain ability. So as often as you like during your turn, you may move one damage counter from one of your Team Rocket's Pokemon to another of your Pokemon. And it does have Psychic. So for Psychic and do colorless, you do 40 plus 40 for each energy attached to your opponent's active. The attack is pretty pointless. It's just kind of there so the card can have an attack. And the real draw for this card would be if you wanted to access that Rocket Brain ability, but I'm not really sure what this fits into unless you're trying to do something where, like I guess you're countering spread strategies and then you can kind of concentrate all of the damage onto one Pokemon on your bench for Wobbuffet to move over. Yeah. But it seems like a lot of work, like getting a stage two set up to try to accommodate something like that. I just don't know if this card has it in it to see play. Yeah, I think that's fair. I wish it, if it was like, just move Pokemon energy damage from one of your Pokemon to another Pokemon, this would definitely see play, but it being bound to Team Rockets, it does allow you to move it off of Team Rockets to another of your Pokemon. So there is a world where there's a Pokemon that you can shuffle back into your deck and just- No, that's fair. Like a Pidgeot V we've seen in the past. So if there's an opportunity for that, we have that kind of going for it. So definitely there's some play with that if you wanted to think about it from that perspective. But yeah, definitely, like I know you were shooting down my Dottler. I don't see Orbeetle seeing much played from the jump. No, Blipbug though. Blipbug's got- Yeah, Blipbug's, I mean, he's definitely scheming with those Pokeballs, man. I don't trust that guy. He's pretty shifty. My brother will be happy that there's a Sudowoodoo in this set. I don't think it's very good. Whoa. Oh, actually, okay. I'm gonna hard disagree with you on this one. Sorry. Yeah, go ahead. So anyone who enjoyed Knackly, you now have a better Knackly. Oh, okay. So it's a one retreat cost, 110 HP. You know, I guess technically it's worse in some ways because you can't Poffin for it, but you have Impound, which I'm almost certain is gonna be translated as corner, but I guess maybe it might still be Impound. One fighting for 20 damage during your opponent's next turn, the defending Pokemon cannot retreat. But additionally- I didn't read that. Sorry. You do also have two color lists for attempt mimicry. That's Flip a Coin if heads, choose one of your opponent's active Pokemon's attacks and use it as this attack. That's kind of a last ditch, like I need to win the game this turn. Let me flip a coin and go for it. But I do think that the corner option is actually pretty interesting with this card. Yeah. I mean, we've talked about it before with the Knackly and all that. So this definitely continues that strategy. And yeah, if you hit into something with resistance, you're doing zero damage. So you're able to just indefinitely lock up. Something like a Mimikyu or like a- Latias, beware. Yep, yep, yep. So definitely something to think about. We get into Team Rocket's Tyranitar line. So we definitely have some play with Explosive Awakening on the Pupitar. Does 30 damage and then search your deck for a card that evolves from this Pokemon and put it onto this Pokemon to evolve it. So just a way to boost into the T-tar, which has a really strong ability in sand stream. As long as this Pokemon is in the active spot, you put two damage counters on each of your opponents, basic Pokemon during Pokemon checkup. The attack is pretty bad, I think. Yeah, it's just hard to power up. Yeah. Like you can reversal it into existence when you're behind, but I don't know. Yeah, I guess so. Yeah, it's just not, I mean, but the ability is pretty strong. I wish it, like it being, having it be in the active is a bummer because you don't really want a three retreat pretty bad attack in the active, but the ability is really strong. Yeah, this goes back. So again, Rock Lock, you want Ampharos and Tyranitar in conjunction with each other. And so you're devolving all of your opponent's Pokemon with TM devolution, so they're all basics again with the Tyranitar using that attack. So they get the four counters when they evolve, you devolve them, they take, everything takes 20. Anything that was rare candied up is probably not evolving again immediately. Or if they just evolve into a stage one, suddenly they're up to a hundred damage total. And when you devolve them, they will certainly be knocked out. The neat thing for this card though, in particular, is that you can actually Salvatore the Larvitar into the Pupitar on turn one and use Explosive Awakening to get a Tyranitar active on turn one going second. Oh, that's kind of fun. Which is pretty neat. I don't know, maybe there's a world where there's just like a turbo T-tar deck and you just ignore the Ampharos completely. Yeah. You just focus on, again, still just a full TM Devo and spread 20, spread 20, spread 20. Again, Monkey Dory probably kind of just mutilates this strategy as an option. If there was a way to recover tools and- Oh, like if Roseanne's backup was still legal? Yeah, or something like Eco Arm. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, where you're able to shuffle them back into your deck. Something a little bit better than Roseanne's would be nice. Because yeah, just that's one thing with Rock Clock. I think the TM stayed on the Pokemon, if I'm not mistaken, right? No, once you used it, it was gone. Yeah. Oh, my bad. Okay. So I guess it's a similar principle then. Things just have way more HP now. I don't know. I think it's a cool proof of concept, but it would be hard to see actually be executed. No, it's a nostalgia thing more than anything, but I will almost certainly be putting it together because it will be very cheap to build. Oh yeah, 100%. And notably, things that we've seen kind of with the Roaring Moon to Dunsparce deck recently are any indication you could play Neutralization Zone Yeah. And just hope that it sticks. Yeah, you might be able to choose some wins for sure on the latter. So that's definitely an option. Absolutely. Moving forward. I don't think Metachim's very good. No, RegirockyX is not very good either. No. This is another 180. Next thing would be, we've got the Cynthia's Garchomp line would be the next thing up, I think. So Gible, 70 HP, you can Poffin for it. Super great. But Gible evolves into Cynthia's Gabite, 100 HP Sage, one that has the King's Call ability. Once during your turn, you may search your deck for a Cynthia's Pokemon, reveal it, put into your hand, and then shuffle your deck. So again, this goes right back to Fluffychomp. You had the Dragon Called Gabite back then, did basically the same thing. It was just search your deck for a Dragon Pokemon. So you evolve one Gabite, it finds another Gabite, it finds another Gabite, that goes and finds, insert other Cynthia Pokemon. And then on your next turn, you search for three Cynthia's Pokemon, and you're probably getting a Garchomp, a Roserade, maybe a second Roserade, maybe a second Garchomp. You know, just getting something set up, and your whole board gets set up immediately without having to really search your deck with a bunch of Ultra Balls and kind of weighing things down in that way. And then Cynthia's Garchomp EX, 330 HP Stage 2 fighting type, has the Spiral Dive attack. For one fighting, does 100 damage, and you may draw until you have six cards in your hand. And for two fighting, Dragon Buster does 260, and you discard all energy from this Pokemon. So notably, again, these damage numbers might seem a little low for a Stage 2, except for the fact that the Roserade that is meant to combo with this is boosting each of them by 30 for each Roserade that you have on your bench. So Spiral Dive does 100 or 130 or 160. Dragon Buster can do up to 320 for two fighting. And then you do discard your energy, but you could play something like Power Glass with this and just go 260 or up to 320 every single turn. The card has potential. Yeah, you get some other items that we'll talk about in a little bit. Yeah, I think it looks good. You know, it being a setup deck, especially like you're relying on a Stage 1 to help out your Stage 2, it's gonna be tough, Aaron. Like Fluffychomp, if you remember, I'm sure you do. Yep, fell flat on his face. Super, super hyped. One of the most hyped decks I think I've ever experienced. And then, yeah, did absolutely nothing once it got into play. That's exactly what I was gonna say. I was wary of saying the deck was good, but it seems like it should be. It seems like it should be. I mean, maybe, I mean, it's definitely one that's easy to put together and play. And people love Cynthia, so it'll get some play. It'll be like Hopsation at least where people will wanna try it out. And we'll see it for the first few weeks of the format for sure. Whether it sticks around past that will probably be dependent upon how much it actually succeeds from there. Right. Oh, I forgot. Arvin has Pokemon in this set as well. So if Misty's gimmick was being bad, Arvin is exactly the same. But realistically, Arvin's gimmick is that he feeds his guys sandwiches and he heals them and keeps them around. That just unfortunately is not very good. The Toad School and Toad Scroll are not worth talking about at all. The next card of note, I think, and a card that I, like on reveal, was particularly interested in, I've kind of cooled on the card a little bit since then, is Team Rocket's Arbok. So stage one dark type, 130 HP, has the intimidating Glare ability. It says if this Pokemon's your active Pokemon, your opponent can't play any Pokemon that have abilities from their hand, except for Team Rocket's Pokemon. And then for the attack, for three dark, it does 30 damage to each of your opponent's Pokemon. That's not really super relevant. The bigger thing is just that you have the ability to stick something in your active that says you can't play your Dracloak, you can't play your Goldengo, you can't play your Pidgeot, you can't play your Charizard. So unless you can get around this Arbok, you can't, your deck doesn't function in a lot of circumstances. Yeah. And it could be good early game. If you can get set up early, it can definitely slow your opponent down effectively. I don't know how much it is besides a deterrent. The attack's not very good. Spinning Tail, for three dark, it does 30 to each of your opponent's Pokemon. So a spread attack, which is fun, but definitely less impactful with Terra Pokemon in play and the return of Shaman now. I mean, potentially your opponent might not be able to get the Shaman down turn one, so you could prevent that from getting to play. There are ways to cheat out Pokemon, too, with Nest Ball, particularly. Yep. Nest Ball, TM Evolution. Yep. TM Evo. And then, yeah, so definitely in a different format, I think this would be really, really strong, especially one without Gust to like move it out of the active. Sure. But I think there's just too many ways to get around it right now. That's fair. Not to throw a wet blanket on your snake. No, no, no. Um. Let's see. I don't unfortunately I don't think that the Nidoqueen or Nidoking are particularly good. No, unfortunately. The Golbat, though. Tell me about Golbat, John. Oh, yeah. So I played Toad Bats a lot. I'm not going to lie. I was the degenerate player that loved announcing Quaking Punch 85 times in a game and watching my opponent just slowly pull their hair out. So this definitely brings a lot of memories back for me. And it's a very similar reprint to a Crobat line we had in the EX era, capital EX era. So Team Rocket's Zubat is pretty weak. Yeah, I don't think it's very good. Yeah, I wish it had free retreat, if anything. But yeah, we're bound with a 50 HP guy. But the Golbat notably is a lot better. It has the ability Sneaky Bite, which is the exact same ability as the Golbat from, I think, Phantom Forces, was it? Yep. Back in the day, it says when you play this Pokemon from your hand to evolve one of your Pokemon during your turn, you may put two damage counters on one of your opponent's Pokemon, which doesn't seem like a lot, but it's not too bad. And then from there, you can evolve it into Crobat EX. Which has 310 hit points. Dark type Pokemon has the ability Bite About. It says when you play this Pokemon from your hand to evolve one of your Pokemon to your turn, you may put two damage counters on two of your opponent's Pokemon. So I think it's a little bit it's different. The Crobat from Phantom Forces put three damage counters on one Pokemon. So this could be arguably worse in some ways, but it has a nice attack to pair with this. It's got for two dark, so definitely fulfilled by the Rocket's energy. Has Assassin's Return. There's 120 damage, and you may put this Pokemon into your hand. So you're able to pop this right back in your hand and then start placing more damage counters. So this would be something you could do with like a Safeguard Attacker or a Wall, like a Walls deck. I could definitely see this being paired with. So definitely more like Bidu and then building this up around Bidu early game and then you pivot it to something else. So I don't know how much play this will see, but it definitely like for you, you know, talking about Rock Lock, I definitely felt a little nostalgic looking at the Crobat line here for sure. Sure. No, I love this card. I'm not super positive about how strong it is. I know it's super weird because it's hard to look at the Japanese results and really have any idea of how they're going to be similar to or dissimilar from whatever we're going to experience, especially given the fact that they have access to a Psyduck gym promo that it essentially the ability shuts off Dusknoir. It says any ability that would knock out a Pokemon cannot be used. And because we don't have that card being released in the set, our format's going to be entirely different. But purely because of the existence of Psyduck, we've seen the evolution of decks like Dragapult to exclude Dusknoir in some instances and instead include a Crobat line as the way to kind of help accentuate the damage spread abilities of Dragapult in particular. But it's just at some point this card has to be good, right? Just plopping extra damage into play, especially in Crobat itself isn't really a liability. Like, yes, it is a two prizer, but it's got 310 HP. Like that's not easy pickings by any means. No, no. And, you know, the one retreat is pretty manageable. Right. Lightning weakness isn't super relevant right now. So definitely, um, yeah. I mean, you talk about the Xur or definitely like that can only hit bench Pokemon. So I don't think it's super relevant. Right. In this matchup. So, yeah, I definitely I don't see a world where this is like never played. I can imagine like you just have a deck where your opponent can't do anything like you're you're paralyzing something in the active or figuring that out. And using Crobat's around that. I don't know, I feel like there's got to be something that. Somebody comes up with at some point. Yeah, hopefully I'm feeling it, I want to be a degen again. Just quaking punch. Continuing down last couple of team Rockets Pokemon to look at here. We have Team Rocket's Murkrow that just says search your deck for a supporter card, put it into your hand for a colorless. Not super great, but I guess it's something that you can nest ball for that can kind of get you out of a jam if you don't have a supporter. And Team Rocket's Sneasel is kind of a natural pairing with that Crobat line with its backstab attack for two dark. So again, Team Rocket energy fulfills this cost. Does 20 damage to one of your opponent's bench Pokemon for each damage counter already on that Pokemon. So as you stack up damage on your opponent's bench, you can suddenly hit something for twice as much damage as what they already have on them. Yeah, not super like it's not going to, you know, win tons of games by itself. But I think I could see a world where if you did have this kind of spread oriented strategy, this is a pretty easy slot in kind of finisher, if you will, for that. Yeah, could be good. So then to keep in mind, for sure, like that's a nice thing with all of these Rockets Pokemon, since you have Team Rocket's energy. So all the psychic and dark ones that take two energy types or take two energy, you pretty splashable, right? Like you can mix and match effectively for the meta or for whatever your strategy is. Real quick, we had Cynthia Spirit Zoom. We talked about this in our earlier video game as a quiz Flames quiz show question, and I got wrong. But then Aaron realized he asked it wrong, so I got it right. For one colorless, it does Raging Curse, does 10 damage times the for each 10 damage for each damage counter on your bench. Cynthia's Pokemon, it's not affected by weakness. I don't think it's super good, but, you know, it could be one of those like you catch your opponent by surprise, pull this out and have like a really good one prizer doing a lot of damage. So there's that. Yeah, that's fair. Next up would be the series of Marnie's Pokemon, which are all dark types, but the only one that's really worth talking about is the Marnie's Grimmsnarl EX, and it has the Punk Up ability that when you play this Pokemon from your hand to evolve one of your Pokemon, you may search your deck for up to five basic dark energy and attach them to your Marnie's Pokemon in any way you like. And then for two dark, it has the Shadow Bullet attack that does 180 damage and also does 30 damage to one of your opponent's bench Pokemon. And the way that this card is being used currently, it's not like a straight Marnie's deck, like the pairing that this is intended for is the Marnie's Morpeko that does an extra 40 damage for each dark energy attached to it. So you're supposed to get this Grimmsnarl out, power up this Morpeko with five energy and suddenly do a whole bunch of damage on a one prizer. But the way that this is seeing play instead is kind of as a an alternate attacker or just in addition to the Froslass Monkeydory archetype that we've seen. So you want the dark energy in that deck already because of Monkeydory. You have this kind of spread based attacker and if you're only doing 180 damage with the Shadow Bullet, you really need that supplemental damage from both some combination of Froslass and or Monkeydory to really kind of get you over the line against a lot of decks. But when you combine all of those things together, it's kind of a pretty natural marriage of these cards. And they mesh really well together. And they've been seeing some pretty strong success so far. Yeah, it's interesting how effective it's working. Maybe frustratingly so for some people. I don't know about you, Aaron. I definitely feel weird about Marnie, like Grimmsnarl. I don't think it's my it's probably one of my least favorite Pokemon. Oh, it's ugly. It's from from a design standpoint. Yeah. Every time I see it, I'm like, what? Why? You know, it's just it's weird that like and it's especially like Marnie is such a cool character and Morpeko is cool. And then you just like get Grimmsnarl and you're like, OK, turn my TV off. Let me go do somewhere else. I don't know. I don't feel safe looking at it. OK, I mean, I guess we can move on from it then, if you want. Yeah, but definitely, definitely, definitely a strong card. I think that the Marnie's battle deck comes with two copies of it. And that's probably all you're going to need for the deck. So I would definitely pick one of those up. Should be pretty easy to get your hands on if that's something that you're interested in playing. Yeah. Maybe just put like a little sticky note over his face. You don't have to look at it. Sure. That then Arvin again, just not we're talking about, unfortunately, I think we're going to skip right over it. The next thing would be, again, that Stevens Metagross. We talked about the car being being able to reduce damage done to this thing. It's got 340 base HP's with the car bank. You get an effective 370 and there's a Steven Stadium that does the same thing as car bank, so you can get up to an effective 400 HP and Metagross's ability is notably really good. So once during your turn, you may search your deck for a basic psychic and a basic metal energy and attach them to your psychic or metal Pokemon in any way you like and then shuffle your deck. But, you know, I guess as an energy acceleration card, this is decent. But as an attacker, it just really falls short because it only does 200 damage. And that's just not going to be enough to really keep up with anything at the end of the day. No, it's a. It's like a really like in a different format, like in an alternate timeline, like this would be really, really powerful, a good attack. Yeah. But yeah, I think just right now it doesn't really make sense. No. Team Rocket's Persian is a meme card. Play with it at your own risk. The next one would be the Team Rocket's Porygon2 and PorygonZ, which I'm not sure how good these cards are. I think that they want to be good. Yeah. And so there's a whole series of Team Rocket supporters and they pair up with this card pretty directly in that both of these cards have the R command attack. So for Porygon2, it's three colorless. For PorygonZ, it's two colorless and they both do 20 damage for each supporter card in your discard pile with Team Rocket in its name. And the PorygonZ has an ability that you must discard two cards from your hand to use, and it just allows you to draw a card. And so you can fuel two extra Team Rocket supporters to your discard pile to draw a card. But to really hit like distinct, strong damage thresholds with this, again, we're looking at you need to have 16 Rocket supporters in your discard pile to one hit KO a Dragapult. And that seems like a lot. Yeah, I wish it was more than 20. I think that would be the only way that this would be good. Sure. But yeah, definitely just kind of underwhelming at the end of the day. Yeah. Not a whole lot more in the Pokemon category. Arvin's Greedent just likes sandwiches. Again, what a... What a guy. Yeah, what a guy. And that's about all I got for Pokemon. We're moving all into trainer cards, more sandwiches, if you will, with Arvin's sandwich. Yeah, it doesn't really do much for me. It's a potion, but if it's an Arvin Pokemon, it's a little bit better. But I think importantly, we have Cynthia's Power Weight. It's a tool card that basically just reads Cynthia's Pokemon. This card is attached to get 70 more hit points. Yep. So just pretty nice. You know, as most gimmicks go, this one's not too bad. Plus 70 is actually a decent amount of hit points, and especially right now when there's really not a lot of easy ways to remove tools. We have the one. What is it? Not Ruffian, is it? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. OK, Ruffian. That's about the only one. And that's the supporter. That's not that good. So, yeah, this could see some play in Cynthia's Garchomp deck or something like that. I guess maybe it's a one of early game to help you survive and just build up your hand size and all that stuff. Yeah, I mean, making Garchomp 400 HP is definitely a notable, like that's a big wall to get through. But I think that at the end of the day, like you said, maybe as a one of, because I do think that the tool card that Garchomp is going to get a lot more mileage out of is going to be that Power Glass. Yeah, I'd agree. But seeing this as an option, you know, it's definitely better than Bravery Charm. And that card sees tons of play. Yeah. So I would not at all be surprised if you're playing a Cynthia's deck. You should probably put at least one of these into your deck. Right. And like it might prevent your Roserade from getting knocked out from Dusknoir or something. Exactly. Yep. Or like early game, you can attach this to your basic Pokemon and give them get them out of range from some KOs or something like that. We've seen that, you know, in Dragapult even running Bravery Charm and stuff just like for Bidoo's maybe, but more for to keep your bench Pokemon alive on the early game. Yep. Some reprints here. This is, I guess, not MC's Chatter, but very similar. I guess we haven't really seen this mechanic, but it's not that good. So we need to talk about it bad. But we do have Energy Recycle. Yeah. That's just shuffle up to five basic energy cards from your Disc Compile into your deck. This card notably saw a lot of play with Lost Box when Kyogre was in the deck in particular. I'm not sure if any deck really takes advantage of this card right this second, but it definitely is worth noting that it exists and has the potential to see play if a deck really strongly wants to specifically put a lot. of energy back into the deck. Yeah. Yeah, it could be good. Definitely something to keep in the back of your mind is in the format. All right, so we talked about it. And yeah, go ahead. The next one, I guess is a granite cave from Stevens. So that's just the 38 HP buff, or I guess, less damage to Stevens Pokemon. So we won't go back. We get a reprint a judge. This is notably a G regulation card. So that means that it will rotate before the rest of the cards in this set. So this is one thing that Pokemon is done with the regulation marks. So in this set, we have judge and we have professors research. Both of those cards are from earlier regulations than the rest of the set. So they print judge out, I guess, to look cool. This guy looks pretty wild. Yeah, I don't think I've ever worn shorts those colors. But yeah, just to get cards out of the format a little faster, I think, and keep things going. Sure. Keep things fresh. So we get cool reprints like this that don't affect the timeline for legality. So that's kind of nice. Yep. Next up another reprint. So we have Sacred Ash, very similar to Energy Recycler, except it's for Pokemon. So you can shovel up to five Pokemon from your discard pile back into your deck. If you're really on that misty train, you can put your four Psyducks back. More power to you. Have fun with it. For sure. It's so it's tough for me to call either of these cards particularly strong, especially right now, when Super Rod and Super Rod exists, and it's kind of more versatile, both of them. And even it's not seeing that much play because Night Stretcher exists. Yeah, I mean, we had at the very start of this format before we had Super Rod, we had Miriam, which did put back some stuff as a supporter effect and then draw three cards, I think. Yeah. But that only saw play because there wasn't other recovery cards. I think Super Rod will just probably see more play than both of these combined. Sure. So next is Spike Meth. Just kind of going over what we had earlier. But this is just a stadium that lets you once during your turn search for Marnie's Pokemon, put in your hand and shuffle. So it definitely helps with consistency and especially with a stage two deck like Grimmsnarl. So yeah, definitely not bad. Yep. Yeah. Notably, it's kind of like so right now, Froslass Monkey Dory plays Artisan as its main stadium. And unfortunately, that kind of allows opposing Monkey Dory decks to more easily set up their Monkey Dory and make your game plan a little bit more difficult. With Spike Meth, unless your opponent is playing an exact mirror match, it only benefits you. And so that's kind of what you ideally get out of the stadium when you're playing a deck is you want it to benefit you and you hope it does not benefit your opponent as well. So I can imagine Froslass Grimmsnarl mirrors, dude. That sounds awful. Yeah, I don't I don't want to live in that world. So next, we'll dive into the suite of Team Rocket trainers. And the first one we see here is Team Rocket's Archer. It's a supporter card that you can only play if any of your Team Rocket's Pokemon were knocked out during your opponent's last turn. Each player shuffles their hand into their deck, you draw five, your opponent draws three. So it's kind of like a mix between several different cards. And, you know, it reminds me the most of Roxanne, I think, except the stipulation instead of having a prize card stipulation, the requirement is you basically have to be a dedicated Team Rocket's deck, or something that somehow forces your opponent to knock out a Rocket's Pokemon. And, you know, if your opponent knocks out like a Tarantula, and then you say, No, you only get three cards now. That's pretty good. Like this card is strong. It really is very strong disruption. I mean, notably, like, yeah, Roxanne, you had to wait till your opponent was on three prize cards remaining. Essentially, their board was much more established. This is more like an unfair stamp in the power level, where it's basically Oh, you knocked out one of my Pokemon. All right, now you're down to three cards. Yep. And this is kind of like the disruption we were talking about a little bit with the blip bug, I guess you could slip slip their hand down to three and then try to control their top deck. But I don't think it's that good. But anyway, it's still good disruption for Rockets for sure. I think Rockets cards will definitely play that we go to Rockets Ariana. It says drawn CF five cards in the hand if all your Pokemon and player Team Rockets Pokemon drawn CF eight cards in hand instead. So straight up draw to have eight with no real downside if you're running a Team Rockets deck. Very, very strong. We talked about Lily in our time capsule as you know, you drew eight the first turn of the game, drawing up to eight, you know, we complain about draw till you have this many cards in your hand. And there reaches a threshold where it is just pretty strong, right? Like, right. Even if it's like a weaker effect than a discard, draw seven or something like that. So you have eight really works out well for a lot of decks, especially like setup decks, where you want to hold on to one or two pieces like a rare candy, and then you can draw into the remaining pieces. So that's nice. Yeah, and you still have cards like ultra ball to thin excess cards out of your hand to make it a little bit better. And in conjunction with all of this, we also have this very powerful stadium card Team Rockets factory. This is once during each player's turn, if that player played a supporter card with Team Rocket in its name from their hand during that turn, that player can draw two cards. So you can Ariana up to eight and then draw two more. Why not? Yeah. It's crazy. It's not even when you play the supporter though. So it's like you could do Ariana play some cards, search your deck with nest ball, thin it out a bit more and then draw two. And you can do that every turn you play a rocket supporter. Yeah, definitely a strong card. Speaking of more rocket supporters, we have rockets Giovanni, which says switch your active Team Rockets Pokemon with one of your benched Team Rockets Pokemon. If you do switch one in switch in one of your opponents bench Pokemon to the active spot. So for those that remember Guzma, this is essentially that but for Team Rockets Pokemon when you have Team Rockets Pokemon in play. So, you know, Guzma probably one of the most broken gust supporters of all time. We talked about in a time capsule again. This is that so I mean, you're able to, you know, take advantage of that more Peko with free retreat or not more Peko. Mimikyu. Mimikyu Thank you. With free retreat and then just able to kind of go from there. So this is definitely I don't know. I think this is the these, you know, we talked about a lot of this stuff and we'll get into some more of them. So we'll just keep going over and then we'll have a little summary at the end of it. Sure. And then notably, you can do your Guzma effect and draw two cards. Yeah. But so then you have Team Rockets Great Ball, which is literally capturing aroma. But for Team Rockets Pokemon, if you get heads, you get an evolution. If you get tails, you get a basic. I wouldn't think that this card is that strong. But from every list I've seen of the dedicated like Team Rockets Mewtwo deck, they all play this card. And I guess it's just strong enough that it sends most of your the time you want. I guess it's because for like stage ones and twos. Yeah, maybe there's not a lot of search for those right now. Just an additional copy to go find more stuff. Maybe Team Rockets Intruder Robot is not worth talking about. But the big card that kind of brings a lot of these supporters together is Team Rockets Receiver. So if we had the this is, again, another callback very reminiscent in a lot of ways to kind of various supporters we've seen throughout the game. So you got like the Roxanne, a similar card, the similar card to Guzma. And now you have Team Rockets Receiver, which is very similar to Halon Transceiver from back in the day, except not quite as powerful. And that it only allows you to search your deck for a supporter and put it into your hand on an item card, which, you know, just proves to you how broken Halon's Transceiver was. But this, this card is still extremely strong. And we'll get into a couple of other supporters that kind of add to this power. But saying on demand, oh, man, I need boss for game or I need to Giovanni for game. Let me go find it. Oh, man, my hands really small. I need to draw until I have eight cards. Let me go find that. And so it just seems like an auto for of an every rocket deck for sure. Yep. We have Team Rockets Petrol, which says search your deck for a turn a card reveal it put in your hand and show for your deck. So similar to Skyla, which so this allows you to get stadiums, which is nice. You could even play this in decks that aren't Team Rockets to search out specific items like your ace back or your stadium for turn. So there's definitely some advantages to this, like same thing with like we had Skyla where it's awesome play. This is a little bit faster format. So probably isn't as good. I still could see it being a one of I think, in a lot of ways, especially if you're running the receiver for sure. And I think in a lot of ways, like we've talked about kind of the weakness of Arvin in the current format. And I think specifically because it says trainer card, you can go find other supporters, like you said, you can go find stadiums. So in a lot of ways, I think that this might actually might just be better Arvin at this exact moment. But it's a little bit less power in the sense that you don't find two cards with it, you only find one. But instead, you get the versatility of being able to find any trainer. And then the last Team Rockets supporter to talk about is Team Rockets proton, which notably has the text, if you go first, you may use this card during your first turn. And is just search your deck for up to three basic Team Rockets, Pokemon. And so this is the Bridget of the Team Rocket engine or the Holland mentor of the Team Rocket engine. So you get your two to four copies of proton in your deck, you have four Rockets receiver, you suddenly have a super consistency for playing proton on turn one going first, get a bunch of Rockets Pokemon set up and get yourself established and ready to go for turn two. And if you have that factory card in play, you draw two cards. Yeah, yeah, I mean, very, very strong. Probably the most strong setup card we've seen since Bridget. Yeah, you said. So definitely, definitely cool to see the kind of a reprint of that card. And like the same mechanic, essentially. Real quick venture bomb. It's kind of a gimmick. Flip a coin heads but two damage counters on one of your opponents, but one of tells put two damage counters on your active. So maybe in a deck where you don't mind damaging your active, this would be okay, I guess. Yeah, but like the things that I've seen this see play in so far are like our chalet on which people are now including monkey Dory in, or in hop Sasha index, because you already wanted to play monkey Dory. And so it just means that no matter what you're putting two counters somewhere on your opponent's board. Yeah, I guess that makes sense. In that case, it seems a lot better, right? Yeah. And then getting near the end, we have Team Rockets watchtower, which is a really strong stadium. It says call this Pokemon and play both yours and your opponents have no abilities. So just a hard card hard counter to some of the more strong Pokemon we've seen come out in the last few formats. Like Pidgeot EX, knock towel. And then I guess what else? I'm kind of drawn a blank. There's some subtle like, positive words. Yeah. But there are some positive ways you can play this too. And some weaker cards, but like slacking EX, you can turn off his ability. So you can allow your slacking to always attack. But the big thing is going to be shutting off the Pidgeot shutting off the knock towel, and trying to prevent your opponent from setting up with those powerful search based abilities. For sure. Yeah, so definitely, I think it'll see some play for sure. And then the last trainer we have is TM machine. So search your deck for three Pokemon tool cards with technical machine in the name, reveal them, put them in your hand and then shuffle your deck. So it could see some play. It's a gym promo. So probably just kind of, you know, chilling. If you have a deck that is trying to chain like the divas, like we talked about, maybe this is worth like, an inclusion for that. But I don't know, that doesn't really seem that good. No. And it's one of those things where it's like, unfortunately, like, while Arvin still exists, this card seems bad. Maybe if you really need to search tool cards, once Arvin rotates, you can play that petrol to find TM machine to go find your tools. Sure. But I think by the time Arvin rotates, the TMS might also rotate. So maybe that combo will never exist. And then the last thing we've talked about a lot we have the here's the artwork for Team Rocket energy. So you can see it's purple has the darkness symbol, that means that it is dark and psychic at the same time provides two energies. And notably can only be attached to Team Rockets Pokemon. So if it's attached to any Pokemon that is not a Team Rockets Pokemon, you discard the card. Love this text. This is the type of double energy that I can really get behind in that it is not just a universal provides to energy to anything. I like things like this or like rabbit strike energy is another good example. You know, or things that have a drawback or a requirement to activate them like reversal as an example. Like things like that are way better than double colorless or even double turbo felt a little bit too ubiquitous to me. Sure. At times. This definitely seems like the kind of gimmick I can get behind where you definitely like, I don't know, we can talk about it now that we're kind of through it all. But Team Rockets has a lot of potential. And there seems to be so many great cards, so many great supporters and tools and or item cards and all this stuff that it's almost like too big to fail in a lot of regards. And there's a lot of versatility. And this kind of energy ties it all together with allowing you to have psychic and dark attackers to the best historically best types in the game. So I definitely think there's a lot to explore with this set. I'm excited to see kind of what comes out of it. And where we go here. Yeah, but that being said, this took a long time to get through this time. I feel like this is one of the bigger sets or had kind of more of the cards, more cards in it that were at least worth mentioning than a lot of other sets I've had recently. So I don't think unfortunately, we're going to have time to get into any predictions for Utrecht, or Melbourne this weekend. But you know, stay tuned for those results. We'll definitely discuss them next week heading into Portland the following weekend. But we hope that you've enjoyed this journey through the Destined Rivals set. If you are not going to either that regional or special event this weekend, go see if your local pre-release is happening. Get signed up for it. I know that there's been a lot of interest for the set in particular. So if you do need to pre-register, make sure that you get that out of the way. But if you're interested in following Jon or I further, links to our socials will be in the description of the episode. We would definitely appreciate it if you would give the show a follow or a subscription on whatever podcasting platform you're on. Or if you're watching this over on YouTube, if you would subscribe to the channel there, we'd appreciate that as well. Any like, follow, comments, subscriptions, anything like that. Super great. We're super appreciative. And if you stuck around to the very end of this and have heard this whole spiel, really appreciate you for getting through the gargantuan episode that we are providing this week. Yeah, I mean, every time we do a set review, it's almost like here we go, Aaron, come back to it. Because it is a long session. But I think it really helps if you're a new player trying to digest the metagame or an older, more experienced player trying to figure out what decks, what cards to include on their decks. Just to hear somebody else's thoughts is always helpful. For sure. So I definitely see there's a lot of value in it. And we're happy to help with that. We're always happy to help people kind of form their own opinions and take away things on their own, as opposed to just regurgitating stuff they've seen online. So we're happy to help with that. Perfect. Couldn't have said it better myself. So with that being said, like we said, we will be discussing the results of the events happening this weekend on next week's episode. So look forward to that. But until then, John and I will see you all on the Battle Frontier. Have a good week.