2-8: Time Capsule Returns and Lille Predictions

About this episode

<p>Aaron and John jump into the past with the reintroduction of the Time Capsule segment reviewing a deck that had a similar introduction to the game as Tord's Mega Absol Box deck. Then the guys drop some predictions for which players and decks they expect to succeed at the Lille Regional Championship this weekend.</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 Aaron Curry. Here with me, as always, is my co-host, Jon Orgel. And just at the top of the show, for anyone listening, I wanted to remind everybody, we are back uploading to YouTube. So last week's episode made it up onto YouTube. This week's will as well. And planning to cross-upload both on all podcasting platforms as well as over on YouTube for the foreseeable future, because I had a few people ask about it.

So if you are listening here and would prefer to listen there, head on over, hit that subscribe button. You'll get notifications when we put new episodes up, and you'll be good to go. But it's pretty light Newsweek, right, Jon? We had the announcement of a couple of regionals. We got Orlando, which, for some unknown reason, is on Easter weekend. And then we also got Houston, and I can't remember off the top of my head what the date for that one is. It's April. I'm sorry. I had it pulled up. Houston, it's going to be March 20th through 22nd.

Okay. Okay. So late March, and then literally like two weeks later, we'll hit up Florida. Orlando. Cool. So I'm sure, as per usual, registration for those won't go live till early next year, sometime like January, February. And yeah. But that's really about it in the realm of news. We do have LIL regionals coming up this weekend, which I believe is broadcasted. So we'll be doing some predictions for that at the end of the episode. But on the way there, we're going to bring back, at the request of a couple of listeners, Time Capsule this week.

And it's a pretty interesting one, because I think that the story of this deck lines up pretty well with the story of the Absol Megabox that toured and everyone premiered in Milwaukee a couple of weeks ago. And then we'll hit up Blaine's Quiz Show and then close out with our predictions. But before we get to that, of course, I need to know, John, what did you get up to this weekend? This weekend was pretty chill when it comes to Pokemon. I went out and visited my in-laws in Winchester, Virginia.

Unfortunately, I looked at the calendar before I left or on the way over and saw that there was a cup going on at the store there on Saturday. And I felt obligated to like, think about that. And then just had to kind of squanch that feeling down and just spend time with family. You know, it's tough being a degenerate gamer out here. You know what I mean? Like, just disregarding all family obligations to play Pokemon. No, but it's good to like, kind of reset stuff and make sure you like, you keep the main thing the main thing when it comes to family.

You know, sometimes it's easy to lose sight of what really matters or like, what is actually what your goals are, you know, like, if I was in a different point of my life, like before I met Sydney, and, you know, I was definitely more on the mindset of I'm gonna go for the world's invite, go for playing all the tournaments I can play in. And, you know, so it just depends on where you are in your life. So there's no real correct answer for all that stuff. It's just like, what works for you and your schedule and your priorities in life at the moment.

Sure. So, but I just had to remind myself that my priorities are not Pokemon. But that was good. You know, we did a lot of fall stuff. We went to an apple orchard. Her parents live in like the northern Virginia part that of closer to West Virginia that's like in the Shenandoah Valley. So they have a lot of apple orchards and beautiful mountains and all that kind of stuff. So we just spent some time. The weather was nice. Friday and Saturday. And it's pretty windy Sunday, but Friday and Saturday were gorgeous.

So we just spent some time outside at an apple orchard and that kind of stuff. Went to dinner. So it was good. And then just came back and just got ready for the week. Yesterday we had our league challenge, we had decent turnout, I was happy to have my friend Christian judge his first ever tournament. So that was cool. He just got accepted as professor. Let me know that. I'm like, dude, if you're not doing anything this Monday, I got a tournament, just hop on in there. You know, so you know, league challenges are a great one to get people introduced to Pokemon.

And yeah, it was good. We had a pretty decent turnout. We had I think 15 players total for a Monday night league challenge, which was not bad at all. No. And I believe Gardevoir took it all down, beat Ceruledge in the finals. And I had to like, do like the slow-mo, like no, stop, because the Ceruledge player used Briar on his last turn and it was like, looked and took his last two prize cards, except the Gardevoir player was down to one prize card. So that was tough. It was far enough into the game where I'm like, and I don't think it mattered.

Like I feel like the Gardevoir player, like I ended up normally the penalty is you give it a double prize card penalty. But like, I don't feel like I want that game to even come to be permanent. Yeah, yeah. I mean, Pokemon's been really strict about having all the rules be pretty standardized all throughout every level of tournament. They do put in the clause like based on a level of experience. There's a little bit of that kind of clause in there to give you like the ability. So what I said was like to the player, normally like this would be like a double prize card penalty, but because you've searched your deck multiple times and reasonably can be assumed that you know what these two prize cards are without looking at them.

I'm just going to give a warning here. You know, we could go back and forth about whether that was the correct ruling or not. Normally it would be a double prize card penalty, but I didn't want the game to end like that. And I didn't really feel like that was fair to the player. Most I didn't really watch a whole lot. Unfortunately, like when you're kind of organizing stuff, you're the one just running Tom and yeah, doing all that. I was letting Christian take over a lot more of the fourth four calls.

But yeah, it is it is tough. Like when we had a new player who had never played before who played an unsleeved pre released deck with some extra cards thrown in. So like, that was a challenge, you know, not not any knock on him, like you got to play what you have, right? Like, it is what it is. And there was times where he like, forgot to put out a prize card or something like that. Right, right. So there's like little stuff where people are learning. And so league challenges are definitely like, you have to like, kind of figure out the level of like, is it worth, you know, breaking this, it's just tough to like, gauge where to, you know, you want, you want everybody's experience to be similar throughout all levels of organized play.

But you also want somebody that's a new player to come back and play and experience all that. So I'm just that's kind of the stuff that goes through your mind as a judge when you're doing those things. Yeah, I don't know, I think, yeah, but you can't like you can't force someone to have a good time, right? And realistically, if you're if you're entering a tournament, and you're playing with a sub Maybe you don't know you have a subpar deck, but you kind of find out over the course of that event that you have a subpar deck, and you lose every game that may not be fun.

But that's up to you as a person to determine whether or not you're interested in improving that to come back and do better, or if you just say, Hey, this isn't for me. And that kind of sucks from the community aspect, like you may have lost a potential person, but there's not really a way that you would retain them. But the Pokemon community is such that a lot of times that that player gets beat, or like, you know, somebody beats them, like everybody's willing to help them make their deck better if it's at that point, or that players like one motivated to now spend, you know, because it's still not that expensive to get into Pokemon, thankfully.

So like, they're motivated to spend 40 bucks to get a top tier meta deck, you know, right? You buy like, the lead the rival battle deck, plus a trainer toolkit or something. And yeah, maybe like $50. And now that you could obviously just buy singles and be better off be able to get into everything a little bit more cheaply. But as far as sealed products are concerned, buying like we have much better new player resources than we ever have. For sure. Yeah. And League is always a good spot to like, just have people come and try stuff out or trade or whatever you need.

Like I've got people posting in my league discord, you know, asking for trades or for cards or something like that. And most of the time, everybody's willing to help them out. So that's really cool. It's what it's all about. I love seeing it. And yeah, like everybody I had some new like the new player, that new player, and then I had two other players that it was their first time and they were excited to keep playing. I had a family that showed up and it wasn't didn't know it was a league challenge, but they were like, ready to learn and come back and we're doing like a pokey Halloween thing next week.

So I'm excited to do that. We're going to do some raid battles. So that'll be fun. Okay. So what does that entail? The raid battle? It's like, well, I just meant like the Pokemon Halloween thing, but I'm good. It's just just like that. And then like you can dress up in costumes and I give out like the booster packs, you know, I'll probably give out that and then plus a play pack or something like that. Everybody that shows up. So we'll see. It'll be fun. But that was my Pokemon. Not much going on this week.

I tried new towards deck and played two games on live with it and kind of just like, I'm too tired. It just went to bed. If I'm honest, like I got bodied by one thing and then I don't know, man, like, my heart's not entirely in it because I don't have a tournament that I'm playing in or like judging sure for a while. So it's kind of like, I'll get back into it. I need to like stay on top of it because it's a good format. I don't know. Have you played much done much with Pokemon this past week? Yes and no.

So I it was funny when I was editing the episode last week, I had entered a couple of random Twitter giveaways for Legends ZA because it was also released last week and coincidentally got a message Wednesday night while I was editing our episode that I had won a copy of the game and so immediately stopped what I was doing and input the download code so that could finish and I've put a lot of time into that so far. Like I definitely enjoyed Legends Arceus a lot, you know, outside of the kind of slog of the tutorial section.

I thought that that game was a lot of fun and probably one of my favorite Pokemon games that they've ever made. So I was really excited to see what they did with this one and so far it kind of has the same issue at the beginning where you do have a good chunk of a tutorial section that like you can't really explore anything but it has the same catching mechanics but now also has more battles and the new battle system is pretty interesting and it's kind of a breath of fresh air from my perspective at least as a, you know, rather casual Pokemon video game gamer.

Like I'm not doing hardcore VGC battles or anything and I don't, you know, Pokemon's obviously always been pretty light and accessible as far as story is concerned. Like there's nothing truly crazy heavy or dark within the story. Like there are some notes if you dig deep enough for it but this one so far at least has been pretty interesting and there's kind of different elements like true boss battles and things that have made it different enough from a quote-unquote regular Pokemon game that it has definitely sucked me in to where I've been playing it almost every night.

Have not played a ton of Pokemon TCG but I, like I said, I had put a good amount of time into Mega Absolbox as a concept prior to Milwaukee once I had seen the original kind of leak of it and played a little bit more of it up post-Milwaukee for those like Monday and Tuesday following the event. And I think the deck's a lot of fun. I think this format is honestly really good and things have widened in a really interesting way and I know we'll talk about this a little bit more when we talk about Lil and what we expect maybe some of these developments to be but I'm intrigued to see how things go moving forward throughout the series of tournaments that we have for this format because I know we've got a European event this week, we've got another European and an Australian event the week after, then we've got a break and then we've got Vegas and then LAIC and it's like that's a month or more than a month longer for this metagame to continue to evolve and develop and see how people are shooting, like what risks people potentially want to take in their deck choice because there are some people may not like this but a lot of decks do kind of have like a rock-paper-scissory nature to them where literally every deck has a bad matchup and you just kind of have to take the time as a player and if you invest enough time in learning your matchups you can kind of lower that percentage of your bad matchup against maybe a player that isn't as experienced in it as you are and kind of leverage that skill expressiveness in terms of experience to come out ahead more often than you would otherwise and I think that that in my opinion is a sign of a healthy format where the person who's putting in the most amount of effort should be rewarded more I think rather than just oh you're a guard of our decks weak to my dark type guy so I win like that's not fun for anybody right I agree I and I agree with your sentiment that you really like the format I was kind of afraid that with the introduction of mega pokemon that it would just go back to how it was like when we had v stars or tag teams and it just felt like oppressive or if you're not playing those you know you're not doing what the game designers want and they're like threatening and but they don't feel like an insurmountable wall like we've had in the past where you can't knock it out in one hit and you can just kind of like stone jurnor v max your way through the format or something like that where there's it's just like obnoxious to try to like that wasn't a good deck like no one can tell me that was like fun to play against or interactive like it was kanga scott is almost there at times but even so like there's counters you can play like you can play tool scrapper you can play jamming tower you can like you know do different things to counteract that and it's weak to fighting like it's not you know an instrument like it you can counter it with different things so um the card pool feels pretty good right now yeah i think so so yeah the legend za thing and then Um, I totally forgot to talk about it on last week's episode, but I had the, um, opportunity once again, this past weekend to cast a league cup at versus games in Oviedo. And that was pretty cool, like relatively well-attended like 29 or maybe it was 30 players for the day. And we saw a lot of Charizard. I think there were six Charizard decks in the room and literally all of them were just Jackson Ford, 60 from the walkie. Um, but it's a good deck and it ended up with four of them converted into top eight. And then we had to drag a pulse that unfortunately had to play each other in top eight. And then the last two decks were a grim snarl and a, an absol box. And the finals ended up coming down to absol box against Charizard.

And the Charizard player that was in finals pretty clearly didn't understand how to approach the matchup. So it was a relatively, unfortunately uninteresting finals, because I think that he, the Charizard player had set himself up to run through things properly. And, you know, to, in his defense, I guess the absol box player had crazy good starts, both games, like the first game opened cornerstone and had trolley in hand. Geez. And then the second game, um, you know, never had an, a Pokemon in play that he didn't want to have him play. So it was able to retain all of the pennies to, so that like a single dust noir was never a threat. It was able to get Psyduck on the field. Every game didn't prize the fighting energy. So it was able to actually attack with the cornerstone, never bricked on supporters despite not putting Kangaskhan into play. And so it just kind of all went that player's way. And it did, but it didn't help that the Charizard player kind of prioritize the wrong things and didn't really want to go for the kind of a big combo, double dust noir, cleft key countercatcher Psyduck, like kill your cornerstone and get your thing out of place. So you have no energy going on all in one turn and not being able to accomplish that made it. So he just couldn't win the game. Like the second game was relatively close despite that, but just the absolute guy ended up taking it down 2-0, but it was a good event otherwise. And so it was able to get the footage from that. At some point, still haven't found the time for any of those leakups to go through and try to actually find clips and cut everything. But I'm a temp, like at some point I need to, I would really like to get that done. Then on Sunday, we got to go to a nearby town and they have a kind of a historic downtown district where they host an annual craft fair.

And this thing was huge, man. It was two streets and probably three blocks on each street. And then also had tents lining the streets, connecting those two streets together. And then at the end of the second street, there's a park that's right on a river. And that whole park area also was lined with different stalls and tents. So there had to be like 140 vendors out of this thing, but it was cool. There was some neat stuff. Like I know I showed you one of the things that I bought was this kind of pressed wood, laser cut Frankie from One Piece for my nephew, because it's his favorite character. And we saw this guy who does custom fire pits had made a really cool Death Star thing, as well as he had an undersea one, which was all like mermaids and fish and seaweed and stuff. And it's just like shaped metal that's also cut into these unique configurations. And I'm like, cool, that looks really neat. It's very expensive, so I will not be buying it. But I appreciate how much effort you probably had to put into making that. And then, you know, a company that you had the low effort stuff. And we were kind of ranting about the woes of low effort 3D printer sales folks. Or yeah, I don't know, there's probably a better way to describe it. It's like AI art to me where it's just like very close.

Yeah, like you just copy placed it a template from somewhere online. And like, yeah, I just fired up your 3D printer hit print. And it's like, I'm selling this for $15. Right? Okay. But I mean, there's cool things you can do with 3D printers. I've seen some stuff like I was talking with Aaron, like I've seen people like make little inserts you can put into the tins that Pokemon's printed for the last few like mini tins. And you can put all your like dice and hold all your dice and your coins or status conditions or whatever. So there's a lot of cool stuff you can do with 3D printing. And it's a really cool thing to have as in the hobby for Pokemon. When you like, I've seen people like, collect coins, and they 3D print like holders that will hold the coin in a binder page. And so you can do it that way. I've seen, you know, you can do it with like people with 3D print, like little hanger tags on the back that will like kind of hang from the spine of a binder or something like that. But you know, the cool thing is the imagination is really the motivating factor. But we were just like, yeah, the people 3D printing see the same like spiky dragon for like the hundredth time. Yeah, it just gets really old.

And you're like, please stop. Yeah. But yeah, you know, if there's if people are buying it, there's clearly a market for it more power to you. I just, you know, not for me. Yep. Fair enough. Yeah. I think that more or less summed up, like, since then, it's just been playing more ZA. And just dealing with the work life baseball, like family just doesn't stop for and I'm sure most other people have their own stuff going on. But, you know, I think that that's enough non concentrated Pokemon talk. Yeah, we can get into kind of the meat of what people may want to come to the show for. And that is a segment we haven't done in a while called time capsule. And so the gist of time capsule is either John or I picks a deck from a retro format and presents it to, you know, talk about what is the deck kind of what is the point of it for people who aren't familiar with it? How would you think about generally going around playing it? And also giving a little bit of kind of an overview of how did this deck come about in that format, or kind of what was its impact at the time. And so the one I've chosen this week is was originally called ambush. This was a deck that was created by Jimmy Ballard. So for most people, they would know that Jimmy Ballard is a to or one of the folks who runs, I believe day two events.

And right, is that the organization that? Yeah. Yeah, day two events. But Jimmy is also the guy who was the runner up at the 2006 World Championship with his Eeveelutions deck, and has just historically been an avid rogue deck builder throughout his tenure within the Pokemon TCG. And once again, ambush was kind of one of those such cases. And the reason that I wanted to talk about this was that the kind of lead up to this deck was very similar to what we saw with the Absol Megabox heading into Milwaukee, where Jimmy and a few other people had made posts on pokegym.net at the time, since the Pokemon community online was concentrated into this pokegym message board. And somebody had been talking about, oh, there's going to be an ambush at US Nationals, which was the big tournament for the for the year for a lot of folks in the US since we didn't have ICs at the time. So every country would have an independent national championship at the end of the year culminating in a handful of invites that would then feed into the World Championship as the next big event following that. So US Nats is eventually what translated into becoming NAIC. But just being very the cryptic nature of describing that there was a secret deck out there that people were not necessarily aware of or privy to reminded me a lot of what Tor did heading into Milwaukee, which saying I have a deck I have to play and nobody has guessed what it is. And at the time that this deck came around, the Diamond and Pearl expansion had just been recently introduced. And we had had a series of battle roads, which are roughly the equivalent of modern league challenges, which used to have to be run seasonally, it was a little bit different, we would have a spring season, and a fall season, and all throughout spring season, the Infernape deck had been just Infernape, Delcatty had just been dominating battle roads, winning basically every event because Infernape could, you could rare candy on turn one at the time, you could rare candy and Infernape attach a double rainbow energy, which fulfilled Infernape's attack cost, and Infernape could knock out basically every basic Pokemon that in the game that wasn't an EX for just a single energy attachment. And people have, oh, this deck's so busted, it's going to win everything. And then there were, of course, other decks that were also viable throughout that time. But sitting kind of silently in the shadows was another Diamond and Pearl starter in the form of Empoleon. And so at the time, you know, Diamond and Pearl had introduced the concept of energyless attacks. So there we have this Piplup here that just kind of innocently does 10 damage for no energy, he would basically never use the second attack, but the star of the show with this deck was Primplup with Aqua Shower, which for a single water did 10 damage to all of your opponent's Pokemon, which by modern standards is absolutely trivial and sounds like a terrible attack. But this paired up really interestingly in a lot of ways, you know, the HP thresholds of a lot of Pokemon were much lower at the time. You know, as an example, there's an Absol EX in this version of this deck list that is a two prize basic and only has a 100 HP total. So when your Aqua Shower does a tenth of that HP, that's much more impactful than what 10 damage is in the modern game. And then to accompany that, the deck also played four copies of Cursed Stone, which is effectively Froslass's ability, but on a stadium. And so just any time between turns, each player puts one damage on his or her Pokemon that has a PokePower.

So this is before abilities got combined, we had PokeBodies, which were kind of passive effects that were always ongoing, and PokePowers were activated effects that you would have to utilize either when a Pokemon came into play, or once during a turn, or when it evolved, the trigger for the card would be on the card. So you have the Primplup spreading damage, Cursed Stone spreading damage, and if you sometimes needed to kind of go over the top or wanted to just snipe something, you had Empoleon, which had Ice Blade for a water and a colorless that could do 40 to one of your opponent's Pokemon, or if you had enough time to get three energies on it, you also had Aqua Jet that did 70, and then you would flip a coin, and if you got heads, you would also do 20 to one of your opponent's bench Pokemon. And at the time, Empoleon is a stage two with 130 HP and a weakness that is plus 30 to lightning rather than being times two, was incredibly tanky, especially when you paired it up with one of the most powerful tool cards that we've ever seen in the form of Cessation Crystal. It says as long as it can only be attached to a non-EX Pokemon, and as long as it is attached to that Pokemon, and that Pokemon is active, no Pokemon have any abilities. So you're locking your opponents out of, you know, like I said, one of the big decks at the time was this Infernape deck and had Delcatty in it, and anyone who's really familiar with retro would know what Delcatty does, but had an ability called Energy Draw, where you would discard an energy from your hand and draw three cards. So literally Lunar Cycle for Lunatone, except it was on a stage one, and you could utilize as many of them as you wanted, as long as you had that many Delcatties in play. And so shutting that off is really important.

You're also shutting off the abilities. At the time, the Eeveelution EXs were really big, so one of the big decks from this year, the deck that ended up winning Worlds, was Absol Eeveelutions, where there was a Jolteon that when it came into play would spread 10 to everything, and then Absol's Cursed Eyes ability would allow you to move those damage counters and manipulate them so your attacks could do things, but that deck is very dependent on its abilities going off. So making sure that you have those abilities locked down, super great. If you ever really needed to kind of manipulate the damage in your favor, this list did play that Absol to use Cursed Eyes to move those damage counters around. And then the secondary player in the deck was the Delta Marowak from the Delta Species set, with its attack energy bone for a Fighting and a Metal that says, choose a number of your opponent's Pokemon up to the amount of energy attached to Marowak, and this attack does 20 damage to each of them. And so you figure, you look at the energy lineup here, and we've got 11 Waters and 3 Scramble energy. Well, we don't have any Fightings or Metals, and Scramble is a really interesting energy. It's basically just Modern Reversal energy, so it can only be attached to Evolved Pokemon, which is a little bit different from what Reversal does because Reversal can be attached to Basics. Scramble could literally only be attached to non-rulebox Evolved Pokemon, but if you were losing the game or behind in prizes at the time, it would count as 3 Rainbow energies. So a Scramble on a Marowak would allow you to target 3 Pokemon in your opponent's field and do 20 damage to each of them. And then you had kind of other ways to work around this as well. We do have two copies of Holon's Electrode in here, which is a really cool concept. I think we've mentioned the Holon's Energy Pokemon in the past, and I think that it would be really neat to see them revisit this in some capacity.

But Holon's Electrode provides 2 Rainbow energy, because you can attach the card from your hand as an energy, but in order to do so, you have to bounce an energy from that Pokemon back to your hand. So it doesn't really accelerate you in energy attachments, but it does provide 2 Rainbows for you. So if you maybe have a turn where you attack with a Scramble energy as active, but then it puts you ahead in prizes, so now it's only providing a colorless, you can bounce that Scramble to your hand to preserve as a future resource down the line, while also getting back your 2 Rainbow or colored energies that you would need to attack.

And then one of the other aspects of this deck that I think makes it kind of similar, or a little bit more similar at least, to the Absol Megabox is we have the Roselia from Legend Maker, and the Pokebody is literally irrelevant because we don't play the React energy in this deck, but we do have for one colorless, Flick Poison. And this attack isn't unique, we've seen something like this on a lot of cards, but you switch your opponent's bench Pokemon with one of the defending Pokemon, and your opponent chooses the defending Pokemon to switch, but that new defending Pokemon is now poisoned. And that wording is really confusing, because at the time that this card was created, there were technically rules in the rulebook for 2v2 battles, where a given player would have 2 active Pokemon, but the gist of it is, you switch your opponent's active with one of their benched, and that new Pokemon that comes up is now poisoned. And importantly, in terms of, like if there were things involving missed energy, or a similar effect that would stop effects of attacks, if that was on the active Pokemon, it actually doesn't stop Flick Poison, because the effect is targeting the bench Pokemon, even though it does end up affecting the active kind of indirectly, because the direct effect is on the bench Pokemon, it would override something like that. And then the other thing that makes decks in this format in general, pretty interesting, although it gets a little boring when you kind of look at a bunch of lists from this format, and they all look very...

similar in their trainer section. It's just the Holon engine, which I believe we've also referenced before, but you have Holon's transceiver, which is kind of almost the spiritual predecessor to the rocket receiver we got in Destined Rivals, where the rocket receiver could search your deck for any rocket supporter. The Holon transceiver allows you to search your deck or discard pile for any Holon supporter, which is probably just the most broken card that's ever been printed, honestly. Yeah, I'm kind of mad that they didn't do that for the rockets engine.

That would have been a better way to go about it. I think it would have made the deck, it honestly would have made the deck significantly better because you could have slimmed down all of your supporters and just fit more cards into your deck. But because of that, we're able to play Holon. All of the Holon supporters have the caveat that in order to play them, you have to discard a card from your hand. So minor cost for a very powerful effect most of the time, or just the discard is also potentially a benefit.

But Holon Mentor, as you discard a card, search your deck for up to three basic Pokemon that have 100 HP or less, and then put them into your hand. Holon Adventurer is discard a card and draw three. But if you happen to discard a Delta Pokemon, you draw four instead. So we do have access to that via the Marowak. And Holon Scientist is discard a card and then draw until you have a hand size equal to your opponent. And so, and a lot of matchups like that Infernape matchup where they use the Delcatty's energy draw a lot, they get rather large hand sizes.

So being able to go Transceiver for Scientist, discard a card, I'm gonna draw six off of this, is pretty powerful. We have a few other things. We have Wall-E's Training, which allowed you to evolve a Pokemon. It was basically Salvatore. So you could just evolve a Pokemon from your deck to your active, or you could evolve your active by searching your deck for the evolution that went on top of that card. And you could even play this on turn one if you were going second. So you could potentially Aqua Shower with a Cessation Crystal starting on turn one if you coincidentally open with Wall-E.

Or you could do something like evolve Piplup into Primplup, attach a Scramble Energy, Wall-E into Empoleon, and utilize Aqua Jet on a given turn if you're behind on price cards. And like I said previously, Empoleon is really difficult to get rid of in one shot in this format. So you have something there. We didn't have a lot of search items at the time. So instead, like we had the Holon Mentor to find basics, Sealeo's Network could search your deck for any Pokemon that was not an EX and then put it into your hand.

It was kind of a necessary evil at the time. We had Castaway, which allowed you to search your deck for a follow-up supporter, a Pokemon tool, and a basic energy. So just a really generically good consistency card. We've seen things like Cyrus's Conspiracy in other formats, or I feel like we've had something somewhat, Arvin is kind of almost there. Just- Yeah, it reminds me of Guzma Holo Tag Team. Sure. With the discard effect. Yeah, so without the discard effect, you're still doing something extremely powerful.

Yeah. I think like the thing I really liked about Castaway or Cyrus was also getting to search your deck for your follow-up supporter, in addition to the other cards that you're finding. Like, it's really cool. And then you also have a copy of Scott, which is just search your deck for up to three cards in any combination of supporters and stadiums. So you have a way to directly search out your Cursed Stone, but also getting follow-up supporters into where you can filter cards out of your deck, like extra Holon supporters that you don't want anymore to discard them down the line, or just getting things out of your hand.

And then there were a couple of break points that throughout the way, because you have Castaway to find your Cessation Crystals, we also had a tech tool in the form of Strength Charm, which is just whenever the Pokemon that this is attached to attacks, that attack does plus 10, and then you discard Strength Charm, which really sounds awful compared to any sort of modern tool. Like you look at, you know, Muscle Band or Choice Belt, or even something like Defiance Band, where those tools just stay attached and continue to provide damage output as long as the conditions are met.

And this is, hey, one time you do plus 10 and you're gonna like it. But it was good enough. Again, the HP totals were low enough that if this had been a consistent or a persistent effect, rather, it would have been ridiculously overpowered and everybody would have played it. But so this deck kind of took nationals by storm. It didn't ultimately end up winning the event, but I think there were three of us that made top 16. I was fortunate enough to be one of those people that made top 16 with the deck.

And then we had, I lost in top 16. I think two people did make top eight with it. And I believe that its run ended there. I don't actually recall what ended up winning that year. I know Jay Hornung was up there with Scizor Metagross, but you know, this is, it's, 2007 is a really interesting format in the sense that I feel like a lot of people don't play it because they're in favor, they're more in favor of playing RSPK because of the wider card pool. But I do think that Diamond Pearl with some of these Ruby Sapphire era cards is a pretty interesting format.

And it actually mixes pretty well, even though the initial, because the initial Diamond Pearl set is low enough power level that even though you have the changes in the weakness system that were introduced there, the cards are not ridiculously overpowered to the point that you, they're the only cards you can utilize. But from Ambush, so Ambush kind of persisted. You can see this list was ultimately the list that got top four at Worlds in the senior division, but Empoleon continued to see play in, you know, Sugiyoshi Yamato, it's a historic Pokemon player, won the first Nintendo-based World Championship or TPCI World Championship, played a straight Empoleon list at Worlds as well, but decided to cut the Marowak in favor of Corsola to help you find your water Pokemon, and then a 101 Infernape line.

So you could beat something like Scizor, which I believe also ended up making top four. I think that that was specific to Japan, but just the power of Aqua Shower plus Cessation Crystal plus Curse Stone is really the backbone of this deck. And until you really see it in action or have more experience of this format, it's hard to kind of put into words just how impactful and how powerful that is. But it was really good. And if you- Cessation Crystal's mean. Oh yeah, for sure. And if you are at all a fan of spread decks, this is definitely one that I would recommend visiting if you were ever to play the 2007 format.

Yeah. What is the recovery in this deck? Is there, I guess- Nope, there is none. That is terrifying to me. But that, and that is why, well, there wasn't really- There was no recovery in the format outside of like Holon Farmer, which was discard a card, shuffle, and do a double super rod, basically. You could get three Pokemon and three energy and shuffle them into your deck. And instead of that, you're playing just thicker counts of all of your Pokemon and more energy. Yeah. I mean, that's not like, I mean, it makes sense.

It forces you to use your Marowak and your other guys, I feel like, because yeah, early game. At some point. But I think realistically with this deck, if your opponent has managed to knock out four Prin Plups and you haven't won yet, you either have a Marowak that has two scramble energy on it that can clean up the board for you because you've just spread so much damage, or you just aren't going to win. That's fair. Yeah. It's a cool deck. I mean, this is like spread ability lock, kind of similar to Monkey Dory, Frostlass, with like an extra dimension of ability lock, aka pookie power lock.

Yeah, like you said, it shut off a lot of good stuff. I had actually never played 2007. I think I played 2008. Like I have two decks from that era with- 2008's a totally different beast because- It is. But the weird thing is it does have the Empoleon deck as one of the world's decks. So I believe it does. I wonder what age division that was from. Oh no, yes, you're right. Because by then we had enough Diamond Pearl sets. We circled all the way around to the other Empoleon. Yeah. And yes, Dual Splash Empoleon, that card is broken.

My goodness, that card is broken. And we still had, they still had Cessation Crystal. They still had, I think, they didn't have the Holon engine at that point. All of this stuff rotated at that point that year. And we got to a point where all of the Delta stuff was gone, but we still had the late, or almost all the Delta stuff. We had like the late stage Delta cards because this card was from- Oh, true. No, oh my gosh, it's the set with Crystal Beach. Crystal Guardians is what it was called. And yes, so the very tail end, that's like the last year this card was legal was 2008.

And probably a good thing. I mean, we've seen other- It's such a powerful card. Global ability locks be printed, but they were much more conditional than this. Just the fact that, oh, your Pokemon only needs to be active. And realistically, the only way to have this card not be active was through the use of a warp point, which is effectively escape rope, or an attack, a drag off type attack, like Flick Poison from Roselia or something. You did have Windstorm later on. So that was- You're right, you're right.

But at the time, Windstorm- Like nobody ran it. It was not very widely played. Or at best, it was a one of in whatever deck was playing it. And so you better hope you just have it in your hand. Yeah, it's tough. But no, this deck is, it just shows the consistency. And this one's interesting to me. It doesn't run any rare candy. So it's a much slower build. There was a list, I know. I remember distinctly from Nationals this year. So this, again, this is just an example of this list. But I know for anybody familiar with Michael Chen from Washington State area, used to be teammates with Ross Cawthon and Mike Fouché and all the X-Files people.

But I think he staffs events now. But he also was one of the people that made top cut with this deck. And he was playing a single candy in his list along with a Briny's Compassion. So you could do a play, have your plump plump, take some damage, and then you use Mr. Briny, which is, I guess, penny effectively, except it didn't only work on basics. So it's kind of like the midway of, or the combination of penny and Turo, where you can just pick up whatever Pokemon you want. And it just goes to your, or it's, it only works on non-EX Pokemon.

That's what it is. But so you can pick up any non-EX Pokemon, but it also keeps all the cards attached to it. That's nice. And so you could do something like pick up a prim plump and a pip plump, put the pip plump back down, and then rare candy and other, a different pip plump into an Empoleon. Or you could rare candy the same turn at the time. So you could just rare candy that pip plump right back into play into an Empoleon, and then drop a scramble energy and do some crazy stuff. I know I ended up playing Michael in Swiss and lost specifically because he played a rare candy.

And I was like, oh, totally wasn't expecting that. But at the time, again, because your main thing is just going through prim plump and using Aqua Shower. Yeah, it makes sense. Occasionally using Brine, because Brine is relatively powerful. They totally glossed over this before, but for two water, if you choose one of your opponent's Pokemon that already has damage and you do 40 to it. And again, when a lot of basics are 60 HP or less, you know, Aqua Shower into Brine KO'd a lot of evolving basic Pokemon on your opponent's bench.

And for anything where that wasn't going to take you prize cards or you didn't want to take prize cards yet, you just said Aqua Shower again. And you know, we didn't have anything like Relicanth at the time to allow you to use the attacks from your previous bait or previous evolutions. So it was okay enough and powerful enough to just sit there with your 80 HP stage one and just start spreading 10 to everything. Yeah. Cool deck. Thanks for sharing that with us, Aaron. Absolutely. Good to see the segment back on the track.

It's always good to learn about, like I've been playing for a long time and it's interesting because there's still so many decks that I don't know about. So it's really cool to kind of see that and hear about your old runs a little bit. Do you remember what you lost to in top 16? It was Rob Down's Rayquaza deck, which is also on, so the website we were featuring there is PTCG Legends run by Alex Wilson. And Rob's deck is on there too, is a kind of a variant of Destiny for anybody familiar with either 2007 or RSPK, but it's just a Delta Rayquaza EX variant.

And just being a lightning thing, a big, I think it had 120 HP on a two prizer that didn't have a power. So Cursed Stone didn't affect it. And it just made it a little bit more difficult. Wasn't easy to take down. And I just lost game three. I think I ended up losing on time. And I remember being pretty bitter about that in the moment, but just is what it is. That's the game. Like I had played against some other interesting decks over the course of Cut. Like I think at top 32, I played against a Rhyperior Mill and then, or you know what?

That actually might've been top eight because I think in top 16, I played against Electivire Dragonite Delta, which is another cool deck from that format. I think that the Delta mechanic, especially in tandem with some of the stuff like that Electivire deck would not at all have been viable without the Delta Electabuzz or the Delta Dragonite and being able to mix those. So the Electabuzz just had an ability that if it was evolved from Elekid, you could draw a card off the bottom of your deck. And that gives you enough consistency throughout the course of your gameplay that it was technically viable to run that instead of Metagross, which a lot of people may be familiar with the Metaknight deck, which was just Delta Metagross plus Delta Dragonite.

And then Delta Dragonite accelerating energy from your Disco Pile to your bench allowed you to repower up the Electivire that can do like 120, I think, if you discarded. But that deck has a lot of abilities and is really dependent on those abilities. So Kirsten plus Cessation Crystal shut it down and made it pretty easy to win that one. Same thing like the Rhyperior guy was not happy that I played Cessation Crystal when his whole deck evolved my Pokemon to discard your deck. And when that doesn't work, your deck doesn't work.

And yeah. So fittingly, the thing I ended up losing to was the deck that did not have enough powers for Kirsten to really take advantage of. Makes sense. For sure. So yeah, I'm sure you got a great prize payout for your top 16 finish at Nationals back then. No idea what it was. No money whatsoever. I know that for a fact. You got three packs and a firm handshake. Maybe. Honestly, the thing that I think about the year of the first Worlds of 2004, I was in the senior division or I was just 11 to 14 at the time.

time. And I got top 16 that year. And I lost to Sebastian Crema, I think, in top 16. He's a player, he's come in and out of the game, but pretty good players from Canada. I know every time he does come back, he does pretty well. I think the last one, last time I remember seeing him around was something to do with Primal Groudon and Wobbuffet. And he like won or got second at a tournament with it, but lost to him. And it was when they, they debuted Pop Packs, which was something that they determined that giving us a pack of Ultra Pro, like plain black Ultra Pro sleeves, two Pop Packs, and like, I think, eight packs of the newest expansion was adequate prizing for top 16 of Worlds.

That's disgusting. That's such a shame. Prizing has come a long, long way. Anybody that complains about, you know, what you get for just making day two now at regionals, like, yeah, I guess. It's literally, it's like the, it's the equivalent, it's the equivalent of walking uphill both ways in the snow. Yeah, for sure. Back in my day. It's definitely a slap to the face. But I mean, it is like, that was what they offered. And at the time, I didn't care about the prizing. I was more bitter about the fact that I was out of the event.

Yeah, I mean, it's, it's tough. Like, there's so many good things about where Pokemon's at, there's so many, like, things that we could complain about. But overall, it's just fun to like, look back at like, yeah, I'm sure you did really well at these tournaments. How well you compensated Aaron, you know, and it's like, None. I, to this day, I think, I think the following year, I aged up into Masters and got second at Florida regionals, and I got $250 as a scholarship. Right. It wasn't even like cash or any sort of voucher, I had to put it into it might have been more than that.

Actually, it might have been like 500. And to be fair, like the entry, there was no entry fee for any of these tournaments. True, true. And they were my and they admittedly were much smaller, like that Florida regional had maybe 100 people. Right. So, I mean, differently, different time, different elements to it. But it's still fun to look back at, like, because, I mean, we did, you know, this people making the decks of this area, like, these aren't fully optimized lists. These are just the lists that did well, that, yeah, may or may not be the best variants of this.

Like, we look back at some of these formats, and it's like, this is what did well, so maybe it's great. But oftentimes, as people like go back and re explore these formats, you find out more things like, oh, maybe rock candy would have been good in this deck, as opposed to just running it like that. So, yeah. Yeah, that's one thing we don't, I guess, talk about enough is the at the time. There was the level of information sharing, like I mentioned that the stuff was generally talked about in hushed whispers on like, private messages on Pokey Jim, because, you know, there was no social media.

So there was no, like, the reason that these decks were secret was because there was a distinct advantage to keeping your deck a secret if you at all thought that you had a good deck on your hands, and people 100% just would not share that information with anybody outside of their friend group. Whereas nowadays, like towards like, yeah, I've got this really cool deck, I'm going to do a metafy class to like the week of the tournament, if anybody wants to pay me for it. Even when I started playing in like 2011, there were like, yes, like six prizes existed.

Yeah. But before that, I mean, like, but even then, everything was still like, I guess that's the beginning of paid to play, like information sharing, but like six prizes started, I think it started, when did that start? Like 2011, 2012? Right around there? Yeah, somewhere around there. So yeah, I guess when I got into it, it was still like beneficial to, because like six prizes would always be a little bit behind for the most part, you would have some people that would post articles predicting stuff, and then they would post lists, but the list wouldn't always be like, well refined, they would just be kind of first drafts or just one person's impression rather than a testing groups or something like that.

And then yeah, like people would still be able to show up to regionals with like rogue decks and do well, you know, especially expanded, because it was such an untested format, people would absolutely pull up to that and just body like the competition with something that nobody saw coming, like a control deck or something like that. So, but I mean, I, I think the distinct shift in all of that really happened post COVID. I agree. Yeah. Yeah, we definitely see like, the shift for me, because even like Henry Brand running YouTube Mew tag team, like, don't think that was heavily popularized and played before that world's like, at all.

And that was kind of like a surprise deck to do well at that tournament. And then since then, like we've had surprises with stuff here and there, but I mean, not really like, No, and it doesn't help. A lot of times, I feel like a lot of expansions have been much more cookie cutter in terms of what is and is not viable. You know, mega evolution was kind of a breath of fresh air, again, having something where, you know, the pool of cards available, because we happen to have turbo energized and precious trolley and Kangaskhan and Absol in the same format, suddenly, you can throw all these things together.

Oh, and monkey Dory. So like, once rotation happens, this deck doesn't literally doesn't exist anymore, because the TMS are gone. And a lot of this other stuff just doesn't exist for it to be viable still. So we get this nice little kind of time capsule, you know, quote, unquote, of a moment where it does continue to exist. And it's really neat. And that's why I think that it's cool. The thing that kind of gets undersold a lot of times when people talk about these past formats is most of the time, people are referencing the world's format for a given year.

And so these in between formats do sometimes end up being some of the better ones, or more interesting ones, at least. Yeah, I agree. Like, especially now that rotation is midseason. Like, there used to be that world was at the very end of the year. So you have the culmination of all the cards in the card pool. That's true. Yeah. But since... That's a really interesting argument now. Like, if you are building retro decks, do you build to the world's format? Or do you build to like the quote, unquote, max power format, which effectively, I guess would be the EUIC format most years?

Last year, I guess. The last few. Yeah. Yeah. I hear what you're saying. Yeah. And like, even like, I built like, HGSS through NVI, which was a city's format. That's a good format. Yeah. And like, that's one that's like, you know, I'm not sure how to put it. But like, I'm not sure how to put it. But if you're building retro decks, do you build to the world's format? Or do you build to like the quote, unquote, max power format, which effectively, I guess would be the EUIC format most years? Last year, I guess.

The last few. Yeah. Yeah, last year. Oh, yeah. No, no, no. It would be most years. Yeah. But yeah, I hear what you're saying. Yeah. Like, I built like, HGSS through NVI, which was a city's format. That's a good format. Yeah. And like, that's one that's like, that world's format is historically, like, one of the worst. I still like it. I mean, I like it too. I have that built too. It's fun in its own way. Like you can turn your brain off, go bird with turbo dark rise. Try to like, choose your opponent with smear, like, you know, does he have a supporter?

Does he not have like, that's kind of fun in its own way. But the HGSS through NVI, like, there's just so many fun decks in that format. Like, you have triple V, Selgor, Chandelure. You have just so many fun things you can try to do. Yeah, like, and you get to play with the primes, you get to do like, all the fun stuff with that. So yeah, there's a lot of fun stuff. Like, we'll talk more about them as we go through the, I'll have to like, pull out some decks and just like, actually have the camera tilt down and look at them because now I'm finally finishing some of them.

I'll have to feature them here on the podcast. That'd be fun. Super cool. But yeah, we'll be sure to do more time capsule coming up in the near future rather than I gosh, I think the last one we did was probably a couple of months ago at this point. Yeah, I think I did one with Black Bolt, White Flare with the electrics might have been that would have been like two months ago. Yeah. Okay, fair enough. All right. Yeah, we'll get back to it. That's enough. I guess historic Pokemon, unless, well, I guess technically I don't know what the topic for this week is, but I'm interested to hear what you have in store for me and Blaine's quiz show this week.

Sure. All right. Let's get that started. All right. For as a refresher, for those that are joining us for the first time or haven't listened to in a long time, players will be given three multiple choice questions. If a player is stumped, they are allowed to ask for a hint at any time during any of the questions. Just the one hint though. So if players answer all three questions without the use of a hint, a bonus point will be awarded. And I think Aaron, remind me the score update, it should be like four to eight or something like that.

I think it's, I'm pretty sure it's four to 10 currently. Ooh. With me being at 10. I might be wrong. Oh yeah. You are currently winning. If I am truly off on the point totals or regardless of what they are, I'll go ahead and throw them up here. All right. So this week. I stopped for a second. I was like, what is he waiting for? Like, I know this is the spot. I did my hand motion. So I'm like, this is where I'm going to put the ding in the episode. I can't see your hand. Cause I have the window closed at the moment.

Sorry. You're good. You're good. All right. So with the release of Pokemon Legends Z through A, I figured we should go back to the Kalos region for this week's trivia question. You've been playing the game a lot. So maybe you have a good advantage going for you here. I don't know about that. CA is only Lumio City, not the whole region. It is in the Kalos region, but yeah, fair enough. So we'll see if that makes a big difference or not. I think you can, you'll get most of them, hopefully. All right.

First question, including natural form, how many different forms can a fur fruit take? Is it six, eight, 10, or 12? I have literally no clue and a hint would not help me. I know it's more, I do know it's more than six. I know that for a fact, but I'm trying to figure like, what would. The number has to, I feel like the number needs to be significant in some way. And actually I think I do know the answer to this because Xander Bennett did a whole thing on like number of forms that a Pokemon has at his worlds or his NAIC trivia.

You did remember that. And this Pokemon, but I don't remember what number he said this one had. I know it's more than six because it's more than Rotom and I think it's less than 12. And I'm trying to think about Pokemon Go because I know like there's ones that there's one that's unique to Japan. There's one that's unique to Egypt. There's one that's, I think there's another unique one. And then there's like four that you can do no matter where you live. So that gets me to six and then the natural one or the regular one.

So I guess the number that's closest to that is eight. So let's go ahead and go with eight. And you got so close, but you had to go a little bit further. It is 10 forms. I'm not going to list them out. All right, next one. How many cells make up Zygarde's 100% complete form? So this is the big hulking monstrosity. Is it 50 cells, 100 cells, 200 cells or 250? Is this... It is not how many you collect, it is the number of cells. So there is a difference there, just to give you, I guess, a hint or more clarification.

I guess I had a different, my other question was going to be, I mean, I've already can't get all the bonus, I can't get the bonus point this week. Like my question on whether or not, is the number of cells you collect in every game the same? I don't know if that would help me at all. No, I don't know the answer to that, to be honest. Yeah. Okay. So it's not how many you collect. So how would it be a different number than how many you collect though? I could be wrong, but from what I read briefly, it doesn't seem like you collect all of these cells.

Okay, so we've got another 50-50 on 100 or 200, because I think 50 is not enough. 100, they did, no, they did 999 with Gimme Ghoul, which is sadistic in its own right. 250 seems like too many. What game did Zygarde 100% come out? Was that Sun and Moon? Because I know Zygarde came out in X and Y, but Zygarde 100% was not a thing in that game. I think he could only be the snake one, whatever percent that is. Okay. We'll go, like 100's too on the nose for 100% complete. So I'm going to go with 200.

All right. Well, surprisingly, it is 250, so it's at the very high end of it. I'm going to go, I think, from, I forgot the breakdown exactly, but yeah, it's a lot of cells. So that's 0 for you so far. I'm going to fact check you on this one. Yeah, go for it, please. I'm just going off of what Google told me for the most part. How many cells are in Zygarde? What if it gives me a number that's not even a choice? Then we'll just say you get it, because that's fair. You can prove I'm wrong. Let me see.

This is not helping me. Oh, okay. So it looks like it does depend on what game you're talking about. Okay. Because in Pokemon Go, you need, where is, oh, gosh, I've got to get through this whole article to find this. In Pokemon Go, to get Zygarde complete, you need 200 Zygarde cells. But what is it in a main series game? Let's see. So let me refine my question, sun and moon, because I know it's from sun and moon. In Pokemon sun and moon, there are a total of 95 Zygarde cells. to collect. Additionally, there are five Zygarde cores that can be found throughout the Alola region.

Collecting all of these allows you to assemble a complete Zygarde. So that sounds like in Sun and Moon there are a hundred? Which really seems too on the... Where did you get this 250 number from? I think it's from... I mean, it's what pulled up when I googled it. But I think you might be right. So I'm going to just throw this one out because it's not a great question. So, Aaron, after fact-checking, I don't feel confident in saying you're wrong. I will give you this one. Yay, technicalities. I think there's not enough conclusive saying, hey, this is 100% the answer.

200 sounds good to me. I think that was a fair guess. And I will give you a point for that. So sorry to kind of derail it there. We'll go on to the next question. Your final question is, which of these Kalos Pokémon, as of today, does have a lowercase EX printed? So one of the newest wave of EXs. Is it Xerneas, Yveltal, Zygarde, or Diancie? Slam Dunk Xerneas. All right. And you are correct. I figured I'd throw you as one of those TCG questions. He was one of those crappy Japanese themed deck guys.

He was one of those crappy Japanese themed decks that got released as a promo. Oh, it was a promo? Okay. I couldn't remember if it was in Prismatic or something else. No, it was a Scarlet and Violet promo. I think two for three. That's not too bad. I think you are still... Anytime I throw you a TCG question, you're still great. You're fantastic. But outside of that, TBD, which is fair. For real. We are a TCG podcast, so at least we know our subject matter. You're a subject matter expert where it counts. So that's what matters.

I really got to start throwing in like Unite questions and stuff to really... Unite and Go questions to get you off your game. Like this Pokemon was the prize Pokemon in Pokemon Go Series 4. Or Pokemon Go PVP Series 4. I would just have to guess. There's no way I would know the answer to that. Was it Pikachu wearing this costume? Pikachu wearing this costume? Pikachu wearing this costume? Or Shellos? Gosh. Even getting stumped, I think the trivia is still really fun to do. It's just interesting.

You always learn something new. I did learn something new. I learned exactly how many Zygarde cells there are. In Pokemon Go. Yes, in Pokemon Go specifically. I guess what I found out there with the 250 number is the max inventory space you have for Zygarde cells. Interestingly, I guess there was an update with Pokemon Go recently to where the max level changed. I know I happened to log into it. Coincidentally, I think I open it up once a month, maybe, nowadays. I jumped from level 41 to 57 or 62 or something.

The max level must be higher than that. Somewhere like 80, 90, or 100 or something like that now. I've seen a couple of YouTube ads this week that have made me want to open the game. Because they're bringing out Gigantamax Grimmsnarl soon. Thanks to the TCG, I now have a soft spot for Grimmsnarl. They're truly marketing toward me. I think the events for it are exclusive to Japan or something. I'm probably not going to get one. It's a little disappointing. Maybe you've got to make friends with some Japanese players and trade it or something.

For real. To close out this week, we're just going to do a couple of quick predictions regarding Lil. And our thoughts on some questions we may have had heading into this format. We're seeing it evolve. It's not brand new at this point. But maybe some things that should be on people's minds as they head into it. And where we stand on those questions. I'm going to let Jon go ahead and roll through our first prediction. First one is, how many, if any, Absolbox, a.k.a. Towards the Secret Deck, do we expect to make top cut this weekend?

It did really well with, I think, 3 out of the top 8 placements being this Absolbox. For Milwaukee, and I don't know exactly how many. I think we had 2 or 3, maybe even 4 in Belo Horizonte. So it had a good showing there. Didn't win, but EU is probably eager to play the deck. And we'll definitely see more people playing it this weekend. But do we think we'll have this sustained success now that people have had time to test against it. Maybe formulate game plans against it. That surprise factor is gone.

So, Aaron, how many do you think we will get after... Are we talking about top 8 or ASIM? I said top cut, so just to say ASIM. Okay. I think 2 is a good number. Honestly. And I'd even go so far as to say that I think 2 will make ASIM and 1 will make top 8. I do think that a lot of the success of the deck was tied to both the surprise factor as well as just the average strength of player that was playing it at the time. And now that you've hit a wider pool and that more people are prepared for it.

And decks will be better built to be prepared for it on top of people knowing what to expect. I think that it'll falter a little bit. I mean, that's not to say that it's not a good deck. I think 2 copies in top cut is still very respectable for a given deck. But I also do think that we're going to see some metagame shifts. You know, Raging Bolt was heavily on the decline. And both Raging Bolt and Serraledge have relatively good matchups into this deck. I also think that there are ways to kind of tech Dragapult to be a little bit better into it.

I do still think it's largely unfavored into the deck, but I do think that it could be a little bit better. And then I think that if a studied Gardevoir player can just straight up beat this deck more often than it loses to it. Yeah, especially if they run, you know, the Mega Gardevoir. Drifloon can come back into play. Yeah, for sure. Those will definitely help. And I think I'm with you. I'm definitely thinking it's going to be less than the 3 that were in Milwaukee. I'm going to go down to 1. Not that I dislike the deck, but I do think that we're in a really wide meta right now.

And to expect, like we had that Grimmsnarl question before Milwaukee. And we thought it was in a good position and only one made top cut. And I just expect there's just going to be a lot of decks out there. You know, you expect Gardevoir to take up a spot and it's EU. So you'll probably see some like Raging Bolt. You'll see some of that kind of stuff. So I don't know. I think it's good. I think there's the potential for it to go as high as 3. But we'll see. I think, yeah, now that people know how to play against it, like you said, it's not quite as powerful as it was in Milwaukee.

Sure. You brought up some aggro decks in your quick rebuttal to the Absol box. The next question I have is, will an aggro deck be the largest meta share on the stream graphic for day one? So you talked about Cerulege and Raging Bolt. I think Cerulege was listed as the number one deck in Milwaukee. Do we think Cerulege might hold on to that? Or do we think something else will come up that replaces that? I don't know if it will be Cerulege. Oh yeah, go for it. Go for it, please. Yeah, I don't know.

I think Cerulege is probably that strong. I think yes. My answer is yes. Because there's still a large contingent of players that go into regionals at that level that are just looking to play a deck that's consistent, that can give them the chance to make day two if they just play it optimally. Or if they just play it normally. Just set up and start swinging. And Cerulege can definitely do that. So I'm going to say yes. I think it makes too much sense to say. Yeah, I think that's the MO that most players that are going to be going to regionals, that this is their first regionals, or they don't play at a lot of regionals, this might be the way to go.

I'm fully on board with you there. I don't think, well, not that I don't think, I don't know if Cerulege will be the most popular aggro deck, but I do think that an aggro deck will be the most popular thing in the room. And we see that a lot of times. I mean, how many times last year was Raging Bolt the most popular deck on the Day 1 Metagraphic before it ultimately fell by the wayside? I do think that there is an argument to maybe Raging Bolt numbers going up ever so slightly just because it is pretty good into this deck in particular, and if people are expecting a lot of people to pivot to this, then it wouldn't surprise me as much.

However, Raging Bolt is still really bad into most of the rest of the metagame. And then there's the argument where if Raging Bolt is going up, are those also the players that would have been playing Cerulege? Maybe they're cannibalizing each other. But I do still think all of these aggressive decks, not all, these two specific aggressive decks are really good against the megabox, and can win games against the other decks in the metagame. So I'm going to, once again, just stick with yes on it. Okay.

Yeah, I feel. All right. The next question, we saw Psyduck kind of have a breakout. I mean, it was the first tournament that it was played in, but we saw a lot more Psyduck than we thought originally going into Milwaukee. There was four in top eight. And do we think that trend will continue? So I set an over-under for the number of Psyduck, and I didn't put top cut. Do you want to do top cut or top eight for this? I think we've done top cut for the first one. Do we want to keep up with that? I think we could stick with Ace-M.

Yeah. Personally, I don't think that it really changes my answer. Yeah. I think that – sorry, what was your number again? 2.5. I changed it from 3.5 just to give it a little. Because I think three above white, like four is a lot. So do we think it will stay high above that or below that? I'm going to go with low one. Again, like we talked about, I think that the number of Absol boxes that may cut is going to be lower than what we had in Milwaukee. And then I also think that a lot of other decks just aren't playing it.

Dragapult largely is on the downtrend. I think that Jackson demonstrated that even though Charizard can play Dusknoir and very commonly will, it also can very easily fit a Klefki into the deck and utilize that Klefki to make it so Dusknoir is still an active threat for the deck throughout the game. So I'm going to go – I mean if I had to – I mean I'll say yes under 2.5 and I'd go so far as to say I like will see two. Again, like if I'm going to stick with two Absol boxes, I think those will be the only decks playing Psyduck and that they will be two of them in top or Ace-M.

Yeah. I mean we saw it in some other decks that you didn't list. For sure. Oh, yeah. Marnie's Grimmsnarl I think can run it. Like they ran it in the top cut list in Milwaukee. Control can run it. If there is a Control variant, that does really well. But, yeah, I think I'm going to take the under as well. I think four was pretty much an anomaly. Oh, yeah. It is good. It's a great tech inclusion. It helps make the metagame stronger, but I don't – it's too early. Like I feel like this is not the tournament to like play – like there will be enough Psyduck in the lower levels or just like spread around to kind of cut into Dragonfall Dusknoir, and I think that will get played a lot less as a result.

And so the top players will start to see that and to say I don't need to play Psyduck. I can just – Exactly. I don't need those other players to tech for me and hopefully not hit into it. And, you know, it's not like you lose the game immediately. There's still other things you can do against Dragonfall Dusknoir, and the deck's not always consistent or able to execute on its game plan. So it's not like you just have an auto loss. It's just a little bit tougher. But, yeah, I think we're both under on that.

The next question I had was will Charizard make top cut? So we see Charizard with Jackson Ford coming out of – I wouldn't say nowhere, but out of obscurity. Charizard really wasn't played for the longest time. But, you know, with that relative decline of Dragonfall Dusknoir, still a good deck, but just falling off just a little bit. Charizard was able to reestablish itself and say, hey, I'm top dog, you know, big bad, definitely have an infernal rain going on. So I don't know. Do we think that will continue?

You said that you had a huge turnout of players at your League Cup playing Charizard. I'm sure there's going to be a ton of people. I mean, there could be – we talked about what would be the highest played deck. It could just be Charizard. It wouldn't even surprise me. People love Charizard. When it was really popular back in the day, I remember just kind of scratching my head and seeing how many people were playing Charizard. Like back in Regidrago days last year, you know, it was just like, why are people still playing Charizard?

Like it wasn't as good as it was at that point, you know. But now it is kind of back. Like now with Dragonfall Dusknoir falling off a little bit. bit? Do we think? Do we expect Charizard to make top cut? And I'll answer first. I think yes, I think that it is in a decent position. Still, there's not a lot of people that are gonna be teching for Charizard in my mind, even though one, it wasn't a huge meta share. I don't know what you can do to take a whole lot maybe like the cornerstone play works a little bit, but I don't know. Like if it's like the Jackson Ford list, it's pretty adaptable and good into a lot of different things. And it has just enough to get around cornerstone. Like I think Jackson did beat a cornerstone in one of his top cut matches to make it into the last final round of the tournament. So I'm going to say yes, it's just in a good spot right now. And I feel like we'll have a huge turnout of people playing it. So what are you thinking? I mean, I'd like to be contrary and disagree with you, but I also know how popular Charizard historically has been in Europe.

So I fully, I fully expected to be in cut. I honestly fully expected to be in finals again. I think like you said, yes, it is adaptable enough that it can be shifted as necessary to fit these things in. Like you can, you know, we saw Jackson and the shifts don't need to be huge, but we saw Jackson played Shaman. You could play the Psyduck instead if you really wanted to. You could just cut both of those entirely and play other cards. I know you can up your number of jet energies because of evil tall trapping plays. You could play Turo. You could play an additional Dusclops to make your Dusknoir a bit more consistent. You can play a fourth Candy to make your Dusknoir more consistent. We've also seen, I know Jackson put out some type of class at some point post Milwaukee where he's also shifted his list and his preview image for that shows the Ho-Oh that we saw the contingent like Grant Manley and Caleb Getterman playing in their Charizard list. So as just another thing to KO a cornerstone, doing 200 with Ho-Oh plus a Dusclops pop, KO's cornerstone.

And so if you can leverage a turn where you throw Klefki active, pop, you could like pop Dusknoir to KO Psyduck, pop a Dusclops, which is easier to achieve than getting Dusknoir back out and put 50 on a cornerstone and then promote Ho-Oh and KO it. I mean, that's a lot. And yes, it's a lot of resources, but I think in that matchup in particular, you almost have the time to accomplish that type of play because Demolish is not a lot of pressure and you're not putting counters in play for your opponent to leverage their Monkey Dories. And so outside of that, you know, just Charizard has always been a powerful card.

It really has. And it was really being held down specifically by Dragapult. So as long as Dragapult is now being held down by Psyduck or more specifically this Absol deck that just kind of eats it alive, after watching that matchup a couple of times this past weekend, it feels so supremely difficult for the typical Dragapult Dusknoir list to beat this Absol deck that I wouldn't be surprised to see Dragapult drop into, not obscurity, but just it's almost like it's dropped down a tier for the first time ever in its existence. Yeah, since the new rotation kind of pushed out Rigidrago and Dragapult Dusknoir became kind of the way to play it.

Yeah, basically. It definitely feels like it's lost its luster. I mean, I used to play that deck non-stop and I love that deck. Like it was kind of like my mainstay for the last almost coming up on six or seven months. But yeah, since Mega's come out and we have a hard counter to Dusknoir, but it just doesn't feel as powerful as it once was. It doesn't feel like it has that like looming ability to just take over games. I mean, you still have comeback mechanics. You still have a lot of good stuff going for it. It's still good. But yeah, I think like even at the end of it in Milwaukee, like the players that were playing Dragapult Dusknoir, one commented like it's a sunk cost thing where they've just put in too much time with the deck. It's too late to switch.

Yeah, absolutely. I could see that for sure. Yeah, I can relate to that. But yeah, I think... That's a really long-winded way to say, I think Charizard is still really good. Yes. There you go. There you go. All right. Then our last question, the one that we usually say, we've been very anti-contrarian today, so I respect that. Been very, very friendly. Only one question we haven't agreed on. But the last one, we do have to pick different players. I don't think we can both agree on the same one for this one. Sure. Pick a player you think will...

There's no shot you're going to pick my player. Oh, okay. Pick a player to do well at the event. We'll give the point based on who does the furthest tournament run. Yes. For the life of me, I don't know how to pronounce this man's last name, but he is one of the friendliest people that you'll ever meet if you ever meet him in person. I'm, of course, speaking of Oyvind out of... I always mix this up. Oyvind from Finland? Is he from Finland? Uh... Great question. I think so. Legitimately always mess this up with him, because at one point I could have sworn that he was from Norway, but I know that he's not.

No, he's... I think he's from Finland. Yeah, he is from... Okay, so Oyvind and... Gosh, I've been going through this a lot. Svenhavod? Yeah. Something like that. That is the closest attempt that I have, but Oyvind is a known Charizard player, won a regional with it last year, made top eight at Worlds with Charizard. Guy loves Charizard and plays off of vibes, so I'm sure he's going to show up with the most Oyvind-coded Charizard list and will have a game plan and is studied enough in the Charizard mastery to be able to utilize all of the tools in its arsenal to blow away these other new-age Charizard players and these Absolbox players.

Yeah, he's finished. Now, notably... Yeah, yeah, I confirmed that when I went to look at Limitless to try to find his last name, but also I'm concerned there's a chance he's not going to the event because I know he just got married within the past couple of weeks, but fingers crossed he'll show up in Lil and he'll go on a deep run again. Gotcha, gotcha. My heart was saying Stefan Ivanov, but I've kind of come off of that a little bit. He's posted on Blue Sky today. He doesn't know what he's playing yet for this weekend, so I am going to pick another... Yeah, I'll go with somebody that had really good success last year, somebody that had really good success last year at a couple different tournaments, Daniel Magda. I know that we could just easily hit the Tard Rec Club button. I thought about doing that too, but I'll pick somebody a little bit less on the nose with that.

Daniel had a lot of good successes, including a deep run at... He won LAIC, I think, last year? No, last year. Top four at LAIC, sorry, and sixth at EUIC, so back-to-back top eight finishes. Hadn't really done a whole lot since then, but just been consistent, and I think he'll right the ship going into this season, so that'll be my pick. Okay, solid choice, all things considered. Yeah, so we'll see, and we'll definitely kind of break it all down next week. It's always tough to kind of piece these together after the rush and excitement of a new format, just the day-to-day. We'll be here for a little bit. Thankfully, we're getting a new set relatively soon. Pre-releases will start up early next month. That feels... It's so crazy, though. Our friend Ian messaged me last week and said, there's no way the set's coming out already, right? It feels too soon, and so I went to go back and confirm kind of the release dates from last year for Stellar Crown and Surging Sparks, and the thing, the hang-up, the reason it feels too soon is I guess Mega Evolution released two weeks later than Stellar Crown did, and just kind of threw everything off from there, but I don't know.

I just like seeing new cards. I think that new cards being added to the game, I almost, as much as it would suck from a consumer perspective, because it would just be more money more frequently, I almost wish that they would release cards faster, if that makes any sense. Almost like the pocket level of... Not necessarily that often, but you know, we get, and I had this argument kind of online too, where I don't necessarily, like, half the time we'll get a set like Shrouded Table or Prismatic Evolutions, like the mini sets more or less, and yes, there can still be impactful cards in them, but for the most part, they're not really metagame warping sets. Now, Prismatic was a bit of an exception to that, because Badoo itself was just that much of a focal point in the format, but on average, they're not. Like, Shrouded Fable really didn't do much, do a ton to change the metagame, even though there were admittedly some very, yeah, 100%, very powerful cards. We got the Dusknoir Lime, we got Nightstretcher, yes, good cards for sure. The set as a whole was terrible, and didn't really overthrow the metagame in a huge monumental way. Just not a lot of depth. No, but you get something where, like, Japan's release schedule is just, I think, more interesting than ours is on the whole, and I wish that there was a way to sync up with that a bit more, but I know that people would complain, though, we're getting cards way too quickly, like, I can't keep up with this metagame, it's not fun, etc., but also, we've got to alter our tournament structure as well, I think, because instead of having quarterly League Cups, they'd have to be, like, every other month your store can host a League Cup, that way you get the chance to host one in every single format, more or less. Yeah, so. You can't win them all, though, I guess. No, I know, it's, like, tough, especially for collectors and stuff, like, and I don't know what it's like printing. My friend Ben was telling me, like, his father, his girlfriend's father came into town, was, like, going over, like, the printing press of what Pokemon uses, because that's what he does for a living, he's, like, a printer, so he was, like, showing, like, oh yeah, this is crazy, like, so I found out that, oh, what did they say, it was, like, I think it was something like 1,600 sheets an hour of Pokemon cards can be printed, or something like that. How many cards are on a sheet? I think it's, like, the full printed sheet contains 99 cards, so. And you said 1,600 an hour?

That's what I remember hearing, so. So we've got, but, roughly 100 cards an hour, or 100 cards per sheet, so 160,000 cards an hour, and you've got 3,600 per box, so every single machine can print 44 boxes an hour? Yep. That honestly feels, that number feels lower than I would have expected it to. It might be, it might be wrong, I could be wrong, but it was a very impressive statistic that stuck out of my mind, either way, so, you know, I'm sure we'll get fact-checked by our loyal listeners. Somebody out there, assuredly, is an expert on this topic.

Yeah, but it is always fascinating to learn the depth of the game that we play, and just learn, like, how, I don't know, man, it's always staggering to see how much Pokemon is out there right now, and the fact that it still has value is crazy, considering how much of it has been printed, you know, we've talked about that a lot from time to time, but it's good, so we'll be talking some more about the results from Lill next week, and then, yeah, we'll hopefully be talking a little bit about Halloween stuff, and Phantasmal, was it Phantasmal Flames, or? Yes, yes.

So we'll get into a set review at some point, maybe not next week, but definitely before the new set comes out, so stay tuned for that, and Aaron, you want to close us out? Yeah, if you're interested in following the show, be sure to hit us up on your podcasting platform of choice, whether that is Apple Podcasts, Spotify, other podcasting platforms that I'm much less familiar with, or if you are more interested, again, like I said at the top of the show, you can follow us over on YouTube, make sure to hit the subscribe button if you do visit the page, we would really appreciate it, it helps other people find the show, and if you're interested in following Jon, myself, or the show on social media, you can find Jon on Blue Sky, jonorgel.bsky.social, my Twitter handle is at underscore Aaron underscore Curry, and the show can be found at BFPTCGpod, so again, we'll also have all of that in the description of the episode, and we hope that, like myself and Jon, at some point you learned something this week about Pokémon, and we hope anybody that's listening that is participating in LIL has the best time, have a good weekend, best of luck, and we will be back with the results of that tournament, like Jon said, next week on the newest episode of the Battle Frontier.