Nerd Notes: December

Welcome back to the Nerd Notes. I feel like I've lived a whole life since the last dispatch - I've been back & forth to the US (work), France (pleasure), and Germany (Pokemon) in the interim. But for now, I have my feet on the ground at home in Utrecht and am not planning to go anywhere until the next tournament in late January.

Playing locals

In between Gdansk and Stuttgart, I played a couple small local tournaments including one in San Francisco without the kids. That was probably the moment where I had to fully reckon with the fact that this has become more than just a silly thing I do because of the children...I was in San Francisco, and I chose to spend a whole day in a game shop playing a children's card game. No regrets; I had a wonderful time and then ate some dumplings and noodles at Dumpling Union.

In both of those tournaments, the Tsareena deck performed so much better than it has at any regional event. I think it really comes down to 3 factors:

• A small tactical change: I had been choosing to go 2nd, and I changed that to choose to go first. In Pokemon, this is pretty consequential. The player who goes first is not allowed to attack or use a Supporter card on their first turn, whereas the player who goes second can...but the flip side of it is that the player who goes first gets to evolve sooner (you're not allowed to evolve on your first turn). My deck, it turns out, is much more consistent going first.
• The difference between playing "best of 3" format instead of "best of 1." In the regional tournaments, you play a match - best 2 out of 3 games. In local tournaments, you usually play just 1 game. For an unexpected deck like mine, the element of surprise matters so much more in the first game, which is a big benefit in a best of 1 format.
• The difference in quality of play...playing a local event is much less of a commitment than playing a regional event. It's less expensive, it doesn't require travel, it's a shorter time commitment. It's a good place for players to start getting experience. Now, Dutch locals can be extremely competitive at the very top - several of the top players in Europe live in the Netherlands, so it's hard to win a local event...but that's so far beyond my current level of play.

Anyway, I had an inkling that I was getting better with this deck and that the deck itself was becoming more consistent because of playing the local events.

Also, the best part of playing an event in San Francisco was how it confirmed for me that the global Pokemon community really is a friendly place. There's something to be said about showing up at a random game shop where you don't know a soul, and within a couple hours being in sustained friendly conversation with people.

Getting into the new deck

With the changes in my deck, I just wanted to give a quick play through of how the deck works now...this one isn't exactly perfect - the nature of online play is that you never know what you'll get paired into, and I went on a long run of not getting paired against the major meta decks.

Still, you can see a lot of the ways that my deck is both more aggressive and more resilient now. There's a turn in there in which I take 5 prizes, and it's kind of cool because one of the things I didn't address in Pursuit of Play is what the deck does against anything that isn't reliant on either Basic or Stage 2 Pokemon (if you're filling in the gaps, you have probably put together that there's also a Stage 1, which would seem to be unaffected by my stadium strategy). In this very weird matchup, which you can see I'm kind of perplexed by at the beginning, they are using a Pokemon V which evolves into a Pokemon VStar, which is a Stage 1 Pokemon. What I'm doing in that case is using a Devolution attack that lets me devolve The Pokemon back down. Because higher stages of evolution come with more hit points, devolving often leaves the lower stage card with too many hit points, thus knocking it out immediately. So on the 5 prize turn, I use the Gravity Mountain to reduce the hit points of 2 different Stage 2 Pokemon - gaining 3 prizes - and then I use my attack to devolve a 3rd Pokemon in order to pick up 2 more prizes.

An actual example of (very light) technological innovation in Pokemon TCG

Back in August when we were at the World Championships watching the stream of the match, I noticed something I hadn't seen before. If you take a look at the image below, you can see it too - but it will probably only jump out if you've been watching a bunch of Pokemon streams (and I understand if you haven't been...I'm still kind of amazed that anyone is reading this):

Here's the thing to see: On both sides of the screen, the graphical overlay shows you what card the player currently has in the active spot and what they currently have on the bench, as well as how much damage every Pokemon has already taken. By way of contrast, here's what it looked like before that:

The top example is so much more rich in data & in visual clarity. So many players - especially at the top levels - are playing the rare shiny style of card that is nearly impossible to recognize on camera.

I am pretty sure - like 95% - that the company responsible for the stream is using some sort of optical character recognition to identify the cards, because there is almost no lag between when a player puts a card in play and when the graphic updates. It's possible that they're just doing it as a Wizard of Oz trick...they only stream 1 match at a time, so they'd only need to have the deck lists and have all of The Pokemon queued up. They're certainly doing the damage tracking manually, so maybe they're also manually assigning Pokemon to the bunch - but it's an example where it wouldn't be terribly complicated to build a database that uses an image recognition algorithm to match the Pokemon from the card and put up the corresponding graphic.

Ready for a plot twist: that second image above with the Charizard in it - it's not from before the World Championships. It's from the most recent Stuttgart regional. The streams are done by different companies depending on region, and the nicer visual presentation is only happening for the US tournaments (in fact, the first image is from the US tournament a week prior to Stuttgart). Why can't we have nice things in Europe? I mean, I guess if I'm choosing between healthcare & public transit or clearer visual presentation of Pokemon streams, I'll take the former...but this one just seems like such low hanging fruit.

Some quick housekeeping:

• I realize as I'm writing a lot of this that I don't explain all that much about the actual game mechanics...I did a little bit in Pursuit of Play with Stadium cards. Let me know if you want more in depth game explainers.
• And, honestly, if there are any Pokemon, gaming, or play related topics in general that you want to hear from me about let me know.
• Sneak preview: I'm going to play a different deck for Birmingham. It's probably a one off, because I think Tsareena is a lot of fun...but the 3 Trudeaus have a plan to all play the same 60 card deck, so I've been testing with the new deck the last few days. It's definitely a more competitive deck that requires knowing your matchups...but I won't say too much more about it just yet.

I'll probably drop the January edition of Nerd Notes before we head off to Birmingham for the next tournament. So I'll catch you in 2025!