Episode 2-22: ARBOLIEVERS RISE UP!

Do you have any luck getting any Ascended Heroes cards last week when the ETBs dropped? Uh, not a lot. I picked up... what did I pick up? The Psyduck and the Free Forced No-Rant, and then I think I picked up Omega. So enough to play Frostlast Monkey Dory if I go in that direction. Did you get your PokéPads yet? Nah, not yet. You're sitting on it? Uh, no, I'll probably get them next week. I think once the ETBs came out, so now the price is going to come down a little bit. It did for like a day. It dipped to like $6 and then it went back up to like $8.50 again. Oh my god, that's a disgusting proposition. Yeah I'll get them eventually, I mean, even in the card shop, all the bulk people turn in, people know to take the PokéPads out, so it's kind of hard to get them for cheap. That's rough. That's rough. I mean, if I have to pay $5 each, or worse comes to worse $8 each, I mean, I'll be alright. Yeah I mean, I went ahead and bit the bullet and just ordered them. Yeah. You know, I was about to take some, because I pulled out four from bulk that I sorted, but I was like, nah, I don't really want to buy these right now, I'll wait a couple weeks. We'll see. That, so we can just keep the rest then I guess. I went to a card show with my brother over the weekend, that was fun. Yeah I saw he made a comment on the last episode that we put out, something about pseudo-Wudo evolving and for the life of me, I could not remember what the context was. I have no idea what he's talking about. Let me see if I can pull it up real quick. I can message him and ask him. Oh Pat, why don't you just leave another comment for us and let us know exactly what you meant. Because yeah, it says, first off, pseudo-Wudo does not evolve, and where was I when a poker night was mentioned? You must play poker or something, at least Pokemon when you come up and visit, and I'm assuming that you guys did something to that effect when you were up there. We played, yeah we had a good time, yeah we, so that's what I did last weekend was, I went up Friday night, and then Friday we played standard a little bit, and then Saturday we had like a full day, we went into Boston, and we started, it's a cool city, winter sucks in Massachusetts, I will say that, and I think anybody that lives up there, I mean it's pretty in its own way when you can go back down to the south and don't have to live in it, but we went into Boston, and we had some time to kill before Red Bull did like a showcase where they had snowboarding around City Hall, and like they set up ramps, and like a whole like crazy two-story like rails down the steps from the top of City Hall to the bottom, it was insane. People were doing like backflips, and it was a great time, like the highlights are awesome, so definitely recommend like checking that out on I guess Red Bull's YouTube channel or whatever, but it was a lot of fun, but before that, that started at like two, so before that we went to, I think Card Vault's the company, Tom Brady I guess has started doing like sports cards, so his company showcased a Pokemon and sports card show right next to TD Garden where the Celtics and Bruins play, so that was cool, so we walked around that, it was like 10 bucks to enter, which whatever, and then I bought a little bit of stuff, I have a buddy who is trying to like master set all the IRs, so I bought some IRs from Blackpool Whiteflyer for him, and then I bought some Primes for myself, and some Full Art, you kind of got me in to the Full Art item cards. They look good. They look good, I like them so much, so I was like let me see, so you know sometimes you go around those shows and you can pull them out of like the $2 or $4 binder for pretty, so I picked up a play set of like night stretchers for like three or four bucks each, and then air balloons for three bucks each, so I was happy with that, and then yeah, I'll tell a funny story because I was like getting a kick out of this. The first thing I buy at the card show, and it's still kind of early, but I pull up to a table where there's not a whole lot there. It's two kids and their dad's kind of off to the side, and since it was at a, the venue was kind of like a nightclub that was like during the day or whatever, but there was like bars everywhere because it's a nightclub, so like the dad that was next to the kids is just like drinking a Michelob Ultra, and I'm like alright man, but you know these kids have all their singles set up. They have a bunch of slabs, like high-end slabs, pretty expensive, not like something crazy, but like expensive stuff, and then like an ETB full of singles, and I'm a sucker for an ETB full of singles, so I start pouring through that, and I like pull out two cards. One's a Mismagius, or Misdreavus, whatever the earlier stage is. It's the Wizards of the Coast one that has like, yeah, the Blackstar promo, that the artwork is hilarious to me, like it looks like, it looks like a child druid, right? It looks like a child druid, but it also looks like, like the Squidward, like chiseled jaw whenever he's like cuts, cuts, I don't know how to describe it perfectly. I'm too far into the brain rot cycle, but yeah, it just looks super funny. I, maybe we'll, Aaron will put a picture of it in post, and we'll throw it up here, but it's, it's really funny looking, and I'm like this is cool, and near minutes, like 15 bucks, but it was mildly placed, and I, so I go and ask like how much is it, you know, to the kid, and he's like, I don't know. He looks over at his like older brother to try to get the price, and I'm like okay, well, you know, I looked it up just so I know, so I showed him like near minute 16, and I said this isn't near minute, like there's whiting on the back, whatever. I'd give you like three bucks for it, because it's like, that's what the price is for my moderately played or whatever, and he's just like, he looks at his older brother again, and doesn't, kind of sheepishly says okay, I guess, yeah, or something like that, and so that's fine, but then there's the other card that I saw was like a Greninja V that, Greninja V is not an expensive card, but it was like pretty severely miscut to where you could almost see the next card below it on the sheet, and I don't really love miscuts, but I have a buddy, Ben, who kind of collects them, and I'm like, well, I'll get it for him if it's cheap, and nothing in this ETB is priced, like nothing, so that's annoying, so I'm like, how much is this, and he's just like, has no clue. He's like, okay, sure, you know, and so I'm like, well, do you have an idea of what you might want to get out of it, and he has no clue, and I'm like, okay, well, normally this is like a $1 single, you know, bulk V, but since it's miscut, like it might be worth a little bit more, I'll give you five bucks for it, and he takes the card, and he asks his older brother, like, do you think five bucks is worth it? His older brother doesn't know, and so he's basically tells me, no, I don't feel like I want to, I don't want to sell it anymore, and I'm like, okay, yeah, and he takes the card back to me, puts it in like a top loader, and then puts a $50 sticker on the back of the top loader, and I'm just like, what are we doing, man, like, okay, so what. You told him it might be worth a little more. Yeah, I did tell him that, to my detriment, but like, I don't try to like scam kids, like, you know, it might be his first show, and then I talked to the dad afterwards, and I think he said it was like his third show, or something like that, but still, like, kind of basics, like price your stuff, know what you want to get for it before you bring it to a show, but the kicker for me was, like, okay, well, I'm not going to buy the V if you're going to raise the price to 50, like, I'll just get the Mismagius promo, and be on my way, and so I'm like, I pull out a $5 bill, and it's like, do you have change for a five, and he's like, no, I don't have change for a five, and I'm just like, so I'm like, the best part was Pat, earlier in the day, I think picked something up like another cheap single, and the vendor is like, sorry, man, all I have is quarters. What is going on? $2 and quarters, and I'm like, Oh, I had, I had like a, I think I had $2, I had a single on me or something like that. And I go over to Pat, I'm like, Pat, give me your quarters. So I go back to the kid and buy the card for a $1 bill and $2 worth of quarters. And I'm just like, there now, and now we don't have to worry about the quarters the rest of the day. And that sounds like a playground card deal, if I've ever heard of one. Dude, it felt Mickey Mouse, it felt. I just mean, like, legitimately, like elementary school kids, like that's something my son would do at school. Yeah, it definitely felt like, and I'm like, they kind of said, like, is this going to be the rest of the show where I like walk around and like nobody has changed and nobody knows what their cards are worth. And I'm like, having to like look up pricing on everything. But thankfully, like the rest of it was fine. Like I bought everything else was priced accordingly. And everybody was pretty chill. I found some cool primes that I don't know. So that was fun. And then we did the Red Bull thing. And then we went to like a cool record store and got dinner at a yakitori place, which was cool. And then me and my brother that night, talking about Pokemon, went and did a Zoroark two player cube that I made a while back. Where I'm getting onto Instagram now. So I posted the two lists we have on there. And so me, I always usually lean towards like the Gardea build whenever we draft the cube just because I feel like it's the best out of all the ones. But I mean, that's to say like you could do a Gardea, like you have, you can kind of counter the Gardea build in a bunch of different ways. And there's like a Garbodor line. There's fighting. There's a Golisopod line. And both players start with like a 4-4 Zoroark. Okay. And for DCE. And then you kind of draft everything else for your deck from there. And there's like four puzzles at a time. And so we do draft where it's like I lay out four cards and one player picks one card. The other player picks two and the other player picks one and then it reverses where they lay out four cards. I pick one, they pick two and then so on so forth. So we both have drafted all the cards in the card pool and then you make a 60 card deck and we just did a best two out of three. It's just a lot of fun. It was pretty chill, you know, just good to hang out with my brother. And then while we were out and about on town Saturday, I get a notification from the airline that my flight might be impacted by incoming winter weather. And boy, howdy, was it? You know, I was flying out Monday originally. Monday morning and I changed my flight that day. Like I canceled my original flight and booked another flight for Saturday. And so I ended up flying out Saturday at one o'clock from a different airport than I flew into. But weirdly enough, or I guess conveniently enough, my sister-in-law and my niece were flying into that airport. Literally the same plane that they flew up and flew into the airport on. Like the turnaround was quick. And so I got to hug them as they came off the plane. And then I boarded that plane to go to Richmond. So that was pretty wild. So it's just kind of a crazy story of how that happened. And then, yeah, just since then, I don't know, I've been playing a little bit of Pokes. We had our League Challenge this Monday. I was coaching another kid, getting ready for Orlando still. So, yeah, I don't know, nothing outside of the norm for me, I'd say, as far as Pokemon goes. But how about you, Aaron? I know there might be a reason why you didn't work. Well, truthfully, you were able to record last week, I think. Yeah. Yeah. You can't put that on me, man. I was ready on Tuesday. You were ready on Tuesday. It was also my birthday last week. So. Oh, excuses, excuses. Yeah. Yeah. My wife planned a nice dinner for me last Tuesday, so we couldn't record Tuesday. And then Wednesday, I think, didn't work out either. But yeah. So obviously, yeah, go ahead. Well, we said at the end of the last episode two weeks ago, my wife and I welcomed another baby on the 12th. So congrats to her and myself, I guess. But so we spent four days in the hospital, watched a lot of curling. And also, I kept my eye on EUIC while we were there and just trying to adjust everything. And then finally coming out and like we have this rather large age gap between our kids. So our son is nine. And so having a new baby, it's like, I don't know if I remember how to do this. And but it's it's been a learn quick. It's been. an adjustment. And like John said, I thought I was ready to record on Tuesday. And then we had a pretty rough night, like baby was just really fussy. He didn't really sleep a ton. So then we were supposed to record Wednesday and I just was not up for it. Like I would not have been able to function to try to record something. And my wife was in pretty much the same state mentally. So we were both kind of just hanging on for dear life on Wednesday. But we're getting there. We're getting there. We're adjusting. Everybody's doing well. And I don't really think I can ask for much more than that. Nice. So like last, like I said, that we can watch the UIC last weekend, watched a good bit of Fukuoka. So being up in the middle of the night with a newborn means that it was pretty easy to tune into Azul stream off and on and see what was going on with that without having to just watch a VOD. So it was kind of cool to see that in real time, because normally I know like that stuff kind of wraps up around like five or six a.m. our time on whatever given day, but instead I was just there for a lot of it. So that was pretty interesting. I got to see a lot of like post-rotation stuff. So we kind of like watched current format like Phantasmal Flames next weekend, watched a thing two sets from now and still have not seen significant gameplay in the Ascended Heroes format, which is extremely frustrating, but still have been playing a lot of it actually. Had seen a post from you may remember him from back in the day. I know he's still pretty. He started starting to be a more active player now from Tennessee, Sam Liggett. Hmm. Yeah, yeah, I saw him at a regional I think at the beginning of the season. He's been around off and on. I know he's been to a few events this year, but he posted a Dragapult list that he had gone to a few cups with had won like three cups, I think. And it's a really like pared down list only plays five energy. But it's like a thicker dust of our line and just really leans into the like I'm going to combo off and only I only need to attack with Dragapult twice to win a game, so I don't need all these extra energy. And I kind of took that because his list was still built for Phantasmal Flames. I modified it a bit to be able to do it in Ascended Heroes and have just been like have ground out a fair number of games on TCG Live, like went from, I don't know, whatever, like 300 points, whatever, like ultra ball, great ball tier up to like eighteen hundred Arceus with just this. And it's like I'm not a Dragapult player by any means. But this list, this list feels significantly better, in my opinion, than what most people consider to be the standard for Dragapult. So I'd be interested to see if it could gain any level of traction. The problem is for that to happen. Somebody like quote unquote more notable would really have to put it on the map first by playing it to a tournament, which is relatively unlikely to happen given the results of EUIC. So I know we're going to talk about that a little bit. We're a week late on that, but it is still relevant because we do have Seattle coming up. So we're going to bounce from EUIC with our predictions, kind of brief overview of results there. And then we'll maybe like we're going to dip into Fukuoka, even though we won't see these cards for a little bit. I think that tournament was pretty fun, pretty interesting. I'm assuming you got to check it out a little bit, at least the results from it. Yeah, I just saw the results. I think I watched too much. But yeah, the results were crazy. Yeah. So we'll look at that and then just check out. We got Seattle this coming weekend. This, I think, is finally correct me if I'm wrong. The last tournament in this format. Right. So then because next week we'll have San Juan. Oh, yes. Send them what? Puerto Rico. Let's be. Do you know, are they doing a stream for that? They did last year. I don't know, I might do some digging, I might do some digging, might try to figure it out. But then. I don't know, man, I'm looking forward to Orlando. I am hopeful. I'm still not 100% positive that I'm going to be able to play, but I'm hoping I am because I'm having a lot more fun, I think, with some of these newer cards and seeing it doesn't the format doesn't feel so limited, which is really weird to say, because a lot of people are like, oh, Ascended Heroes doesn't change anything. But really, the more you kind of play with the cards, in my opinion, it does feel like it changes it somewhat significantly in terms of, yes, the like quote unquote big four are still the big four. But even you, I see prove there are a lot of decks outside of that big four that are fully viable and capable of taking down tournaments. Sure. And then we'll get to the results. But yeah, I think anybody that says this format is still like, honestly, we're going to look back at this format in like five years from now or whatever, and like really kind of miss it, I'd say. Like, I mean, maybe that's just me being like a little more sentimental. But I think, honestly, this is like you have good hand disruption in Iona. You have good comeback mechanics. You have like fair Pokemon right now. I mean, maybe some things like Budew and Dusknoir are annoying, but I think they're also like, I don't know. Well, it'll be interesting to talk about maybe after rotation comes and we'll kind of do a recap a little bit more or talk about it. But yeah, I like Pokemon right now. I mean, I played some today. I coached a kid and I was just playing through some like I played Gardevoir for the first time in like forever. And that it was just fun to like kind of figure stuff out and like figure out the strategy of because I didn't have my own Gardevoir deck. I think I left it at home. So I borrowed his dad's Gardevoir deck. And it was like just a little bit different of a list than I would have ran. More more traditional with like a 2-1 Jellicent line. So I had to like kind of figure out how to best use that against his Golden Goat deck. And but also just like try to help them learn the matchup and learn what to do and what not to do and all that kind of stuff. But it was really fun. Just fun to play Pokemon right now, man. I still enjoy it. And I'm hearing that you are kind of in the same mindset. And I'm excited to be able to play a regional, especially since you'll hopefully be there at the same time. So that'll be a lot of fun. For sure. It's like the first regional we've both played in, I think, since you came back. Well, yeah, because you are judging. Yeah. How many did you even play last year? None. The last one I played before. Yeah. So the last I I played in NAIC 2024 and that was the last major I played in. OK, so I mean, I played that event, too. OK, but I guess we were really like, you know, we weren't in the same circle at that point. So no, no. We were like more just familiar with each other. I mean, obviously we knew each other from whatever. Right. 2010, 2011, something like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It got kind of reconnected with our mutual friend Ian, and that led to all of this. So we could go ahead and look at our predictions for EUIC and see how wrong I was about a lot of stuff. Yeah. So I got him in front of me right here. We had, let's see, one, two, three, four or five predictions. Some good, some bad. I'm not going to lie. I sugarcoat it. We said pick a road deck to make top eight. Aaron, you said Greninja pile. I said Flare and Noctowl. Either one of us did particularly well. Aaron, the top Greninja pile was three hundred and ninety third. My Flare and Noctowl pick the top one was one hundred and seventy six. So not even a top one, twenty eight for either one of us. I would say that the best road deck and I know people might say that it's not a road deck at this point, but like I'd say and Zora, because the play rate is a lot closer to Greninja pile and Flare and Noctowl than you would think, even though there's like a lot of top players that this is their pet deck. But we had one in fourth and one in sixth, and it was only a play rate of one point two percent, whereas Greninja pile had a point eight percent play rate and Flare and Noctowl had one point zero eight percent. So pretty close to the other two. But. So that would be the top one. And the monkey do a frost last if you don't buy into ends or being a road deck or. Yeah, it's like beyond that, just scrolling through results. It depends. Then it's like, what is your frost? What is your definition of a road deck is either. Yeah, like you said, Frosted Monkey Dory. Or do you consider Pidgeot Control Rogue or Tank Kangaskhan? And then it's like as you scroll down, the first one that I hit on here that I'm like, OK, truly, this is a road deck in my mind is the like Tim, Tim Danklin, Blood Moon, Ursula Luna, like non EX deck. And you know, she taped it. Yeah. Yep. 74th place. Yes. The anti meta god. I love that. He's he's been like the road deck enjoyer for forever. That's cool. So I kind of gave that a wash to neither one of us. So the next one, the next prediction was predict the number of golden go and top cut over or under one point five. Aaron shows the under I chose the over. Aaron got this one successfully with only one golden go being a top cut. That player did do particularly well with his top cut around, and we'll cover all that in a minute. So Aaron gets that one. The next one was which Zard variant will have the best representation in top 32. Aaron picked Pult Zard. I picked Pidgey Zard, which left out probably the most popular version of Charizard that neither one of us picked with Charizard Noctowl. There were three Charizard Noctowl and only one Pult Zard and one Pidgey Zard. But you lucked out with Oscar Madsen having a top eight finish with his deck as playing Pult Zard. So I'll give that one to you since even though we tied on that and we were wrong. Yeah, and we were wrong. I think you still get the edge on that because you're yeah, your pick did better than any other variant of Charizard. The fourth prediction was what region will have the highest placing Gardevoir? Aaron picked North America, and unsurprisingly, it did really well with Makani making a really deep run. I picked Australia and Brent made a deep run as well. I think he made it all the way to Ace-Em. So you beat me by having a player in top eight. And then, yeah, Brent, I think it was an Ace-Em. So Brent had good guesses on the correction. Brent was actually just outside of Ace-Em. Oh, all right. He was one point off. Unfortunate. That's yeah. So solid for the correction. Yeah, still. So I mean, it's hard to do well at any tournament, and especially I think this I see had close to 4000 players. So yeah, it's it's it's insane runs for and both of these players. But yeah, you got that one. And then the last one, I I needed to take at least one pity win away from this, which we said which dark deck will have the best showing. Aaron, you went with Grimmsnarl, and I picked the eventual winner of the tournament with Mega Absol blocks. So, you know, I can get away with that. But overall, Aaron, you kind of swept this one pretty well with three to one. So I guess you win this round of predictions. But yeah, I mean, I know it's a lot of fun. I pretty distinctly remember in the discussion of those dark decks that I said that I fully felt that I was going to be wrong about it, but I just wanted to stick to my guns. The absolute deck has definitely been creeping up as people have really like figured it out before, like just to look more kind of results proper, I guess, really quick. Like one of the real big, interesting takeaways from this event, and I'll jump back. We can look at metagame and see maybe how we think that that'll impact things, or maybe it'll be better. We'll save that when we go to look at how do we think this will affect Seattle and just talk about kind of results right now. But the interesting thing is you see this really respectable record. I mentioned that Brent was just outside of a sim with his 11 to one record. Yeah, we had all the way down to gone P. Weijun with an 11 to one record at 17th place. Since when does X to one just can't make cut like that's. Yeah, and I think that's a result, I'm assuming, of the size of the tournament as it was just the mass number of players that was kind of getting closer and closer and closer to that threshold for the next additional round where all of this would get broken up more and it wouldn't be an issue. But this has got to feel bad for people that are at this record. Yeah, that factor of you're so close to that threshold. And then also, if you look at the tirade for this tournament, it was a much lower tirade than what we had seen for a lot of the events. Oh, cool. Yeah. Oh, so that I think factors into it, too, where there's just more points in the void, if you will, or more more like results that ended with a higher match point total, which inflates the overall point total to make it a more competitive or, I don't know, forces some of those X2 ones to miss. So, yeah, it's unfortunate. I think. I don't know. There was talk some other I've seen some talk of like. Do we just guarantee that all X2 ones make cut or do we make it to where, you know, you lower that threshold to where it's easier for all the X2 ones to naturally make it in or like you play that extra round or whatever? I don't know. Yeah, it feels really bad, but like. But there's got to be a cut off. There's got to be a cut off somewhere. You got to. Yeah, exactly. We got to end the tournament somewhere. And it is unfortunate. But at the same time, like, do I feel like the results change because of that? Maybe like maybe players were playing towards the X2 one record versus a X1 two record, and that could impact that. But like, hey, now, you know, for the next time now, if we have an IC, that's close to this level of players and, you know, the tirades like that. You can kind of predict the I could get to the point where X2 one doesn't make it into top cut and you have to play accordingly. Well, and notably, even if X2 one did make it into cut, we still would have had somebody bubble because there's still a hard cut off at top 16. Yeah. So it's like, you're just not, there's no, again, there's like, there has to be a cutoff somewhere. Um, it just is crazy how thin the margins are getting to where really you can only afford to lose one round if you want to make it into cut at some of these events. I know that there was a, that what this happened in a regional, I want to say last season, maybe two seasons ago, I think it was like Charlotte, if I remember correctly, where there was, um, at the time it was like X two, Oh, didn't make it into cut or something, or maybe didn't make, gosh, I can't not off the top of my head. I can't remember what the scenario was. And they ended up making some system changes to where it was easier and more possible for that to occur and actually make it into cut as the tournaments went on throughout the season. I don't know if that changed like that needs to happen again here. Like you said, tournament has to end sometime. These ICs are only going to, as long as they allow more entrance and have adequate space, they're only going to continue to grow. And, you know, the player base doesn't seem to be dwindling by any means. You know, we had people kind of begging for an last minute release of more seats for EUIC as they were trying to get in. And they, I mean, they, to EUIC's credit, they did put out tickets like the week before, I think, right? A few, a few, I know it was really limited. And I also think that they intentionally avoided going over the threshold for an additional round. Sure. I mean, there's a lot of factors and, you know, on the, if we're talking about tournament dynamics, one thing that I know that was a rub for the seniors was that they played seven rounds of phase one on day one, and then they had to come back on Saturday and play the last round of phase one on Saturday. Morning before they played phase two and top cut all of Saturday. So yeah, it made for, like, I was talking with Omar's parents at my league cup or league challenge on Monday. And just, yeah, they're like, yeah, we get it. Like he's, he could see both sides of it, but he was just like, it doesn't really make sense when, you know, so first, and we were talking like, it just doesn't make sense when, for some people, like this is their big trip of the year, they're going to England and the kids out of the tournament. But you don't want to like pull them out right before he's done playing just so that they can go sightseeing because like the Excel center, if you've been to London, like it's not near any of the main attractions in London. It's very far outside the center of the city. I mean, it's only a couple of train stops, though, like London's pretty easily travelable. Once you as long as as long as you can handle like the subway system, it's not too bad. I'm not going to say the that the Excel center is conveniently located by any means, but it's not really anything, but it's not that bad. Yeah, again, it would definitely feel bad to show up, play one round and just be done. Yeah. And you're done. Like you lose your winning in and now you're forced to like kind of go hang out with the family as you tour London. Like I can't just literally just start your day off. Your day gets ruined and now you need to go try to enjoy a city. Yeah. So as a child, you know, my heart goes out to the seniors and their families, but like hopefully hopefully Pokemon takes the feedback and people offer the feedback in appropriate ways. And yeah, we just move forward and grow as a player base. So, yeah, we'll see what happens in a similar vein. How do you feel about some masters have done kind of the opposite thing where they'll play all of phase one and then they play the first round of phase two on day one? Yeah, I don't have as big a problem with that, I think. I mean, it is exhausting. Like, you know, you do want kind of a break after finishing phase one. But nine rounds at originals used to be the norm. So I don't have a huge issue with nine rounds being like a normal amount. I mean, otherwise, like the tournament still like Toronto didn't finish on Sunday until. I want to say like seven or eight o'clock at night, so it was pretty late by the time it finished, so I don't see. I mean, realistically, like unless you're trying to leave at like ten o'clock at night on Sunday. It's not really prudent to try to because it's just so much longer of a day like Topka, especially now that we have a sim drag stuff out a lot. And it's just the reality of it, like seventy five minutes, best two out of three just takes close to two hours, if not, you know, more with deck check and with. You know, some matches are finishing up and you have to wait on that. And some some players like progressions, not entirely like, oh, OK, 75 minutes is up starting the next round, right? I mean, you're right. You have to. It's a lot of sit around and wait or hurry up and wait, especially if you're going to keep up with production and like what matches they plan to stream. Yeah, like if they stream top both in top four or something like that, like they do for ICS. So it just makes for a long day. But to answer your question, I think I'm OK with it. Like it's a it's a it's a reasonable sacrifice. Well, I can see the argument from four pushing it to like kicking the can down the road, so to speak, and pushing it onto Sunday because that affects a much smaller percentage of the player base. And is it inconvenient for those people? 100%. But by the same token, like everybody that would be finishing phase one on day one, they want to go hang out with their friends that didn't make it into phase two that aren't necessarily going to want to stick around while they play another round or they just want to go get dinner. Get out of the hall at like nine or 10 p.m. when a lot of places are shutting down, unless it's like a bar. No, I hear you. I think my counter to that is the tournament hall has to stay open until the last match finishes and you can't start tearing down until the last match finishes. So if we shove it all on to day two and run until 10 p.m., you know, all the all the all the breakdown has to occur, like all the production has to tear down, like production tears down the whole stage. Yeah. You know, everything like Gigi has to break down all the switches. And I mean, they start doing the switches and VG stuff before it ends, obviously. But all the TCG stuff like, you know, carting at all, like we can't bring the trucks in to load up anything until everybody's out of the hall. So, yeah, just logistically speaking, like you can't start tearing down until everybody's out of the hall. And then it's already a late night and you have to have like a lot of convention centers force you to be out of there at a certain point in time. So, you know, it's one thing like when you're going from like you can run a little later on Saturday because you have the hall for the next day. A lot of convention centers want you out of there by like midnight that night or something like that. I mean, I don't know that as a fact, so I shouldn't say that necessarily. I don't know what what time they want you out of there, but like logistically, like you want to be out of there as soon as you can be, right? Yeah. Yeah. And well, maybe my understanding is most event spaces, if you're not out by midnight, you pay for the next day. Yeah. Which that sounds awful. So, I mean, I get it from a business perspective. It just is inconvenient and, you know, unfortunate for players. But that aside, tournament logistics aside, if we like look at these results, is there anything like any list in particular that you would want to look at or just kind of talking kind of like the vibes of the event as a whole and kind of looking at where we've got, you know, Absol, we said, won the event. Drew Stevenson managed to take Goldango to another deep run, came in second, almost closed things out. We had another apps or two more apps or boxes in. Top cut and a sim, like you said, Liam Halliburton and then Christian Lubella bringing the end Zorach into top cut. The county tram with Gardevoir and McConaughey story was really interesting. I think he was undefeated in Swiss. Technically, it's like undefeated with an asterisk because he did have one loss in Swiss that was because he slept through a round. Which, yeah, it was really easy. That's an interesting result. I don't know if anyone else can ever can say that they had ever done. Like legends. The weird thing is that it's not like it was the first round of the day. My understanding is that it was like, oh, it was like round six or something. Yeah. Or maybe it was like in day two. He slept through it. I don't it's weird. I mean, you just you just did it for the aura, you know, like the whole like, yeah, around six, around six there against control. That's a good round to sleep through. Yeah, right. If you're going to you might as well just take a nap while you're playing anyway. But yeah, that's that's that's legendary status. That's crazy, dude. Yeah. So that's cool. Yeah, I got two two czar decks with Oscar Madsen proving to everybody that, you know, the Pulitzer master is him. Jackson Ford with another deep Charizard run. Like I said, Lucas Singh was one of these other Absol decks and then rounding things out with the Jelly Guardi from Julio Rodriguez in 10th place. And the like notable thing here, no Dragapult whatsoever. I mean, even looking down to top 16, no Dragapult. We don't see one until we get down to 18th place. And there's a few of them here in top 32. But like the big story was. It looks like the dark decks showed up and kind of showed out and said, like, hey, we are a small contingent of separate dark type deck archetypes, but we are fierce and we are mighty and you should fear us. Yeah, I mean, definitely the name of the game was the Absol box and the Zora kind of showing up there. Absol box especially, I'd say made a name for itself. I mean, we saw Tord went out regional with it earlier in the year, but I don't think that it was seen as like a top tier play going into this tournament. I think a lot of good players were shifting towards it or playing it and testing it going into this. And that showed here, obviously. But as far as like the Metashare, it definitely didn't have as much. Like it definitely wasn't top four. Yeah. Coming in below Grimmsnarl and, you know, Gardevoir, Goldengood, Dragapult and Charizard. That's shown there. But still, just like just over 4%. And it's a little bit more than it has. Yeah, that's significantly higher than what it has been. I think if you go back and look at like Toronto, I think it was like two, maybe 3%. And, you know, when you talk about going from two or three up to four, like that's like, oh, that's only one or two, but like that's a 100. So that's somewhere between a 60 and, you know, 100% increase. Like, that's crazy. It's pretty significant, for sure. You know, considering. And then just there was a type not even that long ago. An absolutely stellar win rate in day one and then carrying over to day two, it actually improves on its win rate to just showing like it was a crazy good play for this event. Dragapult showing it was, you know, not a good play for the event, despite being the overall most popular deck at 18%. So we look at like Dragapult, Goldengood, top two plays, both sub 50% win rates across day one. If we go to day two, just to be fair to both of them, still sub 50% actually having worse win rates in day two, just showing players are overall ready to play against these decks. A lot of people are teched for them. We saw a lot of the mega apps all decks specifically toward actually brought the cornerstone back out, expecting a lot of Goldengood players not to play a cornerstone answer. But most of them are playing the toad scroll. And I think the other notable one, like if we do, I will pull up one other list because I can't remember what I know. Lucas had a different tech, but I can't remember what it was because we don't see it. There's no toad scroll. No, it's double Yveltal. So, yeah, he brings back the retreat locks. He's got the Genesect to shut off like the prime catcher against Goldengood. And then also Erica's invitation to counter the Turo. So, you know, you bring up the Genesect, you clutch it. They Turo it out of play. You Erica it back down because they don't have a way to get it out of their hand most of the time. Unless they're going to say unless they can superior to wait the same turn. And you just try to win the game through retreat lock. And that's something where we saw that be pretty effective, even in the finals of this event in a list that wasn't really tailor made for it. Oh, goodness. Names escape me right now. One second. If my Ethan. Edwin Edwin. So we saw Edwin up against Drew in the finals, and Edwin was able to pull off a successful Yveltal clutch play to close out the finals. You know, despite everything, we thought it looked like Drew was in a pretty good position until, you know, Edwin was able to buy enough time between clutch and countercatcher and boss and bringing up unfavorable targets for Drew and just really holding them off with that retreat lock. So. This deck is very versatile. All of these top four lists are different from each other, even though they do obviously share similarities, they all play Absol, they all play Monkey Dory, Petron, Latias, et cetera. But the way that they're choosing to tackle matchups to show the deck is extremely adaptable. And the way that the opponent has to play against those answers is going to be different from game to game, depending on who they sit down against. So I think that the surprise factor in it, it really plays into the strength of this deck. Yeah, definitely. Like, you don't necessarily know what the techs are until you see them. And like the Erica's, I'm sure got so much knowledge over the course of the tournament. Like, I mean, I'm not sitting there across from an Absol box and like the Yveltal I expect, but then like you drop Erica's and your heart sinks like you're just like, oh, my gosh, like I thought I got through the stupid Yveltal this turn and they just kind of come back out and put another Yveltal down without even playing an Ice Stretcher and Erica's. And you're just you're it's such a bad, bad feeling. Yeah, I mean, that's I think that's the story is Mega Absol box is is rising as players have figured out ways to counter the bad matchups for the deck. You know, and it's not just Cornerstone. It's not a hard counter. It's more of a soft counter that allows. Versatility and other matchups that provides value against other decks, and I think that's usually how stuff goes But it's cool to see like kind of innovations like we just talked about Can we look at Ethan or not you think Edwin's list real quick just so we saw what he did for Golden Goat He had the test right it was toad so yeah I think that was like you said the most popular way to deal with it. Did it run? No TM evo Just the turbo okay, yeah, but you get the two toads down They can't deal with it that you have you can definitely get out one at that point And then yeah, it can be really hard for them to hit that 120 unless you know they have an answer with a couple different things, but Yeah, it's a It's a good deck when we knew that kind of going in but There's just new technology being thrown in with the jumbo ice cream and like different things here with Trying to think about Missed and double missed energy is new I think one wasn't uncommon, but like to you know taking for Maybe an enhanced hammer or just being able to find it earlier Right and just having it for mirror is really important and then you have like the watchtower to shut off the knock towels against the Tsar decks because that's your other rather unfavorable matchup and Just know if for whatever reason you don't have a read that gold Ango is gonna be really big in the event Suddenly you freed up three spaces by cutting these toad scrolls You can fit something else in and just make yourself more adaptable in that way instead. It's a really strong deck overall I think that the one thing that I actually wanted to look at just maybe for anybody who was looking to counter ABS all box Because it does seem like a rather difficult thing to do Just like what is this deck bad against essentially? I mean raging okie-dokie Okie-dokie, but no, but realistically yes raging bolt has always been like a big difficult thing The kind of the beat stick aggro decks raging bolt Sarah ledge Sarah ledge Flareon actually is relatively difficult and yes charizard and they know from there it kind of just The popular decks the deck is strong against like when you look at I mean that all these are a little bit unrealistic But let's find Like grim snarl good matchup 60% drag a bolt 63% jelly guardies 59% pulse art 59% Tara box 55% straight guardie 55% regular gold Ango and Zorarch this one is interesting to me because I actually would think without Zekrom being available for the Zorach deck I would think that this would actually be a rather unfavorable matchup, but I guess maybe you can just leverage the ability to use the rage style attack from the Russia ram Enough and you have enough resources available through trade that you can kind of weather the storm of the ABS all and just kind Of bossing around it and ignoring it long enough. Maybe taking out all the monkey Dory's on the bench So you don't have to worry about the terminal period Interesting probably a pretty skill testing matchup. I know it was like Zorach seems to be and Kind of on the same wavelength as absol I think except it's got an even smaller pool of players that are willing to play it and you don't Generally see your average person picking it up. Like we look at you know, there were what well that that's this matchup in particular If we look at ends or arc 83 players in day one and that shrinks down to Okay, it doesn't doesn't show me. Oh well But really small player base overall for the event and it's a deck that I think we're gonna continue to see kind of rise in success as At least with with the small contingent of people like if you see Christian Labella or Liam Halliburton They're probably well Christian kind of swaps every once in a while But Liam will for sure still be playing Zoroark and will probably make another top cut appearance at the next event that he goes to Yeah, it is interesting like how Good this deck is even with a lot like even with not having ascended heroes at this point And then yeah, it's very exciting If you're a Zoroark player like one of my locals is really into Zoroark and he's just like salivating like chomping at the bit to get access to the Zekrom and You know pokey pad, I guess but more poorly Zekrom It just allows you to reach a lot more I can have it. Yeah, but the fact that it's so competitive and so dominant I Mean when you watch the gameplay from that deck, it's fascinating because it doesn't It doesn't overwhelm you like it doesn't look like it's not like Golden ago where it's hitting for 300 damage immediately turn to It feels like a Chinese finger trap kind of deck where your opponent punched or like kind of quicksand where your opponent punches in and nothing happens or like you kind of The more your opponent struggles into the deck the harder and harder it hits back And you're just able to set up checkmate scenarios very well and like kind of out Positioning yourself against a lot of other decks And one thing I saw a lot of was like the ends Darmanitan like Liam got a lot of value about In his stream game. I watched I did watch that And that card is so good like sniping right now, especially because nobody's running shaman Just tears a lot of decks apart when you can snipe for you know a double knockout against to gimme ghoul turn two or Just a number of different things and running the power glass you can kind of chain the chaos back-to-back And you see you're running the two reversal energies so you're even able to use Dharmaka directly So our Darmanitan sorry Directly, so I mean you just have those two in there for Darmanitan, which is crazy Yeah, it's effective It circles back like this is the way people initially thought the deck was going to be played when it was first revealed And it was how people attempted to play it and it kind of flopped and then it we had these lists rise up that completely Like ignored the Darmanitan and just played a couple of Reshiram's and made do with that and some other attacks And now we've kind of circled back to where hey, this is necessary let's put it back in and it's kind of the if you're on the Like cutting edge with a deck like this or a deck like Absol and you can stay on the forefront of what is Good popular necessary having a good meta read is really kind of essential when you're playing either of these decks and Being able to construct them appropriately but if you have that knowledge and the ability to maintain kind of a Locked in mental status in terms of having a good read on what's going on in terms of meta trends and everything like that's where these decks thrive and they become more adaptable and more difficult for people to adapt to Because you don't necessarily know like you said, you don't know what they're packing until you sit down across the table from them Right. Yeah, you don't know how How many ants peepee up they run or like what stadiums? What's your stadium count? So yeah, you don't and that's that's the fun of a lot of these tournaments is We don't know like deck lists before we start playing and sit down. You know, it's changed a little bit with top eight now sure But for the most part, yeah, you're going in blind to most of these matchups But I think we've covered a lot of the decks. Is there any other decks you want to look at? No on your side. No, I think I'm good. I like just The interesting thing to me. We've got one weekend left in this format. Finally What Really is gonna change like are people actually gonna like see these results It's been a couple of weeks since this happened Are people going to actually change what they're playing we're going into Seattle or is Everybody just kind of probably set on what they were gonna play and they're just gonna let the chips fall where they may for this final tournament of phantasmal flames Yeah, I think it'll be similar to Vegas where we saw a huge uptick in Absol box and then the moment that players start to realize that the deck is a lot harder than They originally thought it was to play maybe it won't even be as much as after Vegas because I remember after Vegas I remember just going to locals and like cleaning up with golden go because so many players are playing absolute box and Even if they had like the cornerstones They weren't really playing it to a high level like you need to play that deck where they would bench they would bench stuff to where you could boss up and KO something on the bench and then just Deal with one cornerstone over the course of the game with I ran the Megan wall a while so that was enough but I Do imagine there will be an uptick in play for mega abseil. I don't think it'll be quite as high as it was after Vegas Although we didn't have a lot of events Did we have a lot of events after Vegas like I remember there might have been a gap After Vegas Week after Vegas was LA I see Okay, okay, so did we have the same format then as LA I see Yeah, yeah Right. So that's crazy. Yeah, that was you I sees in the same format No, well, that was mega. Sorry. I thought you meant same format as Vegas. That was mega evolution So immediately after that was when phantasmal flames was legal like the week the week later, okay After LA I see that's right. That's right. Okay, so but we saw I guess the mega I've sold back at Yeah with that at Vegas because it didn't really gain anything from Pentel, is that correct? I'm kind of drawing a blank is to like I got ice cream like the ice cream is texture. Ice cream is technically another But yes, yeah now Tord brought it out in mega evolution for sure Yeah But yeah, so we've seen the perfection of the list and then yeah I think people will try to maybe pick it up and play it. I don't know how well it will succeed It's one of those decks where if you haven't put a lot of man-hours into it it's gonna be just it doesn't seem very hard to pilot and then you play it and then When everything works perfectly fine, it's not that hard but like it's just the games where it's like How do I come back from a bad board state or when do I use my penny? Appropriately and how do I fix the monkey Matt? I don't know it. I don't think it's as hard as or guess So like That would be surprising to me if we saw a huge uptick in Zorak because I mean it's done really well Off and on at the last few regionals and now again at this I see and it still sticks at like a Super low meta percentage, right? Right, like right. It was one point that we talked about earlier was 1.2% even though it's like a Continuously top cut it at a lot of regionals and stuff. Well, it's a very polarizing deck though Like you'll have these for every Liam Halliburton or Christian Labella result. You have the guy that goes To four on day one and is out of the tournament Because the deck isn't not it's like you said with ABS all it's not necessarily the easiest deck to play and Having putting the reps and putting the time and having your sequencing down knowing exactly what resources you need for a given matchup so what you know what you can afford to trade away is extremely important and Without that knowledge. You're gonna falter and yeah, that's where you end up think like with people thinking Oh, this deck's terrible because I can just never win with it because I do and I do everything right and it just doesn't Work out for me Whereas somebody like you watch the the gameplay from Liam and all that there's turns where he's just passing with something in the active or like Content to be do for another like there's just not a lot of action going on. There's not a lot of like easy decisions And you know trading away stuff like if you trade away the wrong thing early And you run out of resources. You're just boned. Like there's no there's no easy way to to re right? Like you get punished from early game mistakes and there's no way to recover like there is with other decks like, you know with like a Golden go where you can kind of just okay Well, I'll just draw into something else that I need and that'll work out Like you get saved by that a lot of times where you're just able to draw more cards and trade is effective But it is not as it's less forgiving than like a coin bonus or something like that for sure As I imagine there will be more mega absolute to answer the question and then I Imagine I think Dragon Ball is gonna fall off a little bit. Like I don't imagine we'll see it being the top deck I mean, maybe golden good comes back into the top again It's hard to say right like who? If you played it for this long and it's the last Tournament of the format like are you really switching up decks from there or you just chalk it up as a weird, you know Because I don't think it'll go it might come back down to earth from 18% I think it could be like 16% but it'll still be pretty like it'll be one or two, right? Like it's not gonna fall off super super hard, but I do imagine I'll fall. Oh, no Yeah, dragapult always has kind of an inexplicably high play rate and I did say at the top of the show I do think that there's a list out there that is actually pretty good into a lot of decks It even I think has play into absol because you aren't trying to be too cute with things and you're trying to combo off as Much as possible plus it also plays rare candy Which I think is kind of the only way that for that that deck to succeed right now like we talked about going into you I see my problem with the deck was that it was kind of a slow methodical build up and Because of that it's exploitable and it's pretty easy for people to kind of pick apart your board state as you have to evolve through your stage ones but when you add the element of even if you're only playing one or two rare candies the Ability to have kind of an explosive turn can flip things on its head in a lot of matchups or at least Kind of catch somebody off guard and again That's where your advantage comes in when you're playing something like this where people think they know what you have in your deck list and when you do something a little Bit different and it catches people by surprise They haven't necessarily tested against that, so they don't know it kind of shifts the clock of their game plan or their idea of their game plan against the deck pretty significantly, but no, like you said, I agree. I think Dragon Ball is going to fall down a little bit. I think that that leaves an interesting window, though, for Charizard to kind of come back again and potentially be successful, where if the pulse are down, the dangos will probably stay about where they are, maybe dipping ever so slightly. If Absol is up in play rate, if Zoroark is up in play rate, I could totally see Charizard spiking another regional this weekend. Yeah, yeah, it could make it makes a lot of sense, or I mean, I think Golden Goat, if Absol and Zoroark, I mean, we talked about there's answers for Golden Goat, but it's still not a great matchup. I'd still, I don't know. Golden Goat is probably the most linear out of all the decks in the top four. I know it's Aaron's personal punchline for this format, but I still think it's in a decent spot moving into this format. I'd be interested to see how it plays out with, you know, if Zoroark and Absol Vox are doing really well. If I don't know, there's not there's not really like a tech or a solution that Golden Goat can add. Maybe you add Mega Lopunny back in, and that helps some of the math on against like a Mega Absol Vox, you can get some easier knockouts against like their Latias or something like that. Well, you just have a way to hit the toad scroll to like you can do something like you can prime catcher up toad scroll, and then if they night stretcher and get get it back out of all the second toad, then you can boss it and do spike hopper to take another prize and get the toad scroll off the board. And then you have your golden goes available to you. And you've seen people put the Cramorant in the deck to like to accomplish a relatively similar purpose. If you can go cram prime catcher KO the toad scroll, they KO cram you night stretcher or super rod it back and then boss up the other toad and do it. Like it works kind of both ways. The Lopunny is probably better about it because it also covers you against the cornerstone if it happens to pop up. But I don't know, I think you've got to do something that you have to respect the toad scroll. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, I don't think you can get away with no, I don't think you can get away without putting probably either mega mawile and the Cramorant or the Lopunny in this weekend if you're trying to play golden go. But I don't think that's a bad thing. Like I think there's, they have value in the deck. They're not just, you know, tech cards, they they come up in other matchups like, you know, you know, I don't know. You know, against item lock, you can use mega mawile effectively to take prizes late game and close the game out where you wouldn't necessarily be able to do that if you're, you know, stuck without having access to your superior energy retrievals. So there's a lot of value in those cards and mega Lopunny has a lot of, you know, not just into the, if you hit crustle, you have an answer, which is really nice. And because you have the shred ability with a second attack. So, yeah, I don't know, it's, it'll be interesting to see exactly what comes out of like what will delete into it. It's also like really exciting to be, I'm going to be out there as a judge. So I'll definitely be able to talk about it, but I'm very excited. This is Pokemon day this Friday. So, and is also the first time we've had a Seattle regional in a long time, I believe, because normally it's in Portland. Yeah, normally you have Portland and Vancouver, and instead this year they got rid of Vancouver and did Seattle. So I'm, I'm, I'm expecting them to kind of pull out all the stops and make it feel really special. So that'll be a lot of fun to be a part of that. So, um, I don't know. Um, I don't know of any other decks that at this point it's so late in the format, I think everybody's either picked a deck or is pivoting to something that can counter that deck that they think is going to do really well. Um, so I don't really expect any super big surprises. No, no, I think a lot of people are kind of checked out at this point. Definitely moving on to Ascended Heroes format. Yeah, for sure. Or even further down the road into post rotation. Yeah, I know some, some people are just like, Nope, I'm not playing an event until rotation happens. So why do I even care? Yeah, I mean, we do have a good amount. We still have two major regionals in the North America before rotation with Houston and Orlando. And so I know neither one of us has fully checked out, but I know there are a couple of players that I've seen that are just already scheming, already thinking about, you know, and more excited about. And to be fair, I get that, like, that's just kind of people's prerogative. Like, that's how they interact with the game. And that's a good segue. There's a lot post rotations coming up. And we'll get right into that. But before we do, Aaron, you brought up earlier, well, we were before the podcast, just we have our Pokemon Day coming up this Friday. And with that, Pokemon's announced that they're gonna do a Pokemon Direct. One of the few times where it's a Nintendo Direct, but it's all around Pokemon. And so they usually announce a lot of video game news and TCG news and all the games for in the Pokemon sphere, if you will. And Aaron came up with the idea of just asking kind of like, what do we want as a pie in the sky? What do we wish Pokemon would announce for this Nintendo slash Pokemon Direct? Aaron, you want to go first? Sure. So first, I fully expect they're going to talk about the like Animal Crossing game that they have coming out in like a week or two, which looks pretty neat. It's a little weird that you're like a ditto that turns into a person. But I'm sure a lot of people are really going to dig it. I know a lot of people loved Animal Crossing, and a lot of some of that had to do with the pandemic. But it was a that was a really popular game. So I really expect this thing to succeed. Everybody thinks they're going to do Gen 10, which would not surprise me at all. And I think that would be pretty exciting. I don't know what I would expect the starters to look like. But just, you know, I'm excited. Some cool starters would be kind of something that would be on my wish list. I know we've and they don't normally miss with all of them. I think like the last like I'm trying to think if there's a gen where I just don't like any of the starters. A gen, the sun and moon ones, other than Greninja. Now I look Greninja's been X and Y. That's me. I think X and Y, that's what I meant. It's probably closest. I actually like all of the X and Y ones now, mostly because I actually like chessmen. I actually liked chessmen from the beginning. But one of the few chessmen enjoyers. We're playing playing Pokemon Unite actually gave me more of an appreciation for Delphox. And then Greninja, everybody likes Greninja. What do you what are you going to do about it? Yeah. But then Marina is always kind of second fiddle, I feel like to the other ones. And I like to situate my favorite in that generation, too. Yeah. Decidueye and Incineroar are sick. And then, yeah, Primarina is forgettable. But I would say as far as like my wish list thing, I know Pokemon Unite's having issues back and forth. I know like I have not I don't really play Pokemon Unite much anymore. But the one thing that they've had in China for the longest time that would get me back into Pokemon Unite if they brought it back over here is they have an auto chess mode in their game. That I think would be a really cool announcement and like really big in terms of bringing people back into that game. And maybe it would actually drive people towards playing the, you know, the MOBA version of the game. But, you know, auto I love TFT. I've played a lot of hearts on battlegrounds. So just looking for like an auto battle or auto chess mode that's Pokemon themed would be right up my alley for sure. Yeah, I'm surprised that doesn't exist. They I'm telling you, they have it in China. It's in the Chinese Pokemon Unite client. Yeah, it's just kind of trapped over there. Interesting, but yeah, those would be cool. I mean, I think, yeah, Gen 10 is definitely top of the list for me as well. Anytime we get a new generation of Pokemon, it always feels like a huge event. And rightfully so it is. I'm excited. I mean, it being the 30th anniversary, I hope they do a lot of cool collabs with, you know, what I really was thinking about what I'd love to do. Like I know for covid when they had 2021, when they had it last time in 2025, they did like the tournament of champions or like the invitational. And it was in the middle of covid. So we didn't really get a full view of what. But I would love for them to do like an invite only style tournament where they invite past champions from different events all throughout the TCG time and do like a format where they do like the conquest style or something like that or double elimination, like something a little smaller, but more like maybe you have. I think they did one where and during covid, where you had to play like different formats, like different eras of the game. Yeah. And each round was a different era. I loved I loved that so much. It was a really cool idea. And I hope I would love to see something like that come back. I know that's kind of niche and was just like we had nothing else to do. So let's just make something up and do it. But that would be really cool for me, like as a fan of the game and the fan of the history of the game. I love that. And I'm looking forward to they'll do like a celebration set for this one, I think. Oh, true. That I don't know if that got leaked. I saw like something on Instagram and who knows if it's real. But it was like a picture of a Pokemon card with like the 30th anniversary stamp on on one of the corners or something like that. So who knows if that'll come to fruition? I imagine it's like free money is for them, you know, like celebration still today is one of the more sought after sets. And like having that cool, like 25 cards throughout the history of the game, like you could do something like that again would be really. Not too hard to do, but, you know, would be really cool if like you reprinted Tropical Beach through that or something like that. That'd be pretty wild. So I don't know. We'll see. I'm excited to. I think what else would I want to see? I'd love to see like. More about Pokemon champions to see like that. That's true. Yeah, they probably will talk about that. Yeah. So that'll be cool to see like what the full demo of that would look like. What what exactly it entails? Like, do you get to kind of have rental teams or do you get to like just throw in like create a create a Pokemon, essentially and throw in whatever stats you want or like, what is it? What is the what are the mechanics for that? So that'd be cool to have kind of a demo kind of go over the tech specs and all that kind of stuff. And that might even get me into like kind of casually playing the video game for the first time, because I like playing the video games. But like, yeah, if I want to play the battle, I don't really have the time to sit down and like. It's a lot of work to like. Oh, for sure. Your full team. Yeah. With all the with all the right items, held items and abilities and hidden abilities and IVs and EVs. And geez, man, terror types and all that kind of stuff. Figure all that out. And then, you know, you you change your team up because it's a different format or like whatever. It just gets to be a lot. So and if you could just like plug and play from your box of guys and just like do a slider for their stats or something like that, way, way more accessible. No, I know. Like they've and they've done this play. If it seems hard to believe from, you know, the perspective of somebody that isn't a VG player, but like VGC, from my understanding, is more accessible than it has ever been. Sure. In terms of like how easy it is to make a competitive Pokemon now where people you used to have to like breed Pokemon for, you know, hundreds and hundreds of eggs trying to like get the right IVs on your Pokemon. And then you had to go knock out like 600 zoo bats to get however many speed points you needed and whatever. Like Tentacool to give you whatever Tentacool gives you. And, you know, getting your your EVs that way. And now you can just give them something like berries or something that I get their stats up and you can fix the IVs with like bottle caps. And it's just way, way easier to do things now. So. So, well, I mean, I'm sure we'll. And yet it could be even easier. It could be even easier. I mean, it has to be, I think. Like if we're really expecting a competitive, like an appreciation for the competitive game, like they dumbed down the TCG for Pocket. I think you could see not a dumbed down, but like a simplified version of VG in a lot of ways. I hope that dumbed down doesn't necessarily mean devoid of strategy. Like there's so many things now that I really I mean, I started to appreciate. I've been watching some VG content, mostly Wolf Glick. I'm not going to pretend like I'm sophisticated. But that's, you know, it's good enough. But. Yeah, I've come to appreciate the amount of skill and just kind of like having to know, like the the math of will my Pokemon survive a single type attack boost attack from this Pokemon with these, you know, like with my stats versus their stats versus, you know, do they create or not? And like, oh, I kind of it's just insane and kind of insane amount of math you have to do on the fly, even more so than TCG. Like we're we're figuring out all that kind of stuff on our end. It's yeah, we're adding they're they're doing a lot more than that. And the problem is it's more like they have to do it ahead of time because you have to be able to plan for it. Like, do you need to make an adjustment to your team, whether it's the stats of a Pokemon or you need to fully change to a different Pokemon because you need to beat a specific matchup or something that's going to be popular. So definitely interesting. I oh my gosh, I just thought of. I didn't realize they already announced a whole bunch of stuff in the middle of last week where like we're getting another Pokemon pocket set that comes out, I think tomorrow or maybe third. Maybe the day this episode comes out is when it comes out, like the day before Pokemon Day. And then they already did announce in Unite, like Articuno Zapdos and Moltres are coming as playable characters. Right. It's like, so if we're, they're already announcing all this stuff. What are we, like, how big is this presentation going to be? Like, they're probably going to talk about gen 10 and champions. And then it's like some Netflix shows. Like I know there was that one from like the Wallace and Gromit people, the claymation thing. Like they showed that briefly last year. That's probably going to come back. I don't know. It would be interesting. I just more Pokemon is always good as a fan of the franchise. Like, give me something new to do. I don't want another mobile game. I'll say that. I do not want to, I mean, I know champions is going to be available on mobile platforms, but like, don't, don't give me another like gotcha game or whatever. Like, no, I don't, I don't want it. You don't, you want another versus or I don't want another Pokemon masters. I don't know. Or Pokemon cafe. No, no. Although the, when they had the one, they had the one that was, um, the camp one, the trading figure game. This is a while ago. I don't think they discontinued a little bit ago. So do you remember this was like early two thousands, like 2004, 2005, they had what they came out with the trading figure game, and it was like a little Pokemon that was on like a base that was like a spinner and when you're getting you to see like what move you were using against the other Pokemon, they've made that into a mobile game, except it did have like a gotcha system for acquiring the different Pokemon figures. So every once in a while they would release a new figure and there'd be like a super rare one to get people to dump a bunch of money into it, to try right. To get it. So they could be on like the highest part of the ranked ladder or whatever. But that was pretty neat. But beyond that, like, I don't know if any other mobile game has really grabbed me for Pokemon and it's just, I guess I'm not a mobile game person. So maybe I'm not. No. Yeah. We played pocket for a little bit, you know, that was. Hey, the, the, the new sets pal day a theme, then I do like Fuego. So we know this. Although they, oh my gosh. I saw, I put out a tweet about it too. With the, in the trailer for the new set, they demonstrated that they're reusing the artwork from Goldengo ex. And I saw that flash on the screen and had like nom flashbacks. Yeah. Give me a little draw to every turn. Yeah. With it in the active. I don't remember. I mean, I think it's, it's obviously significantly worse than make it wrinkle Dango, but of course you couldn't, you couldn't possibly have a one-to-one copy. It would just break the game wide open. Yeah. Also, like, how would you make it rain with no energy? No, I know it. Yeah. It does something else. I don't remember what it does. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah. Yep. So we'll definitely talk about it. Um, you know, in the coming weeks. Um, and yeah, I'm excited to see it, especially just to be a part of it in Seattle will be pretty fun, you know, to have all the, like, I don't know if they're, I'm sure they'll like, cause I'll be working Friday, so I'm imagining they're going to have the Pokemon direct up on the big screen. Oh, that's cool. On Friday or something like that. I'd hope so. Fingers crossed. Cause yeah, I won't be able to really watch it on my phone if I'm judging a tournament or something like that. But, uh, yeah, I'm sure we'll, we'll hopefully have that and, uh, have a whole reveal there, which I don't know. In Seattle, the Pokemon direct is going to start at like 6 AM. So I don't know if you guys would even be in the hall yet. Oh yeah. Cause it's, I guess, Japan time. Yeah. It's like nine EST. It's nine EST. Okay. So yeah, 6 AM. So I guess, oh, you might, you might be able to watch it on your phone. Oh, you're right. I won't be able, I don't, I don't think side events open until noon. So I'll definitely be able to watch it on my phone. But, um, yeah, I'll probably just be a jet lagged from the night before or whatever, but, but we'll learn about the future of Pokemon and speaking of the future of Pokemon this past weekend in Fukuoka, Japan, they did play in the future format where the perfect order legal, or as it is known in Japan, um, Nihill zero. And so this is post rotation. We have lost our Gardevoirs and our Goldengos. They have forsaken us and have left the room. Uh, professor Sada has forsaken raging bolt and yet that has not stopped the deck from being successful. And a lot of people kind of, if you looked at city league results for this. Format going into things. People were like, Oh, Dragapult is the undisputed BDIF. Uh, everything else is at least two tiers below it. And kind of the other like deck that people thought was, you know, punching a little bit above the others was mega Lucario. And then this tournament came around and kind of seemingly flipped all of that on its head and had some pretty interesting outcomes. If you watch the stream, some of the more like big takeaways are teal mask, ogre pond, absolutely broken card. If you do not have a play set of them right now, go get it. Uh, they're super cheap. I don't think that they're going to really spike in price that much because it's been reprinted 18 million times, but just make sure you have four of them because a lot of decks play at least two. Um, the other thing Meowth is not quite as toxic as I was worried it was going to be coming into the format, but the ability to go grab a supporter is a really nice bailout in a format that has a slightly lower bar for initial consistency, but it also is a liability that sits on your bench, takes up a bench space, and the only decks that can really mitigate that are ones that can afford to run area zero and a stadium bump, whether it's Chan power from surging sparks or a different counter stadium to help get those Meowths off the field because we don't have Penny or Turo anymore. So that was a big takeaway. And then the other kind of big winner was Crispin where like almost every deck that was successful was playing Crispin, whether it was Dragapult, this mega Absol deck, Raging Bolt is fully Crispin now that Sata is gone. Uh, obviously any Terra deck is Crispin based. And so I went through and I pulled out a few lists here. We can come back and look at any of these other ones if you are so inclined, John afterwards, but the first one was the winning deck from Takato Nogamida. Yeah. One other thing, um, before we jump in, uh, just the emergence of Unfair Stamp as the top deck for this format was huge. Like every, I was looking at the list, every single deck, every single deck, even Dragapult now. I mean, cause you, you, Iona's rotated and I think you, you really feel the impact, uh, after post rotation. The available hand disruption cards are Judge and Harlequin. Yeah, that's it. So yeah, you're kind of pigeonholed into running Unfair Stamp. And I know Chip went through and looked at, if you, if you look at all of 16 of these decks, um, I think eight of them have Unfair Stamp and some of the ones that don't, like I, I do have this Honchkrow deck pulled up as one of the ones we're going to look at, but it runs Miracle Headset because that just kind of fits the game plan of the deck. And because the Rocket's deck has access to Archer, which is a fairly effective hand disruption card. So it's a little bit different there. Um, but yes, far and far and wide Unfair Stamp is the go-to Ace spec just because you, it's the only way to really come back if your opponent is way too far ahead of you is you Unfair Stamp and hope you can break them because there's no Unfair Stamp, other big loss, uh, no counter catcher anymore. So you're, it's like boss or bust basically, if you're trying to stall for something and if you're doing that, you're not disrupting your opponent's hand unless you're playing Unfair Stamp. So really good call out. And, and I'm sure that Takato Nogamito saw a lot of games where they went Unfair Stamp into Claw of Darkness with Absol and just absolutely ruined their opponent's hand. But this is a deck we thought was going to be kind of unsuccessful as we hit rotation because TM Turbo Energize was gone. And like, what are you going to do to, you know, set up with, without that? And then it's, this is another one where I think it's really interesting to see them play Stamp when every single list for this in the current format plays Trolley and Trolley is just like the go-to Ace spec. Like you, do you play Trolley so you don't have to play all these other ball search cards and without TM Turbo Energize, what are we going to, are we going to play Mega Audino? And Takato came out and said, no, I'm going to play Four Energy Switch and play Teal Mask Okropon and Crispin. And that will be good enough to set up my, my board. Yep. Yeah. I mean, it's a very unique take. I don't think it's a, well, like the longer you look at it, the more it makes sense in a lot of ways, like having Cyrano and stuff, because like we lost a lot of the ball search, at least like the good ball search for this deck, like Nest Ball rotated. Yep. So we're running Cyrano now, which gets you the majority of your Pokemon other than like the Monkey Dories and a Psyduck, but every, every, every other Pokemon in your list is an EX. So it's very easy to get them all into play. I mean, you can kind of draw into your monkeys from there or find them with the Ultra Balls that are in the list. So yeah, turn one Cyrano and then move into Crispin. We do lose TM Energize and yeah, we don't see Audino, but I think that's okay. Like overall it makes a lot of sense when you can just go Crispin Energy Switch the next turn and just have a Kangaskhan powered up or have, you know, work on getting an Absol if you got that turn one Energy attachment to an Absol and then turn to, you know, Crispin or something like that. It's not, it's not too hard to get going. And yeah, I don't know. It just seems like low to the ground kind of a list. Interesting. Like you're seeing Cypher Maniacs code breaking being used as more of a set, like that makes a lot of sense for my mind. Brock Scouting is a nice backup to like get the Monkey Dories. Everything's a basic Pokemon, so you get a lot of value out of it. You know, not as much as Cyrano, but still a good amount. And then, yeah, just from there, you only run the one draw supporter, which is interesting, and Lillies. But if you get into Mega Kangaskhan early and you're drawing cards with Teal Masks, Teal Dance, and you're drawing with Fezzendipity and you're able to search out specific supporters with Meowth and you can bump your own, well, you can't really bump your own stadium, but you know, it just comes to a point where you reach critical mass and it doesn't matter if you have Meowth in play and you're taking knockouts here. And then you can, like you talked about, Unfair Stamp and then Absol, your opponent's hand feels pretty good. So yeah, this list, it brings the one cornerstone, I guess, just as an answer for some things we see to Missed Energy. I think Missed Energy was another callout with Alakazam being a big deal in this format and obviously the Mega Absol and a lot of other Pokemon that can do a little bit, like the Alakazam, I think is probably the main reason we see that. At least, well, the Alakazam and the Mirror are probably the two main decks. Sure, sure. Yep. So Missed Energy's kind of on the rise. I saw another control list in the top 16 where it just ran to Team Rocket's Articuno, it was the Crustle list, I think. Okay. I don't know if you have that pulled up, but it was, it literally ran to Team Rocket's Articuno, and I'm like, why the heck does it run Team Rocket's Articuno? You just auto win Alakazam by putting them both down? Yeah, exactly. You literally just put the Team Rocket's Articuno down and no other, like no other Pokemon, and they don't have an answer for it. I'm like, that's genius. Honestly, that's crazy that that just works. And they run like a one Prism Energy so you can attack with it. So they can't knock you out with like a Kadabra or something like that. But yeah, just crazy. But anyway, so yeah, this is this is kind of the surprise deck of the tournament, I'd say. But like, the more you look at it, the more it makes sense. And I would expect this to see a lot of play post-rotation. And for sure. And not just in Japan. And just like being super toolboxy, like you get the answers to a lot of the big things in the format. Like I said, like Dragapult was far and away the best deck. So of course, we have Clefairy. You actually have the ability to potentially attack with a lot of yas in this deck and knowing that you need to be able to get into Kangaskhan, remove your Blood Moon. We're actually playing two Latias because you have the luxury of having the room to be able to do it. Like you called out, like if you can go Cyrano for Kangaskhan, Latias, Meowth. Now you've got your Kangaskhan set up to draw you more cards. Latias pivots you into the Kangaskhan and Meowth finds you a supporter for next turn. So it's kind of a self-fulfilling like engine, so to speak, that a lot of other decks may not have access to. So just really neat deck. Definitely going to see some play moving forward and just continue. Absol and Kangaskhan as a duo continue to terrorize tournaments. Next up was the second place deck, and this is a deck that nobody had on their radar, but the other thing I didn't call out like Tealmask Ogrepon kind of being the highlight or one of the highlights of this set, this tournament, Zoroark is still really popular, didn't make top cup, but Zoroark and Grimmsnarl both together made up like 15% of the tournament in day two, and neither of them made top cut because there was so much Tealmask Ogrepon around. So definitely really popular, but this was one that, again, caught me rather off guard where we're just like loaded. This reminds me a lot of Ray Chen's Toad Scroll deck, to be honest with you, where you're just like, I'm going to bug catching set into Ogrepon and Grass Energy. We don't have Earthen Vessel anymore, so bug catching set really kind of pulls double duty here and you go grab a whole bunch, you know, Grass Pokemon, Grass Energy, get your Forest of Vitality into play and our Believa EX taking second place in, honestly came so close to winning the tournament and just a really cool card. It's a card that doesn't get a chance to shine in current standard because, honestly, mostly because of Goldango, I think because I went and took this deck and kind of retrofitted it into current standard, put some Ionas into it, don't have Meowth obviously, so a couple of other changes here and there, but outside of Goldango, this deck is actually reasonably strong into most of the current standard metagame. You just literally cannot be Goldango unless they full brick and you're able to like, but do them to a point where you can oil salvo, knock out all their game eagles and kind of go from there. But really neat deck. You kind of get to pull double duty with oil salvo, just knocking out a bunch of basic Pokemon in your opponent's field where you get to for a single Grass Energy, select a Pokemon in your opponent's field, and then you get to select a Pokemon in your opponent's field six times, and you can select the same Pokemon as many times as you want to. And for each time you select a Pokemon, you do 20 damage to it. And then you kind of get the other half of the deck where I'm going to knock out the big thing by loading up energy on Ogre Pond, which draws you cards, sets up your other stuff, but also puts a bunch of energy on Ogre Pond, which gets doubled by Meganium and just mollywop things like Lucari. or dragapult and clear them off the field if they are able to get set up through your oil salvo barrage Yeah, it's a fun deck. I mean I was testing her a little bit over like losing a lucha stinks Cuz yeah, I will to go how lucha is really good. Yeah, the combo is crazy, but um Yeah, I believe definitely Just one of the few like we had the water pawn But this is definitely like a different variation on that and you get more Control with the damage placement allows you to set up chaos and go from there and you know you can target down one thing and then put some spread damage on stuff so that your teal mask is able to More efficiently set up chaos and this is just one of the I think the main can the reason I like this deck right now Is it's consistent like you're able to to execute your game plan Fairly consistently where other decks struggle. I keep the Having dawn in this format like makes this deck so much better like you're running the four stadium So you're usually able to find that turn one You can go lilies get your stadium into play and then next turn dawn and then you know Get your stage two line out of our Believer start putting damage down and then the next turn Dawn again and get your Meganium out and start, you know, putting energy out on your teal mask over pawns and stuff. So this one It's weird to say that a deck with two stage two lines like this is consistent But I mean, I don't know you tested a little bit Did you with your your attackers at all or anything like that? I think there are times where you like you won't hit the stage one and then you can have it can have a hard time Finding this stage two, but sure it's it's for the most part like when everything like dawn felt pretty cool Like oh, yeah like being able to go like dawn force of vitality into play and drop a whole stage two out of nowhere is really good for Sure, or even Lana's aid and bring it back. Yeah, that's pretty cool. So Cool deck cool deck. I don't do not know if we will see any more of it in the future But it was definitely a neat one. Like it unfortunately kind of reminds me of like for alligator where yeah It did well at a Champions League But may not have any Western success whatsoever until Tim Danklin sends 18 people to an Australian regional with our believer Makes make makes them our believers, you know, something like that Next up is kind of a take on dragapult. And this was a top four list So we see again Crispin as the energy acceleration because we pivoted to unfair stamps and no more neo upper energy in the deck But that means that we need to make sure that we have more energy available So Crispin can happen for two more often, which means we have an excuse to put monkey Dory back in so to fit all that We're slimming things down. We're not running dust or anymore We have Meowth to help us find supporters and then fitting our own kind of mini Kangaskhan package in you also have the Clefairy as an answer for mirror or mega Lucario and You have a pseudo tech for our believer, but I have to assume it's more for The well spring master on yeah with the shaman over here But I think the cool thing is running area zero and then running that she and pound it just clear liabilities off the board It's a really cool combo something that I expect to see success and a lot of decks that can afford to fit it in moving forward I'm surprised we didn't see more of that this tournament to be honest with you You know, we've seen it in the past with like Skyfield And like pumpkaboo or not What was it? But anyways, like the whole intentionally playing a Pokemon that clears your stadium and then that allows you to get rid of damaged Pokemon or get rid of liabilities like Meowth Makes a lot of sense. So sure And yeah, dragapult just will be strong The big thing like Clefairy is popular and rather splashable and still definitely also strong into dragapult Yep Next up was raging bolt and this doesn't look honestly that much different from a standard raging bolt list. It's crazy How it's crazy how raging bolt doesn't seem to die even when you lose Sada when you lose like that seems crazy to me But yeah, this is very effective Running for teal masks, you know, so that's kind of your main way to Supplement your energy attachments you have Crispin but like yeah, you definitely want to be using your teal masks more often Um, you have teal mask and then you have trumpet in place of Sada Sure, that's that's a good point. So you just kind of go from there This is another one where like I guess you don't play the Qian Pao because you have the actual Stadium as a bump and you don't have to play Meowth in this deck because you have knock towel. Although I still Don't see a reason why you wouldn't play one Meowth Yeah, that's fair. Yeah, like I could see that where If you have to go down Right just get Close the game out You can get your one boss or get your one and get a Crispin to get all the energy you need to attach Yeah, but yeah, like I mean raging bolt players But like having Crispin and then you know, you run a tech energy switch So you can get extra use out of your baby raging bolt and Just all all the different things like I don't know I think this it's gonna be I Think it won't take over like it won't increase in play to the point where It's like a top three deck or anything like that. But I mean this deck Seems really powerful and like you have a lot of options like you have a grass attacker you have a slight damage with a baby raging bolt And You have arguably like the most efficient highest like no damage cap attacker in the game right now And raging bolt and raging bolt, you know, it just it does what it does and it does it well So yeah, it's just you have to be more careful now about not You can't make yourself as vulnerable where like if you have to clear all of the energies off your board It's gonna be really hard for you to pull off another bellowing Thunder to the next turn Because you don't have Sada to reattach and you'll quickly deplete the energy in your deck because you don't have super rod to put him back anymore either So unless like maybe we could also see a world where an energy recycler makes its way into this list To kind of supplement things and keep your Crispin flowing throughout the game, but I don't know interesting It'll have it'll be interesting to see how they adapt and to do things moving forward because I do think this is a pretty rough kind of first draft of a list and Even though it is pretty similar to what we have now. I think that it has room for a refinement for sure That's for sure. I like the to tear or if I think that's a nice innovation and for pokey pad seems like a lot But then yeah, you can get anything you want with knock down. So it's like guaranteed Search for whatever you actually need One of your one of the stuff so for sure. Hey John real quick before we move to the last one I'm gonna go I can hear my baby crying. So I need to go check. I got you. Yep We're back Okay And back from a baby break we will do one last list on from this event and it's a deck we talked about this During the Ascended Hero set review, but t-rockets honchkrow seeing some place seeing some success in Japan We actually saw at one point on the Fukuoka stream a team hunt Rose mirror match Where one of the lists was a Porygon based one and the other one was actually using spied ops which I think is something that I mentioned during that set review and the spied ops deck did end up winning because You have the ability to kind of play through Archer in mirror Specifically you could play through Archer to disrupt your opponent's hand and then you don't have to have supporters in your hand to take KOs on your opponents one prisers and you can just be a bit more efficient because you can Find your energy a bit more easily because you can power them up out of your discard pile But I think that this is a rather interesting list because every other Version of this that I've seen people try to put together for Ascended Heroes runs Porygon Z And this one is just straight stage ones I'm gonna keep things as low to the ground consistent as possible fit as many cards into the deck that I need or can as possible In the Fez is interesting in that. I like the extra reach that it kind of provides you even though you And for if you start it, you're just kind of done Like not only are you kind of foregoing your advantage as a one-price deck, but you're also Kneecapping your Ariana's for the entire game unless your Fez gets knocked out Yeah, I think it's good when You've got your board established and you're like coming after like three like when you go down to like three prizes or something like that Yeah, and then you get you know Unfair stamped or whatever like it allows you to get out of that situation it allows you to dig for the like there comes a point in time where your hand size is just too big to really get Any decent value out of Ariana, especially like when the only hand disruption is Judge and Harlequin and then yeah If you get the unfair stamp played against you earlier and you draw an Ariana, you're able to drive it pretty effectively But yeah there comes a time where your hand size is just too big to get real value out of Ariana and that's when I first starts To get better and you're just able to dig more because you're able to Fez more times With this deck than other decks. Sure, and if they bring up Fez sure, that's a thing but You know, then you're able to kind of recover more easily I guess you don't need Fez, but it's a nice thing to have for dig late game as the game goes on But absolutely roto stick getting some love you love to see that Miracle headset like we're we're in full post rotation lunacy Over here, but it makes sense. Like it's plus. Yeah damage I think proton is still really cool like rockets There are a couple Rockets mew two decks as well And we think I'm not gonna look at those because they look literally like standard Rockets mew two decks Just with unfair stamp as the a spec because the Rockets decks don't really lose anything to rotation if anything They have the advantage that they didn't lose anything so they get to maintain their whole engine With like they have their team Rockets factory stadium they have all of the rocket supporters proton plus transceiver to set your stuff up and just kind of go from there and You know, that's why this looks this this list probably doesn't look very different from what you would see except I don't think a current standard list would play roto stick. I don't know what you would play. I don't know They're playing roto stick. Are they? Yeah The card shop people are asking for roto sticks. So that's crazy I've pulled them out of the bulk trainers that we're just gonna you know sell for bulk pricing and I've had to pull them and put them into the Playable binder now, so that's that's where we're at Dark times but or exciting times, I guess depends on your perspective But yeah, it's interesting like you brought up We see this dick not change very much and I think before rotation like the rocket supporters, they're not bad But there's just some borders that outclass them that are just better that you wouldn't play The rocket supporters when you can play and I know you can play in our van when you can play research Now, you know now that we have a whole new slew of Stuff that we lost we are really limited as to what we can play, you know Are really limited as to what we can play, you know, we still have lilies we still have Cyrano and Cypher but like this deck I think escaped unfazed and now comes back and is in a much better position and that's Pretty evident with the results of this tournament and I think we'll see a lot of players The hype for rocket stuff is pretty real like people love the villains, especially team rocket So I definitely was I am I mean I imagine we'll see a lot of play from like at the local level and at the casual level like people want to pick this Up and play it and that pressure and it's super cheap to get into this this deck in paper for sure probably cost $15 Yeah, if the hot screws are a little annoying to get right right now sure a hollow rare So that is but like, you know, it should be fine relatively speaking And then yeah, like if you want to bring this deck out start start picking up your protons and Giovanni's got some cool artwork I'll say that So yeah, all of the supporters like I think aren't there SIRs for most of these cards? Yeah, or at the very least full arts. He's full arts. Definitely. No, there's a there's a full art transceiver and ascended heroes, too Yeah Set this this deck can look cool and I will say I know that I think about it Actually, I'm pretty sure let me pull up this mute you list to see if I'm wrong or not But I believe the mute you decks did evolve ever so slightly To where they are actually playing for Lily now in addition to the rocket supporters just to make themselves a bit more consistent And we also do see the very making its way back in So just interesting this that's a weird inclusion the bug catching set kind of is catches me a little bit off-guard But a lot of these other things these I come up on stream Sorry, we're having some limitless lag Okay, good, yeah that guy the the Rockets one runs maximum belt which makes sense so yeah, it's just that one you're able to since you run the Not Ariana the Forget the name of it, but like the hatch option rocket support. Oh Archer. Yeah, we're able to Okay, petrol is the Arvin. Sorry Archer is the one that's Skyla not even Arvin. Oh, you're right. You're right. It is Skyla. It is exactly Skyla It is exactly With the added benefit that you get to draw two cards, I guess if you have a statement play, but that's about it Yeah, it's uh, it's exciting I don't know I we really didn't cover me at mega Lucario or the Dragonfall lists or anything like that And well, I'm sure as we get closer and start testing on our own and especially you know when we get into the later stage of Like after Orlando, I think immediately after Orlando. It's rotation. So Yeah Yep. Yep, so we'll probably talk a lot about Ascended heroes, unfortunately, but yeah, we'll get more and more into the post rotation as it comes up and yeah, I'm excited I mean, it's always a fun time of year for those that haven't really experienced it I know it can be a little bit daunting and overwhelming to lose some of your favorite decks or Feel like all the money you invested kind of goes to waste like all your ionos and Arvins that you bought or Played with for the longest time like if you bought full art copies of it, they're just gonna diminish in value, but the good news is like Down the road you can build the decks and like I'd encourage you if you're debating just selling stuff You know hold on to your decks that you you really enjoy playing Maybe just put them on the shelf if you have the ability to do that Because yeah, it's fun to go back and play formats where like the full the full breadth of like a three-year Set calendar is playable at the same time and it's really fun to play like, you know, Reggie Giga's or Palkia or Stuff like that where you have full access to stuff. Maybe I picked the wrong area. That's probably not my favorite but uh Yeah, like I'm thinking like When we had Like 2010 where we had a lot of Sets at the same time. I wish I wish I still had those cards I know you and I have both experienced kind of both ends of this now where when we were younger, you know We were kids we didn't have any money and you could sell your cards to troll and toad or collectors cash or whoever at US Nationals and These are rotating. I don't need them anymore Yeah, and you know now you go to try to rebuy them and they're like 15 times what they used to cost or more and It's it's backbreaking and makes you very sad. But you also stars But you also like hit a point where I think I have it over here like just eat the Nostalgia factor of a deck if you have something that you're particularly attached to or you had a particularly notable Performance with like your first League Cup win or maybe you made your first day to at a regional or your first top cut at a regional or You know if you're listening to the show and you've won a regional Thank you but your first regional win and I've seen a lot of people do things where they'll Do like frames with regional play mats and then like the marquee cards from the deck I've gone a little bit different direction I still like I still have the the cloth deck that I made cut with in Puerto Rico last year still fully Completely sleeved up put together can't play the deck and standard obviously, but have not migrated any of those cards They're still in the same sleeves. I took to that tournament and that's something where I'm gonna like keep that deck put together I'm gonna keep my grim start all deck from worlds put together. Yeah, and Just I like I don't see a reason to really take it apart and something where having that available is really cool Like I've went back through and put my I don't think they're the same cards Unfortunately, because I don't I can't guarantee that I still have the same ones but I put my world's deck from 2012 together again and Have that in a box somewhere so just the nostalgia factor of Pokemon always sneaks up on you in one way or another and You would heavily encourage you to lean into it if you have the ability to do so. Yeah, I mean not to say that you regret selling I mean Sure, it's always like you look back at it's like dang. I could have done that but that's life Like I don't think it's really beneficial to obsess about how much money you gave up over the years Playing a hobby I think it's more valuable to look at what you gained by playing it and the friendships and the actual like Memories and moments and all that kind of stuff. And yeah, that's the main thing I get out of making old decks is just reliving those moments reliving those memories remembering like going to city marathons and Like crashing on couches and having late-night testing sessions and playing games outside of The actual tournament and eating a bunch of pizza and like, you know all this kind of stuff so That's you know, that's the kind of sentiment that I think we should all aim for Out of our hobbies like it's cool when they pay for themselves, but overall It's you don't do a hobby to make money for the most part you do you do it because you love it And so that's that's where we're a lot that's hopefully that what do you get when you hear and listen to the battle frontier and I am Excited to go to Seattle and have a full kind of breakdown of what happened After all that and I'm excited to talk with you about it next next time we get together Yeah, hopefully it'll be next week. If not, you know, you know again the releases may or may not be sporadic such as life But thank you for bearing with us and we hope that you guys enjoyed this episode leave some comments down below if you have your thoughts on what we'll see on Pokemon Day if you listen to the show ahead of Pokemon Day or maybe with the most exciting thing that we did see revealed on Pokemon Day if you listen to the show after Pokemon Day has already happened But we do thank you for getting to the end of this episode we thank you for bearing with us through our sporadic release and Potential break between these episodes and any continued listenership But you can find John and myself and the show on social so I'll be linked in the description of the show if you're listening Over on YouTube watching over on YouTube rather go ahead and drop a sub. We'd appreciate it drop a like leave a comment letting me know letting us know what your favorite part of the episode was and If you're on Spotify or Apple podcast give the show a follow and same thing there comments ratings reviews Everything helps the show go a little bit further reach a few more people and maybe get some new listeners in and kind of growing a community But from John and myself, we thank you very much. If you're going to Seattle, good luck Enjoy your Pokemon Day Say goodbye to phantasmal flames format and we will see you guys on the other side on the next episode of the battle frontier Have a good week