2-10: SOME OF THESE CARDS ARE FIRE
About this episode
<p>Aaron and John go over the results of the Regionals from this past weekend before jumping into take a look at the contents of the soon to be released Phantasmal Flames set.</p><p><br></p><p>Follow us on socials:</p><p>@BFPTCGPod</p><p>@_Aaron_Curry</p><p>@JohnOrgel.bsky.social</p>
This episode is published by Battle Frontier - A Pokemon TCG Podcast.
Transcript
Machine transcript — exact wording may vary.
Hello and welcome back to the Battle Frontier podcast where we aim to help you level up in your journey as a competitive Pokemon TCG player. I'm Eric Curry, here with me as always is my co-host Jon Orgel, and this week we're going to check back in on some predictions we made heading into the Gdansk and Brisbane Regionals this past weekend before we look at the results of those tournaments. And then we will take a pit stop and do Blaine's Quiz Show where Jon is currently crushing me 12 to 6, but I will attempt to climb back as much as I can. You know, can't catch him, but maybe make a little bit of incremental progress along the way. And then we figured with no tournaments coming up this weekend, aside from pre-releases, we'll take a look at some of the cards in the Phantasmal Flame set and how we think they'll fare in this metagame as we head into things post-LAIC. We still have a good ways away a fair number of tournaments before these cards become legal, but always good to check in and see how powerful we think the cards are. But before we get into all of that, I know you were doing some pre-release stuff this past week, Jon. How about you fill me in on the details?
Sure, yeah. I went up to Charleston, or went down to Charleston over the weekend. That's where my parents still live. And Sunday, I had time to go to a pre-release at Final Round Games in Ladsen slash Somerville, South Carolina. About 15 minutes from where my parents live. The owner is one of my longtime friends, Jacob. So it was cool seeing him. And then, yeah, I got to play in the pre-release. I got the Broken Dark deck, dude. I don't know. I know you didn't get to play in the pre-release promos.
It's fair. There was four different ones. Psychic, Dark, Fighting, and Fire. Fire is the worst. It was Ceruledge, and it had no real Pokemon search. I farmed the Ceruledge deck three times. So I played four rounds. This tournament was... I liked the format. It might be something I adopt in my future pre-releases. But the format was everybody, you get your pre-release kit with the four packs. You build your deck, all that. And then normally, you just get three extra packs. Everybody just gets three extra packs. At this pre-release, they gave everybody the two extra packs, and then put one pack out of the three into a prize pool. And then gave out, based on how you placed, more prizing. So I'm like, okay, that was fun. So I got second. I went three and one.
I lost in the last round to Deckout, actually. One of the decks was a Flygon deck, which we'll get into all the crazy, I guess, abilities that are coming out. But this one, it wasn't all that, like, it was annoying. And then eventually, I lost because I decked out. He got his last Flygon in his deck, evolved by Rare Candy into the Flygon, which has an ability when it evolves, or when it comes into play. When it evolves, you mill the top two cards of your opponent's deck. So I lost by Deckout. And it was frustrating to me because in the pre-release, like the 40 card pre-constructed deck, I had an Energy Recycler. And I'm like, I already run 12 energy. I don't need more energy back at some point. And I'm like, so if I put that card, if I left it in there, I'm pretty sure I would have eventually won. But you know, it goes on, man. I did. I did.
I flew too close to the sun. But the dark deck felt cool. It was cool, like using Sableye, like sneaking him in. And we'll get into all the different attackers, I guess, later on. But yeah, it was a fun time. I hadn't played in a pre-release in like, gosh, it must have been like close to a year, man. It's been a long time. I usually just end up running them. And I did run one on Monday. I had my pre-release at my league. We were one away from hitting our cap of 32. So we had 31. And so that was like a full house. And it was really good. Really good turnout. Everybody seemed pretty happy. Some new faces that didn't just like get up and walk out whenever they got their product. Everybody stuck around till the end. So that was cool. Didn't have to like, you know, ban anybody from the store from just scamming product that way. Which I talked with Jacob about. And apparently that's more and more common now. So, you know, don't love that. But it is what it is, I guess. You know, with sealed product becoming harder and harder to find, it makes sense that people are just trying to abuse the pre-release format. And I get it. Like, it's one of the few ways you can get stuff at MSRP reliably.
Right. And like getting stuff ahead of street release date is a pretty big deal for people that are trying to run whatever grift they're trying to run. Right. And there's always somebody trying to be like the first to submit a new card to PSA and get it graded and get it back. Say that they were the first and that's fine. But, you know, it sucks the fun out of it for sure. But yeah, that was my weekend. Enjoyed Charleston, South Carolina. It's beautiful weekend weather weekend down there. I love Charleston. Charleston in like October is my favorite time of the year to go there. Like it's not humid. It's not like too cold and rainy yet.
Like it kind of gets kind of gross in the winter, but it's like it was peak, like just perfect crisp fall weather down there, but not too cold. So we walked around downtown and just had a good, we went to a nice restaurant with my parents for my dad's birthday. And yeah, just had a nice little night out on the town on Saturday and then watch the Bill's game with my dad. They beat the Chiefs. Love to see that. I was happy to see the Bills pull out a resounding victory, even though they only won by one touchdown, it was still like a full, like they looked pretty good. So I was pretty happy to see that. I didn't share that with my dad. That's always fun. So yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I know you were probably watching the World Series and getting hype about that. So I definitely want to hear about your week, Aaron. How was your week?
Oh, good, man. Like we, like you said, uh, watching the World Series, it was probably honestly the best World Series that I remember watching in recent history. Like neither team was commandingly ahead of the entire time. And I legitimately thought that the Blue Jays were going to win the series. Oh yeah. But it seemed like, like the magic number was every single time that the Blue Jays were kept under six runs, they didn't win the game. And you can say what you will about a couple of things. I know people were complaining about a couple of calls in the last game, but I mean, at the end of the day, like that's baseball, but it was crazy. Like the ending of that game was absolutely absurd.
Well, game seven. Yeah. Yeah. Or just probably just like from, from like the eighth inning on, when it got like down to the nitty gritty and you're like, okay, well, who's going to win? Like once you, like the Dodgers are just bringing it back and they're closer up, then the Blue Jays score again. And then they get another home run and they're closer and then they tie it up with their like bottom hitter. And there's no way there's no, it was, it was absolutely absurd. Um, and unfortunately if we didn't have a, I would have loved to share that with my son, but we had a tournament this weekend. So he was in bed already, even with the time change coming that night, like for us Americans between Saturday and Sunday, which that's been messing with me so far this week, man. Like I've, I've been still waking up earlier than I need to. And I've also just been inexplicably tired at night, like much more so than even if we were still on the same time we were previously. I'm like, I feel more tired than I feel like I should. And I've just been passing out super early pretty much every night. Yeah. It gets depressing when you're like driving home from work and it's already getting dark. Right. You go like today I went in before the sun came up and by the time I came out, the sun was setting. It's oh, I love this time of year.
It's great. It doesn't feel nice. Like, because before you were like, oh, I can eat dinner before it gets too dark and maybe like take a walk or something. Now it's like, well, guess I'll get ready for bed at six 30 or something. It just feels tough. I can't imagine living in countries like, you know, the Scandinavian ones where it's dark for more than half the day. That's, that sounds awful to me. Yeah. But the Arctic circle, yeah, it's tough. Uh, but other than that, you know, so baseball on TV, baseball with the kids, uh, they had one of their unfortunately worst tournament experiences so far this week, but had a lot of tough teams in the, in the tournament and our pitching was just not on point. So it got absolutely smashed and ended up as the bottom seed going into bracket play, won our first bracket game. And then the second one was pretty close, but we did end up losing. So go went out in like seventh or eighth place. I think, um, could be worse, but another tournament this weekend. So we've had practice the past couple of nights and we're just gearing up to go right back at things. Other than that, um, I know Riftbound released this past week and it's a game that I've been kind of waiting on for a little bit, not to try to get into like super competitively or anything, but just to pick up some products, you know, league as a, obviously still a super popular IP and the game seemed interesting enough while also being different enough from Pokemon that it actually felt like it might be worth getting into as long as product availability was there. And luckily one of my local game stores had a few things that I was able to like jump in and snag for, you know, MSRP. And yeah, I'm trying to treat it like it's more of a, I guess, collectible board game, like something where you could buy like a starter deck for this character, a starter deck for this character.
And I know that there's a way to play with more than two people. And so trying to make it to where, Oh, well, like, here's this guy, this guy, this guy, like everybody, you know, four people sit down to play and everyone gets to just randomly like swap what character they're playing for that game. And I don't know, something akin to that, rather than trying to be like, Oh, I'm going to go hardcore and win Riftbound Worlds. Right. But they've had some crazy tournaments, man. Like it's been big in China. It's been big in China for a few months now. I know it released there first.
And I think that they had some, a couple of regional level events where they're having like $30,000 prize pools. Jeez. So it's like, it's coming in hard. Yeah. Like Riot's got money and they're good. They're throwing it around. Okay. Okay. I mean, that's cool. It's always fun to have like kind of side quests and the TCG hobby, you know, I've picked up Lorkana off and on and played Kaijido at one point when that was a thing, like back in the day. And yeah, I mean, that's, that's the fun thing is it's as long as you don't treat it like, you know, I think that's the right approach, like to say like, Oh, I'm just gonna just do this for fun. And if it comes into being something more than that, then great. But yeah, it's fine to just, you know, even if you treat like a established IP, like magic or something like that, like that, that makes sense to like, I've had times where I'm like, Oh, I'm gonna, you know, hang out with my friends and play magic or whatever. Like, it makes I think, you know, having that cross pollination, like helps with other card games, like with absolutely, for sure. But it's a lot of fun to like we've talked about before, like you get the different almost that cross training, that's, that's not really the right word. But just looking at how mechanics and certain games are handled and being able to apply that back when you do come back and play Pokemon again. And, you know, seeing how things crossover and being able to just kind of sharpen your skills, even if you're not actively playing Pokemon, but I have actively still been playing Pokemon. I've got a further refining the Grim Snarl list that I mentioned last week, I think that I'm gonna have another one that I'm probably going to post before Vegas because I'm not going so I don't care if everybody has it.
And other than that, there's an event or not an event while there's a list that's been doing decently the last couple of weekends over in Europe with the Greninja Grand Tree deck. That's been kind of, you know, slightly updated, modernized to account for the presence of Psyduck. So obviously, we're playing Klefki now. But it just again, I know I've talked about the deck previously, it reminds me a lot of Dusknoir Palkia from last year. And just being able to like blow stuff up and then Mirage Barrage blow more stuff up. It's a lot of fun. It's really effective against a lot of decks, especially because people still aren't playing Shaman currently.
You have a few things like Goldango is a little iffy. Dragapult can be iffy, depending on how quickly you get set up. But I don't know, sniping, spreading, taking multiple prizes has definitely always been my favorite way to play. Yeah, I haven't really played too much myself. But yeah, it's cool to see you still tooling around with the old faithful, reliable Grim Snarl. I don't know if I can put it down, man. It's it's funny. It's a lot of it's so innovative. Like even every time you play it, it's like a puzzle to try to figure out. You know, it's not like a Goldango or like a Cerulege where you have like a clear line thing. Yeah, it's like, Oh, well, this isn't working. I'm going to pivot to devolution or pivot to stalling something inactive for a few turns and see if I can reestablish my board state, you know, stuff like that. Definitely is a little more of a challenge than, yeah, just banging your head against something. And I do think like this is the first archetype that they've released in quite a while that has made me want to consistently play the same deck over and over despite new sets releasing. Like most of the time, I'm like, OK, I'm bored. I'm going to move on. Like, let's find a different deck. Oh, well, this is good now.
Let's play that instead. And instead, I like keep coming back to it. Well, wait a minute. Let's see how we can update this and make it continue to work here. And I have had to accept it's probably not the best deck in the format, but I think that it is still competitive enough that it could win an event. And, you know, we saw some deep runs with the deck this weekend in both tournaments. So I think before we get into those results, let's go ahead and look at the predictions from those events. Oh, true, true. So, yeah, we did have some predictions, a little bit of let's see if we can guess who will win each event. So we had one for Gdansk and one for Rizban. For Gdansk, Aaron picked Kirin Farah, who did play. And I picked Piper Lapine.
Uh, Kieran finished in 379th place. Uh, so not his best finish. I don't think he made day two at that rate. You know why that is though, right? No, I don't. It's because he chose to play Gardevoir instead of Grimmsnarl. Oh yeah. Well, there you go. You have it here first. I'm excited to see what he says on the, uh, Shiftgear podcast. We'll see if he, uh, recants his Gardevoir ways or doubles down on it. We'll see. Uh, but Piper did a little better. Uh, I think she played, let me look, it was, she played Zoroark again.
I think it was the same 16th from the weekend before. Love that. Yeah. I mean, it's, and it's still good. Uh, placing one higher than Tord Reklev at 60th place. So you like to see that, uh, you know, she's been very consistent. Um, I think she had a really good day one and then, uh, no, it was up and down. So two losses day one, and then losing in the ninth round, I've, I guess they probably played nine rounds day one, but lost in the ninth round to the eventual winner. Um, but yeah, let's, uh, so I had a weird trend though.
I picked Piper to do well two tournaments ago and she did phenomenal the last tournament. And then if you'll remember, I picked, uh, a different player to do well. It was, uh, at, at little, they didn't end up going to, I think they did play in little, uh, no, no, they didn't make day two though, but I picked Daniel Magda to do a little, and, uh, I just picked it a little bit earlier than it probably should have. Um, and he ended up doing really well here and we'll, we'll cover all that in a minute.
I just wanted to give myself a little pat on the back for that though. Um, we had another tournament though. Oh God. I was going to say before we get into that, I also, you know, last week I mentioned offhandedly that Mike Ellis was going to show up and spike a Grimmsnarl finish and, you know, spoiler alert, Mike made cut again with Grimmsnarl. So maybe I should have stuck with my gut there, bleeding that over into Brisbane. I had also offhandedly mentioned that Ryuki Okada was going to show up and spike the event and lo and behold, he did end up being the eventual winner of that event.
But I know I had picked Tim Danklin or Tim Franklin as he is legally known. And I mean, he had an okay day, finished in 60th, so top 64. I picked Kaiwen Kababe, who as far as I can tell, didn't play in the tournament. So, um, yeah, I don't think he was there. I think he's in medical school, so maybe it's not too surprising that he didn't show up, taking the Gustavo Wada route. So, you know, take, take a year or two off and then come back and reestablish dominance over the competition. So, but respect, you know, that's life, life meets us all at different points when our Pokemon journey.
So we have to establish like, you know, when we want to play with the game and all that stuff. But, um, yeah, I think that's a even split, you know, especially our top finishers, both finishing in 60th place, uh, at their respective tournaments, you know, uh, Gdansk had a larger field. So I think Piper had the better placement if you're going to go that far. Um, but you know, we'll, we'll call it a tie just for fun. Uh, and yeah, I think, um, there was some impressions from the results over the weekend.
I didn't really get to watch too much. Uh, I was kind of busy with just family stuff and traveling and all that. Um, but I did see that our eventual winner in Gdansk, uh, Daniel, uh, ended up playing, winning with Golden Go, a deck that I'm somewhat familiar with. I picked it up and played with it a good bit, um, before it got the Solrock Lunatone combo, but I hadn't really messed around with it too much. And, um, Golden Go had a really good showing in Gdansk. Uh, it was by far, I think it was the most played deck, right?
Am I saying that? Uh, yes, yes it was. So if we come over here and we look at the metagame for the event. Pretty good play rate and solid conversion rated about 18.9, 19%. Um, which is pretty good for the most played deck. Usually we see that not always hold true. Um, so a good weekend, honestly, for Golden Go. Um, and I think that makes sense considering that, you know, Charizard has been on the rise, uh, Dragapult has been on the rise, uh, Gardevoir has been off a little bit, like it hasn't really slid all the way down off of the graphic or anything like that.
But, um, yeah, I think it's still prevalent, but it's still there, but it's not as like played in heavily numbers by the top players as it had been at the earlier portions of this format and last format. Um, yeah, I'm looking at the numbers. There's a bit more here too, where we've got, you know, the absolute boxes that did really well in Milwaukee. Suddenly had fallen off as of last week and had gotten to a point where they said they had to decide, okay, are people respecting cornerstone enough that I would remove it from my deck and just not even worry about it?
Well, even though that's typically your primary out to beating the Golden Go deck and there are other ways for the deck to go about it. I know we've seen people include copies of either Erie or zero sick, and then attempting to do some kind of, you know, trick play with one of those cards in tandem with Absol to just rip a bunch of resources out of the Golden Go player's hand and make it impossible for them to take a knockout on this 330, 380 HP Pokemon. But cornerstone was kind of the go-to way to win that matchup initially.
But everything had answers to cornerstone last week. So absolve kind of either one just falling down in play rate in general. I mean, if we come in and we look at the day one percentage here, it was down to 4% when I think it was still at five or six as of last week, so falling further down, and then we also see Sarah ledge has continued to steadily decline in play, which is something that Golden Go is really on the lookout for previously. And Golden Go has kind of boasted solid matchups into Dragapult and Gardevoir.
Historically, depending on how things are tooled, and now you've got the respect that Gardevoir is having to put back on the Dragapult matchup after Lil, it just kind of creates this perfect storm for this straightforward deck to kind of pop back up and just bust its way through the tournament. Yeah. Yeah. And definitely like looking at Gardevoir, the mega Gardevoir, the Gardevoir build was far less played. So that was a huge factor because that has a, Golden Go is a much worse matchup into that than the regular standard Gardevoir you know, not being able to use energy retreat, super energy, superior energy retrieval, and Buddy Poffin and all those things to set up really hampers that deck from being able to continuously take knockouts.
Eventually you can just kind of item lock them out of the game. So yeah, definitely a turn in the favor for Golden Go here. I guess that makes sense a lot. I'm not too surprised by that, but it is surprising to see like the number of Golden Go after the last few weekends where it just didn't really show up at all. Right. Right. And people were kind of like writing it off a little bit. But yeah, definitely. I don't think anything else was that surprising. Like we didn't see the rise of a new deck or the, maybe like the two Eevee boxes is kind of surprising.
Right. That would be the one thing I look at this page and say, and then, yeah, the Greninja that barely missed out on cut. Unfortunately we had another week where a 17th placed player with the same match point total as the rest of the players in top cut missed out on cut. So another victim of the bubble, if you will. Well, and that's a little bit of a bummer. Yeah, go ahead. Do you want to hear another bit of irony? So Drew Stevenson was the player who bubbled out of ASIM last week. And this week he managed to bubble out of top 32 on opponents, opponents, resistance of all things, two weeks in a row.
So he's out a minimum of $3,000 and the, you know, the championship points from breaking through those thresholds as well with respectable tournament records across both weekends. Yeah. I mean, you can't, you can't really blame your performance at that point. It's just the look of the draw. And unfortunately, you know, it just didn't work out this time. Um, but, uh, yeah, I don't, I don't know. I don't think you think that's a big concern, I guess. Is it, is it more fair? Like there was talk about potentially switching up the pricing structure.
We talked a little bit about it last week where, you know, do we move to like a golf format where everybody with the same match points gets the same or is it just kind of like sour grapes? Like, you know, if this is going to keep happening, um, I think this one's still an anomaly. Uh, if we look at like the match point total going into top cut, it was very crowded at, um, at the top where everybody that made top cut either had 31 or 32 match points, and that's pretty uncommon if we look at like other historic, other regionals, um, there's usually like one or two players that will separate themselves, um, and have a stronger record than the rest of cut, you'll have somebody that, you know, gets 38 or 35 match points, you know, with going, uh, X, you know, X one or X two, Oh, or something like that.
But everybody was either X two, one or X one, two, uh, going into cut. And that was, uh, you know, just a little bit more condensed at the top, or at least like spread a little thinner, I guess. I don't know how to best phrase that, but something like that. Well, I think part of that's a symptom of a lot of players IDing and, you know, wanting to be safe, not necessarily wanting to play it out. Like I know when we, we looked at on here, the, if you look at the pairings just for the final round of Swiss, the tie rate, and we assume that this is influenced largely by, you can see a number of, I assume all of these are IDs, a large number of some of these other ones are IDs as well, but the tie rate in the final round of Swiss was almost 20% for day two, which that just is absurdly high.
And again, obviously it's inflated by IDs, but do you really expect players to play it out at that point? Right. Especially when the margin of like, if you win, you lock up, or if you tie, you lock up top cut. If you don't, if you play it out, you know, you could potentially lose out on top 32. So you're losing out on cash rising. It's like, why would you risk that? Why would you feel like, even if you have to play that ASIM round, you know, where one person bubbles, I like my chances of bubbling versus like, even if I bubble, I'm still making some amount of money as opposed to if I play it out and lose, then I, I'm out of like a lot of money.
It's pretty rough. Yeah. Yeah. And you did see a fair number of wins on that page as well. So it's not like literally everybody that made cut tied and I have to assume some of the ties were still natural ties, but I think that we've seen the average tie rate across both of the last two European regionals be higher than that of any American regionals that have happened so far this year. And as long as that tie rate stays closer to that, like 15, 16% mark or lower, I, which it has historically over here in the States, it wouldn't surprise me to see this never come up over here, regardless of tournament size.
Well, I think the overall tie rate for the tournament, looking at like limitless labs, it was listed or looking at pokey data. It was still 17, right? Except at 16. Oh, maybe I misspoke then. So, uh, can you look up what was Milwaukee at? Milwaukee was 16. Okay. So then there's just gotta be some sort of wonky relationship. Like you mentioned the way that the tournament is playing out, the way that everybody's so condensed and crammed into the same kind of point bracket is. And undoubtedly influencing what we're seeing here when you've got, well, now, weirdly enough, I've, I've said that, uh, I mean, in Milwaukee, everybody was either 34 or 35 match points.
So, but the circle back, we did, uh, John mentioned earlier that the flurry on boxes or the EV boxes, and you'd almost hesitate to call it that at this point, but we've, we've kind of seen this weird merging of concepts between Tara box and EV box over time, starting with, um, Alex Schumansky's list at worlds this past year, or a couple months ago now at this point, but Emma Hagan has been a big proponent of this flurry on deck, playing it at every single regional that she's gone to, along with playing it at the full group games event and had evolved the list even further, refined it even further had I believe gone so far as to actually post her list on Twitter the week of the event prior to playing it said, Hey, I'm not sharing my 60 with anybody for this weekend.
So here, everyone can use it or can see it ahead of time. And then went on and got second place at the event. And you admittedly, if you go back and watch the footage of the finals, I would say only lost in the finals due to, you know, bad luck, bad variants, which is something that can happen to this deck from time to time, but you've just got a lot of tools here. I think a nice adaptation that you could really call out as being different from other lists for the deck is that jet energy. So really not wanting to be retreat locked by anything, being able to reset something like carnelian or blood moon pretty easily are big, you know, benefits for this.
Also being able to get tournament assault landings off without having to get lottie awesome to play something pretty cool that you can do with it. And this is definitely a deck that I've enjoyed playing from time to time as well. It's a lot of fun to play. And when things line up, you just have so many different tricks that you're disposal that everyone knew that this deck was good. It's just kind of always been on the periphery most of the time. And I think maybe. the tide of Goldango is maybe what was able to kind of push this over, along with the still continued disrespect of Wellspring Mass Go Groupon.
You know, if you look through a lot of the lists for this event, people still aren't playing Shaman. And I'm sure Emo was able to capitalize on that over the weekend. Yeah, definitely reminds me of the Maze lists that did well at Worlds, I believe, right? No, that would have been in Frankfurt. Sorry. Yeah, earlier on in this season, with the Pidgeot. And then yeah, taking out the Ditto, not running the third EV, so making a little room for a Pidgeot that way. Just a bunch of one-ofs, which normally is a huge issue.
But this deck still has one of the most broken engines with the Noctowl engine, just being able to search out any trainer card in your deck whenever you do evolve. So yep, and this deck kind of lives and dies by Noctowl, for the most part. Getting that turn one Fan Rotom, and establishing your board early is such a key component when you only have like the one draw supporter of Iono, it can be really tough. No Mew is interesting. I think that's tough, like other than Fez and Dippity, you're really relying upon getting your Pidgeot, Pidgeot EX established, and kind of working your deck out that way.
So that's interesting to me. Yeah, I think this is just a really cool toolbox, and really cool to see something like this do well at these events. Absolutely. It is a little bit of a shame that Emma had such a rough time of it in the finals. You know, I don't know, I didn't really watch much of the tournament, but it's discouraging to see that like, you get all the way to the finals, and then something like that just happens. You know, you don't want to see that as a fan. Is what it is. Emma seemed pretty happy with the result, and probably continue to be happy sitting at what is it like 900 championship points on the season at this point?
Right. Yeah. I mean, that's fair. When you put that in perspective, it stings a little less, but yeah, you still hope to do well. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, definitely. Interesting matchup. Like, it's got to be extra frustrating, I think, though, when you're favored into something, and your deck just decides not to work. So like, you know, running the Flareon, you should just be able to like run through gold and go. And yeah, not the case this time, unfortunately. As she did, you know, against Christian Fontenot in top four with another Goldango.
Finally seeing Grimmsnarl get some respect here. Like I mentioned earlier, Mike Ellis made it into top 16, unfortunately fell to some friendly fire playing against Arthur Trutzler in the Grimmsnarl mirror in top 16, which is definitely not the most fun matchup in the world. But Arthur carrying the Grimmsnarl torch all the way up into top four of the event, where he also lost to Daniel, in my opinion, due to some bad variants. It's a cool thing for this event, they were able to actually stream both top four matches, which I know we don't always have time for.
I know they try to whenever they can, but it doesn't always really fit logistically. But being able to watch all the games is really interesting, especially when it's not Dragapult and Gardevoir over and over and over again. True. I'm sure everyone was happier to see some more interesting decks. Yeah, yeah. And speaking of that, rounding out the rest of the top eight here, no Gardevoir or Dragapult present whatsoever. Cal Connor hopping over with Zurark. His list is still pretty similar to Piper's, if I remember correctly.
Kato Arai making the trip from Japan all the way to Europe, rather than Australia, playing the Absolbox, who I believe he lost to Emma in top eight. And then Hermione making another pretty deep run with Charizard. And then we've got Vinny Fernandez taking the place of his brother in cut this week with Zurark as well. We do have a couple of Gardevoirs with straight Garde from Max Roberts and Garde Jellicent from Jamie Hindley. Another Charizard from Alexi Yonti. And then we finally see our first Dragapult in cut from Julius Krag with Dragapult Dusknoir.
Two more Goldengos from Nicole Peterson and Pascal Tillenberg. And then, like I mentioned, Mike Ellis rounding out with Grimmsnarl in top 16. And it just seems like a weird cut to me. You know, we saw Dragapult popped up last weekend. Gardevoir had seemingly fallen by the wayside because it had adjusted to a metagame where it wasn't respecting Dragapult as much. And it looks like maybe continued to make those decisions to not respect Dragapult while also not respecting Goldengo potentially. And I guess maybe the question is, outside of playing Jelly, how do you really respect Goldengo as a Gardevoir player?
I mean, yeah, it's tough. Maybe run the Devo or something like that if you can get a Devo playing. But yeah, I don't really know. I'm not much of a Garde player. Something with Fluttermain? Yeah. But like that doesn't really, like, it only goes so far. It doesn't solve it. Yeah. It helps, I guess, if you can get like the early stuff down. But yeah, I think Jellicent's probably the best answer for that kind of thing. Like we saw that do well. But no, I think this is just kind of the churn of the meta at this point.
Like we've seen Garde do well. It stretches. We've seen Dragapult had a good week last week. We had, you know, the new Tord now Absolbox pop up here and there and kind of is an answer to like the established meta and the people countered that and then had answers for Cornerstone. And like we just, this is the churn of the meta, especially now. Like this is the, what is it, fourth or fifth week of this format. So at this point, yeah, like we're into a new month. And the crazy thing is we still have, you know, potentially was like another month and a half essentially of the format or just a month.
Yeah. Just one more month because we'll have LAIC at the end of this month or in a few weeks. So now two weeks will be Vegas, then LAIC. Vegas and then LAIC or Vegas plus Buenos Aires and then LAIC. Yeah. But still three more events with the same format. And I know that this kind of happens around this time of year, every year, like we get some stretch where a set, a given format takes up seemingly an exorbitant amount of tournaments. And normally you end up with the same tired metagame where it's the same deck winning over and over and over again.
Like last year, I think it was Regidrago just over and over and over doing very well. It wasn't always winning every single event, but it was the expected BDIF and just present a super high numbers doing really well at every event. And this year things seem way more wide open and it becomes much harder or much more of a task on players to really predict what they're going to see at a given event rather than being able to accurately say this will be this percentage, this will be this percentage because a lot of those percentages are fluctuating week to week.
Yeah. Yeah. It's so wide right now. And I don't expect that part to change. I expect like, you know, Henry Chow can innovate a Guarded Voralist and it just doesn't matter sometimes. Like it's still going to be good, don't get me wrong, but it's not going to take over a tournament like we've seen. I think. Sure. I think that that's just not as likely to happen now. And I still think that like the good players will still rise to the top. Like we're seeing continuing performances from a lot of these players.
But they're all just doing it with whatever deck that they feel like they have the best chance to win. Like they're not trying to metagame too hard. They're more playing decks that they want to play. Like I think Daniel's played Golden Goat for forever if I'm correct, except for that little foray into Garchomp last week. Sure. Yeah. That was that was a fluke. We'll chalk it up to that. Noah's played, you know, Flareon forever. I mean, Cal Connors played Zoroark for a minute. You know, all these players are kind of playing the deck that they want to play and aren't playing like aren't forcing themselves to like, innovate too much.
And I think that's suiting well, that that kind of decision making and and leaning into that is suiting this format really well when when it really is allowing skill expression, it really is allowing like players to play the matchups as they present it to themselves. And you can find ways to outplay your opponents with the skills of your deck. And I think that's pretty cool. Yeah. And I know there was no coverage for the other regional this weekend, but we did have an ASIM of nine players over in Brisbane.
Brent Tonneson being well, I guess I'm not sure if he was actually the bottom seed here or if he lost this game. It's tough to say. I can look it up. Oh, true. We do have technology, but do you know this? There's this kind of stark contrast of the top cut over in Europe versus the top cut here in Australia, where, you know, Absolbox had one copy in top 16. And then I think very few making it super far other than that. And over here in Brisbane, Absol or Megabox, whatever you want to call it, Tordbox was a third of the top nine decks in the room.
And then as you continue to look down, there's another one in top 16, at least one more in top 32, and just pushing things out of the way. And now we get to see the continued success of Dragapult with Brent Tonneson, Max Cundey and Sitaro Mizutani, all bringing Dragapult Dusknoir to the event. And then two copies of Charizard and one more Goldengo. So still no Gardevoir. Gardevoir's kind of on fraud watch maybe? Or is it just because the Henry Chao contingent is not present? That's a hard one to say.
Just to give a clarification, you said, Brent, that he did lose in Ace-Sim. He was the only person to play Ace-Sim for this as the cut ended at ninth there. Sure. Okay. Yep. Yeah, I'm not too worried about it. But yeah, I think it always seems like whenever Australia gets their hands onto it, they people just want to play whatever deck did well, like two weeks before, it seems to be like a bit of a delay. And then, yeah, the Japanese players seems like they wanted to play the Absol Box deck. They like, you know, I think Tord worked with some of the Japanese contingent on innovating the deck.
And so obviously, they want to show off what they did and what they helped build in some ways. Well, right. Especially since they never got a chance to play it in Japan in that format, like it wasn't a known quantity at the time that that Champions League happened. So they said, oh, well, I technically could play this in the, whatever the Japanese equivalent of Phantasmal Flames is, format, but maybe it's not as good there. So let me come back and play it in a format where I feel like it's better, or, you know, I just don't want to play Dragapult or Gardevoir or what have you.
I know a lot of Japanese players do tend, trend toward big basic decks when, as frequently as possible. And it's, you know, no surprise to see them continue to be successful. Ryuki is no stranger to this type of strategy, like a trolley-based deck, you know, Ryuki obviously won EUIC last year with Kloff. And so coming back out here, giving the trolley another spin, and like we mentioned, no cornerstone. But we do see both that Eerie and that 0-6, so that's how you, like, that's your sticky point.
That's how you're winning your Goldengo matchup. It's just ripping all of the cards out of the Goldengo player's hand and hoping that that's enough to get you over the finish line. Yeah. So, kind of a list we're used to seeing at this point, a combination of the Lively Stadium and Bravery Charm list versus some of the other stuff we've seen. But yeah, this is running a 2 Yveltal, I think there's nothing too surprising with this at this point. But yeah, it looks good, it looks solid. Yeah, it definitely is leaning into disruption with Absol over the cornerstone line, which I think is the right way to go at this point.
Especially it looks like in Australia, they didn't have the same outbreak of Goldengo. There was only one in top cut. And I don't know what the metagame looks like, but I'd have to guess it probably doesn't have as much Goldengo. Yeah. Oh, far, far less. Far, far down. Yeah, it was close to 11%, I think, in Gdansk. Yep. And then jumped all the way up to 17% in Day 2 for Gdansk. Yep. And here it is a lowly 6% in Brisbane. So... Yep. Much more manageable. So, you know, it still had a decent conversion.
But definitely not as... I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Definitely not as... Where is it at? 24%. Yeah, 24% is pretty good. Yeah. But not as, you know, not as heavily played. And so that allowed... That Absol box allowed some of the other decks that we were talking about earlier to have a good matchup into that. For sure. Have a good showing at this tournament.
Yeah. And like we'll talk about all these decks some more. I mean, we don't expect to see any huge, like, waves maybe. But we'll see. Maybe some changes will pop up in the online metagame between this week and Vegas. But we'll talk about the decks a bit more next week as we head into Vegas. And the next topic will be the Phantasmal Flames set. But before we get there, we're going to take a little break and head into Blaine's Quiz Show for the week. For those of you that may not be familiar with the format, it's just a multiple choice quiz.
I'm going to ask Aaron a series of three questions. If at any point in time Aaron is stumped, he is allowed to ask for one hint. If a player forgoes that hint and answers all three questions correctly, they will achieve a bonus point. And Aaron, you might need some bonus points. You might need that bonus point this week. We'll see how you do. I don't want to say I made it easier for you because I always try to, like, you know... Come up with questions I think that are fair, but like hard, if you will.
Okay. And so this week you did the spooky side of Phantasmal Flames. I decided to lean into the other side and look at the flame side of Phantasmal Flames. So all these questions will have a flame motif or theme and we'll get right into it. You ready? Is this just a series of quiz questions about Twitter beef? Oh no. No, I got off that app a while ago at this point. So no Twitter beef for these questions. These are all Pokemon TCG related. Awesome. Sounds way better. Let's get into it. Alrighty.
So not including Phantasmal Flames, how many sets since Black and White Base have had a fire motif, AKA any adjective or verb relating to fire? And is it four, five, six, or seven? I got nothing, man. You don't think you can puzzle it out? Can you like try to- I didn't play Sun and Moon or Sword and Shield. How in the world? Like, okay. So I know, I do know, I know we've got, we've got X, we've got Flash Fire. We've got, I don't know, would Plasma Blast, is that a fire motif? I'm going to assume no.
So we'll go, we've got Flash Fire, we've got Darkness Ablaze, not Crimson Invasion. We've got Burning Shadows. So we've got three. Three is not an option. We've got... Let's see. What was the set after Team Up called? Team Up, what is the Charizard Reshiram set called? Oh my gosh. That's probably got a fire motif, we'll count that. Basically anything that has like a prevalent Charizard in it has to be a fire set at this point, right? So we've got Obsidian Flames. There we go. I remember that one.
That's five. I'm probably missing at least one because I didn't say anything from Sword and Shield era. Or no, I said Darkness Ablaze. Okay, that counted. I'm probably missing one though. I'm going to go with six. Okay. You were right on the right track. I think if you stayed at five, you would have been much happier. It is five. I have Obsidian Flames, Darkness Ablaze, Burning Shadows, XY Flashfire, and White Flare. Oh, I forgot about White Flare. Okay. Brand new one. That's it. There wasn't...
The Charizard set I think earlier in Team Up, like the tag team one, I don't think had a fire motif. I'm remembering... What was it called? Give me one second. I'm going to have to look it up now. It's Unbroken Bonds. That is definitely not fire related. That's unfortunate. No. I think it's because it has Mewtwo and Mew in it as well. Okay. Darn. That sounds right. So, yep. So, 0 for 1 so far. We will keep going. Sure. So you're telling me Plasma Blast is not fire based? No. Blast is not a fire adjective.
I don't know where you're getting this information from. All right. Next question. There are three secret rares in the XY Flashfire set. Which is not one of them? Is it Mega Charizard X, Mega Heracross, Mega Charizard Y, or Mega Kangaskhan? It's Heracross. All right. I think this was a softball. You got it correct. I was trying to like puzzle out the best way to ask this question. This is kind of what I settled on. But yes, Heracross was in the next set from this era. And we just had the two Charizards and Kangaskhan as the secret rares as the only Megas.
All the Megas, I believe, had secret rares in this kind of era. Yeah. And they were the only secret rares from these sets. Like they had the attack name of whatever the attack was in Japanese for the English printing or in English for the Japanese printing. And then the secret rare version is one where it had gold text for that attack name. Yeah. They're very cool cards. I think my favorite though are like the full art ones they had for Generations, I think. Sure. Honestly, I like the ones that they're coming out with.
I think I don't know if they're going to be promos or if they're going to be in like the whatever this year's equivalent of like Prismatic Evolutions, Palladian Fates, that type set that they've shown where it's almost like comic book artwork. But then it also again has the attack text in Japanese. So they've revealed ones for Gardevoir Charizard and Lucario already. And I think they look pretty sick. I would like to see those. I haven't really seen them yet. I'll check them out. Yeah. Sounds good.
All right. One more question. Rounded to the nearest whole number, how many copies of Charizard VMAX, the most expensive card in the set, can you buy for the price of one sealed booster box of Darkness Ablaze? Is it four copies, six copies, eight copies or 10 copies of Charizard VMAX? So I know we've had similar conversations to this where like you can buy a master set of Obsidian Flames for the price of an Obsidian Flames booster box currently. Or that was the case a couple of months ago and may not be the case anymore.
Darkness Ablaze, again, no idea what it's worth. I have no idea what Charizard VMAX is worth, to be honest with you. So this is going to be a huge shot in the dark. I'm going to go. It's got to be like an absurdly big number. So it's either going to be eight or 10. I've already lost my bonus point. So I'm going to ask for the hint and see where we can go from there. All right. The hint is a booster box of Darkness Ablaze costs three hundred and twenty five dollars. OK. So do I think that Charizard is like thirty two dollars or more than that?
Do I think that's thirty two or closer to forty? We're going to go. We'll go with ten. We'll go with ten. I'm going to say Charizard is cheaper. I feel like the hint actually hurts you here. It was eight. Charizard is forty two dollars. I'm bringing it up to a total of seven point seven Charizards that would net you the same cost as the sealed booster box here. So close, Aaron. I feel really bad about it, but it's also kind of funny. So I don't feel that bad, but it never fails to amaze me how ridiculous sealed prices are on Pokemon.
Like, it doesn't it doesn't make sense, man. So, hey, I guess people just don't know that that Charizard VMAX could be in there and it could be a ten. That's what they care about. Oh, well, I guess, you know, if we could look at the price of a ten, I'm not going to get into all that now. I'm sure that's ridiculous. It's probably up there like for four hundred or something like that for a ten, you know, but yeah. That's just I can't I don't know, man, like you do what makes you happy, but like who?
I don't know how many people that would make happy at this point in my life, like. I don't know, man, but I think what would make me happy is getting more questions right in Blaine's quiz show. You know, well, I'm you'll have a chance to do it two weeks from now. Yeah. I are you are you like is it is it me? Is it a me problem, Aaron? Do I need to like? No. You're I mean, at some point I may have to study on looking at pricing, need to study these topics that you enjoy asking questions about because I am utterly failing at them.
Like you hit me in two separate weaknesses this week with like, hey, I put the funny thing is, so you you ask the fire motif question and I actually correctly named one of the sets from an era that I absolutely didn't play during and did get tripped up thinking that the Unbroken Bonds had some sort of fire name. I had no idea what I would have thought it was like just tag fire, something stupid like that. And then, yeah, I am. I definitely do not know card prices. You're good. No way, shape or form.
Do I know card price? Well, the stupid thing is they keep fluctuating, so that doesn't make it any easier to know the price. I don't really know prices until I look it up, to be honest with you. I know like relatively like I know that a booster box of burning shadows is stupidly more expensive than like any card in burning shadows is like like you can buy a master set of burning shadows, I think at this point for far less than that booster box sealed. So, yeah, yeah, it's it's stupid. But anyways, you know, that's the crazy world we live in.
And I like it because I get to ask you silly questions about it. And yeah, that's that's Blaine's quiz show. So we go from what was it, 12 to I had six, so I'm up to seven now, OK, so hopelessly behind and you will continue to pull further and further away, you know, but that is OK. The name of the game. Yeah. So if we're going to talk about sets that are probably going to end up with booster boxes that cost more than what the set is worth, oh yeah, then we are right at home with Phantasmal Flames.
It was just one Japanese set, right? And then some some battle decks thrown in. So, yep. So this set is comprised of the Japanese Inferno X set, along with the Mega Dianci Mega Gengar battle decks, which were also, again, released as separate products over here. But similar to what they did with Steven's Metagross and Marnie's Grimmsnarl EX with Destin Rivals, they've included all of those cards in this set as well, with the exception of a couple of like promo IRs that they stuck there. But let's go ahead and jump into some of these cards, right?
First one. I know people have been people like this guy a lot. I think just in general, Mega Heracross, unfortunately, has never had a very good card. But in this one is, you know, no exception to that. We've got Panzer Horn for two grass energy does 100 damage. And if this Pokemon was damaged by an attack during your opponent's last turn, this attack does that much more damage. And for three grass, Mountain Thrust does 170, and you discard the top two cards of your opponent's deck. And this is just a super lackluster card for something that gets up three prizes.
Yeah, if it was tankier somehow, or if there's a way to increase his HP to the point where you could almost guarantee it wouldn't get knocked out in one hit, I think it's a little bit better. But it's even then like, just kind of hard to like maneuver it being it being a mega giving up three prizes. If you have to use Panzer Horn, it means you're damaged. So you could potentially heal yourself. And there are ways to do that in this set. Yeah, we'll get into some of that. But I don't think it's like a really good viable strategy against a lot of the top decks.
If you're getting one shot anyways, you don't get to use Panzer Horn. And Mountain Thrust is a mediocre attack for a mega. Right? Yeah, I mean, at that point, like you're probably playing this with some combination of, you know, all of what we've seen in the mega Venusaur deck from the mega evolution set, you know, some combination of Venusaur Meganium and Teal Mask Ogrepon. And at that point, why aren't you if you want to attack with a mega just attack with a Venusaur, or you're even probably better off just attacking with Ogrepon rather than attacking with Mega Heracross.
Yeah. We did hint at some healing and we do get Ludicolo. It's a stage two 160 HP Pokemon that has the ability excited healing, it says once during your turn, if you have a grass type mega Pokemon EX in play, you can heal 60 damage from one of your Pokemon. So that I guess I would allow you in theory to heal off your mega Heracross after it gets damaged and keep it in play. And then, you know, you don't necessarily need to focus that down. You could use it on like a, you could run one of these in your mega Venusaur deck or something like that.
Sure. Like a beefier grass guy that is really hard to knock out. This makes a lot more sense. And yeah, I think that's it. I don't know, man. It's it's like one of those things. It's like, do I really think this will get played? There might be a niche for it in a grass deck like a mega Venusaur deck. But, you know, if you're running mega Venusaur, you're probably running either Meganium or right. You're running a bunch of other stuff. Any deck that runs two stage twos, that's one of those stage twos is a Pidgeot EX.
Like that just feels really weird. There's not a lot of decks that can really pull that off efficiently. No, I mean, we're going to we're going to get into some of the other tools that might make multiple stage two decks better in a little bit. But yeah, I just I don't really love it. I do think that grass kind of gets to be a little bit of an exception to this right with. Well, as long as the Forest of Vitality is legal. Sure. Like you can almost get away with including just a one one one Ludicolo line and playing something like bug catching set or one of the other cards that we're going to talk about later when we get to the trainers and being able to plop Lotad into Ludicolo in a single turn makes it a bit more viable to have this.
But then the question becomes, is 60 healing once a turn enough to merit including this? And the answer is maybe. I mean, that's that's all of the residual damage from Phantom Dive cleared off of a Pokemon if it was to be put onto a single Pokemon, which obviously, if the Dracula player knows you're playing Ludicolo, they're either going to bust Ludicolo or they're not going to put 60 on one guy to begin with. They'll diversify where that damage is going and it won't be as effective. So it's not to say, but I think that it's interesting.
Like you always have to look at the grass type evolutions through a different lens than other types, as long as that stadium is legal. That's fair. Yeah. And I think like you can heal off a good amount. Like if you get two in play, you're doing one twenty three, one eighty. 80 is plenty enough to heal pretty much anything. I don't know a world where you'll have a three, three, three ludicolous. No, that's your deck. But a card that I think we'll see play in that mega Venusaur deck is Genesect. Like the thing that that deck really wanted before was a one prize attacker and bug cannon is just an exceptionally good attack for one grass.
You choose one of your opponents, Pokemon, and this attack does 20 damage to it for each grass energy attached to this Pokemon. So between Meganium, Teal Mask, Ogre Pond and Venusaur, being able to move energies around, double them and accelerate them into play. You're suddenly sniping things off the bench for, you know, you've got three energies attached to it. It counts a six all of a sudden and you're doing 120 to something. You can very quickly kind of snowball into larger and larger numbers.
And it's kind of like raging baby raging bolt, almost on steroids in a way where when you effectively think about it, when you have Meganium in play, you're doing 40 per energy card attached as opposed to 20. On paper, it's weaker than baby raging bolt. But when you have that added acceleration or multiplication effect taken into account, you're stronger. And baby raging bolt has been a pretty dang good card since it got released. So if mega Venusaur was ever a viable deck, I think that this card is going to play a pretty large role in its success.
Yeah, I think it's a good tool to add to that grass toolbox kind of mindset. Yeah, it's not bad. We get some cool. I mean, this is kind of one of the namesets of the namesake of the set with Phantasmal Flames is a Charizard line. We get a usable Charmander here with ADHP and the ability Nimble if this Pokemon has no energy attached to it. It has a retreat cost of zero. So free retreat. It does have ADHP, which is good and bad. It can't be searched out by Buddy Puffin. But in a world where that card doesn't exist or in a world where you're trying to just keep your Charmanders alive for a little longer, this guy can stand around a little bit longer.
And you don't really mind it having a two retreat cost with the abilities. And Life Coal is a solid attack, at least knocks out Badoo. So that's saying something. And then the Charmeleon is not too bad. I think I don't know if you take out one of the other Charmeleons that you usually run in a Charizard EX deck and slot this in. Hard to say. I don't know enough about Charizard to really speak with authority on it. But 110 HP is not insignificant. It's a good amount of HP. It still has a nice two retreat costs, so it's movable.
And the artwork's kind of cool. I like the artwork. But the namesake, I'll let you read it out. Yeah. So Mega Charizard EX, 360 HP Mega Stage 2 EX with the Inferno X attack for two fire energy. Discard any amount of fire energy from among your Pokemon. And this attack does 90 damage for each card you discarded in this way. So Raging Bolt, Stage 2 version, basically. And with that in mind, there are obviously tools that go with it. Like if we want to jump down, the Oricorio X is kind of tailor made to go with this card.
We have Excited Turbo as the ability there. So basic EX, 190 HP, your typical, quote unquote, vulnerable support EX Pokemon. But Excited Turbo reads as often as you like during your turn. If you have any fire or mega evolution Pokemon EX in play, you may use this ability. Attach a basic fire energy card from your hand to one of your bench fire Pokemon. So similar to how we had Sandy Shocks with Raging Bolt and then Tailmask Ogre Pond and Raging Bolt, you now have Excited Turbo Oricorio with Inferno X for Mega Charizard EX.
And I'm super underwhelmed by this card right now. Yeah, I think there's a world where it's good. The HP is really hard to get over. Sure. And so it'll stay on the board for a while. In theory. And I mean, if there if there is a world where like we get a bunch of megas that are just duking it out, this guy is definitely going to like be better. And the fact that, you know, you could run this guy and then run the restroom, run some other fire Pokemon that are able to kind of combo with Oricorio's fire acceleration.
We're getting a little bit more of fire support. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know. It's I mean, Moltres is OK. I don't think it's that good. Like, no, it's not good. But like there's some fire Moltres is a sick card. I've but I was not done with Charizard yet. Oh, sorry. Go ahead. But yeah, like I think we go back. We always go back to Raging Bolt felt like, oh, well, this card's stat overstated and really powerful, but like, OK, you're you're hitting two prize or against two prize or like, when does that really matter?
And there are there are times where that matters. There are times where, like, you know, beat stick decks are prominent and you just you have the bigger guy that's harder to knock out. And you win and that that'll come up. And, you know, as long as you can pivot, like the fact that it's a stage two means you can pivot away from like a one prize board early and then pivot into the three prize or and close out Mega Charizard. You can choose when to put that into play as opposed to having it in play from the start.
So that's a little bit of a difference, I'd say, from like the Raging Bolt kind of thing where you have to get into play early and power up your board that way and make it a little bit more vulnerable while you're setting up. This allows you to like choose when to put that into play. And when do you want to move towards that strategy? Yeah, so I guess that's true. The thing that bothers me about it, and maybe this is just the case until rotation occurs, but we still have regular Charizard EX. Sure. Which has always been an amazing kind of late game monster card to begin with.
So why do you need this to close your game out when you have the thing that already ramps up its damage output to one hit KO? Basically everything in the game. And you have the cards to overcome the ones that it can and can't one hit KO in the form of the Dusknoir line. And that just kind of compensates for like the issue with this with Mega Charizard EX is you're forced to run more fire energy just to be able to attack with it consistently, right? And like maybe you can make the argument that you can play things like Superior Energy Retrieval.
You could get away with running, I don't know, six or seven energy as opposed to having to run like 12 like Raging Bolt does. But at that point, it seems like you're stretching and really trying to like force kind of a square peg in a round hole. And maybe I'm biased because I don't believe we've seen this really pop up as a core archetype. Like we've seen one of Mega Charizard's in Charizard Pidgeot decks. But even that feels a little out of place, like the best use case I can see for it in that deck is that it's a cornerstone answer.
Just because it doesn't have an ability, being able to discard three fires from your board to do 270 is not terrible. Yeah, I think the real strength of this card is not as an accessory to a Charizard EX deck. I think it's as its own deck. And then you can like use Aura Corio to power up other stuff. The fact that Aura Corio doesn't have to attach the fire energy to like a Mega, it can do it to any fire Pokemon on your bench. That I think helps a lot. I mean, obviously, Aura Corio can be a liability as it has only 190 HP.
But I don't know, I think. It's. I think it's still early days for this card, I don't want to write it off. I think it is overstated. It is just a beefy guy that is really hard to knock out. There's going to be a time where this this card just kind of is dominant. And it might not be for like this format, you know, with with Golden Go and Raging Bolt kind of doing what this does better as a two prizer instead of as a three prizer. But like those will rotate at some point. And this will be like the only way to knock stuff out in one hit.
And it'll still be powerful to pair with some other stuff. And if we don't have an easy way to hit 360 HP, I can see a world where like, yeah, this guy is kind of a mainstay of the format. So, yeah, you could definitely be right. Definitely. But yeah, I agree. I think we won't see it right away. I'd agree with that. That that we probably won't see it kind of develop until later on. Sure. A card I do think we're going to see right away, and I know that you mentioned that you weren't a huge fan of it is the Moltres.
So 120 HP, basic one retreat, one fire energy. The fighting wings attack does 20 damage. But if your opponents act, a Pokemon is a Pokemon X. The attack does 90 more damage. And so the main use case for this, in my mind, is if you're behind against Golden Go, just fire defiance band. One hit chaos, a Golden Go every single time. And that's big for if your deck can fit in prism energy or luminous energy. And Golden Go gives you a hard time like you are in for defiance band plus nest ball, attach a fire energy, get this thing active and poof, Golden Go is gone.
And then when they trade back into it, cool, you don't really care. Or if they go around it, it's kind of like Chi-Yu, but with less cards in a lot of ways. Yeah, I mean, one prize, like a one prizer that hits for one energy efficiently. I'll give you that. I think that's as a counter. It's a good counter. It is a very strong like that's a good use case for this. I guess I gravitate towards that originally. No. And yeah, same kind of thing with like a teal mask. Exactly. Exactly. So there are fires in a decent spot as far as a hitting for weakness against some popular types and not being like water is not too popular right now.
I don't think there's any deck that other than like court like. What is it? The last thing I'm on. Yeah. Well, spring mask. I think that's pretty much the only consistent water Pokemon Chi-Yu's falling off. And we don't really have like Vaporeon or anything like that at this point. Yeah, I could see some use. Definitely. Like, yeah, you said, like the fact that you can run prism or luminous energy and power it up pretty easily is pretty nice. For sure. For sure. Card that I hadn't looked at at all, but I guess does maybe fit the bill.
If you are putting a mega Charizard XEX deck together is the Reshiram. So you could or a choreo four fires to it to do 240 from a one prizer, which is a relevant number. You know, 240 is a lot of damage for something that's only gives up one prize. But other than that, the card's pretty mediocre. Yeah, I think it's OK. Yeah, I think that that would be the one case where it would be pretty good. You know, we have Emboar from Emboar, like the stage two Pokemon, Black Bolt, White Flare, Black Bolt, White Flare.
So we're going to get Inferno Fandango action. The Magneboar rerun with I saw somebody on Blue Sky post the Emboar with Reshiram and then running the instead of Magnezone Prime, you have Reveruum where you can discard an energy and then draw until you have six. So very similar in that vein. Not quite as powerful, but it's stage one instead of stage two. So, you know, reliving those glory days, I guess, for me, is a heart, gold, soul, silver through noble victories lover. That one's a lot of fun.
This is a fun deck to play. But yeah, I don't know. It'll probably it'll probably see some play at some point. I don't think I mean, 240 for a one prize is not nothing to sneeze at. Like, it's knocking out all the support Pokemon, knocking out a decent chunk of the format. So it's it's pulling its weight, for sure. Yeah. As long as you can afford the cost of four fire energy, which isn't totally unreasonable, either with Oricorio or something like Ho-Oh Armor Rouge could potentially splash it in as well.
And that deck got a little bit of an upgrade, along with Sarah Ledge, getting an upgrade in the form of a new Charkadet because we totally needed another Charkadet. But this one has gather power for a fire energy, which is minor errand running, but for a fire. And then for another one fire attack, you chop for 10. But I think minor errand running fits really well, both in Armor Rouge and Sarah Ledge based decks. You know, finding this energy early to either accelerate them with Ho-Oh or being able to discard them to power up your abyssal flame with your Sarah Ledge, it's just a nice combo.
Yep. And the fact that it doesn't specify what energy type you have to get is pretty nice. Yep. So you can get like one fire when fighting and go from there. So, yeah, that's pretty cool. I don't love the two retreat cost. I think that could be a problem with the deck. You I mean, you you run like the ADHP one, if I'm not mistaken. Right now, I think some of them already have to retreat. Sure. So if you're going to like opt for that, I guess it makes sense. It's like, do I want to trade off of an ADHP Charkadet or is like gather power powerful enough?
I don't know enough to really like be excited by it. If I'm honest, like I don't play enough Sarah Ledge to like, oh, am I really missing out on energy turn one? But like, yeah, it's not bad if you're going second. You just want to see more energy to discard. Makes sense to have this guy in your deck. We got a new Sarah Ledge. This was one of the pre-release promos has for one fire purgatory slash. Does 220 damage, but you have to discard for fire. I don't think it's that good. Nope. So we can just skip it.
Like, like Sarah Ledge X already does this much damage. Doesn't get stopped by something like Cornerstone. I mean, yeah, technically you can't hit through Mimikyu. But if you're doing this to hit through Mimikyu, I think you have other problems. Yeah. Like you already have Solrock to want to kill Mimikyu anyway. So why do you why do you need this card? Right. For sure. Rotomy X continues the trend of trying to make tool type things happen. And I know that we mentioned I want to say it was two sets ago now.
I think it's destined rivals where you have all of the different Rotoms that have like the tool drop style attack where they do damage based on the number of tools you have in play. And now we have Rotomy X that says your Pokemon with Rotom in their name may have up to two tools attached to them. If this Pokemon loses the ability, discard Pokemon tools from your Pokemon until they only have one remaining. And then the attack is totally unimportant. So we won't read it. But it's there for the ability.
Trying to stack all the tools on all of your other Rotoms, because I think they do 30 per tool that you have in play. It's a gimmick archetype, but could be a fun league deck, I guess. Yeah, I think it's cool. My friend, my best friend Thomas, his favorite Pokemon is Rotom. So I'll definitely like make this deck. and like send them the list or something like that. It's gonna be a fun one. Sure. Oh, we have Pommat. Actually like Pommat borderline is really good. It's borderline really good. It's one of those things where it reminds me of kind of like ShockLock or, you know, Accelgor Gothitelle, where if you can set this up, there's a chance that- Is the Articuno, right?
Well, right, exactly, exactly. The Emergency Jelly Articuno or the Articuno Monkey Dory. If your opponent's not respecting this type of deck, you can just run them over. So Pommat, of course, is a stage two Pokemon, 140 HP electric type. And the energy cost for the attack is where things are gonna get a little bit shaky, but for two lightning, Voltage Fist is 130, and you may do 60 damage to this Pokemon. If you do, your opponent's active is now paralyzed. So like John called out, the Articuno from, is it Brilliant Stars, I think?
Or Astral Radiance? I think it was Silver Tempest. Okay, I don't know. One of the V-Star sets. One of those, yeah. Had an Articuno in it that did, basically had the same effect or very similar. And so we've seen now, as long as we have Monkey Dory in the format still, self-damage is a good thing, and it will continue to be a good thing. So being able to do 130, paralyze their active, and then just pinging damage to their bench, or being able to KO whatever's active, they're forced to promote something, and you paralyze that thing, and you continue that process until you just win the game.
We are seeing a lot of respect for Retreat Luck right now in the form of either Petrunt or Turo, or just playing Switch. So maybe this won't be super strong, and it gets a little bit weaker because it's on a stage two as well. But it's definitely something to keep track of as the format kind of progresses, if you can utilize it. Yeah. I think there's worlds where, yeah, you're able to establish the Monkey Dory, or you get the, what is it? The Ludicolo. If you have the Mega Grasshook, well, you can heal.
We're gonna park a Heracross on our bench just to heal Pommat. Yeah, if only the Venusaur can move grass energy that weren't basic grass, I feel like you'd be in a much better spot with us, this kind of goofy deck. Right. But yeah, I think there might be a world where we get something cool like that. You never know. But definitely, anytime we have like that, like you said, auto paralysis without a coin flip, and people will take advantage of it. You have to give it a look, right? Yeah, exactly. It always sticks in the back of your mind.
And when you start scoping lists out, and nobody has the Retreat lock or Paralyze lock figured out, then yeah, you can take advantage of it for sure. Fun League deck. Another card that's very fun League deck worthy is Flygon. Oh yeah. So John mentioned getting milled out by this during the pre-release, and that's kind of the MO of the card with the Flapping Sand ability. When you play this Pokemon from your hand to evolve one of your Pokemon during your turn, or when this Pokemon is knocked out by damage from an attack you may discard the top two cards of your opponent's deck.
And I feel like that's a lot of conditions for this card to actually be good. But mill strategies are the favorite thing for a lot of people. Like I've seen way too many people try to force a great Tusk Mill to happen. And at the end of the day, I honestly think that this is better than that. And so maybe there's a world where this works. Like, you know, you could, if you play Prism Energy, or not Prism Energy, Legacy Energy as your A-spec, you theoretically could try to force your opponent to knock out seven Flygons to win.
And that gets you through 28 cards in their, or yeah, 28 cards in their deck, but the seventh one would win them the game. So you could get through 26 cards in their deck before they've won the game. And then you combine it with things like Turo or, I don't know, if there was a way to devolve it, maybe it would be worth it. But I think that- Yeah, I'm saying like in an item sense, yeah. Right. Like if Strange Timepiece worked on this card, like we'd be in business. Is there any Pokemon that their attacks devolve your own Pokemon?
Trying to remember. Off the top of my head, I honestly don't know. I think we've seen that in the past, but I don't know if that's the case anymore. But yeah, it's underwhelming. Like two's just not enough, unfortunately. And there's enough recovery in format right now with like Super Rod and stuff like that to where it shouldn't really just derail everything. But it's kind of cool. I mean, you know, Mill's a viable strategy sometimes in the format and keeping people honest with Mill, you know, is kind of fun.
Especially like, yeah, talk about like a league deck or something like that. Definitely. Phil falls into that category. For sure. I think when we go into the dark types, we need to head down a little bit lower in the list first, and then we'll circle back to the upper ones. With your broken dark deck, I'm sure this card was in it. Yeah. So why don't you go and tell me about Toxtricity? Yeah, this guy's pretty cool. It's a stage one with 140 HP, but the ability is really the showstopper. I don't think it's...
I don't know what it's actually called. The ability is bad upper. It says basically once during your turn, you can search your deck for a dark energy, a basic dark energy, and attach it to one of your bench dark Pokemon. If you do, you put two damage counters on that Pokemon, then shuffle your deck. So broken energy acceleration from deck on a stage one. We haven't really seen this, I don't think. Like it's not from a stage one, not from deck as far as I know. So this is definitely like... Normally it's recovery from discard pile, like metal links or...
Or like look at the top five and choose any you find there. This is definitely like guaranteed energy search, guaranteed energy acceleration, onto bench Pokemon, but like that's pretty easy to work around. And like we talked about with damage being placed on Pokemon, it's not always a downside. I mean, Monkey Dory takes dark energy to move those, dark energy over to your opponent's side of the board. So there are plenty of times where damaging your Pokemon is an upside. And a few Pokemon are able to take advantage of that energy acceleration, primarily the mega Sharpedo that came out in this set.
So it has two attacks, grief angst for one dark, it's just 70 damage, but you get to draw two cards, which is always nice. But then the better attack is hungry jaw for two dark, it's 120 and then it does 150 more damage if you have any damage counters on it. So pretty easy to see where you get the damage from. So 280 for two on stage one, it's really, really powerful. You are damaging yourself a little bit. So you're bringing your 330 HP down to like 310, but still not the easiest thing to deal with.
And you can attack pretty quick. It has free retreat as well, which is nice. So you can kind of pivot between these, or I don't know, kind of work in some extra ones. If this one gets damaged, you can like just turrow it up, bring up another one, retreat into like this. Like if you run two, you can power it up with toxicity pretty easily and just turrow up and bring up the next one. And yeah, kind of flip between the two really easy once you power them up. So not too hard to get going. I don't know.
I don't think that, 280 for two energy. I mean, it's a very efficient attack. You don't have to discard the energy, which is nice. I don't know if I'm like blown away by it, but it definitely seems interesting. I definitely would like want to try it. And of course, because you play dark energy, like you can play monkey Dory, do further mitigate or manipulate damage in your favor and hit some thresholds that you otherwise wouldn't be able to. I mean, I do think that this is going to still be a difficult thing to pull off.
Like you're trying to set up multiple stage ones, but maybe you can just manually power your first Sharpedo because it's so efficient with only needing two energy to really get going or your first one's okay. Just doing greedy fangs for 70, like one hit KOing basics and drawing two cards and trying to further set up your board from there. And then in tandem with this, you do have access. There's another one prize dark Pokemon with Seviper. Its ability says, if you have a dark mega Pokemon EX in play, this Pokemon's attacks to 120 more damage.
And then for three darks, which is a pretty hefty cost, but notably you can use Toxtricity once per Toxtricity you have in play per turn. So if you have two out, you're accelerating two darks from your deck every single turn. And it has an attack for three dark that is 120. So with the ability, you're doing 240 on a one prizer. Again, we talked before Moltres or the Reshiram even up in the fire type section, being able to hit those damage thresholds on one price Pokemon is pretty important. Knocking out all of the support Pokemon EX and taking two prizes, being able to swap them two for one is pretty dang good.
The one downside obviously is for Seviper to be effective. You do have to have a three prize Pokemon in play. So your opponent with some sort of gust option could still potentially come out ahead in that prize exchange, but still being able to offset your prize trade as well is also very, very important. Yeah, definitely like a good additional attacker. I mean, darks, it's, I like dark. It's always a cool like engine. There's always a good dark support. It seems like it always sticks around in the format.
So yeah, cool to see. And the other thing that they had to play with, so just to scroll down here, because it didn't include the contents of these decks in there, the dark types did also get Mega Gengar EX. With its shadow hiding ability, that's when one of your dark Pokemon is knocked out by damage from an attack from your opponent's Pokemon EX, your opponent takes one less prize card. So something like your Seviper is potentially only giving up zero prizes. Like you get the legacy energy effect on all of your dark Pokemon as long as Mega Gengar EX is in play.
So making Mega Sharpedo a two prizer, turning a Pheasant Dippity into a one prizer and so on. So it's an interesting effect. Notably has not really seemed to do anything so far in the online tournaments where it has been legalized to play. And also I don't recall seeing it do anything in Japan either. But this almost screams like you want your opponent to have to play into you in like a controlling type strategy and you're trying to kind of outlast what they're doing and kind of deplete resources rather than trying to take prizes, which is pretty difficult to do when you're putting something that is three prizes into play.
But maybe there is a way where it's workable. And I guess we'll just have to wait and see if some of the more control oriented players could come up with something to make that work. Yeah, I don't know. I think it's a cool card. It's always cool to see stuff like this get thrown out there. But yeah, I don't know. I think it's pretty easy to play around at the end of the day. Like you can, if you're not taking knockouts on this guy or whatever you put out, if you just take a knockout without a Pokemon EX, like it gets around that ability.
So definitely not the hardest thing to play around. Just a quick shout out to Sableye, who is sneakily good. If you have a stage two Dark Pokemon in play, it does 90 damage for one Dark energy. So that's kind of nice. You know, decent attack for one Dark. Sure. My MVP, one of my MVPs for my pre-release, I snuck him in a couple of times when I had the, was it, go scroll up, scroll up just to back to the dark top. Other guy is the, not top. Yeah, the Crocodile, it was in the deck. So once you got him into play, you could get the Sableye involved.
So that was pretty cool. Sure, sure, sure, sure. But yeah, I don't want to leak all my strats for the pre-release, you know, but. I think Dark's in a decent spot. You know, it gets Grimsley's move. We didn't really talk about, we'll get into that in a little bit. So there are some support cards it gets. Rounding up Pokemon here, we have a couple, I guess, interesting ones, but nothing too earth shattering. You know, Empoleon, I don't think it's worth talking about. It's a bulk card. Yeah, unfortunately.
I like Empoleon, but he's not very good. Yeah, Metal didn't really get anything this set. You know, they got some cool artwork, but all the cards are pretty, pretty underwhelming, all things considered. Yeah, unfortunately, I have to agree with you on that. And then Colorless, though, got probably the best card in the set. Best Pokemon, I'd say, for sure. Yeah. Yeah, Mega Lopunny EX, stage one with 330 HP. For one energy, Gale Thrust does 60, and then an additional 170 if this Pokemon moved from the bench to the active during your turn.
So yeah, just a super efficient 130 damage for one energy. Then Spike Hopper is worth a shout out too. Oh, 230, sorry, I misspoke. And then, yeah, the second attack, Spike Hopper, 160, but also is a shred attack, which is really nice. So you can get around some pesky stuff that your deck might not normally be able to get around, like what are they called? The Crustles. Those are the guys we wanna get rid of. So don't have to worry about that guy anymore if you're running this. We hate Crustle. I mean, he's okay.
I kinda like Crustle, honestly. His goofy game design is always fun to me. But it is an annoying ability, for sure. So this gets around that. And yeah, this is infinitely splashable. I think this is one of the few cards that was seeing a lot of play in addition to another card we'll talk about in a minute, I'm sure. But I think this is cool. I think having this super efficient, super low to the ground, easy to get, kinda reminds me of Golisopod back in the day when you had Golisopod Zorroark. You can run it like that, where you're just getting into your Mega Lopunny and just hitting for 230 consistently.
And then your opponent, if they can't really deal with a 300. 30 HP Pokemon. All you have to do is just bounce it back to your hand. No pun intended. And just kind of recycle the strategy over and over again. Yep. And you do have some easy workarounds for this too. Like you could drop a balloon on Mega Lopunny, retreat into a Dusknoir, pop the Dusknoir, Mega Lopunny comes back up, you get to attack with it again. And you are also placing those extra damage counters like, and this is infinitely splashable. We've been seeing this in all sorts of decks in Japan so far, even as just a 1-1 line. Because again, it's an easy cornerstone answer. And it's almost like the Blood Moon Ursaluna of this set, even though it is a stage one. Just because it is so efficient to have a single energy attack that does 230 damage. Yeah, that's a good point. It's a good number. Yeah, it's a very good number. Cornerstone answer and like, yeah, just kind of deals with all the jank that some decks are having a hard time dealing with. Yeah, yeah. Like notably you do miss out on KOs on things like Goldango, Raging Bolt, obviously any of the stage two EXs. But I know in addition to just being like a splash tech card, like I said, there has been a concerted Mega Lopunny plus Bombs deck that has actually been doing decently well.
So you know, outside of Psyduck, where even then you can play around Psyduck by retreating into Klefki and then playing a Jet Energy to get your Mega Lopunny back into the active spot. I mean, there's just a lot of cards that have a lot of really good synergy with this card. And I will not at all be surprised to see it make deep runs in tournaments once it is legal. For sure. So that rounds out all the Pokemon other than we have, we can go scroll down real quick before we get into trainers. Diancie. Yep, talk about Diancie. So this is probably after Mega Lopunny, the best Pokemon in the set. It might be better than Mega Lopunny arguably.
I mean, just particularly what it gives Gardevoir. I think Mega Lopunny will be more splashable and play to more decks. But this one, Mega Diancie being what it is, is really annoying for me. If you retired of Gardevoir before this set, I hate to break it to you. But the game designers don't know when to stop giving Gardevoir more tools. Sure. Mega Diancie. It's a 270 HP mega basic Pokemon with the ability Diamond Coat, which just says that this Pokemon takes 30 less damage from attacks. So effective 300 HP basic Pokemon that, you know, with Gardevoir already running the bravery charm goes up to 350 HP. And yeah, it has a really, really good attack with Garland Ray. I don't think that's the actual name of it. These are all translated before the set release came out. So that's fine. If it's a different name, so be it.
It does 120 times. You can discard up to two energy from this Pokemon. This attack does 120 for each energy discard in this way. So just a nice solid, you know, basic answer. 240 is like we just talked about a really good number right now. Discarding energy is not really a downside. And the fact that you can damage your Mega Diancie, move the damage off with Monkey Dory. So if you put like six damage counters on there, move with two monkeys, you're hitting for 300. So you're basically dealing with everything that's majorly concerning. And the best part about this card, I'd say is the weakness. So one of the hardest counters to Gardevoir decks was Dark Pokemon. You know, we had a glut of good Dark Pokemon kind of counter that deck. This guy is weak to metal. So just a really annoying weakness in a lot of ways. Not a lot of crossovers to help deal with it. Really hard to eliminate unless your name is Goldengo. So yep. Don't expect... expect to see this in every Gardevoir list. It's really easy to slot in. Excuse me.
It's more efficient as an attacker than... oh my gosh, I got the hiccups. It's a good card for sure. You're good. It's a good card for sure. We've seen it see play since its introduction over in Japan. And 300 effective HP, like that's if you're hitting it one time, you know. So for each successive time that you have to hit it, Diamond Coat just ticks 30 more damage up in that effective HP category. Good card for sure. Won't see play outside of Gardevoir, but in that deck is definitely very strong. And then Psychic types.
Also got a new item in the set with Wonder Patch, which is just Dark Patch, but for Psychic. So attach a Psychic energy from your Discrapile to one of your bench Psychic Pokemon. People have been seeing use with that in Alakazam, I believe. And I guess theoretically if you had a straight mega Gardevoir EX deck, you would play it there as well. Otherwise, I don't know, it'll see splashes here from time to time. We'd have to see a Psychic deck that is not Gardevoir really rise to prominence before that card comes into play, because Gardevoir offering infinite energy acceleration is obviously better than using an item that only accelerates one. Yep, that's for sure. Jumbo Ice Cream. Unfortunately, this is not edible, at least in this form. This is a item card that states heal a whopping 80 damage from your active Pokemon that has three or more energy attached. I think healing is always underrated. And this one definitely will see play at some point. Three energy is not that many. It's not that hard to reliably reach three energy in this game. So I think there are a few decks that want to heal and can take advantage of this card.
I'm trying to think of anything like maybe like a Mega Venusaur or something like that that can take a hit. The ones that come to mind for me are like the tank Mega Kangaskhan, so like Bouffalant Mega Kangaskhan or Crustle. Okay, yep. Crustle is a good one that was running like the, what was it, Pokevital A or whatever at one point to heal. So this definitely is a better version of that. You don't have to... You can play Heroes Cape now. Super Potion at one point, which I think only healed 60. So this definitely is a much better version of all those things. The only... Once you, like Crustle and Mega Kangaskhan already have to use three energy to attack. So you're already, you're chilling. So yeah, this will be played in a good, like some of those tank decks we were just talking about. Right. And again, it just further proves that the game devs have admitted that Max Potion was a mistake and they never want to reprint it.
So we are going to get closer to that without getting all the way there. And healing is interesting in some form. As long as something like, I know you talked about it a couple of weeks ago, but the Stonejourner VMAX, as long as that doesn't come back as like a viable thing, I think healing is okay. It's when we cross over the threshold that something similar to that becomes viable is when we have a problem with how efficient the healing is in a given format. Yeah. I agree. I don't think Stonejourner, like Stonejourner was like early VMAX format, where nothing could clear it. So I think this is a little different where we have stuff that can hit for like over, like, but then yeah, Crustle could be annoying to deal with for sure. So we'll see. At least they printed like a Mega Lopunny to help deal with Crustle in some ways. So we'll see.
It'll be interesting to see kind of what interactions we have play out. And we also have a way to remove tools again now. Well, outside of Ruffian, but we have a heat burner that reads, you must also discard a basic fire energy from your hand in order to play this card, but you choose a Pokemon tool, special energy, or stadium that your opponent has in play and you discard it. And so I wouldn't be surprised to see this play. We did have Toolscrapper already. Oh, you're right. You're right. My bad.
This does have some added benefits. In addition to getting rid of Pokemon tools, you have that special energy or stadium card option. So it's not too bad. So it's kind of like a Lost Vacuum plus an Enhanced Hammer all rolled into one, but it's hyper targeted in that you have to discard specifically a fire energy to utilize it. Yeah, there's some decks that can take advantage of it. I'm thinking mainly like a Ceruledge that ran the tool jammer earlier. Now you can run this instead. Potentially getting more energy into the discard pile in addition to removing some of the, I don't know, energy on your opponent's side, like a Luminous off a Monkey Dory or something like that. I don't think that really comes up too much in Ceruledge now that I've said that, but still.
But Neo Upper off a Dragapult or a Luminous off a Dragapult. Yeah, there you go. Or discarding any number of stadiums, like Neutralization Zone as a random example. Or, you know, Bravery Charms against Gardevoir, Air Balloons against Goldango. The card would be usable as a one-of in Ceruledge for sure, but that's probably one of the only decks that could really fit it in there. Yeah, we'll see. I mean, if it gets to the point where fire becomes a more prevalent deck and those energy acceleration decks we were talking about are good, like I could see this getting thrown in there. But yeah, most of the time, Toolscriber is a better version of this card for sure. So we'll see how much impact this card makes. Speaking of another card that probably won't have much impact, Sacred Charm, a Pokemon tool where it says the Pokemon this card is attached to takes 30 less damage from attacks from your opponent's Pokemon that have any abilities. I mean, this makes, I don't know, this is okay. I don't think there's like a huge market for this, if you will. You know, we have a lot of strong Pokemon with abilities right now, like I'd say the majority of top decks right now. I mean, look at Cornerstone, like people had to put stuff in their decks specifically to deal with the Cornerstone Ogre Pawn because of the fact that that shut off anything with an ability to be able to damage it. This is like, I don't know, this is just bad.
Like there's not a lot of use cases where 30 damage really like tips the balance in your favor. Yeah, and you can either remove it or just hit with something else. I don't see where, I mean, do you see any anywhere where this would be playable in this format or any future format? Unfortunately, like it falls in the same vein. Like I remember having the same conversation, I think when we talked about the Stevens cards back in doing Deaths and Rivals, like reactive cards like this or cards where your opponent gets a say on whether or not this card is effective for you rather than you just being able to immediately take advantage of it. It just is never, it's almost never good. Like the break points are not severe enough in the given format for this to really matter. Yeah, I mean, we had like Eviolite way back in the day, but that was in a format where I don't think there was two rule removal or if there was, it wasn't played heavily.
And the HP numbers were so much lower that that was actually relevant. Or being able to stop 130 from like a plus powered Resha Ram was actually a relevant break point because you prevented your opponent from taking a one hit KO. Whereas now things just either go over the top or most decks are fine not one hit KOing you because they're going to set up to take like a four prize turn down the line. Yeah. And so it's just not really effective at the end of the day. No. But we do have another card, which I'm skeptical as to whether or not it's going to be effective, and that is Grimsley's move. So you look at the top seven cards of your deck, choose a dark Pokemon you find there and put it onto your bench. Shuffle the other cards face down and put them on the bottom of your deck. You cannot play this card during your first turn.
So notably, you choose a dark Pokemon, not a dark basic, a dark Pokemon. So it's kind of like a Tatsugiri EX attack, but specifically for dark Pokemon and you only get to look at seven cards. So I think I referenced this last week where it's like you played a deck with one basic and four Cinderace from Mega Evolution and then just went through and tried to play Grimsley's move to get out like Mega Gengar or Hydreigon EX or insert big dark type Pokemon and then Cinderace attack to accelerate energies onto them and kind of go from there.
It's a neat meme deck, kind of in the same way that the Tatsugiri toolbox thing is a neat meme deck, but I really don't see a world where this will ever be an effective, established, strong archetype. Yeah, I'd agree with that. I think it's a cool interaction. We've seen it with like Archie's Blastoise back in the day, cheating the stage two directly into play where you don't have to play the basic or the stage one or like anything else to get them out. It's kind of cool. And it's not that hard to get into stuff like that into play with what we have in the format right now. We have Academy at night and you know, you could run some other things. There's like that the Watchhog or not Watchhog. What is it? The Gumshoes. Gumshoes. Yeah. So, I mean, I'm not saying that there's just options, which is cool. But yeah, at the end of the day, is this really going to like, oh man, this pushes dark over the top, like the stage two dark Pokemon was so bad and it was just too slow to get into play. The fact that you can't play it on the first turn kind of stings. And then yeah, I don't, I don't really see a world where like, this swings any deck in your favor, like maybe getting the Mega Gengar into play a little faster is kind of cool, but I don't, I don't think it's gonna win you.
you like the majority of your games every time you get it out or something like that so right I don't especially because you still you have to use your supporter for turn to even do that to begin with yeah So it's pretty just doesn't have a lot of on-board draw right now. I don't think so Yeah, I don't know. I mean outside of pheasant deputy obviously, but sure yeah, that's for every deck not just dark types Mm-hmm But definitely stronger card coming up next is dawn Which searches your deck for a basic a stage one and a stage to put some into your hand. So we've seen various other search supporter cards really come back into vogue the past kind of Nine months or so ever since but do came out so we saw Jacques has actually seen play From time to time we've seen obviously Brock scouting We've seen Cyrano see play and now dawn is kind of heralding like the deck that this seems most effective in is probably either something that is playing multiple stage two lines like you referenced earlier where you can grab the stage one from one line in the stage two from another one and then another random basic or you go get something like knock towel plus Pidgeot plus a terror basic Pokemon and Suddenly you're off to the races because you fan called for hoot hoot Hoot hoot Pidgey on turn one and then you just go dawn for like is it like Tarapagos knock towel Pidgeot and Knock tower for rare candy for the Pidgeot and some other card and you're just boom you're set up Now is that strong enough to win games?
That remains to be seen but I think that it makes it Obviously makes the decks inherently more consistent a lot of these knock tall base decks we're playing a copy of either Brock's or Jacques or Cyrano at some point in time and Dawn just seems like a much better fit for those in particular Yeah, I think Yeah, we've seen the rise of Pokemon search supporters the last few formats I mean another deck that comes to mind is dragapult like being able. Oh, yeah Your your main attacker that's a stage one stage two and then like the draw Pokemon the stage one and then yeah I'm lucky door or something like that Really powerful it doesn't like limit it to non exes or anything like that. It's very flexible So yeah, I expect this one. This is kind of my favorite part of the set You know not just as a dragapult player But like it just ends up helping out a lot of decks like in a grim snarl deck I mean, I guess you don't you don't need it because you have the stadium So you're not you're not too dependent upon something like this But like there's other decks that just really struggled like, you know I think just really struggled to get set up and get the stage to stage ones and all that stuff Like I think dragapult is probably the one that comes to the mind and this this really helps with that So I'm excited to try this out in dragapult for sure And yeah, I think it'll be pretty good So Rounding out the last supporter we have fire breather. It's a solid one. I say it's basically It just says search your deck for up to three Basic fire energy cards and put them in your hand then shuffle your deck. Oh, sorry. I'm back in Silent days. We are up to seven basic fire energy cards So way way more than we've seen before I'd say I don't think there's anything that comes close to this many fire Energy is like this. So no. Yeah, this is quite a lot. I Mean most decks don't run more than 14 energy I'd say Charizard historically has run really low amounts of fire energy and just like five or six so There's some decks like several edge where this might be good Like you could if you can go second get a fire breather and then squawk ability it away or something like that That would be pretty good But yeah, I don't know I'm I'm sure this will get played at some point like I could see like kind of what we talked about earlier on with the Charizard xex Mega Charizard xex deck with or choreo like the fire breather Really just gets you going like you just need one of these and you're set up for your all your attacks For the next two turns three turns or whatever Yeah, so I could see where that would be good and you can like supplement like rever room or something like that to draw or I Don't know. I think I don't it's it's okay. It's a good it's a good supporter Like it's it's a really powerful effect of a supporter. Sure. It's definitely a powerful effect I think the thing that this card misses because like you don't want to play more than one of them in your deck, right?
Right, like the second one You're almost never gonna be able to get the full effect out of sometimes you might not even be able to get the full effect Out of the first one. So this really misses having something like, you know Jirachi EX or Luminion V or Tapu Lele GX to be able to go play a Pokemon that finds your Specific key supporter out of your deck get it in your hand and go because otherwise Yeah This could be if you rebalance the energies and Sarah ledge really get a card in that deck if you can go find it on turn one Goldango, it's basically energy search Pro if you play seven fire energy But being able to find all of these things find this card at Exactly the moment that you need it is going to be the hardest thing about it and what probably holds it back from being truly good Yeah Yeah, I agree with that. I think that's a fair point We have a couple stadiums to talk about battle Coliseum is probably the most useful one The effect of it is prevent all damage counters from being placed on benched Pokemon both yours and your opponents by the effects of the attacks or abilities used by Your by the opponent's Pokemon So whatever it's your turn or whatever your opponent is trying to use the monkey Dory to put damage counters onto one of your bench Pokemon This says no and those damage counters just evaporate essentially And do not get placed anywhere on your side of the board They can still target your active but this helps a lot when we talk about stage two setup decks or something like that where Your opponent's able to you know, like or a dragapult Like if we're trying to phantom dive this allows you to just say nope You don't get to place any damage counters on my bench so This is okay. I think people were a little too hype for my thought on it I'm kind of talking about like the same thing we did with the charm up above where this is a It's like a defensive posture that's easily countable if you just run a counter stadium Sure, you have to find the counter stadium and that's a valid point And it's a strong effect to the point where it will make a difference in games and will be annoying But I don't know if it like swings matchups essentially, you know what I mean? Like I Don't know maybe a monkey Dory if you can shut off monkey Dory that's huge like that that shuts off guard of war from being a very good deck at this point, but I Don't think like guard of war can just be like, okay cool I'll run three stadiums four stadiums and or probably three stadiums and I don't really need to find it every turn I just need to find those stadiums when I need them and like If you're running battle Coliseum, like there's probably other stadiums You'd rather be running for the most part since it's such a defensive one maybe if your deck just straight-up loses the monkey Dory like I don't know a crustle deck or something like that. It maybe would run this but I Don't know man. Like I'm not I'm not I think people were kind of overreacting to this one of my mind Yeah, I mean notably it does also stop dust the dust nor a line. Yeah And I guess maybe that's theoretically Better than a Psyduck because it doesn't take up a bench slot but again, like you mentioned like the time that this is only as effective as when you're able to get it out and Try to either prevent or limit your opponent from having the ability to play a stadium card Which is harder to do earlier in the game but you know theoretically less effective later in the game when they've already had the Chance to utilize all of the effects and abilities that would have placed those damage counters to begin with multiple times throughout the course of the game I Mean, it'll still probably see play at some point. Like you said if you're if your deck hardcore loses to monkey Dory or to dust noir Maybe you just splash it in but like you also mentioned you really need to not Have the demand for a stadium in your deck already Otherwise, you're kind of cannibalizing yourself You have the chance over the course of the game that you may end up in a situation where you have to overwrite your own Stadium and you really don't want to But you just can't help it and then your opponent no longer has to worry about the effect and I don't know. It's tough. It's a tricky one. I think it's like it's it's almost niche in its application and Just identifying that it's gonna be really important. Yeah Yeah, I mean, I think it will see play at some point But yeah, definitely not like a staple or anything like that or a format defining card. So right? Yeah, that's about it The last stadium we have is vertigo Valley No, it's it it won't see play nah, so But that's our set review. I know these always go a little long, but you guys seem to appreciate it And we don't mind talking about it It's always fun to see what kind of is around the corner and like kind of get the first few thoughts on a new format I'm not blown away by most of the cards in this set if I'm honest There's a couple that I'm like, you know, Don seems good just another consistency card for stage two decks I Mean Diancie make a low punny or good Pokemon Well, there's some cool Pokemon like that would be fun to try out but nothing like oh This is a new deck coming around the corner. I know we talked a little bit about the Charizard deck I could see you like people trying to make that work but I'm not gonna say I don't like starting out like the problem now is We have a metagame established. This has been established over the last three years now and We have like a card pool that's existed for so long that works well with each other that is figured out and so anything that comes in either has to like blow it out of the water or slot in alongside that existing card pool for it to really make a meaningful difference and You know, there's a couple cards in here like that make a dance see that you can slot in right alongside What we already have with Gardevoir EX Charizard you can try to slide in along the Charizard EX deck but for the most part there's nothing like Like mega Gengar isn't gonna like change the format I don't think now there's nothing in there like make a little punny slots and right alongside We already have it seems like this is one of those sets where?
Stuff is gonna slot in a lot more than kind of shake the meta in my mind For sure for sure and I think that you won't really feel the impact of a lot of the Pokemon directly outside of maybe low punny Ahead of rotation. Yeah, you need the power overall power level of for the format to kind of Diminish a bit before any of these things can really rise up and see play again with the asterisk of low Punny will at 100% see play as soon as the set is legal But other than that, it's gonna be kind of like dawn like you mentioned is the big breakout card and then you get some new tools for a couple of decks with like Diancy and Maybe there will be like a turbo absol deck now with Toxtricity in the mix Yeah, that's a decent it's definitely a decent card and Having a way we've seen the reason that Gardevoir has been so successful for so long Is that it is the one that can generate damage on its own board on its own terms?
And then bounce it all over with monkey Dory as it sees fit so being able to loop energies back into your deck through either energy recycler or super rod or you know penny a basic up and the next turn you shuffle it back into your deck with some supporter and It ends up back in there for you to accelerate it back out get the damage back into play move it over that way So being able to again be proactive with how you're applying those damage counters Makes it more intriguing of a card to look at and it's not as fragile. I feel as something like The electric mostly because that some of the dark attackers are just better than the electric type ones and There's a few other things like the toxo we didn't talk about but has a call for family for two basics for one dark energy It's significantly better than Tynemo and it also has 70 HP, which is significantly better than Tynemo So, I don't know I feel like I wouldn't be surprised to see that maybe make a splash as well So some fun some fun stuff to play with but nothing that's like out of the box This is the new big thing go do this Yeah, I mean we saw like Marnie's grips now. I'll kind of do that. That was like the last deck. I think that was like a Case study of this is deck Here's deck go play with deck like the the two battle decks in the set the mega gang The mega gang are and the Dian see the mega gang are I guess it was his own standalone deck I don't know the Dian see deck. Does that have a guard of Ori X in it? Probably not It's just a bunch of basics and stage like it's terrible Yeah so neither one of those is like anything that really strikes fear into the Opponent if they sit across from it or anything like that, so but that's not to say a lot of these cards will be fun There there's a lot of cool strategies and stuff we can implement from them And lots of cool stuff that we'll have to see how it shakes out like, you know Some control stuff with the palm lot some I don't know Is there anything like I want to try the Rotom deck like make that for my friend. That sounds kind of fun Any silly decks you're looking forward to try Aaron? I know you're kind of always looking for a spicy silly Silly no, and I don't know if this is really rogue because I think it has already been seeing widespread play in Japan But just low punny dust are is 100% my type of deck And so I will 1 million percent be building that as soon as it's available You know Psyduck be damned I'll put my clef key in and we'll put him active and we'll blow up all of our dust oars and move on Seems really good, honestly, and we'd love to hear from you. What what is your favorite card in the set?
What deck archetype are you looking forward to playing? Let us know down in the comments either here on Spotify or if you are watching on YouTube in the comments on that YouTube video as well If you are over on the YouTube side of things, please hit that subscribe button Helps other people find the show leaving the comment would also do the same thing And if you're on Spotify or YouTube Give a rating review or a like to the show depending on what platform you're on and we would really appreciate it If you want to get more plugged in with John or I You can find us on socials.
We'll have links to those in the description of the episode on all of our platforms. And we will be back with more of a discussion heading into Vegas in a couple of weeks on next week's episode of the Battle Frontier. Thanks for listening.