Episode 2-16 The 3-year Embrace: A Gardevoir ex Retrospective

About this episode

<p>Back from a holiday break, Aaron and John sat down to review the history of decks involving Gardevoir ex since its introduction in the Scarlet &amp; Violet base set. The card has a long history of adaptability and has taken many forms in its time in the tcg so hopefully you learn something. If you feel like there&#39;s something we missed, let us know!</p><p><br></p><p>If you aren&#39;t already, please consider following the show (Spotify) or subscribing (Youtube).</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. This is my second take, and I've already messed this up again, but we're going to leave it in this time. Jon and I are going to go over, kind of recap what we've been doing the past couple of weeks. We obviously didn't have a show last week due to Christmas and traveling, and didn't have a show the week prior due to some scheduling conflicts with our planned guest.

Hopefully we can get that back on the books at some point. But in the meantime, we're going to jump back into this retrospective series that we had started December off with, and now we're going to start off the new year with this, as this will release on New Year's Day. So Happy New Year to everybody. Merry Christmas to everybody, since we missed you last week. And we're going to get into that recap like I said, but today's episode will be a retrospective on Gardevoir EX from the Scarlet and Violet expansion, and its long and storied journey within the Pokemon card game throughout its tenure, as it has been an ever-present force since its release, and it looks like it is on track to continue to be so until it rotates.

But before we get into that, I do want to know, Jon, how have you been? It's been a couple weeks. How was your Christmas? Did you get up to anything interesting? Yeah, I've been doing pretty good. We had, yeah, it has been a little bit since we last talked. Yeah, I was bummed out that we didn't have Alex on. I was looking forward to that, but we'll get him on at some point. So sorry to promise that, and then couldn't deliver. But yeah, life happens. Yeah, my December's been busy. I think a lot of people's has.

Not so much Pokemon related. There hasn't been as many tournaments, but I did play in the League Cup and the Challenge, and then I think with Golden Go, so I've been playing that still. But the last couple weeks, I haven't really played Pokemon too much. I did get my presentation. I'm doing a presentation. I can talk about it now because it was announced today. I'm doing a presentation at a Sycamore Symposium, which is similar to the Professor Seminar. Did I tell you about that? No, you haven't.

So I am going to be doing a presentation. It'll be the 31st of January, and all you have to do is be a professor or in the professor program. You do have to register online. But it'll be in Fredericksburg, Virginia on January 31st, and I'll be giving a presentation on approaching judging from a player's perspective. So I'll be talking about some of the stuff I talk about here, combining my experience as a player into my role as a judge, and how I approach judging from that perspective, and how I think that can lend itself to improving as a judge, and the shortcomings of that philosophy as well.

And just kind of do some exercises and talk about applications and kind of get into some nitty gritty scenarios and stuff. So it'll be a lot of fun. It'll be a couple other judges speaking as well. So I'm looking forward to that. That'll be here before I know it. This weekend, I'm really excited. We have our annual, it's called the SLG Open. It's a tournament run by a local, Jacob Stilwell, who lost his best friend to suicide, like, four years ago now, five years ago now, because this will be the fifth one we've had, I think.

And this tournament is a benefit for suicide prevention. It's going to be a combination Pokemon tournament and Super Smash Brothers tournament. And right now we have 52 registered for the TCG component of that, and like 20 something registered for Smash last time I heard. So it should be pretty big. It'll be me running it as an organizer, and then a couple other people judging as well. So it should be fun. I'm looking forward to that. That'll be this weekend. And then, yeah, I'll have my parents in town. I did a lot of family stuff the last couple weeks. I went up to Winchester, and then went down to Pinehurst with my wife's side of the family.

And then my family's coming into town. Well, we're going to go out to Cape Charles, and kind of the pointy bit that pokes down from Maryland, Virginia, and celebrate New Year's with my sister and her family, and then come back to Richmond and hang with my parents for a little bit. That'll be fun. It'll be good to catch up with them. They just got back from a month-long cruise, so I'm sure they'll have lots of photos to show me. So that'll be fun to talk about with them. Other than that, I've been not playing a whole lot of Pokemon, I have to say. But I'm still having a good time running my league. We did GLC night last night. Actually, I didn't play a game with GLC, but I ran the tournament.

I played a fun Porygon, Rocket's Porygon deck that one of my locals built. That was kind of fun, just to play something different. And then, yeah, I don't know. That's about it. So have your locals had the sentiment, and this is kind of my current viewpoint on the format, and Pokemon as a whole? And I know you could probably play back a clip from this show sometime around the same time period last year. And this is just really the part of the format where the game gets a little stale. A lot of the overpowered cards are still the overpowered cards in the format. The metagame doesn't change a ton because the cards are not necessarily scaled up as powerfully as what is currently in power positions.

And people tend to get a little bit tired of the game. And it doesn't help that there are other, like you said, family obligations, non-Pokemon obligations that people are obligated towards or obliged to participate in. And there are fewer tournaments being run this time of year because of those planned events as well. And it's just where that this is the downtime of Pokemon and what used to be, you know, from my memory, like my back in the day with city championships and whatnot. This is one of the most active times of Pokemon in my history playing the game. And now it's in a state where, you know, we're coming up on rotation soon.

And you can kind of see it on the horizon, but there's not really hope of anything changing between now and then. And the game just feels kind of dull to me at the moment, which is unfortunate. But I guess my question was, am I way off base in thinking that? Or is this a sentiment that you think is shared by the larger player base as well? I think that there's always going to be kind of people looking forward to rotation, like even a few months ago, people were like, oh, well, I'll get back into it when rotation occurs or something like that. And I definitely hear more people talking about rotation locally, like planning for stuff post rotation. And it's still baffling to me, like when you're still like three months plus away from rotation that you're talking that way.

Right, I know. Like, it's like, I mean, there's, I don't know, maybe it's just a different perspective now that I've like, been immersed in it for so long. Like rotation, like people want to obsess about it and think about it way more than I think, like, it'll happen when it happens. And then, you know, it'll move from there. But I mean, I will say like, I've heard some detractors like, oh, I can't stand playing Garde and Dragapult and Goldengill on TCG Live. And I'm playing a new deck that I wanted to just play something else.

I wanted to just play something new. And I see a lot of that. But I also hear like players saying this is a pretty skill based format, and they're still having fun playing. When I run like tournaments, when I run challenges and cups, like I had a decent turnout for my cup, I had, I had that cup, I had my cup earlier this month. And we had like 26 total. No, maybe not that many. 24 total, we had like six juniors and seniors. So we had their own pod and then 18 masters, I think. So, and I think, I mean, players were like, genuinely, like some of them, you know, were sour graping, but a lot of them were enjoying the format, even then.

So I think, I don't know, it's, yeah, anything you do for more than three months is going to get stale. I mean, we see that in other card games, we see it with pocket, you know, that meta has been freaking stale now, for a while, like, it's still pretty bad. Like even with a new set being released. It hasn't really changed a whole lot. And that's like still for a different reason, I think. But yeah, I don't know. Yeah, I don't know. I don't think that if you've been around the game for any bit of time, that it's anything uncommon. But this is kind of a great time to do like alternate formats. And that's what I've been doing a lot.

Sure. Yeah. It's kind of a problem, but it's a good problem to have, in my opinion. It's a lot of fun. So I just brought those and we played that. And then, you know, I've also done like the build and battle Ditto draft. I did that one week. I've done cubes, cube knights like that. So just there's, you know, as much as like standards kind of stale, but there's still a lot of Pokemon to play, especially at a local level. And that's kind of the fun thing for me, is I have my locals now, like I have that are going to show up every week. Whether we're, you know, doing standard, doing a tournament, or doing something a little more off the wall, they're going to show up and just have fun.

And that's a lot of fun to see like, you know, high school kids that are out of school coming out and playing and a dad who like this is this social outlet coming on playing and some other people that, you know, this is their kind of their weekly thing that they look forward to. So that's, it's fun to be part of that part of it. But yeah, I don't know. It's it's kind of like, yes, and no, like, it just depends. If you are only playing standard, if you're like, main exposure to Pokemon is TCG live, then yeah, you're probably like, pretty fed up with a lot of Pokemon at this point. But I don't know, I feel like you can still always find a new deck or a new strategy and try that out. And hone your craft that way. I don't know what, what have you been feeling like? Have you been playing anything new? Or have you been playing much in the last couple weeks?

For the past week? No, I basically haven't engaged with TCG live at all. And just haven't had the time to do any sort of in person play. And prior to that, I think the thing that frustrates me is the deck that I enjoy the most in this format is not as good as I want it to be like, it's decent. And it the low pony dust on our deck, which also leads into like a different problem that I have with the format. For as much as I enjoy the like, combo nature, and I do think that they are skill testing cards. They're not really that good.

But I do think that they are skill testing cards like both but do and dust or I have a problem with how splashable they appear to be in the sense that obviously you play them in Dragon Bolt already, you can play them in this low pony deck. But there are other decks we've seen in the past, like, there's also the Greninja EX deck with Grand Tree that's still poking around that has risen up back to prominence because of the rise of tank Kangaskhan and tangentially a little bit the low pony inclusion. But just a lot of I feel like right now there are a lot of non games and there are almost a race.

And yes, we could see people really like hard react to it similar to what we saw in Atlanta when Bidoo was first introduced and people putting more Pokemon search supporters into their deck. But I don't expect that to be the case. And I my concern is that this will continue to be the case moving forward post rotation, because we aren't losing Bidoo we aren't losing dust. And we're obviously we are losing cleft game. We're not losing Psyduck. So but we're but we are losing Buddy Puffin. So like Psyduck becomes slightly harder to search out. But do admittedly is also harder to search out as is Duskull. But I'm just worried that we end up in this weird toolboxy insert your stage like low maintenance stage one stage two line, plus your Bidoo and your dust nor line. And you just go from there. And a lot of the games are who can make their opponent not play the game rather than executing a truly unique strategy. And although that is not what is primarily happening in the game currently, it happens in some percentage of games. And I'm concerned that it would become more common moving forward as some of these other decks do get cycled out. But I am also in the camp of I'm just kind of tired of Goldango and Gardevoir. They feel super gatekeepy to me at this point. I think that Gardevoir being the deck that can abuse monkey Dory more than any other deck is a real problem.

And that's probably more so monkey Dory's fault than Gardevoir's. And then Goldango just is. I don't know, man, I just can't engage with that positively. I can only have a positive opinion because I've done well with it. But yeah, I can see like it is gatekeepy like to say that is a fair statement like, you know, oh, this deck would be great. Oh yeah, it just loses the golden. Like you can't run anything like a mega or a stage ex that's kind of off the wall because of that. And then, yeah, there's just I don't know, there's a limitation there.

Kind of like how Grudgy Drago limited some decks. And like, exactly, for sure. I mean, you have that in Pokemon. There are like like it happens in cycles. And realistically, it seems to happen at this time of year, almost every year. The format's pretty much solved. I mean, that's right. And it's for good reason. This is like the apex power level of the format. And historically, whenever we get released in January, you know, last year we got prismatic evolutions. This year we get ascended heroes.

It'll introduce a couple of new pieces and tools, but it doesn't really shake up the metagame in a major way in the big major shakeup will be rotation. So for now, I've chosen, you know, really short term history to not engage with Pokemon instead of done other things. Thankfully, you know, to circle back to Christmas, did get picked up a few interesting things. I got the DLC for. Pokemon Legends Z.A. So I've been doing that. I've been I'm a big fan of roguelike games as a genre. So having the slight roguelike element included in that is pretty cool.

Finally picked up Silksong and have poured way too much time into that. So basically all of my free gaming time has been that rather than Pokemon. And but I would say to the highlight of Christmas, my wife knows that I enjoy cooking quite a bit and got me a quote unquote real chef's knife as a Christmas present. So that was a really cool thing to open up and see and has been a lot of fun to utilize. It's been a joy to be back in the kitchen using knife, using a knife that isn't like a dull starter knife block thing that we've had since we got married, basically.

What what brand is your chef's knife? It's Henkels. We have. Yeah, I think. We have Wusthof at our house. OK. Yeah, I've seen Henkels. That's a good one. So, yeah, awesome, man. Yeah, my wife, I have to say I'm not much of a cook on my wife. That's her main passion. And like she's really dedicated to it. And yes, yes, has like a good assortment of knives. But yeah, a good knife makes such a huge difference when you're cooking. So. Oh, my gosh. That's awesome. And it just feel it just feels good.

Like right now it still has. So I don't have a sheath for it yet. So right now, like literally every time I wash it, immediately dry it. And it goes back in the box. Yeah. And it's like, sit, sit, because I don't have like a magnetic bar to hold it or anything. And I'm not going to put it in the old knife block to have it get dulled every time I put it in and out of that. So right now it's like the kitchen treasure that just hides away until I want to until I need to use it. And I'm sure at some point I won't treat it with as much respect as I am currently, but it's really cool in the meantime.

Yeah, that's awesome. But do you get anything really cool or like a highlight? Funny you mentioned my CA. So I got CA like the base game because I bought it yet. I was like, oh, I hadn't got it at this point. Let me just get it for Christmas. And so I got that. And then not a whole lot else. Have you liked it so far? I honestly have not even had a chance to play it. So I got it when I was at my in-laws and I didn't bring my switch when we went up there. And immediately I'm like, why didn't that happen?

I should like I knew I was going to get it. Like there was no reason for me not to. But I was driving a lot of the time. So I don't know when I would have had time to play it. And then I ran League last night and then we watched Stranger Things the last few episodes. So we're caught up with that. I still haven't started that show. We've we've talked about it now that it's actually like. And I know people that have opinions about it and all that, but I love it from a nerdy like D&D meets like sci-fi perspective.

I think it's very. And then like the characters are cool. It's a cool show. I would recommend it. I mean, it's it's been around for like 10 years now, which is crazy to think about. Came out in like 2016. And then, yeah, now we're up to 10 years later, but it's it's a good show. Very aesthetically pleasing for me, like as a sci-fi. And I like the vaporwave aesthetic. So it's like that 80s kind of. I don't think it's got a lot going for it for me. It fits right into my wheelhouse. And yeah, we're we're we're fans, so excited to see the finale.

Yeah, I don't know. That comes out tomorrow, right? Yeah, yeah, I think so. New Year's Eve, New Year's Eve or New Year's Day. One of the other, but. Are you guys going to go to? I know that there are some movie theaters that are showing it. Are you going to see it in a theater or are you just going to hang out? That's the thing. I don't even know if we'll be able to watch it because, again, I'm going to go out to Cape Charles tomorrow afternoon. Sure. And like spend time with family. And so maybe like this weekend at some point.

But, you know, I'll be having my parents here and so I want to spend time with them. So I probably won't even be till like Sunday night or something like that. Whenever they well, I don't know when they head back. I think they head back Monday. So maybe not even then. So we'll see. It'll be a little bit. Just you've got to stay off the Internet. So, yeah, yeah. Thankfully, my algorithms aren't like clued into it too much. But cities definitely had a lot of self-control, like not getting on, you know, TikTok or Instagram or something like that.

So, yeah, sure. It's been fun, though. Well, I think that we've done we've delayed things. I was going to say I watched Marty's Supreme, too, so I guess I can comment on that. But it was it was it was a fever. I legitimately don't know what that is. It's the new Timothy Chalamet movie where he's like a ping pong player. Oh, or table tennis player. It's a fever. It's a Josh Safdie movie, which is like uncut gems. Was that same kind of thing where it's just like crazy? Like, I don't know. A lot of yelling people that aren't the best people.

And so I don't know. We don't need to get into all the film reviews and TV reviews. But yeah, it was pretty good. Just crazy to watch. Like, yeah. Anyway. Well, now that we've said all that, we did also want to ask you folks as audience members, what was the highlight of your Christmas? Either the best present you received this year, maybe the best present you gave to somebody this year or the best present or best Christmas memory you have for your entire life. You know, leave it down in the comments here.

Spotify, YouTube, whichever platform you're listening on. And we would love to hear from you. So with all that non Pokemon talk and the little rant about the stale, potentially stale nature of the format, we're going to go back in the past now. And we're going to talk about when Gardevoir EX was released, when the Scarlet and Violet expansion came out. Yeah. So I got a little slideshow ready for us here, and I'm just going to walk us through it. We've got a total of, I think, 13 lists. What did I say earlier?

Yeah, it should be. And that's crazy. You know, we talked about Charizard and Charizard has been impactful, but I think Gardevoir currently is the most it's it's it's like listed as the highest on limitless for limitless points, which might be skewed a little bit higher as they've expanded, like how far those go down now. But it's still like, sure, I think it edged out Lugia for the top placement not too long or a while ago now. It's pretty high up there. So definitely has just had that kind of presence in the metagame for a really, really long time.

And we'll see that as we go through these lists, kind of the evolution of it and the just ingenuity and reinventedness of of the decklist. So let's get started. First, I wanted to look at kind of the innovator. Like this is the first tournament that Gardevoir was playable at. And I figured we should look at Toward Reckless list. This was kind of a benchmark for a lot of people getting into Garde. Um, this was played at EUIC in 2023 to a second place. And yeah, I think just a very different list than what we're used to now.

Um, similar to Towards Worldless, which we'll get into a little bit, but there's some changes I'd say that predate that. Um, we have the inclusion of Worker in this and, uh, the Sky Sealstone was something different. I hadn't really thought about that. I've actually forgot what that card does. I'm going to be honest with you. Aaron had to remind me. Um, it's a ability. It's a, it's a V-star ability, which is on an item. Well, which turned into tools after Scarlet and Violet was printed. Um, but at the time it was an item and then, yeah, you can, uh, attach it to one of your V-Pokemon and it gains an ability and it says, uh, whenever this Pokemon knocks out a V-star Pokemon, you take an additional prize card.

Right? Is that? Yeah. So it was specifically that your basic V-Pokemon had to knock out a, actually I'm going to pick the card up now because I don't want to, I know that it works on V-maxes, but I don't recall if it works on V-stars. Hold on one second. Sky Sealstone. Uh, it is V-star. V-star or V-max. So just taking an additional prize card on those V-star or V-max Pokemon. Uh, the big thing obviously at the time would have been Mew V-max or I mean, I guess theoretically anybody that was still playing Arceus at this point would also apply, um, but being able to take four prizes off of a Mew V-max and then just having to knock out a Genesect or a Mew V to close the game out was really the name of the game, you know, at the time the deck still like all decks was having to utilize battle VIP pass, which was like, you know, the feeling when your opponent opens Poffin and you don't, but kind of on steroids, because they can grab, you know, any basic and also because you didn't open with it, you just can't play it the rest of the game, but this list screams toward to me.

And I know that it's not toward specific to have four refinement curly up, but just being a max consistency deck in the sense that he's got four VIP pass for level ball, three ultra ball, three fog crystal for research, still has radiant Greninja, refinement Curlia, mysterious tail Mew, like that a lot of these cards were included in Gardevoir at the time. They all throughout the life cycle that for this portion of the deck, but you'll see a lot of these counts change or diminish as the deck slims down, becomes more refined, becomes more teched out, but this really does look like a baseline toward list of I want to be as consistent as possible at one of these larger international events and just make my way through the field.

And he did that. But also like he has a lot of tech one of, and like some stuff that wouldn't have been played in other decks like that worker I just talked about. And also like the worker was for path to the peak, which was prevalent. Um, and penny to help kind of make sure you don't get trapped or you can reset the energy on a Pokemon, um, and that kind of stuff. Um, yeah, I think this is an innovative list, um, you know, towards like known as an innovator, it has been for a very long time at this point.

So this is the list that people are going to look at whenever a new format occurs and a new deck comes out. And this is like, it's kind of crazy. We were talking before this, um, Gardevoir really changed the meta in a way that we haven't seen in a really long time. Like before Scarlet and Violet, uh, the Shining Arcana Gardevoir, even though it was a stronger card, it never got played. And the same with the Curlia and Ralts, there was like one deck we were looking at, um, which was a control deck by Sander Vojic.

Um, they got six that are regional that played like a Gardevoir line with the Ralts and Curlia. Um, but overall they're just, uh, there was no reason to play these before the Gardevoir EX and the Gardevoir EX, even though it was just the one card, just warp the meta entirely, like it created a whole new archetype and we see that carry on to today, like we haven't really seen the last, like we talked about Charizard did that and Obsidian Flames, but I guess you could say the same thing with, um, some other decks, but not as much as I think we've seen with Gardevoir and Scarlet and Violet, at least in my opinion.

For sure. Especially the revitalization of older cards. Like you've mentioned the Shining Arcana Gardevoir, the Refinement Curlia, even looking at like basically all of the psychic Pokemon in this list, with the exception of Mew, so had seen no play prior to this card being released. Despite the fact that Level Ball was legal, Fog Crystal was legal, but there just wasn't a strong enough reason to include these cards, even though, you know, I would think Refinement Curlia just seems like a good draw engine, which is why, like you mentioned, Sander utilized it.

Yeah. I mean, we saw like a, the Shadow Rider deck was kind of played at one point, but in that revitalization view, um, but like that was the only one that is in this, um, but yeah, so from towards list, uh, just to follow through that, um, real quick, I wanted to give a shout out to Pedro Pertuzzi who took towards list and just said, what if we had a Mewtwo V Union and he got first place at Santiago Regionals, so I just wanted to point this one out cause I thought it was an interesting list and, uh, that's all I'm going to talk about it.

So, uh, what we'll move on, um, in the same format Torb refined the EUIC list, um, and kind of pivoted to a new strategy here at Worlds and got all the way to second place with it. Um, and in this list we see, you know, he moves away from the sky seal stone. There's still Mew being played, but it just wasn't, I think something he focused on, but a lot of people added the forest seal stone and this was a card that was prevalent in a lot of decks. Like if you ran a V Pokemon, um, you were running for a seal stone if you, because of, uh, um, well, this is before Arvin actually, so not quite at that peak point of consistency, but you can still put it on a Sashen V or Lumineon V if you had it in play and then just kind of have a, get a card free out of your deck, um, to have like a rip cord you can pull to do that.

Um, but I think the main innovation going into Worlds, um, from my perspective, um, did we have Iono in the first one? No. So now we got the inclusion of Iono. Paldea evolved. Yeah. Iono and reversal energy had come out here as well as, uh, Mirage sent that was the other big one. And that was a new inclusion. Um, well it was already in format, but players had determined like, okay, so we don't necessarily need for refinement, Curlia being able to get the Curlias into play and take it a little bit slower and then use Mirage step as an off turn, um, just set your board up so much more effectively.

Um, and yeah, we see that here. Um, we see three rare candy. So like the first list had two. I think this is probably the peak of rare candy early on, at least. Um, so a more aggressive stance then even though you're running the Mirage step, it just depends on the matchup. Like some matchups you can take slower and build up your board. Others you needed to respond and, um, get into your Shining Arcanas to get like reverse, like you're basically just wanting to build up Shining Arcanas. Like you could do that.

It was nice to have. Okay. So. I kind of got ahead of myself, but you can Mirage Step, some Curly is straight into play, and then bench into the Ralts, and then you have free Ralts to evolve straight into the Gardevoir as attackers. So that was really nice, I'd say. Yeah, this one's really interesting to me, and it almost feels like, you know, the Greninja Break decks from back in the day. Now, obviously a very similar attack, but being able to maintain your Refinement Engine on board while still getting your Gardevoir EXs and Shining Arcana Gardevoirs into play through the utilization of those Rare Candies, and then also the Reversal Energy acting as like a major boost to your damage output with the Shining Arcana Gardevoir was also a really big deal.

Yeah, it's a lot of different factors. There's a slimming down of supporters with just the emphasis on drawing with the Refinement Curly is. Yep. That was good. Superrod actually had come back now too, so if you go back to Tord's other list, he had to utilize Miriam as his recovery card. And here, like, Paldea Evolved did a lot for Gardevoir, did a lot for a lot of decks, but really did a lot for Gardevoir by adding back in these recovery cards, these comeback mechanic cards like Iono, and then obviously like I mentioned previously, Reversal Energy as well.

This is, I think, Tord's best placement ever at Worlds, so very cool to see. And after Worlds, people played this list a lot, but made some slight variations and tweaks as new cards were included. So this is Kieran Farrar's list from LAIC 2023-24, sorry, it's in 2023, but this is the 2024 season, and he got third at LAIC this year. We see a new set being released, so we have a couple new cards included. We have the inclusion of Countercatcher, which was a huge card for Gardevoir, still played heavily today, and also included was Professor Turo's scenario.

So you saw Penny early on in Tord's list. Turo is a much better version as it allows you to pick up the stage 2 Pokemon, not just the... and Penny puts the energies back to your hand, which normally is a good thing, but with Gardevoir, you want those to go to the discard pile, so it's a better thing to, you know, have the scenario and have just the Pokemon go back to your hand. Right, and then the last inclusion from that Temporal Forces, or sorry, Paradox Rift set was also Screamtail. So previously, you'd had the Moonlight Bounce attack from Cresselia that was able to move damage over to your opponent's board, but instead now we have Screamtail, and everybody knows what Screamtail does.

It's been a perennial inclusion in Gardevoir ever since its release. So despite Manaphy being in the format, you could, at times, with the fact that these decks were still playing Rare Candy, you could potentially Candy Gardevoir turn 2 into Screamtail snipe off a Charmander or snipe off insert Pokemon and just kind of go from there. I think the thing that ultimately ended up doing Kieran in, I don't remember, I know the finals of this event was the Entei Iron Valiant deck versus Miridon, and so I'm assuming that he just got cheesed out of a win, because overall I feel like Gardevoir is probably the better deck of those three.

So I'm assuming either his Lone Basic got donked by the Iron Valiant deck, or he just got iron-handsed out of the game by the Miridon deck. Yeah, I couldn't, I don't remember exactly the layout of it. But yeah, this is kind of also like a lot of one-of supporters in this one, with Avery and Borker. So again, a lot of path to the peak in this format, so you need a lot of counters to that, so you have those two cards. Well, you have Worker, but you also have a couple of counter stadiums, and you have a Lost Vacuum, even though you really don't care about the Lost Zone or tools, you definitely need to remove Path to the Peak, so that was a huge factor in that, including that card.

Also no Battle VIP pass, kind of a moving away from that, or did that rotate at this point? No, it's still legal here, because Zacian, the V Pokemon are still legal, so that card was still legal. But just saying, originally, I guess we didn't touch on this, originally Battle VIP pass's drawback of not being able to play it after turn one was not as big of a deal for Gardevoir decks, because you could always just use Refinement to freely discard it later on. But now instead, Kieran's saying, you know, we've got the Nest Ball being included over one of those spots, bumping up the counts on things like Fog Crystal, Ultra Ball, and Level Ball.

And then just saying, I'm going to draw enough cards, I don't need Battle VIP pass to get set up, because you only really need one or two Ralts if Mirage Step is your primary setup plan. That's true. Yeah. And it allows you to make more room for other stuff. So yeah, it definitely is an innovation. Moving out of LAIC, we go to EUIC later that year. This is a big shift, I'd say. We have the removal, so this is after rotation, right? We have the removal of all the Vs of a lot of, like the Level Ball and Battle VIP pass.

And then we also get the inclusion of some cards like Arvin. Arvin's a huge card to be included here. And what else? This is true. The Hero Specs were first introduced here. So we see that in the Hero's Cape, which seems like an oddball A-Spec nowadays, but there just wasn't as many options. We didn't have the full range of options we have today. We see Drifloom get released, I think, was this set, right? No, Drifloom was Scarlet Violet base. You just didn't need it previously because you had Shining Arcana Gardevoir.

Yeah. So I guess with Arvin, you have a wider array of tools, so we're able to use the Bravery Charms and Luxurious Capes and Hero's Capes to power up, make our Driflooms bigger so we can put more damage counters on them and then get knockouts that way. And Arvin allowed a new kind of way to play this deck. Before you were doing... I mean, you still have Mirage Step. Actually we don't. So this is a good point to talk about. Did Mirage Step rotate out? Yeah. So we lost that. So we had to figure out a way to set up our board.

We still want to have as many Refinement Kurlias in play as possible. With the release of Arvin, though, and the technical machine evolution, we're able to just evolve, kind of do something similar to the Mirage Step. We still want to get a lot of Pokemon in play. And instead of Battle VIP Pass, we got Buddy Buddy Poffin in Paradox Rift. And that was kind of a huge boon for this deck. It was basically a Battle VIP Pass in so many words. If you could... You would always take the two Ralts off of Battle VIP Pass most times.

Maybe a Radiant Greninja. But I think you'd be perfectly content to have that trade-off of only having 70 HP as this one does if you have the other advantage of being able to play it at any point in time and not just turn one. So we see kind of the parallel. This is kind of the beginning of Arvin for Buddy Buddy Poffin and TM Evo, and then just TM Evo turn one into your Pokemon. So I'm moving away from wanting to go first into wanting to go second kind of deck. Sure. Yep. And we are back from our break.

We're going to move on from Fabian's EUIC 2024 list into the next international championship in the 2023-2024 season with Stefan Ivanov's second place NAIC list. And this one is pretty notable in the fact that this was the first set that introduced a lot of cards that would later become really staples for Gardevoir in the form of Monkey Dory and also arguably I think the best A-spec that has been released in this batch with Secret Box. And yet none of the seven Gardevoir lists that made top eight at this tournament featured Secret Box.

They were all either on, in Stefan's case, Hyper Aroma or in most players' cases, Unfair Stand. Yeah. Just it wasn't seen in the same light as we see it now. I don't know. It's kind of hard to explain with a little bit of hindsight, but at the time it wasn't really that considered that powerful. And I guess it makes sense in some sense where you still have force, but you don't force Steel Stone anymore. I guess that rotated out, but you have- No, we still have force Steel Stone here. We just don't have the Vs.

That's right. Yeah. We just didn't play Luminion anymore. Do you like the Gardevoir very quickly lost the bench space to play things like Luminion V, but you can also see just an underestimation of things in this format where at the time it was very common. Most people only played one Monkey Dory in their deck. And I know Henry was kind of the rogue player, rogue Gardevoir player in this event. Big surprise where he went on a huge tear, I think went into top cut as the first seed ended up losing, I believe in top eight.

And he had two Monkey Dory as his kind of groundbreaking development in his Gardevoir deck. So just really interesting. I would be really interested to see this event and not as much so Worlds from this year, but really this event go back and be replayed with kind of the modern Gardevoir knowledge that we have in mind and see how different lists would look. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'd say that's fair. We have some innovations. We saw Clefky a little bit earlier. We see that continued here. A little Senna gets included as we have a huge influx of Lugia in this format.

So that kind of helps counter that. Iron Hands was released in like a couple sets before, but people tried to put it in Lugia so that could run away with a game if you allowed that to kind of do that. And then an increase in Turo as Block Blacks was a threat that players had to deal with. And then Hans Hammer I guess is the same reason for Lugia. And yeah, I think this is so interesting to look back at lists from this era because it's like there's a lot of innovation, but there's a lot of steps still to be taken.

So some steps were taken between Stefan's list and the Worlds list we're going to look at here. Oh, sorry. Weirdly enough, for how well Guardi did at NAIC, it didn't really do fantastic at Worlds this year. I think the highest placing one was like 18th or something like that. It wasn't anywhere near the top tables for this board. No, it was really just the rise of Regidrago and a lot of players were kind of afraid to play Gardevoir in that environment. Right. Like Regidrago would play Cancelling Cologne and then just kind of board wipe you with the Tri-Frost Curim.

So that card being printed for Worlds was one of the few relevant cards printed from what set was that? Shredded Table. Oh, yeah. So we got Fezendipity and really that was kind of the only new tool that Gardevoir had gained. We're going to take until further iteration in that same format with the Baltimore Regional where we get to see Henry Chow have another in probably his, arguably the beginning of his large breakout performance with Gardevoir, despite the fact that he did have a very good run at that NAIC event.

And here we get to see the return to form. The Rare Candies are back in the Gardevoir deck, Secret Box is in the deck, Research is back in the deck. The Arvin count is down. Things are not. We get to see TM Evo and set up really slowly and kind of from behind. Henry decided to put a list together that's going to say, OK, your Retro Drago deck is really fast and that's scary. And you already have Cancelling Cologne for my Manaphy anyway. I'm just not going to play Manaphy. I'm going to step on the gas and I will Prize Race you.

And was really successful in this event, ended up taking the whole thing down over Kieran Farah in the finals with Lugia. Pokemon League headquarters, notably really good in that matchup, forcing an extra energy onto the Iron Hands and a couple of other attackers in the deck. And notably, Lugia is just not a good attacker into Gardevoir itself, you know, really relying on some of those other basic EX and V Pokemon in its stead. And Henry really just being able to take a proactive approach to Gardevoir, showing that this Pokemon that has been thought to be kind of a controlling force has another side to it can be the aggressor in matchups where everyone always thought that it was playing on the defensive and now has the tools to really just mitigate everything.

We have Refinement still to draw cards. You have Concealed cards from Radiant Greninja. Now you have Pheasant Dippity. So you can still abuse Iona. You can still abuse Countercatcher when it's appropriate to do so. And really just, you know, getting the, again, the most aggressive A-Spec available in the form of Secret Box because you don't really need Primecatcher in a deck like this. So instead, trying to just find the resources you need to to make sure your Gardevoir gets online as often as possible.

We also saw another response to Redudrago. Instead of playing the Manaphy, Henry opted to play a third copy of Bravery Charm so you could potentially Bravery Charm a Ralts to keep it safe from a Trifrost. And then you could just circumvent the fact, oh no, normally a lot of lists weren't playing Rare Candy. If you evolve into Kirlia on a Bravery Charmed Ralts, you would just get it KO'd and you couldn't do anything about it. Well now Henry has those Rare Candies back in the deck, is able to get around that, you know, quote-unquote weakness and can really get Gardevoir into play, which is the thing that the Redudrago decks feared the most.

And they went out of, not out of their way, but really their primary game plan against Gardevoir was just to prevent you from getting the Gardevoir into play as much as possible. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, definitely. We talked about Tord as being an innovator early on with this deck. Henry kind of became the, I mean, I'm not saying anything new if you've been following the game for the last year, year and a half, but Henry has become the innovator, the main innovator for Garde, like the Garde Coat, as he's often called by many.

And rightfully so. I mean, it seems like the, I think Henry didn't really innovate, like he didn't come up with anything brand new. like maybe some new inclusions and new thoughts. But the main flex that I've seen from him over the last year, year and a half, he knows how to make Guardi like specific to the metagame of that era. We, I mean, he does have innovations, obviously on his own, like Aaron just talked about him for the last five minutes, but he's able to really identify, okay, what are the top decks and how can I tech my Guardi deck to beat those decks?

And he did so at Baltimore, and he also did so at a couple other tournaments this year, including San Antonio. And this is a little bit of an interesting list in my opinion. We see a Mawile get included for the Tempting Trap, just adding a stall element to the deck, which was cool. We see an Irida, which I don't know, man, this was a very controversial card in Guard of War. In theory, it's nice. You can get your Radiant Greninja, get a Buddy Buddy Poffin and get set up that way. So that's pretty nice.

We see a Spiritomb inclusion, which has the Fetter to Misfortune ability, which says, what is it? Each, I think it's all, that one's the A-spec one, yeah. It basically says that your opponent's A-specs don't work. So at this point, we had a influx of Golden Go into the format with Energy Source Pro. And so that just kind of shut that deck down entirely with just the one card inclusion. And it also prevented your opponent from playing Secret Box, from playing the really powerful A-spec cards in their deck.

Yeah. Yeah, and we get to slowly see two Monkey Dory become the norm. Like if you did go back real quick, I didn't touch on it on Henry's Baltimore list, but he did go back to only playing one Monkey Dory in this deck, instead of really trying to, because there were a lot of board states here where because Refinement Curly was your main engine still, you needed to have three Ralts in place. So you didn't always have the luxury of being able to go super wide with how many Monkey Dories you had on board.

Yeah, I don't think there's a whole lot more else to talk about. We have the inclusion of Moonlit Hills, a new stadium card. This is a way to counter the Dragapult decks that were pretty popular at this point. Sure. Yeah. Which is another reason, again, to include the extra Monkey Dory. Like you called out the Irida already. It's still really funny to me that like the logic, the logical leap that you have to go through to justify playing that card. And I think the reason the if I remember correctly, Henry's reasoning why Irida was played here and not in the other list is that he had two water Pokemon that he could search out with it.

So it was more likely to be able to get two cards off of the Irida. And I guess also in theory, if you're man, if he was ever like canceling Cologne, Trifrosted off the board, you could super rod Irida to get it back. But that's still a stretch. Yeah, I mean, most times you can just get a nice stretcher with Arvid. Exactly. That's one card we didn't want to talk about. But the deck gained a nice stretcher, which is nice to get your attackers back to get like those tech Pokemon back. Like, yeah, yeah, that helped the deck out a lot, too, after Shrouded Fables came out.

But yeah, I think this is kind of moving towards a more modern version of the deck. But yeah, like you said, still having a lot of bench space being taken up by Refinement Curlios. And that would be solved by a rotation after this tournament where we see all the yellow border cards are no longer in our format. And this is kind of where it gets a little weird, if I'm honest. Garde players, you know, there was a lot of talk about, well, once it loses Refinement Curlio, the deck's going to be dead.

Like your whole draw engine just goes away and you have no way to draw cards and see, you know, see enough cards to win the game. And I think the rumors of Garde's demise were very premature and very over exaggerated. For sure. And honestly, like we didn't mention it with the previous rotation when you lost Mirage Step and Shining Arcana. People also said Gardevoir was dead when that happened. And yet it had still stuck around and has just continued to grow more and more powerful over time. Like it loses a couple tools here and there, and then it just says, OK, I'm going to go find some new ones in the drawer and make those work instead.

And so, you know, Henry's on record, despite winning his third regional of the year with this list, saying that this is not the best list for this deck in this format. But it is pretty interesting. He just couldn't let the refinement go. Had to include the Endzor Arc to use trade, to still be able to discard a card and draw two. Notably in this Journey Together format, Dragapult got a big bump because you now have the Bidu Dusknoir that we have come to know and either love or hate, depending on your stance on it.

Be the modern Dragapult deck that we've had to deal with for a while, but also getting access to Lily's Clefairy. So now you can make those dragon Pokémon weak to Psychic and still, again, we're back to the Turbo side of Gardevoir. The Rare Candidates are still here. The TM Evos are all out of the deck because we don't need refinement anymore. We've got Mew in addition to Pheasant Dippity to draw cards, Research is back in the deck. Because of Bidu, you know that you won't be able to play all of your items as frequently.

So including more supporter-based draw and some supporter-based Pokémon search in the form of Jacques and Morty's Conviction, you know, Morty's Conviction for that draw. Obviously, Jacques to be able to go find your stage ones and stage twos, being able to find the Gardevoir, being able to find the Curly, being able to find that N'Zor arc and just get things set up that way. And the rest of it is more or less a pretty standard Gardevoir shell to where Gardevoir, the biggest strength of this deck as a whole in the modern form, like when you had the Shining Arcana, I think that you could, and you had all the Rare Candidates, the Mirage Step, all those tools available.

The deck could very easily be a super aggressive archetype and had kind of taken a step in the direction where everybody thought that it was getting slowly more and more controlling and has shown that it really is able to operate. The strength of the deck is that it can operate from both perspectives in a matchup, depending on your opening hand, your opponent's opening hand, and just how you want to approach the game, really. So depending on what tech inclusions you have in the deck, what matchups you've chosen to alter your list to be prepared for, you learn these board states that you need to sculpt to make the deck super successful.

And a lot of times that includes kind of a pre-planned prize map, regardless of what your opponent has on board. To say, I know that I'm playing against Dragapult, for instance, that means that I need to make sure that I have bench space for two Monkey Dory. If possible, I would like to use Bravery, Charm, and Mew, plus Clefairy to take like a three-prize turn on my opponent's board. I need to make sure that I have my Ralts, like two Ralts in play. Can I afford to put Fez down? Do I need Zoroark in matchup XYZ?

And the bench space management of the deck is a really interesting aspect that we haven't highlighted super, like a lot going into this. But aside from the fact that we said refinement takes up a lot of room. So now that you don't have that refinement, you have the bench space to really kind of make the deck more adaptable. And we'll see the slow increase in the Monkey Dory population as those juicy bench spaces have become more available for them to populate. Yeah, for sure. So, you know, Henry said as much that, hey, this probably isn't the way we should play Gardevoir.

And people were like, well, I mean, there was a debate for a little bit of time, I think, coming out of Atlanta between this deck here and another deck. And that other deck was Brent Tonneson's famous Brixty. And the argument was like, which one's better? Which one will be, you know, which is this the better Gardevoir list? Henry won the first, I think, round with this debate. But it soon came apparent that Brent's list was just a better list. And this list, instead of running Zoroark, has a little bit more draw cards in four Research and four Iona.

And it's just a lot of consistency stuff here. We see an increase of the Monkey Dory to three, and three Dark Energy as opposed to two. And we see the inclusion of Cleffa to help with kind of the early game setup. So that way, you're not too reliant upon, you know, Mew and all that kind of stuff. You're able to draw with Cleffa early. And then, yeah, once your board's established, you're really just a dominant deck. Yeah, I think this became synonymous with Gardevoir for a large portion of this season.

I don't know, if you've if you played Gardevoir during this time, you probably played the Bricksteer or something very close to it. It was ubiquitous. Like I was looking at as we were getting ready for this, I was putting this together. And, you know, on Limitless, it'll tell you like, what where the deck was played for what tournament. And it had like Brent Tonneson for this tournament. And then like 80 entries. Like, I don't think I'm exaggerating. Like it was that crazy. Like it was that crazy.

I'm pretty sure that this is the list that has the most placements of any specific unique list ever on Limitless. That sounds about right. It's up there. Andrew Hedrick's Lugia list might give it a run for its money, but it's close. I think we had a trivia question about that at one point, but I forget what we determined. Right. We'd have to go back and count. But yeah, like this, Brent, correct me if I'm wrong on this. Maybe I may be slightly off here. Brent won two events with this list, I believe.

And then someone else also managed to win a separate regional in a different region with this list. And so it definitely came out on top as the premier Guard of War deck in the Journey Together format. So moving out of this format and into our one for NAIC, I don't think there's... Oh, this is Isaiah's list. So there wasn't a whole lot of innovation. I think the main thing I'm seeing... So we saw the move from two to three Monkey Dory. Now we're going from three to four Monkey Dory. So this is kind of like a nuclear arms race in monkeys, if you will, where we're just upping the numbers.

So the thought being, if I get three out, if I can get them early, get them often, if I can build my board out that way, because my opponent is going to try to take them out. So if I put three into play, I'm able to outmaneuver my damage on my board and start knocking out my opponent's board and win the game that way. And another way that Isaiah built up Monkey Dory and was able to get the Adrenaline Brains off early was the inclusion of Turbo Energize, which I think it was an innovation that he came up with on his own.

I think he had some other people he worked with on this, but that was... Yeah, this was a head-reach howdy. Oh, okay. Again. Yeah, for sure. But Isaiah did popularize it and did play it to very successful NAIC win, kind of getting a monkey off of his back, no pun intended, winning a big tournament. He had come very close before this and finally had a breakthrough here with the first place at NAIC. So this was kind of a big to-do at the time. You know, we see another couple of cards that pair well with the Turbo Energize and the Energy Switch.

And yeah, I don't think there's a whole lot more to be said other than that, unless you have some things. Yeah, well, so I guess it's more about Turbo Energize and really just the reason for that inclusion. So this set obviously also introduced Grimmsnarl to the format. And so that matchup for Gardevoir really is an arms race of who can get more Monkey Dories into play. Because if you're behind by, I think the way the math works out, if you're behind by two attachments on Monkey Dory, the Grimmsnarl player actually then has the opportunity to put Frostlass into play and kind of just lock you out of the game.

But if you're able to get ahead by two Monkey Dory, you get to just kind of freely do whatever you want with damage on your opponent's board. And that's what, you know, the Turbo Energize obviously just cleanly allows you to do. I think the boss is also a pretty interesting inclusion. We'd seen a lot of Gardevoir lists fully move away from boss and either just play one or zero countercatcher. So the proactive Gust, I'm pretty sure, ended up coming up as a really big factor in his win over Riley McKay in this finals in tandem with the Turbo Energize in one of the games.

But yeah, just other than that, pretty interesting list. I think that the Turbo Energize doesn't guarantee you a win over Grimmsnarl, but it definitely helps a lot more in that in this format specifically, where otherwise, I feel like a lot of the the Grimmsnarl lists that either my group ended up playing, or I know there was another group that was Ian Robb and a few other players that played three boss in our Grimmsnarl list just really gave this deck a huge headache if we were on tempo with Monkey Dory energy attachments.

So being able to really just get ahead in that number, you know, levels the playing field, makes it easier to pressure your opponent or keep the pressure off of your Gardevoirs, really, in that matchup in particular. And then also InMirror has the benefit of putting you way ahead because the ability to only put one in play at a time for your opponent, whereas you could potentially put two in play and then with the energy switch, also having another plus one in that column at some point throughout the game could really just be a big deal in making sure that you're ahead of the curve when possible to take the multi-price turn that you would need to to truly close out a game.

Yeah, these are definitely like, this is the era of like peak refinement of Gardevoir we're getting into. So you talked about briefly that Isaiah played against Riley in the finals, Riley McKay. Interestingly enough, Riley decided to bring the deck back for Whorls and did so well. he ended up winning the tournament. This is just a cool story. If you go on YouTube, there's a really nice in-depth video of Isaiah and Riley's NAIC finals, or not NAIC, World's Rematch match. I think they played in day one of that tournament.

Yep. And it was like, it's such a cool conversation that they had. They watched the match together. It was a mirror match of, similar to what they played at NAIC, but Isaiah was on another list we'll talk about in just a minute, with JellyGuardi, and Riley was on a continuation of his NAIC list, with some changes. It's similar to Isaiah's list, but there's definitely a couple more things that are included in this to kind of help against the mirror, and I guess other matchups. But yeah, Riley, definitely, that's a cool, I definitely recommend watching that.

Chip Ritchie, who is just a great commentator and caster, has those two and interviews them and picks their brains. So if you are at all interested in Gardevoir, I recommend watching that for sure. But yeah, this is Riley's list from Worlds in 2025, our most recent World Champion. Very similar to Isaiah's, but definitely has a lot of major departures in some categories, primarily the inclusion of Flutter main, and the inclusion of TM devolution instead of Turbo Energize. I think those are the probably two main standouts in my mind.

Still has the four monkey, has most of the same attackers as Isaiah did, but just has a little bit more of the Flutter main, I think was included for, uh, drawing a blank. I mean, Flutter main is just kind of a generally strong card in the given format, but you have the ability to potentially strand a Dusknoir against Dragapult if they're building it up, Dusklops or Dusknoir. You have the ability to lock up a Latias for a turn or two. You can bring up a Morgrem, a Marnie's Morgrem, so that they cannot use Punk Up with Grimmsnarl.

You can turn off Monkey Dories or Psychic Embrace from Gardevoir in mirror matches. You can stop, similarly with the Punk Up, you can bring up a Charmander or Charmeleon, so when they evolve it, they cannot use Charizard EX's ability to, Infernal Rain, there we go, to put the fire energies into play. And so you can also, the other big one is you can, well, no, that only works when it's active, but if you're playing against a Jellyguardi deck, you could promote Fluttermane to turn off the ability of the Jellicent to give yourself access to items again.

So it's just got a variety of applications, and then additionally allows you to kind of sprinkle those extra damage counters into play to potentially pull off a TM Devo play in a similar vein to what Grimmsnarl may attempt to do throughout the game. Yeah, that's fair. Yeah, I don't think there's a whole lot more to be said as far as just a continuation of a theme we've seen, but with some variations. But a real big departure from this world's list. With worlds, there was the inclusion of Jellicent EX from one of the Black Bolt or White Flare, I can't remember which one exactly.

But Guardi gained a huge tool in that. It had Bidu earlier on, and now it has a full psychic item-locking Pokemon. It has two actually, which makes it really interesting. We had Frillish, and then Frillish evolves into Jellicent. Frillish has its own use cases versus Jellicent. There's some times where you would rather just keep the Frillish in play, even though you're doing far less damage. It's a stronger effect of an attack versus an effect of an ability. Being able to boss around this. Jellicent makes it vulnerable in some ways, but having that Oceanic Gloom attack just stick around whenever, even if it is moved out of the active was a huge factor.

And this is Aban Ahmed's second place Pittsburgh list. Aban is, if we've talked about, we had a Henry Chao come up into conversation, and then we talked about some other players that played Guardi. Aban's kind of, now that we've gone away from Worlds, he's made a name for himself in the last few tournaments since Worlds, getting a lot of second places. I don't think he's, has he won a tournament yet? I don't remember. Yeah, he won the first regional of the year at Monterrey. So he won with Gardevoir there.

And that was, that list didn't have Jellicent, but he's played Jellicent pretty much every tournament after that, I think. That he's played Gardevoir. So this, talking about why people play Jellicent, obviously the item lock's good, but you have to like look at it in the full context. And item lock against the, this deck was dominant against decks that weren't prepared for it. Primarily the Golden Goat players that didn't have any way to recover resources under item lock. If you were totally relying upon superior energy retrieval, this deck kind of just shut it all down.

Yeah, I don't know. You have any thoughts on Aaron? No, I think the, one of the interesting things is the move back to research when a lot of people thought that coming into the mega evolution format, we would see a shift to just all shuffle draw in the form of Iono and Lilies. So Aban, and I'm 99% sure this list was also worked on by Henry and probably also Isaiah Radner. They've just kind of been part of this collective Gardevoir hive mind testing group for a while now. But they all decided that the increased incidence of discarding the basic psychic just can't be outdone by the non-loss of resources or potential added consistency of the extra card draw from the Lilies determination.

And I'd like you pointed out, Frillish is just a really good card. We've seen some lists for this deck utilize Latias EX rather than the air balloon as an additional way to attempt to guarantee that you can get Frillish into the active spot on turn one as consistently as possible. And just utilizing the Oceanic Gloom turn after turn after turn, and just death by a thousand cuts on your opponent if it's necessary, or just similarly to where the strategic applications for Bidu, which can be interesting, like mid or late game Itchy Pollen.

Well, now you have mid or late game Itchy Pollen on the Bidu that has a built-in bravery charm and does 10 extra damage. And if you ever do need to, you can maintain that item lock. If you can, I don't know your opponent to a low hand size, have a read that they, or have a read that they don't have a boss in hand. You evolve into the Jellicent and you start doing power press for 80 or 160 and just kind of progress from there. Yep. The other interesting thing, actually, with these lists, you know, with two Frillish in play, you have the ability to cycle between your Frillish and still build up that additional damage to Monkey Dory over to your opponent's bench.

So even though you're only doing 20 to the active, you're also setting things up everywhere throughout the field to be able to then utilize the TM Devolution to just knock somebody out of the game completely. Yep. Those are all scary realities we live in currently as we are caught up to our current metagame, more or less. We have had a couple of new sets come out since Pittsburgh, or one new set, I guess, in the Mega Evolution continuation. We've had Phantasmal Flames, but I don't think Gardevoir has really evolved too much from this point.

So I think this is a good stopping point for today, but I hope you really got a lot out of this. We enjoy doing these. It's such an important part of our history of our trading card game. It's a little, a lot. I mean, I'm not gonna say that. If you're not a Garde fan, you might've checked out a while ago, but we appreciate you guys for sticking with us for a little bit as we do a deep dive into Gardevoir. So yeah, I'll be honest with you, Aaron, I haven't really played the deck all that much. I haven't built at all times, but it's not one that I gravitate towards.

It's not one that I pick up and play and really enjoy, but I know that there are the Loyalists, there are the players that have really dedicated and sunk so much time into it. And it pays off. Like I've seen that a lot too. Like the Loyalists do get rewarded for sticking with the deck. But let me know if you had any lists that we missed, or if you thought of anything that, you know, if you wanna see another deck that we can do this for, we still have a little bit of time before we get back into the swing of things with regionals.

So we are probably open to doing one more round of these longer form in-depth discussions on a deck. So if there's a deck that you wanna have us talk about before we get back into regionals and other events going on, please let us know in the comments, and we'd love to hear from you. Absolutely. And if you wanna catch up more with Jon or I or the show, you can engage with all of us on the social media platforms that we will have links to in the description on both Blue Sky and Twitter. And if you are following the show on Spotify, we would love it if you would head over to YouTube and hit that subscribe button, just help get us deeper into the algorithm so the show could spread out a little bit more.

And if you're over on YouTube, do the same thing over on Spotify, give the show a follow. So hopefully more people can find us. We would love to spread some of this stuff. We think that it's a little bit kind of an alternative content base. No, it's not all just, I wanna talk about the current standard metagame. We do like to do these deep dives occasionally, or even just the segments that we have of one-off time capsule things of decks that are even older than these lists are currently. Jon and I have both been in the game for quite a while and would like to spread that knowledge to as many people as possible to help kind of maintain the history of the game, but also allow other people to be able to experience it if they haven't had the ability to do so.

So thank you very much for bearing with us for the last couple of weeks, not having new episodes to upload, but I hope that you enjoyed the re-release of the coaching episode. And if there are any other episodes that we've done previously that you would like to, that you think newer fans of the show would potentially benefit from, leave those down in the comments as well. Like tell other people what episodes to go back and watch because back catalogs or shows can be a slog to get through if you do not know specifically which content you're trying to find.

So again, we thank you for bearing with us. We thank you for getting through this episode and we hope to see you guys back next week in the new year on the Battle Frontier. Have a good week.