2-17: Pokemon Teased That They MIGHT Change Something

About this episode

<p>Aaron and John go over the updates (and lack thereof) to the TCG Rules Handbook that TPCi implemented for the new quarter and discuss how different decks are positioned heading into Toronto this weekend. Along the way, Aaron attempts to gain some points in John&#39;s Team Rocket themed Blaine&#39;s Quiz Show segment</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.

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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 or mostly always is my co-host John Orgel. And this week, we're going to talk about some rules updates or the lack thereof with the Pokemon TCG or at least the announcement of some rules updates before we also just talk about how we feel some of those changes would actually affect the game and for the ones that haven't been fully revealed yet.

But we would like to see come out of those changes and whether or not we actually think they'll do anything to change the game overall. Then we'll revisit everyone's favorite segment of the show, Blaine's quiz show, before we get into some Toronto meta discussion ahead of the first regional of the new year. So before we jump into all of that, John, I do know we missed last week's episode due to me having to take my wife to the hospital for some pregnancy related things. Thankfully, everybody's OK.

So we're back. We're here. We're doing what we were going to do last week, this week, and we have a little bit more information than we did now than we did then. So it probably worked out all for the best, right? Yeah, I mean, thankfully, there wasn't a whole lot that happened in the interim. I'm glad your family is doing all right. It can be stressful and scary. So I'm glad everything's on the course for a healthy pregnancy, which is great. But yeah, it's it's exciting times. We're finally getting back into the tournament swing of things.

And I'm very excited to talk about it. Anything new happen for you, Pokemon wise in the last week? You get up to anything fun or fancy Pokemon wise. We so since I last talked, I think we did. Yeah, we did our benefit charity tournament. Yeah, I talked about the last time we had a podcast that went pretty well. We had like a funding a fundraising goal of a thousand dollars. I think we had like two thousand dollars for suicide prevention and awareness. So that was really good. We had like fifty four players show up for our TCG tournament, which was pretty great.

I mean, that's considering Richmond like the cups I run. I usually get 20 to 30. That's a pretty good turnout. So, I mean, I know it's like not Florida numbers or Georgia. That's really good. You know, some of those. Yeah, I was happy with that. And, you know, Jacob's excited to kind of keep it going. And it's cool to see something like that. Stay stand the test of time. It's easy to like once people forget who the guy that passed away is. Once people are like, who's Carter? You know, then it then it can kind of really sink or swim based on the people that are putting it on.

So that was exciting. Yeah, I don't like I think I have been pretty quiet as far as other Pokemon stuff going on. I tried doing the Lord Connor regionals in last week. I'm an idiot. And like. I don't know, I'm used to Pokemon, I guess, where you can just roll up and get a spectator badge the day of. And they were completely sold out when I went there. So that was frustrating. It's only my only I have myself to blame. But yeah, I was like I had a friend in town, a couple of friends in town from North Carolina that I wanted to like say hi to and like walk around and check on some of our local players like Ian, who is part of our podcast family, I guess, and one of the locals for Pokemon.

He got me into work on it a little bit. It was going to let me borrow a deck and play, but I wasn't able to participate in anything. So I just ended up kind of having a chill Saturday and then Sunday this past week. Lots of football, including my Buffalo Bills, pulling out an insane game against the Jacksonville Jaguars, which, you know, I had no doubt. But at the same time, I was constantly in doubt the results of that match. It's being a Bills fan, man. It'll age you like, you know, smoking cigars and hard, hard liquor.

Like it's it's no joke, man. And I lost my I lost my I yelled a little too loud at the end. There was like the game winning or game ceiling, I guess, interception. I screamed so hard that my voice kind of fell out for a couple of days like the rest of the day. So that was that was exciting. But yeah, I'm looking forward to being close to Buffalo this weekend. Unfortunately, in Toronto, they're playing at 430 on Saturday. I see. There's no way you'll see the game. There's no way I can watch the game now.

Hopefully I can like sneak peeks at the score or something like that. But yeah, I have I have a role to do. I'll be I'll be a TCG floor judge. And I am happy to announce that I'll be also a stream judge this weekend. So I'm excited to do that. Yeah, it's fun. They're doing a little bit different this time. They're having a stream like usually you have your age, Jay, like you have eight different ages or something like that. And then one person from each team, like it's like one age, Jay, and then eight judges beneath them.

And then one person from that would be on stream duty and would basically like spend a third of the matches going up on stream and then a third of them spotting and then a third back on the floor with their team. This region. Excuse me. This regional they're doing a little differently. They're going to have just a stream team like dedicated to stream judging. And so you'll have the age, Jay, and all the other judges on that team are all stream judges. And I don't really know exactly what that means.

I think I don't know if we'll still be doing any floor coverage maybe in the early rounds, because we don't really start the stream until around four. We'll be floating or helping out. And then, yeah, I don't really know what beyond that. So I'm excited to see how that looks and how I think it's kind of like similar to how Europe's done it the last few like for a while now. So it's North America taking that on. So that'll be an interesting way to kind of see how that works for everybody. But I'm excited about that.

And, yeah, I'm excited to be going up to Toronto in a couple of days. So but probably by the release day, I'll be up in the great with the weather. So, yeah, it's supposed to be cold this week. Yeah, it's going to do it. It is like the high I think is like. 20 something or something. Yeah, Friday, it's below freezing the whole time, pretty much. So I'm going to have to. And it's like my dumb self brought, you know, sprung for the budget option where I only get a backpack. So I'm going to be like carrying my winter coat on the plane or wearing it and then like layering up on the plane.

So have fun with that. It'll be all right. Yeah, thankfully, the nice thing is I'm flying into Billy Bishop Airport, which is Toronto City Airport. And literally I can like I'm like two blocks from the airport to the convention center and another block from the convention center to our hotel. And I think the convention center and the hotel like are connected by a bridge or I don't have to go that far. If it's the hotel I'm thinking of, then, yes, it definitely is connected. Yeah, I don't know. I'll have to look it up.

But yeah, I'm excited that that's an option. And there's also a train museum that I'll probably go to on Friday or Thursday, so we'll find something fun to do on Thursday. Yeah, for anybody else that's going up this weekend, if you have never been to Toronto, it is definitely worth noting that they have a heated kind of underground pathway that you can take that is also a mall of sorts. So you are able to get around without needing to be in the cold all the time. And yeah, definitely recommend that to anybody that's looking to do things.

There's also like the train station that's kind of attached. Eventually, you can walk to there from the convention center. And there is a whole like underground mall associated with that as well with tons of food options. So highly recommend checking that out as well if you've never been. And it's just a fun city to visit. So they've got great food. Like, go find something to eat somewhere like you. I don't know if you can find bad food. Just don't go to a chain restaurant. Yeah, as long as you stick away from chain, but there's like some like a couple stops up on their bus or like I think it's a tram line.

It's like their college area, and there's lots of good, like cheap options up there because I stayed up there last year or two years ago. But yeah, Toronto is a great city, great international city. You know, lots of good food, lots of good like things going on this weekend. I'll be a little bit chillier than I went, I think, in October last time. So now we will. Yeah, I had it around this time of year. Same time, like for last season as well. Last year was December, I think. Yeah, last year was and it was.

And the year before that, then too, man. So it's like I yeah, it's the same thing. Like, why are we doing? I get why you do NAIC in the summer, because that's just when you do NAIC. But New Orleans in the summer, Toronto in the winter. Like, yeah, we got to do something to mix things up here just a little bit. And I don't know. There's got to be a better way. But weather aside, before we get into like just updates on my side of things, been playing a little bit more Pokemon on TCG Live, just trying to play other different decks and kind of prepare myself so that I can be educated enough to have an opinion when we're talking about the meta on the podcast.

I tried to steer away from online tournament results and lists from the online tournaments, because I feel like at some point, especially when you have a format that doesn't have any major event data influencing it, that it turns into an echo chamber eventually. And everything is just kind of revolving and consolidating around the established online meta, which I fully expect to not match what we'll see this weekend. Like some of the things here and there might be similar. But I think that there will be some pretty large deviations in comparison to some of the deck lists and, you know, like deck percentages that we were seeing in those online events as well.

Yeah, I think that's a fair statement, like you see the same names at a lot of the online tournaments and they're always playing the same decks, and so it's a different metagame than it would be for an in-person event and like a lot less card or more. We'll get into all that, I'm sure, in the talk of the meta for Toronto. So we won't spoil that quite yet. But yeah, Aaron, what you've been up to? You said you've been playing on a TCG, anything else? I know you had some a little bit of life stuff going on, but everything else pretty even keel outside of that.

Yeah, just like on the TCG side of things. Last week, I begrudgingly had forced myself to play some goldango games. This week, I've been playing a little bit of Charizard and Tarabox and. As jaded as I was about the format previously, I still think that it's kind of just at the end of its life cycle right now, and that just is what it is. Like there's nothing that's really going to shake things up. It just needs some of the old guard to exit for things to really be refreshed. But there are still ways to engage with the game and have fun.

Like there's a lot of the nice thing about the format. There's a lot of diverse options. A lot of things are viable, even if they aren't the top three decks. You can win games against those top three decks with pretty much anything right now. And I guess that would be kind of the hallmark, like the positive thing to look at with this format. But yeah, we'll talk about all of that a little bit more when we get into that metagame discussion in the latter half of the episode. The first thing we were going to talk about, though, was a tweet that was put out by PlayPokemon last week that stated that they were doing, you know, part of their regular updates to all of the tournament handbooks, including the overall tournament handbook and then the game specific tournament handbooks for all the games being go TCG, VGC, and I think they actually, even though it's not listed here, I think that they did do an update to the unite tournament handbook as well, even though that whole system has been fully overhauled for this season where they've got something that's more similar to like the League of Legends, like professional circuit where teams had to like win their way into the circuit.

And now they're essentially locked in until they get relegated at some point later down the line. So their tournaments are just a whole different ballgame compared to everything else. But if we highlight the area that we're most interested in on this podcast with the TCG handbook, they stated that they were reinstating the turn tracker section, clarifying end of round processes for plus one turn rules and added a new line item to the tempo of play table for deck search. First of game and. Unfortunately, none of these changes have actually happened yet, because if you go to the Pokemon website and you pull up the TCG rules handbook, it's still on the edition that was put out in November of 2025 or maybe it's October out the top of my head.

I honestly don't remember. I don't think it's the number last quarter of 2025. So that update has not been put out yet. And they did clarify a few days after putting this tweet out that. They put out a follow up tweet that said, Hey, we'll introduce all of this information later this month. So. You know, with for all we know, that means that we won't hear about it till March, but hopefully, hopefully we'll hear about it in the next week or two, because I think that some of these things for it can only be good as far as just having clarification, getting these updates out to people.

It's nice that we don't just stick with something that's put out at the beginning of the season, that these rules can evolve and be updated as necessary, especially if something like, you know, the the the big one, the one that everybody's been talking about is the deck search. First of game rule that is highlighted here that hasn't been put in yet. But if that information wasn't ready at the beginning of the season and this has been just kind of a big pain point and it gets really brought up with stream games more so, especially because those are so visible.

Like I know somebody did a whole breakdown of how long the first excerpt of the game was for players in the World Championship finals for every single world that's ever been recorded. And this past season was like the most egregious where both players were taking upwards of three or four minutes for their first turn as a result of their first deck search, just being accepted as being this crazy long thing. And it was just cool with it. Whereas, you know, you know, back in my day, you know, if you weren't like done with your deck search in a timely manner, you were getting a judge called on you and it like more than likely you were going to get some sort of warning and then it would escalate if you continue to do that down the line.

So I think what people are looking for here is just guidance on what is the upper limit? What is the ceiling that I can achieve with this first deck search? And the common opinion currently is like from what I understand is like 90 seconds is generally considered acceptable. I. I personally. Yeah. I'm not a fan of that. I still think that that could be too bit too long of a time. But I've heard the counter argument where if we shorten it and make it say 30 seconds, 45 seconds, all that's going to do is transfer that time or shift that time further into the game.

So what the example that I brought up was if I'm going second and I play in Arvin to start my turn and I know that I'm going to go find a buddy, buddy Poffin and a TM Evo as an example. But then I want to take the rest of time to search for my deck and check my price cards. So I go through and I start looking to start looking. OK, I've hit 30 seconds. These are the two targets for my Arvin. I take my Poffin. Now I'm going to play my Poffin and take my full deck search time with my Poffin to continue to try to search things out.

And then you play through the rest of your term. You attach the TM Evo, you use evolution. Now you take the full length of your deck search time for the TM Evo to further sort things out. Whereas with the like 90 second timer previously, a player would pick up their deck and in some cases fully sort it, which that's a whole different discussion topic. I know that that's not allowed in Japan, and there's an argument for why it shouldn't be allowed anywhere. But at whatever mode they go through to sort through their deck and figure out what the price cards are, they take the 90 seconds and then they do the Arvin, do the Poffin, do the TM Evo and their turns over.

So realistically, the sum of the time utilized for all of those actions the same in both scenarios is just front loaded in one and spaced out in the other one. And is it really like I guess my question is from a judging perspective or a player perspective, do you think it's actually going to change anything having this in the rulebook? I think it'll at least give judges a better foot to stand on for enforcing stuff. It all really comes down to that, to the fact that slow play will continue or get worse at the pace it is until game tempo is enforced, until judges make it a point of emphasis and players know that there is a real risk of getting a penalty or potentially losing a game because of it.

I mean, you go back and you brought up an interesting point talking about like the tempo, if you go back and look at games I looked at a VOD I had of a game I played with Mega Mewtwo Garbodor versus I forget what I think it was like Mega Ray or something like that. And it is crazy, like how fast I'm playing, like compared to how I play today. And I'm not saying that I couldn't get back to that point, but it was just like I was either more decisive or just more laissez-faire, who knows? I don't know what my mind was like 10 years ago anymore, but it is fascinating to see like just how fast players played back in like 2014, 2015 versus today.

And I think that's a really interesting point is that we can get back to that point. Like I think games, some games are you have more game actions and more searching than you necessarily had back in the day, but I don't think that's entirely true. Like there are still like decisions I had to make and energy attachments and evolving different Pokemon and stuff that wasn't necessarily intuitive. That was more thought like you had to think a couple of times ahead or whatever. But you still like make a line of play and then kind of have to stick to that.

But I think going back to the point that we're talking about, will having this make a difference? I think it's only going to make a difference if it's enforced at the end of the day. And that, I think, is a different can of worms. I think we need to hold judges and players accountable both to these tempo rules first before we can really start rejoicing, before, you know, oh, yeah, they added the Dexert first a game and now it's 60 seconds instead of the 15 seconds. Well, OK, now I'm going to stare at my watch.

And the moment you take maybe not 60 seconds, 61 seconds, but like 60, 90 seconds or a minute or two minutes, I'm going to call a judge over and like bring that to their attention. Like, I don't know. Do we have to be that petty? Is it being petty or is it like truly enforcing the rules of the game? Is it no different than your opponent? You know, is it different than your opponent looking at an extra card or something like that? You know, was it should we treat it with that level of severity? That's a good question. It's hard to answer.

I think we need to get closer to that. I don't know if I would necessarily like, especially like so many things with judging, it's a nuanced thing, right? Like we can't just assume that every case is the same and that every scenario brings the same challenges. We have to look at the as judges. We have to look at what's presented to us. You know, if it's a new player, if it's somebody with maybe a disability or with other factors in play. I think that is worth considering. And yeah, we can talk about it back and forth a little bit.

We did before the podcast where everything's taken in context, you know, if I'm watching a game and I see a player take 30 seconds to make a game move and then make two game moves within five seconds and then make another 10 seconds to make another game move and then make two more game moves in another five seconds or so. I don't think I'm going to give a penalty for that. But if a player takes 15 seconds each turn or each game move like searches and energy shuffles the deck, attaches energy, takes 10 seconds, plays a different ball, search searches, shuffles the deck, you know, all that kind of stuff, then that to me is more egregious than the player that is taking that, even though they're breaking the rule more than the other player is by the letter of the law.

It's clear that one player is slow playing, utilizing and compartmentalizing their turn more than the other player. So I think that's at the end of the day, that's where we go as far as slow playing. And as a AHJ, I've seen it to where like watching for pace of play can paralyze some newer judges and paralyze like them from catching stuff that's bigger or more impactful. Like, you know, they're watching for pace of play and then somebody is playing items under buddy or drawing extra cards from an Iona or something like that.

And those things, you know, pace of play is important, but it's almost like the reality of it is, Aaron, is that it's a problem that usually fixes itself in a lot of ways. Like if you are chronically slow playing, unless you're manipulating the clock because you won a long game one and then just want to time your opponent out. If you're losing game one, you're putting yourself at a big disadvantage if you're slow playing, you know. So I don't want to say like we shouldn't we should ignore it or anything like that.

But I will say that it isn't at the very front of my mind when I'm judging. Yeah, no, that's totally fair. And I think that the any language they use to describe this, even though it's part of tempo of play, I don't think the issue at hand is actually the idea of slow playing. And I think that the I the problem is, you know, from a viewer's perspective, if somebody is taking a five minute turn to search their deck. Like, that's just not fun to watch at that point, like I've clicked off, I've gone and gone and looked at something else.

And part of the issue ends up weighing where it is like a tempo of play. And I think that's the easiest way to add enforceability to it from a judging perspective. How do you enforce this en masse at a 2000 player tournament, though? That's the problem I have, because you end up with a lot of hands in the air, a lot of like he said, she said scenarios of my opponent took two turn or took two minutes to search their deck when they played Arvin. It's like, no, I didn't. OK, cool. Next table. You've got the same story, like three tables down.

Like what? There's not. It's very difficult unless you are watching live in the moment to verify whether or not something like this has happened. And you can't enforce it. And I think if you have the language written in where there is a ceiling, that's good information and is definitely good information. More information is almost always better. But it opens the door for people who do want to potentially abuse that because they will figure out the optimal way within whatever the maximum a lot of time is to gain as much information as possible, which is fully legal and is totally fine.

But the and it's not. It theoretically should not be viewed as an abuse of the time rules. But I also think that that same player, if they initially would have taken a five minute turn, you're just going to shift the other three minutes and 30 seconds deeper into the turn. So I think it's a good it should long term be a good thing, because you're right, games of Pokemon like for as long as I've played the last I feel post-COVID is really when it seems to have cropped up the most of everyone's going in the tank on turn one, trying to verify exactly what their six prize cards are.

And even in like some cases, people are only looking for specific cards, but they're doing it so methodically. You need to light a fire under their butt at some point and say, no, we need to get this done. Yeah, no, I mean, that's that's entirely valid. I don't think anybody that's played in the last four or five years would say otherwise at this point. Like there are times where, hey, let's play with some sense of urgency. And I mean, you go to League Cup, you experience it. You do it on a local level. You see it there, too.

It's not just regionals. It's like it's endemic. It's it's everywhere. Like there's times where I'm literally sitting across from the table from my opponent and they're like, you know, taking forever. And you're just waiting and waiting and waiting. And, you know, in the back of your mind, you're like, we're not going to finish this game. Like and I can remind my opponent like, hey, this is a timed game. We're at risk of but neither one of us winning because, you know, we're taking so long. But like that creates a whole scenario where now they're like, oh, is he just pressuring me to make a game action too soon or something like that?

Like it's a very hard thing to navigate as a player. And it's difficult as a judge, too. So I mean, it's got to be a systemic change at the end of the day. And I think that the nice thing, because you do have the publicly visible stream games, if it is something that is enforced in those stream games, it'll eventually trickle its way down to the rest of the event as well. And over time, we'll see a shift back toward more expedited pace of play. I know, like the NFL tries to steer the ship with like making points of emphasis as for their judges, for like the referees in the game, where they're like, hey, you know, targeting or, you know, whatever, pre-snap motion, like different things in the game that they see is, oh, they've there's a there's a lot of this going on.

We want to curtail this. We're going to make it a point of emphasis. We're going to start, you know, being a little more hair trigger happy with giving penalties for it. And I think you could potentially do the same thing with Pokemon, at least like, you know, Pokemon can make an announcement like, hey, you know, this season, like we're really cracking down on slow playing or we're going to be more diligent about it. And like maybe you have a judge on each team that just walks around and checks for slow play and like the player or something like that.

I mean, there's different thoughts. It again, it's not there's not an easy answer, but I think it is worth looking into and worth figuring out on answer at some point, because, yeah, it is getting to the point where it's just it's it's determining a lot of like a lot of stream matches and a lot of matches on the floor. And it's not even again like the larger player base is not trying to abuse anything. Everyone is trying to achieve a level of information that gives them the greatest chance of winning the game, because that's what everyone's goal is when they sit down to play a game of Pokemon is they want to win.

But what it has led to is this weird group think mentality that this methodical play is the only way and the optimal way to do it. And instead, they just need somebody to show them that you can do it while not taking six. And there are players that are great examples of this. Like, you know, I for the PNP, I think Ian Robb's a good example as well. There's one other one that I have at the top of my head, but I can't think of who it was. There's someone else from this season that also played relatively fast.

Oh, early in the season, Emma Hagen was playing extremely quickly on stream with her flurry on deck and still, you know, a deck that's got tons of one of still able to identify prizes in a quick manner and is going through the rest of the game quickly because those price cards have been identified. So the problem is a lot of other players do this lengthy price check and then still take forever on their subsequent turns and subsequent game actions, even though they have the information that they need to move forward with things.

So, yeah, yeah, I see that a lot. We'll have to see. They're just we'll have to see. That being said, there is one other rules change that is actually not outlined in this image and that is currently present in the handbook, even though the handbook at large has not been updated. And that is part of the concessions and intentional draws section. And so the only new information here, which was a surprise to a lot of people who flocked to the document looking for that first deck search ruling and discovered some stuff in this ID section that they thought was all new info, like the using information outside of current game or match.

But I don't know. Sorry, that actually. Sorry, that is the new one. Yeah, but things like referring to this hernium in standings where no, you already shouldn't have been doing that. You shouldn't have access to that information like you can make estimates and guesses at like if you're really good at doing the math and you memorize the pairings for every single round, you should theoretically know what the standings are. But, you know, if you're going to go through the legwork of doing that, good for you.

Like, that's way too much for me to do on a on a dang League Cup, of all things. But now using information outside of the. current game or match, including taking illegal game actions to access additional information to decide the result of the match is no longer allowed. And so what that means, we've seen several instances of this, including in stream games where players flip over the top card of their deck saying, Oh, well, if I top deck boss, then I win. And sometimes they do. And their opponents like, OK, cool, you got it.

Whereas otherwise that game would have been a draw. And they're now saying this isn't allowed. You cannot do that anymore. So just something to keep in mind. Yeah, I don't I think we've been enforcing it as judges out on the floor of the last two regionals, but it's just codified now, more or less. So, yeah, this is just an update to reflect the intent that we've established as judges. But yeah, just to go in a little more detail, like it's not just flipping over cards, it's looking at your price cards.

It's basically doing anything that you would not be able to do during that game. There are some things you can do as a player, like if time is called and both players that you've done the plus one, you can reveal your hand to your opponent. That's allowed. You can talk through the board state for a brief amount of time, but you cannot coerce your opponent into doing anything. Or, you know, it's really not like one thing I mentioned to my judges when I was exchanging was it's not a contest to see who's the best at explaining their board state or the best at convincing their opponent that they can win this game.

It is a game of Pokemon, and the game should ultimately be decided by the cards you play on the table and how you play them. Anything else is supplemental to that and often detrimental to that. You know, we don't want a player who's just like charismatic or really just like, come on, man, I need this for my world's invite. Like you're out of you're already out of it. You're you're you're I got pared down to you or something like that. You don't want that. Like everybody that plays in a tournament has a right to win the game or a right to play the game as they want to play it.

And so I think that's just good to have some more clarification. This is just so everybody is aware. There are two different reference documents in the playbook, one rules and resources, and probably more than that. It should be looking at before you go into a tournament. But the main two that you're going to want to look at, there's one overarching document that is the play Pokemon tournament rules handbook. Our Pokemon, yeah, tournament rules handbook, and then there's one specific to the TCG, which is the Pokemon TCG tournament handbook, and then there's also the tournament rules book for TCG.

And then should also be reviewing the standard of conduct policy and any other policies in there, so including the inclusion policy and attire and cosplay policy and stuff like that. Just this is a great page like the rules and resources. I would recommend anybody that's going to originals for the first time or, you know, pretty much every year, just kind of go through and refresh your memory on it, because there are a lot of stuff. Even as a judge, like I have to remind myself of certain things like the other day, I had to like kind of ask some other judges like, when does a match officially start?

Is it like when you sit down at your table across from your opponent or what? And it's like, well, a match officially starts when the time starts. It's like, oh, OK, I guess that makes sense. But, you know, just kind of stuff like that where you have to like kind of talk through some stuff, you know, and it just helps to have people that know the documents. If you ever have a question or need help with stuff, always ask a judge in your area or somebody that has been playing a long time, they'll probably know the answer as well.

So, yeah, it's just this is this is where I go for the most part. If I have a question as to like what a ruling would be or something like that. Something like that. And then there's some other documents outside of Pokemon.com, like the compendium and just, I guess, card knowledge. But other than that, that's this is kind of like where I usually start or where I tell people to go if they have. And on all of these are fully available on mobile as well. So if you have a question and you are mid tournament, you can pull out your phone and answer it yourself like relatively easily.

I know we've had I've gone to plenty of league cups where players were arguing with the T.O. about how many rounds it should be and whether or not we should have top four or top eight. And somebody would pull it up on their phone and say, no, look here. Here's the breakdown. We have X number of players. That means we have this size of top cut. And they're like, OK, cool. And it all gets resolved and everyone goes on their way because, you know, the day and age we live in, people don't just accept what you say at face value.

You have to provide them the proof. But the nice thing in this instance is that the proof is readily available. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're not we're not in the era of speculation or, you know, man, back when texting first came out and you could like text an answer to like they had text answer services where somebody would provide an answer to a trivia question through text message that you asked me how to pay a service fee or something like that. Like we're at a that was an actual person that did that, too.

That's crazy. But yeah, we're pretty far away from that, where you can just Google the answer. They just had Ken. Just don't use a Jennings sitting around somewhere. Basically, just don't use a to summarize TCG rulings. I would not recommend that. But yeah, that's a that's just something we wanted to cover. I do think it's a good thing that Pokemon is vocal or at least trying to be like transparent with rule changes and publicizing them before. Like when they come out, you know, it's better than shadow dropping something and then leaving it up to the players to figure out.

That's never ideal. So this is this is an improvement. And I'm happy to see that. I'm just hopeful that we get an update to the TCG handbook sooner rather than later. Yes. Yes, definitely. It'd be nice to have it before you. I see like I was I was hopeful, even though I'm not playing in the UIC or Toronto. I was hopeful that it would be before Toronto. But obviously don't expect that to happen at this point. So, yeah, maybe Friday. That honestly, that's the nightmare scenario, right? I mean, yeah, we can make an announcement about it, I guess, at some point would be the worst thing.

What would be the first time we've had to make like last minute announcements about stuff? But it is what it is. Like where you, you know, they want to take extra time to make sure everything's like stands up to scrutiny and is play tested and thought through very well. So I don't I don't have any illusions that they're just they know like they've already written it and they're just sitting on it. I don't I don't know. I'm sure there's no. I think somebody was supposed to write it and they took more vacation time over Christmas and therefore it's not done.

Like the TCG person took an extended vacation, all the other players, all the other people were like, well, we're just going to release it. But nobody nobody told the social media manager. Yeah, yeah. But I guess that's enough for this week about how we play the game. Maybe not the best transition, but we'll figure it out. But anyway, before we get into what people will be playing this weekend, we're going to take a pit stop over at Blaine's quiz show. And I know this week it is John's turn to ask me some questions.

And I don't know, John told me before the show that he had changed some of the questions for this week. Initially, he texted me at some point last week and said, is Pokemon Go fair game as a category? And so we'll have to see whether or not that is still what he's going with. As of now. All right, Aaron. Well, I pivoted a little bit, so I won't be completely Pokemon. OK, I know you're a little bummed out about that. I'm sure. All right. So just as a reminder, it's been a little bit since we played Blaine's quiz show.

How you play is I will give Aaron three multiple choice questions. If he is stumped, he is allowed to ask for one hint at any time. And if a player, in this case, Aaron, answers all three questions without the use of a hint, a bonus point will be awarded. I honestly do not have the scores at this point, but I'm going to. We will pop right there. Right. Yeah, there they are. Wow. Wow. Aaron stole the lead. I know that. And hopefully doesn't advance it too far out of reach for me. So we will see. Aaron, your topic this week is Team Rocket Strikes Back. OK.

So I did a Team Rocket theme. I know. I think we've had that theme once before. So I wanted to use this moniker here. All right. Your first question. You ready? What Pokemon does Team Rocket's Jesse accidentally trade with Benny? For the saluting Wobbuffet, that is now part of. Big. Anime lore. Is it Lickitung, Scyther, Nidorina or Magikarp? OK. So I think I would have preferred the Pokemon Go questions to what now looks like might be all anime questions. But this one, I do know because this is relatively early on in the show when I still would have been watching it.

So I'm going to go with Lickitung. Lickitung is correct. Yeah, it's actually I think Lickitung is captured in the Kanto, like the first like stretch and then comes over to Johto and then is traded to Benny for a Wobbuffet. And yeah, Wobbuffet now, like I think is pretty much as synonymous with Team Rocket as Meowth and Koffing and Ekans and stuff. Which is crazy because like they don't do they still have Koffing and Ekans? Now they switch up their like Pokemon they use primarily whenever they go to a new region, I think now.

Like when they went to Yenova, it was like Malamar or Inkay. And who's the other guy? You're way ahead of me. I got nothing. Yeah, I should have asked you which starters they had, which ones which Pokemon haven't been one of Team Rocket's Pokemon like Jesse or James's Pokemon. Oh, well. Next time, next time I do a Team Rocket one, I'll lump it in there. All right. Next question. Which of the following is not a leader of Team Go Rocket? So that's the villains of Pokemon Go. Is it Sasha, Arlo, Sierra or Cliff?

So I do know. There are three. Which just makes sense based on how you're asking this question, but there are three there are two male and one female leader. So I'm going to go with Arlo and Cliff are and then that leaves me with Sasha and Sierra. Sasha can be a guy. That's fair. You're right. You're totally right. You're just trying to throw me off, though. I know Arlo and Cliff. Oh, man. I don't have a way to really eliminate these. So. Oh, we do these chorus. Hold on, hold on. Is there like a naming scheme that goes with these?

No, doesn't look like it. We'll go with Sasha. OK, yeah, yeah, locking it in. All right. Somehow you are correct. It is Sasha. So I'm so mad about this. I see. Are these. Do you know, are these like coded where like if your team? No, you encounter all three of them. If you're just as you go across and use your rocket radar or whatever they call it, I forget what the name of it is, but there's a device where you can encounter gym leaders by equipping it. Yeah, it's. Yeah, that's about it. Well, you know, let's see if we can at least prevent Aaron from going perfect without a hint this week.

We'll go ahead and slide into the last question. I have a feeling Aaron is going to do well. Here we go. But we'll see. I'm excited now. This one's going to be card game related, right? It is going to be card game related. Which of the following Pokemon has appeared in a Wizards of the Coast era rocket card, as well as the sets Team Rocket returns and destined rivals with the in parentheses team or Team Rocket or Rockets owner's designation? Is it Wobbuffet, Koffing, Sneasel or Hitmonchan? OK. So sorry for clarification, you're saying this Pokemon when you're saying Wizards of the Coast era rocket card, is that original Team Rocket set?

I'm saying, no, it can be in any Wizards of the Coast era. OK, it had a Wizards of the Coast card that had rockets. Pokemon X, it had it appeared in Team Rocket returns and this Pokemon appeared in Destin rivals. OK, so all three. OK. Um. So there's no. Team Rockets, Koffing from Wizards of the Coast. I know there was a dark wheezing, but the regular Pokemon was still a regular one. There's. A Team Rocket, Sneasel EX from Team Rocket returns and obviously Team Rocket, Sneasel and Destin rivals, there's Wobbuffet in Team Rocket returns and Destin rivals. Hitmonchan, I know.

Oh, there's one in gym challenge, I think, along with Team Rocket's hitmatch and Team Rocket returns, but it's not. Is there a Team Rocket's hitmatch in a Destin Rivals? No, because there's like Murkrow. What are all the Team Rockets Pokemon Destin Rivals, Mimikyu, Murkrow, Wobbuffet, Sneasel, the Spydops line, Articuno, Zapdos, Moltres, Nidoking, Crobat. There's no hitmonchan, so it's not hitmonchan. It's not Koffing. I just, I don't think there's a Wobbuffet. Okay, I'm going to go ahead and use the hint.

Okay. Wobbuffet is not a Gen 1 Pokemon. Okay. Wish I hadn't used the hint. Oh, man. It's so mean, I could just make it not a helpful hint. Let's see. I don't know. I should have wrote, I should have written hints down beforehand, just so I don't have to use them. Yeah, but I mean, that could have been your hint anyway, and then like, what good does it do me? Sure. Let's see, let's see, let's see. It's a 50-50, yeah. But not a helpful 50-50 in this game. We'll go. I also know, I don't remember what it was called, because I think I used this as a, when I was doing a trivia question previously, where there is a Sneasel that is like, owned by the Team Rocket guy from the fourth movie, but I don't remember if it has his name or if it says Team Rocket.

But I think that makes more sense than the Wobbuffet, gosh, dang it, is there a Team Rocket's Wobbuffet? Because that would have had to be, no, because Wobbuffet was not around when there were owner's Pokemon, so it has to be, I'm going to go with Sneasel. And Aaron, you should have not used your hint, because you would have been three for three this week. It is Sneasel. Yeah, it's from the, so the reason I didn't say actual set name was because it's a Wizards of the Coast best set, I think, is the designation.

It's a really obscure farewell set that Wizards of the Coast did, where they had some of the licensing from the newer stuff. So this is like an e-reader card that has that e-reader border, but is a Wizards of the Coast card. It's a really interesting kind of crossroads, like weird, because some of the stuff in that set is e-reader looking, without having e-readers, it's like the e-reader borders. And some of it isn't, like it's the older Cosmofoil holo-looking pattern, I don't know, it's a really interesting set.

But yeah, this Sneasel did appear in that, I was hoping that would trip you up. And the Hitmonchan, yeah, you sussed out that it's not in Destin Rivals, it is in the other two. And then, yeah, Koffing. I didn't count Dark Pokemon, but yeah, you did pretty good, Aaron, I have to say, you know, making it very hard for me to climb up. I was in the lead at one point, but I knew it would be very short-lived. So I did appreciate it while I had it, and yeah, I'll wave at you as I trail and kind of huff and puff up the hill, trying to catch up to you, but we'll see how it goes next week.

We will see how it goes next week, John. I think it's going to be a good time for you, I think you'll have fun. All right, all right, I can, I can hope to have fun, that's, that's my goal now, catching yous out of reach, but no, no, no, I don't think that's true, I don't think I'm ahead by that much, I'm pretty sure it's, now I might be ahead by like four or five. I don't know, you're more than that, I think it's, it's not quite double digits, but it's pretty close if I remember. We'll figure it out, I'll figure it out, yeah, the viewers know, the viewers know right now because the numbers are above our heads, well, they were above our heads, but anyway, that's enough of Blaine's Quiz Show for this week, we'll say farewell to it as we head into just a discussion on the decks and the metagame surrounding the Toronto Regional this upcoming weekend.

And I know historically we've done things like tier lists or like a hot or not, and I've just felt so kind of blah about this format to the point where I'm honestly kind of glad that I'm not going to this event in the sense that I don't have a deck that I am particularly confident in playing that I feel gives me a better chance than anyone else to win in the room. And part of that is because I feel like the best overall, the most consistent best deck is probably Goldango. And that hurts me to say, just like to my core, that hurts me to say, but I also feel like it's very difficult to make that deck win more from a player skill perspective.

Like obviously there's a sequencing thing. The whole deck is just like a sequencing pile. But because there's no kind of comeback mechanics built into it, I can't win more with Goldango than basically anyone else in the room can. Yeah, it really isn't like a high amount of agency with that deck, right? I'll give you that. Yeah. And that was what I discovered because I played it to Atlanta last year when we thought it was fairly well positioned going into the new format. And that's when I learned I literally never want to play Goldango to a tournament ever again because it's something where, yes, drawing cards is super fun and the attack is ridiculously powerful.

And there's a reason why a lot of slower cards like or big beefy strategies are just out of the format because Goldango exists. And it got these new tools with the Solrock and Lunatone where I can play this one prize board now. And we've seen some like jockeying for a position where players are trying to include things like Vitality Band, Premium Power Pro, Hops Cramorant. We saw from the Korean League this past weekend, some of the Goldango players are playing the baby Goldango again. We've seen people include Low Punny to combat Cornerstone Ogre Pawn.

And as a result of that, you're playing an ultra ball, which makes that Goldango more accessible without having to put Genesect in play. So the pieces all kind of kind of just fit together. And the deck almost feels solved to me. And it's only a matter of there's like two or three flex slots, and it's a matter of what do you want to tech for as far as do you want to tech for Mirror? Do you want to tech for Cornerstone? And do you want to tech for Noctowl decks? Because we've also seen Watchtower pop up, and that'll be kind of a common thread for a lot of decks as we move through this, because things like Dawn Zard or Pidgeot Zard are also, spoiler alert, in a really good place right now.

But I feel like it's hard to argue for the vast majority of people against playing something like Goldango going into this weekend, and I will absolutely not be surprised when it is the most popular deck on day one. Yeah, I think that's a fair assumption. I think everybody that's been playing other one-hit KO decks like Raging Bolt and Serral Edge has moved over to Goldango in the interim time where we hadn't had a tournament in a while. And, yeah, the list, like you said, is pretty much solved.

There are some variations that you can make, like I'm running a list that runs TM Evo instead of the Ultra Ball, just because I think it allows you to get the low punny out on your item lock more effectively, because you run 4 Arvin, I think it works out a little bit easier to TM Evo into stuff, and it has some extra benefits with that, where if your opponent's like, you know, I don't know, it makes sense. But if we have the Shrink Cheeseman at the very top, we have a couple other decks that are pretty close behind, I'd say number 2, number 3, at least the last few times we've been looking at Dragonball Dusknoir, and online it hasn't been Guardi, but let's be honest, like Guardi is still number 2 or 3, if not, you know, 1 secretly.

You can make the argument for 1 as far as results are concerned, but when you take the popularity factor into it, I don't know if people are just bored with Guardi because it's been around for 3 years now, or maybe they're just not confident in playing it, so they don't want to play it online, or maybe they just don't want to play it in best of 1, maybe they really want to play it in best of 3. And that's where you will see it see more play and more success when we get into a major tournament level atmosphere.

I don't really have much to say about Guardi right now either. I do think, like there's been a slow transition kind of away from Jellicent. Yeah, we've seen that, like with the rise of Golden Go and players teching for Guardi with Golden Go, we've seen a transition back to like a one-shot mentality, which is interesting. I don't know if it, like, because a lot of the Golden Go lists have started cutting all the Leventios and started cutting the Lana. So now it's like, well, Jellicent seems pretty good again if all the Golden Go players aren't going to respect it.

So you know, this is a very, this is kind of the end game of metas in a lot of ways. Like if you've been playing long enough, you've seen this like with Lugia and countering Lugia and then Path to the Peak and countering Path to the Peak. So like anytime we get into a really stale endgame, it's really just trying to, the game of it is trying to figure out how greedy can I be? Like, how much do I have to respect the deck? How much do I have to prepare for it? And do my techs really make the difference on my tournament run on that day?

It's hard to say, like we don't really know exactly how it's going to shake out. I think if I'm playing Guardi, I think Jellicent seems a little bit more appealing than it did at the start of this format, because Golden Go is moving away from all those things. And it just helps, like item lock, it makes the deck a lot different. Like you still get to use Monkey Dory, which is, it's the deck that does that the best, which is a huge strength of the deck. But yeah, I don't know if, yeah, it's like, we can make assumptions, we can ask questions.

It's tough to predict, like, I haven't played a lot with Guardivor, I don't know what it looks like in this metagame, to be honest with you. But I know that it's still good, I know that there's going to be a lot of good players playing it. You know, Riley McKay, this is his first regionals back after a World's War, and I just watched Chip's interview, I finished watching it with Riley and Isaiah, and Riley was like, well, my first regionals will be Toronto, so we'll see Riley bringing, you know, a deck to Toronto.

And it's definitely going to be Guardivor, like, there's no question about it. So I think we'll see a lot of good players pivot back to it. You know, a lot of players, kind of like how we had back at the end of the format before rotation and multiple times this season, have just kind of stuck with a comfort pick at this point. And we've moved away from, like, trying to make, like, an Absol Kangaskhan deck work and like spicy rogue decks and stuff like that. I mean, there will be some interesting things that we can talk about in a minute.

But I think the vast majority of players at this point will value a deck that they are able to confidently pilot and play into a room over a surprise pick. Oh, for sure. And I think Guardivor is in a, like, it's kind of a weird place. I think I wouldn't be surprised to see the successful list be something more similar to what actually ended up winning EUIC. So kind of that more hybrid style. I think the weird thing, everyone was so worried about Diancy coming into this format. And now it's gotten to the point where people aren't even playing the card because it's actually not that good in the current state of the metagame because it's just not good against Goldango.

And it's like a death sentence if you ever start the card. Yeah. So you bet you might as well just not include it because the matches where it's good, like the Zoroark or really the dark decks that it's good against. And most of the dark decks just aren't good right now. Or their Charizard and Diancy doesn't really help there as much. It doesn't swing it as much as it did, but like, you know, like a Zoroark deck or something like that. So instead, we're seeing that Guardivor decks were there, including Watchtower, like the latest Henry Chalice, as an example, from what I understand, has gone back to TME, though.

Has luxury or luxurious cape in it, which is something I know, a friend of the show, Hunter Butler actually played that to LAIC. And the idea there is you have a frillish with the Lux Cape as an option to where Goldango just can't kill it, even when they're playing like their frillish techs. Once you get it to a certain point, you're able to they can do 150 and then you can move a bunch of damage over and then they can't repeat that 150 or they can do 100 and then you can move it all off and they can't they can just never knock out the frillish and you're just building up damage on their board while item locking them and you just eventually win the game that way.

But so it's more methodical, slower, trying to make sure it gets set up, whereas we'd seen a shift prior to Phantasmal Flames towards slimmer Guardivor lines like Henry at one point was playing a 2-1-2 guardi with like three rare candies and taking arguably a bad Dragapult matchup. Whereas now we've shifted back, said, no, we're going to set up Curlias, we're going to set up Guardivores, we're not losing to Dragapult and we're going to have as robust of a board as possible. So it also kind of insulates you from the Solrock attack as well and making your Ralts a little bit less vulnerable in that regard too.

Yeah, I think if you're able to execute a game plan against Goldango like that where it's pretty easy to execute and get into play and you can confidently do it most games, that allows you to then pivot and look at, okay, what other decks are going to be at the top of the room and that brings up Dragapult. And so now you're able to refocus and say, all right, we're going to go back to TM Evo. We can play a little bit slower, develop our board, use TM Devo, kind of stuff like that more effectively, use Monkey Dories more effectively.

I don't know, does the Henry Chalice run TM Turbo Energize or no? Not as far as I'm aware. Like the big things are the Evo and the Lux Cape. Okay. So yeah, I think... You know, if you're comforting into Golden, go then. Yeah, the next thing we talked about, Golden, go and Gardevoir. I think the next thing to talk about would be Dragapult. And it's an interesting spot right now. I think people are kind of not respecting the deck and whether that's rightfully so or not. I mean, John, you stop playing it.

I know that's how good can it be. It's it's in a weird spot right now. I'm not going to pretend like. I mean, it's still good. It still wins tournaments, it still does really well. It just doesn't feel as like dominant to me as it did earlier. I know that's kind of weird to say, because the results might tell you that it's not really lost a step and it's gained some things with Dawn and with Hilda, allowing you to more consistently find your partners. But, dude, you still have to like draw into stuff and like it just feels so bad.

So many games just like there's so many games where you just don't get a good like you don't get a puff in turn one or you don't get the drag cloak turn two or you don't get an energy attachment for four turns and you're just behind. Or the worst part is you don't just lose. You can't just scoop the game up because you have Badoo. You have countercatch. You have ways to get back into the game and like you have Dusknoir and you can just go, OK, board wipe when your opponent's down to one prize and they can't close the game out because you essentially destroyed their whole board state and you can run the table from there.

So like you can't just scoop early. Like, that's the problem. You have to you have to play it out, basically. And, you know, it's it's a it's a strong deck. It's a it's a good deck. But it just. It'll give you an ulcer like it'll it'll make your teeth hurt. It'll it'll it'll drive you up a wall trying to play the deck, man. Like that's I think why I pivot away from it was I was just getting, you know, I'm not saying that I wasn't able to win games or do well, but it was just like any tournament I played it at was just a miserable experience.

You know, you talked about Golden Go being a miserable experience for me. The flip side of that is like, you know, whether you've won or lost the game by turn three. That's fair. So you don't you can scoop it up or like, you know, push, push the pedal down and have it have a have a conclusion. So you don't have to just sit there and be like, well, but if I get this and then my opponent doesn't do this and they get Iona and they don't draw out of it and then this and that and the other. And it's like.

Yeah, I mean, or you just run away with it and don't have to worry about it, like, I don't know. All that to say, I think Golden Go is still a good play for the weekend, even if I'm not, you know, excited by it as much as I used to be, if I'm honest. I think players aren't really running Psyduck anymore for the most part, unless you're a Zoroark or a Charizard deck. But even those Charizard decks aren't really don't seem to be running it. I haven't seen Psyduck a whole lot. I don't know about you.

No, it depends, like because a lot of the Charizard decks don't play Dustmore. So they're opting to just like fight fire with fire, so to speak, rather than, yeah, including the duck to try to mitigate it. But Dragapult, I don't know, like it's it can win. Obviously, like you said, it can win games. But I feel like the games where it does win are when everything goes right or but do puts in enough work that everything goes wrong for your opponent. Right. But do cheese. Yeah. And neither of those feel like good things to rely on over the course of a tournament this long.

I agree to the point where I almost feel like Dragapult is a better best of one deck currently that it is best of three. At the end of the day, like I feel like it would be better as a league challenge deck or even a league cup deck than as a regional or higher deck. And it's just like Drac looks obviously really good. Dustmore, broken card. Dragapult has really strong attacks. Well, one really strong attack. Jet headbutt's not very good. But yeah, and Badoo is obviously really good. So they get to come.

It's a pile of really good cards. But I think it's kind of I don't know. It feels like it needs somebody to innovate on it for it to really keep up with how everything else has kind of evolved, because all the Dragapult list still look the same as they did six months ago. Yeah, like nothing. Nothing has changed in that deck. I did see a list recently on I forget the tournament name, but it ran Moltres and Defiant Band over Bloodmoon Ursula Luna. OK, so a little bit of a variation there and then cut the tool jammers for two watchtower as a way to counter the Tsars.

So I think that's that's crazy. It's crazy to me that Dragapult is teching for Charizard. Yeah, I don't I don't know if I necessarily agree with that 100%, but I can see the logic with it, like you definitely. If you can shut that deck down. I guess maybe that's just an online metagame tech because that deck online has been really popular, like in the Limitless series. Sure, we've seen a lot of Charizard. So maybe it's just for that. And maybe it would be a bad thing to do for regionals. I don't know.

I mean, it did. It also won the most recent in-person regional. I think that that's true that it would not surprise me for Charizard to actually be in the discussion for top three overall. Now it's going to be a little weird with dependence on like how they combine variants where we've got like the Noctowl, like the Dawn Zard versus straight Pidgeot Zard and whether or not those are separated from each other, because if they're combined together, I think it'll be really up there on the metagraphic.

I think a lot of people really like Charizard. They think it's good into Gardevoir. I think there are ways that the deck can be built to where it can be good into Goldengo. It's like historically been viewed as having a solid Goldengo matchup through the ability to play a one prize board with the Chi-Yu or play through Chi-Yu. And so like you take a KO, they KO something. You KO with Chi-Yu. If they KO Chi-Yu, cool. Now you KO with Charizard and Iono them to a low hand size. And you're doing all this on the back of the birds in your deck, whether it be the Noctowl or the Pidgeot.

And also because Charizard is able to utilize Briar better than a lot of these other decks. So it can take that single prize early in the Goldengo matchup and still come out ahead at the end of the day because you take one, you Chi-Yu for two, and then you Charizard Briar for three and the game's over. Whereas a lot of other decks kind of can't afford to do that because they can't make up that that odd prize card throughout the rest of the game. And that's kind of where Charizard has felt like it's been able to be successful.

And so you end up in this weird. I would say it's a square, but it's not because Gardevoir is kind of doing its own thing over here, whereas I feel like it's a triangle of Goldengo is good into Dragapult, which is good into Charizard, which is good into Goldengo. And then Gardevoir is just kind of like throwing rocks at everybody from the sideline. Yeah, but those are those are undoubtedly like the top four decks. I think I would think at the end of the day, but I don't know. In my opinion, I think Dragapult is kind of a tier below the other three.

I really do think Charizard is up there right now, although I don't think Noctowl is the best way to play it this weekend. Interesting, so you'd be more apt to do Pidgeot. Yes. Center. I mean, even a lot of the Noctowlists still run Pidgeot. They do, but you eat up all this space with all the other one. Yes. One, it's like a one on one Pidgeot to eating up like 12 deck slots to play Dawn four copies of Dawn and four for Noctowl and things like fan wrote them. And then you're playing area zeros and you're not.

Now there there has been a variant, and I think it has been more popular on like TCG Live Ladder or in limitless online tournaments. I don't think I've seen any results for this in person, but a variant of that Noctowl Charizard that plays water ogre pond. And I think I don't know if they play one or two, but just the ability to utilize torrential pump and take early prizes with that. And then you also get kind of like the side angle of Saab being an option at some point during the game. But it being your extra terror Pokemon, as opposed to or in addition to the trap, it goes to the deck was also playing.

Right. And that's kind of an interesting avenue to explore. I heard about that. I still think I would want to lean more heavily into just like they what I would consider to be more consistent is less aggressive compared to the Noctowl build. But I think just a more standard stage two Charizard set up, do your thing and do the thing every single time. Whereas the Noctowl deck, it kind of goes back to like Tarabox. And we can talk about these afterwards as well, if we just want to go with the Noctowl, but that's like the Tarabox effect or the Noctowl effect where your deck is super powerful when it works.

But when you like don't start fan wrote them or you don't open with Poffin or you don't open just with some way to get basics on your board, it's like you decided you wanted to go out to drive your car, but instead you found a unicycle in the parking lot and you're just trying to make it to work. It's very sad. Yeah, and you don't run draw supporters, so you're just sitting there looking at your bad hand and just kind of like, well. OK, yes, and then really like being so dependent, being so dependent on Noctowl in particular when.

And this again is it is as primarily or partially influenced by like the online factor where Watchtower has been way up in play rate, even though it's normally only a one of in most of the decks that it's played in. Like some decks like there are Zorak lists that I've seen that play like three of them, which that's a whole different story. But yeah, but people that are playing one, sometimes two copies of the card and they get it into play and the Noctowl deck freezes up. It cannot do anything. Whereas a lot of times that the more traditional Charles are variants play through like Arvin into TM Evo into like Pidgeotto and in Charmeleon.

And then you just need an ultra ball and you have a Charizard in play and you're not trying to do all these fancy tricks. You just get the Charizard up and you go in that. Right. It's it's efficient enough. You don't need the extra things there. Are they helpful? Absolutely. But I think that the world at all, like the player base as a whole. Is prepared for it now, so I don't see it being as successful as it was over in suit guard. No, I think that's fair to say, like, yeah, I think people won't be surprised by it, that's for sure.

At this point, people have played against it. I started checking for it heavily, that kind of stuff. So we've covered all the major decks pretty effectively. We can move our way to some of the more rogue decks. The one I played the most, probably since we last time talked about the format was the mega Kangaskhan Buffalo deck. OK. I like the deck a lot. I don't think. If Golden Go is going to be the most popular deck in the room, it gets a lot harder to play that deck. Have you been playing it with Crystal or now?

So I hadn't been, to be honest, and I haven't trust. I like I've just played a straight build of it for a long time just because I liked how it forced your opponent to like play through the Kangaskhan. But yeah, yeah, you lose to Golden Go with that. So I hadn't been messing with Crystal too much. And that just kind of goes into like a different triangle, if you will. As to if you're playing Golden Go, are you respecting Crystal? Are you respecting Cornerstone? Like that kind of stuff. I ran it with Cornerstone for a while.

That's right. When I had it online. And yeah, if the Golden Go player doesn't respect Cornerstone, you run through them. But yeah, the moment they put in Mega Lopunny or Mega Mawile, it gets a lot harder. Yep. I don't know. I think. I think it's not the worst play for the weekend, like you could if you've been playing it for a lot online and it's I've seen a lot of newer players pick it up and play it. So it might be one of the decks that like a less experienced player picks up and plays. Yep. It's got a lot of things going for it.

I mean, it reminds me of like the Stonejourner deck when Mew was really popular. It just kind of says, all right, I'm going to do my thing. And if you can answer it, cool. If not, like I'm going to win. And healing is cool. And you run ways to like counter all the gimmicks of you run missed energy and the medical energy, I think, to like prevent status conditions. I don't remember the name of that exactly. Well, there's missed the other one that I think you're thinking of is therapeutic energy. That's it. Yeah.

And that that like removes special conditions when you attach it. Yeah. Yep. So prevent special conditions, removes them that way. Monkey Dory can't just stall you out. And yeah, I think it's not a bad deck, like I don't think it's. You won't see a lot of top players playing it, I'll say that, to be honest with you. But I could see like one or two making deep runs in a day, too. If you hit the right matchups, if like, you know, Dracapult pretty good if you run the Psyducks, especially like if you're able to get the missed energy down on that, it gets really hard for them to deal with it.

So I just kind of I don't know. I think if you run hot with it and you hit the right matchups, you can make a deep run with it. But I don't think it'll be like what top players play. And we've seen over the last few tournaments or like this whole season, it's mostly the top players at the top. So sure, I'd be surprised to see, you know, more than one or two in like top 32 of maybe another variant of it. Like we've seen with maybe a resurgence of the Mega Hustle variant. But I don't know how you beat just the same issue.

How do you beat Golden Goat? And it's well, I have to dedicate a large portion of my deck to kind of counter it. And I mean, that can be effective. Do you want them? You do. Yes. So it depends. So like you said, we you have to cycle back and get in the mind of the Golden Goat players and say, one, am I willing to play into this? What is generally considered to be an unfavorable matchup against what is probably going to be somewhere between 17 and 20% of the room? And I mean, if you can make it winnable, go for it.

And the way that we've seen some people do it, we've seen they either cut the absol or the cornerstone or both. It depends. So you've got like this. Kangaskhan has kind of got the shell now where you have the Kangaskhan and then you either play the bouffalant or the absol and then or you play. The bouffalant, I think I've seen bouffalant with absol with no cornerstone or you get like this triangle of bouffalant, cornerstone and absol. But now there's also been this introduction of a 2-1 toad scroll line as the proposed answer to Goldengo because there was a research or a surge of low punny play in Goldengo.

So they were killing the cornerstones anyway, and they didn't care. And so now with the toad scroll as an option. Goldengo suddenly becomes a significantly better matchup because when you have a charmed up Kangaskhan with lively stadium in play and Bouffalant on board, they have to discard what? Nine energy to one hit KO you. Yeah. And then you go toad scroll. Good luck. Well, yeah, it's just I don't know how easy it is to get the toad scroll reset up if it gets knocked out. I mean, that's a good question.

It depends on how many recovery cards you play. Like you do. Like you've got pokey gear. Well, it depends. I don't know. I'm not an expert in the deck by any means. Yeah, but I I think toad scroll. This is like the segue I was trying to get to was this popped up. I know that the specific list, I think, got top four in that Korean League tournament was a Kangaskhan list, but I believe it was like Absol Kangaskhan. But instead of the cornerstone, they played a two one toad scroll line. And just the the idea that I wanted to get to was if Goldengo is going to be super popular, are we going to see a surge in toad scroll play as a result?

And going off of that, do you think Gardevoir is actually down enough in play that we might see somebody pop up with something like Ray Chen's toad scroll deck from last year? Excuse me. That's a good question. I mean, like if you want to talk about rogue decks. Yeah, that would be an interesting one. And it gets some extra things with like you could run the Meganium in there that kind of buffs everything. Well, I guess that wouldn't work so well with toad scroll. I think it just hits for how many Pokemon that have less energy on there.

Yeah. And you need the area zero and go wide. I think that list, I don't know if that list would really change very much, but it can utilize toad scroll better than most other decks. Yeah. That's hard to say, like the only person I've ever seen have any amount of success with that deck is Ray Chen. Right. Yeah. So if Ray Chen shows up to the tournament, sure, I'll buy that, you know, watch, you know, I'll buy that that deck does well just because of how good Ray Chen is. But yeah, I don't see a spicy rogue Venusaur deck kind of taking over the tournament or something like that.

I think. If Gardevoir does have a decrease, I could see a Nalakazam deck maybe doing well or something like that. OK, but I don't expect that deck to do well either. And mainly because Dragapult still exists and that can be a really tough matchup for that. I mean, even if you run the battle, the battle cage or whatever. All Dragapult needs is like two stadiums over the course of the match and like a dust nor and they can just kind of get rid of anything with energy and like I don't know and do all that.

And then it just gets really dicey from there. Yep. So I don't know. It's a unfortunately we're at a point where I mean, maybe control it can do well. Like if somebody can brew up a control that because the meta is so top heavy. So maybe it isn't. It isn't. It isn't. It's weird, right? Like we see like the same three or four decks being brought up as like you have to be able to beat these in order to win the tournament. But that's to say, like. There's still a lot of decks you could play to a regionals at this point, and it control really relies on it only being it being very narrow at the top.

Right. And I still think it's fairly narrow, but it's not like it's not as like it's not like a 30 percent deck or something like that. Or 20, 20, 25, like we have maybe one 20 percent deck and then it's like 15, 15, 15 or 12. Yep. And then five, five, five, five, something like that. Maybe it would be like the meta percentage looking at it like that. So it's tough. I don't think and I don't really know what control even has right now anymore. I haven't really kept up with it. If it has anything good.

Neither. I don't know. I do know I saw a lot Blitzel tweet about how Pidgeot's rotating soon. So he felt like he was going to need to play some more Pidgeot. So there's a chance we'll see him show up with it. But I, as far as other decks go, I know I had mentioned at the top of the show, I've been playing terror box a little bit, and that's mostly just to help some people out. You said that they wanted some more data on the deck. I have the same problem with it that I do with other knockout base decks where the games where it works, it feels really great and it's wonderful.

And then the games where your opponent goes secret box for Watchtower on turn one and you just you just cry because you play this. You literally play one draw supporter and you're and you didn't start with it. And there's nothing you can do about that. And over the course of a tournament like that, I mean, they're not going to have secret box on turn one every single game, but it's more more likely. Assuming that Watchtower is a popular tech in person, as it is online, that something like that will happen, or you'll hit the scenario where you just brick, which the deck does not infrequently.

And so like that, I mean, that to me discounts Tarabox and Flareon as potential plays, and I don't really know if there's a way to fix that. I think that that's just kind of is what it is with that archetype. It's kind of an all or nothing sort of deal that you're signing on for when you sit down to play it. Yeah, and right now you get collateraled by people taking in Watchtower for Charizard. Yep. And like that just feels bad, like even if your opponent wasn't expecting to play, even if your opponent has no idea how to play against Tarabox or how to play against Flareon, if they get that turn one Watchtower and you have no answer, it doesn't matter.

Like they don't need to know how to beat your deck. They just need to know how to like attach and attack. And that feels pretty bad, man. So I don't know. I definitely would steer clear of those Noctowl decks. I think that's a fair assessment. I think if you're going to Toronto this weekend, I would probably not play a Noctowl deck. I think they have a big enough target on their back. And if you even if you get like two rounds where you hit into a Watchtower and like your opponent is able to get it out fairly regularly, that feels really rough.

Yeah, like and it's it's one of those things where like at the beginning of this format, nobody was teching for with Watchtower. And now we're at a point where it's it's a solid inclusion and a lot of people are putting it in there. And rightfully so, I think it is a good stadium in this metagame. So, yeah, I mean, it takes out a lot of things like you stop Pidgeot, you stop Noctowl, you disable your opponent's Blood Moon. You turn off Kangaskhan. Yeah, the Bouffalants no longer have any value. Yeah, Pidgeot is no longer any valuable.

Like, yeah, just a lot of little things. And that's kind of built up in enough abundance over time, like those decks have become powerful enough that it makes it worthwhile to play. Now, and then one deck that has kind of coalesced. It almost. So you mentioned control, and I know when people when we say control, a lot of times people envision Pidgeot control is like the de facto control deck of the format. But the deck that has almost established itself as a pseudo control deck in how it has come to be played, which is very different from how people initially wanted to play it, is is N'Zurark.

And like I mentioned a little while ago, I've seen lists with up to three Watchtower in them and also lists that are playing. Toad Scroll, in addition to those Watchtowers, so it's got like the it's trying to cover all the bases like Zorak is struggling to find a way to stay relevant in the metagame. You know, it's kind of foothold in initially before Phantasmal Flames came out was that it had a very good Gardevoir matchup and that went out the window as soon as Phantasmal Flames count because everybody put Diancie in their Gardevoir deck.

But yeah, now that Diancie play is going down. Or at least appears to be going down. Zorak's foothold is reestablishing itself there. They've added the Toad Scroll line to compensate to try to beat Goldengo, and then they're covering the Kangaskhan matchup by beating Cornerstone by playing Lopunny. And so is Zorak in a good enough position to actually take the event down, or is it going to get this far and then just lose to a Charizard at the end of the day? Yeah, it's a good question. I have a local of mine who has been playing a lot of Zorak.

And when it has the answers to the deck that it's going into and is able to execute its game plan, which it can do fairly well a lot of times, I think it is a good deck. And especially if you're able to figure out exactly what metagame you're going to see for the day. Like if you if somebody gave you a list of what decks you're going to see and said, all right, you're going to play this, this, this, this. You could then build a Zorak deck that would be able to win a tournament fairly confidently.

But you can't tech for everything. Like, that's where I'm going with this. Sure. You can try your best, but there's going to you're going to have to take a bad matchup, whether that's Gardevoir or Goldengo or Charizard, which I don't think is the worst matchup, but it's not great. Like it can get sticky if the Charizard like doesn't take a knockout for forever and then Hemorrhage Duskthorn kind of runs you over or something like that. But I don't know. I don't think it's a bad deck. I think it still has a lot of entry, has a lot of power.

It's still going to struggle to close games out and like have. I think, yeah, it's still going to struggle to do what it needs to do to win games, a lot of times it gets really close and then it's a punishing deck where if you make one mistake like early game, it's burning a resource like getting rid of an Enz PP up or a Dark Energy too early or something like that. It's just then you don't have enough resources to close the game out. You see your whole deck pretty much every game because of trade.

As long as you set up. So it's really just managing resources and executing a game plan. And it can do that fairly consistently. Like that's the nice thing is like if you are teching for stuff, you're able to set up your text a lot of time. You're able to get your game plan going. So I would say it's probably like Dragapult level of good right now. Yeah. Where it you can win the tournament. And if you make the right Meta Calls, you can win the tournament. Make the right Meta Calls and hit the right matchups.

It's really not too bad, you know, truthfully, but it can be also another deck where if you hit the wrong matchups, it feels really bad. I'm sure it's going to. Yeah, you're just going to like sit there and be like, why the heck did I play this? Sure. Like it's tough. OK, well, I think that we've done kind of a general overview of pretty much all the decks we can expect to see. We didn't talk about things like as much as I hate to say it. Marty's Grimmsnarl is not a good play this weekend. I maybe it comes back after rotation, but just right now it's not very good.

So keep it on the shelf. Hold strong. You'll get the Marnie's Grimmsnarl Art Rare with Ascended Heroes. Oh, yeah. It still won't be good then. But the time will come. Just stay strong. But also, we didn't really talk about it, but Ascended Heroes, man. What a bummer. So we were talking before the podcast and looking at like regulation marks of like Japanese cards. And I think if we go one to one with what's in Japan, which I think is usually how Pokemon Prince stuff, they don't really modify regulation marks.

No. All the stuff in Ascended Heroes is I, right? Like all the like the Mega Hawlucha and all that other stuff that we got. The Pokepad, the item we were hoping to get is Regulation J. So by that logic, it doesn't look like it'll make it into Ascended Heroes. And if that's the case. You know, the good thing it's a mini set, like good thing it's a collector set that we don't have to like that it won't be too hard to get from what since we've now talking about other sets, there are the potential leaks for the set after the Mega Zygarde set, which looks like it's going to be a Mega Greninja set.

If you combine the Zygarde and Greninja sets together, they're smaller than Ascended Heroes. It's crazy. Like Ascended Heroes is a mini set. Calling it a mini set is definitely a misnomer. Like we'll call they I think that Pokemon used the term special set, but it's like 400 cards at the end of the day because it's got like 80 or 100 SIRs. Yeah, it's absurd. And they're Black Bolt wife. They're beautiful. They look really, really good. But you're never going to see product on a store shelf, although maybe that's not true because all the all like the scalper guys are moving on to one piece now.

So maybe there's a shot. Yeah, and they've printed prismatic evolutions to death. Like they're still coming out with prismatic evolutions today. And like I sort of bulk at a card store and I see more prismatic evolutions than anything else, to be honest with you. And they're all hunting that Umbreon, man. I mean, it's crazy, dude. And I mean, if that's the case, like if they if they go like that, like Black Bolt White Flare, I'd rather see that because that's a cooler set to me. But like, yeah, prismatic just sells better.

And I guess just maybe they made more of it. Yeah. Yeah, we'll see. I don't know. I'm not I'm not here to speculate on the car market or anything. Yeah, there is a lot of cool. I are. I'll give you that. Like like all the comic book ones. Oh, yeah. I'm going to I already started doing it with the Japanese ones. And I'm definitely going to try to like have their reverse in English. So you have like the English name on the Japanese and the Japanese name on the English. I love that. That's a cool thing.

Yeah, but before we head out for the night, Aaron, I got a couple predictions. I want to throw at you. So I got four predictions. First one is copies of Watchtower in top cut. That's a good question. Yeah. How many copies? This is kind of the new tech card that came out in the interim. We've seen it a lot online. Do you think that will translate to in tournament success with how many do you think will be in top cut? So is this one two questions this? ASIM, correct? Yeah, I'm gonna say ASIM. Okay.

And then just, are you asking for just a raw number? Are we doing like an over, under thing here? I want a raw number. So we'll do like prices, right? Closest to the number of launched hours? I think you can go over, that's fine. But yeah, closest to it would be the way to win it. I'll go with three. Okay. I'm being honest, I had four in my head, so I'm gonna say four. Okay, go for it. All right. Next prediction is how many Canadians will be able to defend their own turf and how many will be in top cut?

So how many Canadians in top cut? One. One out of even? Yep. Oh, Aaron, that's disrespectful. Well, okay, so if you go back, go back and look at last year's Toronto Regionals and tell me how many Canadians were in top cut of that one. Spoiler alert, it was one. I hear you. I just think Canada's in a different plane of existence in the last few months. Like we had a Canadian world champion, we've had a lot of different Canadians kind of answering the call and doing well. I at least think like if you were to say like how many will be in top eight, maybe one makes sense there.

I think for ASIM, I gotta say like three. I think I'm going three. If we had like a top 12, I think a good, like you gotta remember like over 50% of the room is probably Canadian, right? So like by that logic, like. I mean, that's true, but I don't think the law of numbers really matters when you get up to the end of the tournament because you figure like the vast majority of those. That's fine, I'm gonna spit facts here because this is not just applying to this tournament. This is every tournament in general.

Most of the people, especially the majority, like a large majority of people don't make day two. That's where the bulk of those Canadian players will be. That's true. And so when you get to day two, you've got the top 10% of the tournament and a majority of the top 10% of players in a field at a given tournament are not Canadian. You know, just look at the history of tournaments over the past three seasons. There are a handful of extremely, extremely good Canadian players, but there's still less than 10 of them, I'd think.

Maybe there's more. I'd have to sit there and sit here and actually name them. It also depends on what nationality you count certain players as. Sure. Like Piper. Right. The one that moved up to Canada for college, yeah. No, I think she's still US, but yeah, I don't know. I think there's a lot of good players in Canada at the moment. There are, there are. Like, obviously you got- And they'll show up and try to represent their country. All that to say, I think, yeah, we will, I'll be cheering on some of the Canadian players and you'll be cheering on non-Canadian players soon, so.

I like a lot of the Canadian players. I hope they do great. Yeah, I know. I just don't think they'll make cut. Fair enough. All right, moving on. Two more predictions. The last one, before we get into the player we pick, we usually pick a player that'll do well. My question is the highest-placing mega evolution Pokemon. So we've seen a couple of different decks come to prominence. You know, Mega Genghis Khan's been running. Golden Ghost now running. Lopunny sometimes running. Mega Mawile. Diancie or Mega Gardevoir can make an appearance.

Yeah, I think those are the main ones. So out of all of those ones- I could see a sneaky Mega Charizard X in the Charizard deck. True. Yeah, we've seen that a couple of times. So that could come up. Okay. What are your thoughts, Aaron? I'm gonna go- Do you want me to go first? No, I'll go first. Like, I'm gonna go with Lopunny. Okay, that's the safe one, I think, yeah. I do think, because I think, so my logic here is Gardevoir has seemed to be trending down on Diancie, so that's out. I think that the Genghis Khan decks just won't make it.

And so, like, what does that leave you with? It's basically Lopunny. Oh. Yeah. What about Sharpedo, though? How do you feel about Sharpedo? We didn't talk about Sharpedo yet. How do you feel about it? There's a reason why we didn't talk about Sharpedo. I don't think it's a very good card. Fair enough. Yeah. I think all Zig, when you zagged, the correct answer probably is Lopunny, but I think Mega Genghis Khan makes a deep run. Either it's the Absol one. You know, the Absol one. I mean, it could be Absol.

Yeah, it could be Absol, but I'll put Genghis Khan just because I think that it has a larger stretch and could be included in something like a terror box or something like that, you know, just for extra draw. So, like, it's the most versatile out of them all. Lopunny is very specific to Golden Goat. I guess the Lopunny Death Star deck, we really didn't talk about that either. No. It also sees play, like I said, it's seen play in Zoroark as well. So, I think that it's got enough of a foothold that it has a good shot of being up there.

Okay, well, that covers all the main predictions. Last one is pick a player to win. I will pick Riley McKay because I think he hasn't played a lot of regionals, but Guardi's still good. And honestly, I think, you know, he'll be testing with Henry Chow and all the other Guardi heads. And we'll definitely like come up with the correct answer, if you will. So, pick the world champ to defend the hometown regional. That'd be a good story, right? Hey, that would be a great story. I'm also gonna pick a player who has yet to play a major this season, but that I know is attending the tournament this weekend.

And this player has a history of winning regional tournaments and winning the invite by doing so. So, I don't think this season's gonna be any different. I do think at some point he's gonna spike an event here. We're gonna go with none other than Azul, wow, Azul Garcia Griego. That's a safe pick. It is a safe pick. And I know he's going, so it's a viable pick. Yeah, true. Although until he tweets tomorrow, oh, I canceled my flight. Last minute, I woke up on the wrong side of the bed, need to cancel my flight.

See you at the next NAIC. I'll be co-streaming this weekend. Come tune in. Something like that, yeah. It could happen, could happen. Yeah, I mean, he sounded like he was losing some motivation as he approaches the tournament, which I get. But we will be excitedly talking about that next time. Next week, I'll hopefully have a good recap of my judging experience. And yeah, I'm looking forward to it, Aaron. And I hope you're able to catch some of it on Twitch and follow along at home. Any other thoughts before we head out?

No, just same old, same old. Stay warm, stay safe, and make sure you have your cards. Like, I mean, take your cards in your carry-on if you're traveling internationally. Take your cards on the plane with you, especially like if you're checking a bag, don't risk it. Just put your deck in your bag. Also, just don't change decks last minute. We say this all the time, but it bears repeating right before the first event. It's been a month since the last event. Just be locked in on what you're doing. You've probably been playing the deck you're playing for quite a while at this point.

Just stick with it, and you'll see more results that way. Yeah, good luck. Cool, well, thank you everybody for tuning into the show. We hope you enjoyed. Sorry for being a bit more inconsistent recently. I know a lot of it is on me. I've had a lot of life stuff going on recently. Very near to having an additional child in the household, and that comes with its own set of stresses and potential life problems. So thank you for bearing with us. If you do want to catch the show elsewhere, depending on where you're listening, we put the show out on all podcasting platforms.

Our home is considered to be Spotify, so if you'd follow the show there, we would greatly appreciate it. I'm also trying to make sure that I get things uploaded on YouTube as well, so if you would go over there and subscribe, we'll have links to both of the things in the description of the show. You can also follow the show on social media at battlefrontierpod on X. You can find myself over there at underscore Aaron, underscore Curry, and John is over on Blue Sky at johnorgel.bsky.social. So once again, thank you.

Enjoy Toronto, whether you're watching the stream or you are up participating in the tournament, and we will see you guys next week on the Battle Frontier. Have a good week.