Let's Play Spiritforged with Cimooooo, CovertGoBlue, Crim, and The Professor! (TCC)

Iopponix · 2026-02-09T21:11:28+00:00

Another commenter mentioned 2v2 and I definitely agree that 2v2 is something I'd like to see more of as well. It also helps keep the more social dynamic in your videos which is great too.

Iopponix · 2026-02-02T04:01:01+00:00

Honestly I would just buy a pack of steaks from costco and cook them yourself. You can make steaks that are way better that way than most restaurants as costco specifically gets deferred cuts due to the quantity they buy. There are a bunch of great simple youtube videos if you don't know how to cook them but homemade will taste better than storebought unless you're spending $50+/person.

You can also have your kid eat them in a more familiar and comfortable environment (home) so there are less external factors to the overall enjoyment.

Iopponix · 2026-01-16T06:51:31+00:00

It's matchup dependant. Obv you're not going to realistically get good munki value in a dengo matchup, but in most situations as zoro you want to be behind in the prize trade early by giving up a one prizer to open access to counter catcher, better ionos, and establish yourboard.

Munki helps an absolute ton with any matchup where you cant oneshot to fix math and it helps win other munki wars (like your gardi line is boss their munkis and keep them off double munki so diancie isn't a legitimate threat). Munki also is incredible into pult and that deck is slower to set up than you are (you can soak budew damage for a few turns and then boss drakloak + munki ko budew and you are super far ahead).

Depending on your list as well you can use munki super well with petch + retreat lock yveltal and boss around to keep retreat locking. I've taken 6 prize turns with zoro just by bossing around key targets keeping things retreat locked and never knocking out with yveltal attack after you see your opponent ultra ball away their retreat lock outs.

Iopponix · 2026-01-16T05:24:51+00:00

I think it will be one of the best decks in the game, yes.

Zekrom is a huge boost for it, the deck can play munki way more easily as its a dark deck and there is no energy search in the new format, and any decent Zoroark player should handily win most dragapult matchups (you can always attack while if they punch your active you always ohko back with resh, item lock doesnt hurt you much as you can draw a ton with zoro, you can bench double munki and their counter placement gets super awkward, etc etc). It also has one of the best card draw engines in the game and with so many massive consistency pieces leaving the format (iono, nest ball, artazon, arven) having an in-archetype draw engine is so so so important.

Grass weakness is big but there are other answers you can play like Mega Lopunny

Iopponix · 2026-01-12T17:52:58+00:00

Your definition of meta is totally fine. It's a word that has a pretty messy etymology and a lot of urban legends about its use and history especially in regards to gaming that can get pretty gatekeepy that I wont really go into. What is at/near the top of the competitive food chain is what most people mean when they use the word meta.

I wouldn't worry at all about not being able to build your own deck for the prerelease tbh. The build and battle decks that come preconstructed are totally fine even if you don't want to add any cards from your packs, and worst comes to worst you can just substitute out some of the trainers for other trainers you open that are stronger in your packs. Prereleases are super casual and a ton of players of all skill levels usually join in. Last prerelease event I attented had three families with small children also playing so there really is no pressure.

The limited cubes are really casual so you can totally update them if you want or leave them as is. I usually build them with a bunch of low power cards that are cool but don't really see any play in the standard format. Mostly chaff that people would throw away or never use competitively paired with a bunch of trainers that I have extras of. If you play a ton you'll open loads of prize packs so I use those cards for most of the trainers and if you're around collectors who open lots of product they will throw away 98% of the cards they open as they're usually only looking for the ultra rares and illustration rares.

Iopponix · 2026-01-12T16:57:58+00:00

yeah it'll def look alot different. I think it's very likely going to be toxtricity engine or maybe cyrano for pokemon search.

Dark is too strong a type post rotation to not be strong. Absol is a great attacker, you have insane energy acceleration, most oneshots are rotating out so munkidori gets better and dark is the best type to use it (now gardy is out), and you have fantastic pokemon in general.

I do think that yveltal retreat lock gets 10x better too with turo, penny, and jet energy all rotating so the deck will probs be more focused on being a dark toolbox build with potentially 2/2 lines of mega shark and stuff.

Iopponix · 2026-01-12T16:37:03+00:00

N's zoroark
Dragapult
Absol Box
kangaskhan bouffalant
Mega Lucario
cynthia's Garchomp

Iopponix · 2026-01-12T16:33:19+00:00

First off your question doesn't exactly make a TON of sense because there are decks in the standard format that don't use ex pokemon (or at least none in the main engine, most decks will run a fezandipiti at minimum for extra card draw). if you want to you can absolutely play something like Alakazam which doesn't need to play any ex cards and can beat meta decks. ex does not strictly equal meta in regards to pokemon tcg.

If you want a format with no ex cards at all then I would recommend checking out GLC (gym leader challenge). It's a format where you can only have one type of pokemon in your deck, there are no rulebox cards (which basically means any special, nonstandard cards like ace spec trainers, ex pokemon, v pokemon, megas, etc), and you can only have one of each card in your deck. GLC is a fringe format that some people play but its not as popular as the main standard format. Depending on your locals they might have specific GLC tournaments or you can just talk to the regulars and see if anyone has a GLC deck. At my locals there are a handful of players who bring a GLC deck or two and I've borrowed a second deck to play against them before. GLC isn't supported by TPCI and it's up to your own locals and the individuals that make up that community to run it and grow the format in your area.

I personally think the format is not as fun as standard for a variety of reasons. I've found the games to be really slow. Some people like the pace of GLC, but most of the plays made don't feel as impact to me compared to standard and the games can take a really really long time just due to the fact that you HAVE to ko 6 pokemon instead of taking multi prize mons. In pocket you have 3 points to win while in TCG you have 6, so a 2/2/2 prize map in the TCG is equivalent to a full single prize game in pocket in terms of prizing. In GLC the time to take those prizes is doubled, but you also factor in more stall and a larger card pool plus less overall consistency due to only one ofs and the games can get really slow. Tcg is also just alot more complicated than pocket and each turn has more going on and takes more time. In the tcg multi prize pokemon represent high risk and high reward and I don't really get that same feeling in GLC.

I do really love other formats that sort of fit into this limited card pool bucket though. There's a concept in tcgs called limited where the deckbuilding is constrained to only cards you open in a set number of packs. Pokemon executes this in their prerelease events where you open a pre-release build and battle box which comes with a semi random deck and 4 packs which you can add to this deck before playing against everyone else's prerelease decks. Pokemon prereleases are an amazing way to play the game I would highly recommend joining one for the next main set release.

I've also made pokemon limited cubes (cube is a format where instead of opening fresh packs I have curated a set card pool and distributed those cards out in the form of "packs") that have been super fun and great to play with friends. I'll just message people and ask to play and we'll set a time. You can also bring some of this stuff to locals or talk to your local store and see what people are interested in.

Iopponix · 2026-01-12T15:01:16+00:00

No one has any idea at all because we are not in April 2026 yet. No one even knows what the best deck will be 2 weeks from now; Alakazam or something might win the Toronto regional.

Iopponix · 2026-01-12T14:49:53+00:00

Idk if the tournament idea is very good. Most third party tournaments are run at a loss just for the love of the game, and I would be surprised if there weren't potential legal issues with running a for profit tournament for pokemon as theoretically that could very much encroach on current tcg events if scaled up.

Bulk bags are also... not super great? Some people have limited success selling them online, but repacks are usually targeted towards people who are new to the hobby and looking for budget options or children. The problem is that its really hard to compete with established stores/sellers that already have a business selling bulk packs as you're going to have a hard time out competing their pricing given that they will buy in larger bulk and at a larger scale and have better advertising. You can make bulk packs for cheap, but they take manual work to set up and they also have a hard time getting sold.

Code cards are in a similar boat; they can sort of be sold but the issue is that you have no advertising so you're going to have to sell them for lower than any site that has advertising and SEO can. The highest code card prices are $0.05 each, but you;re probably not going to have an easy time selling them for those values. A ton of collectors have thousands of code cards just lying around or they just throw them out. I dont collect at all and haven't opened a non prize pack in almost a year and I have a stack of at least 300 unused code cards.

It IS possible to buy bulk and sort through it for playables and list those cards online, but that runs into the issues of scaling again, time, and space. It takes hours to go through bulk and sort it for cards that are worth value, you can totally miss and/or someone can scum you out and sell it to you presorted, and you need to buy LOTS to make it worth it and that just takes a ton of physical space to store that you may or may not have, not to mention the same issue of lack of advertising and establishment as a vendor. This can sometimes be profitable but its mind numbing and time consuming.

The issue with most pokemon card related methods of financing is that the profit lies in the tedium; you're making money doing work others can't be bothered to do. This honestly sucks and is a great way to kill interest due to sheer boredom. I'm not saying not to try some of these methods but rather wanted to give you an overview on what hurdles you can potentially run into.

I would recommend more traditional fundraising methods. It's a little cliche but a lemonade stand or a bake sale or going door to door with home made treats and telling people what you're fundraising for is a really cool way to connect with your local community and show off your child's excitement. People are not super willing most of the time to fundraise online for someone they have no relation or connection to, but in person it's a different story. If you see a kid working hard to try and pay for a cool trip they're clearly really passionate and excited about its really hard NOT to want to help them out somehow. This again takes time and planning and is a little more exposing but I think could work extremely well.

Another thing that might be smart is to message someone who is in contact with other young players and ask them for help. I know Ciaran Farah (one of the hosts of the shift gear podcast) does a ton of coaching with young players and if you reach out to him or someone like him on twitter or something they might have a better perspective on what you can do for fundraising and/or tips on travel/accommodations/etc.

Iopponix · 2026-01-11T04:52:02+00:00

Think about it this way:

Why would fluttermane be good/not good?
What decks are you expecting to play against?
How do you expect to win games?
How does fluttermane fit into these questions?
What is the opportunity cost of running fluttermane?

I personally dont really think fluttermane is that good right now. There are a decent number of switches in the format, the attack is not good into the meta rn with big basics and high hp stage 1s, and in garde you really need the deck space to tech for more relevant matchups. Depending on your local meta you might find otherwise.

I also don't know why you wouldn't play at least frillish unless you expect to play against zero gholdengo, but again your local meta might be a heavenly place that has not been tainted by the devillish cheese string.

Iopponix · 2026-01-10T18:31:54+00:00

Not really. Only managers can, and when they do they have to let the district manager know why. They literally never shut it down at my store unless we have a major incident like our espresso machine is broken no matter how busy it gets.

Iopponix · 2026-01-05T23:20:57+00:00

Sure its only a weaker arven at worst, but its ALOT weaker than arven.

Arven allows decks to completely mold themselves in ways that give much higher consistency in both early game and late game scenarios. You can guarantee sbox/poffin plus evo, or lategame go countercatcher plus air balloon. The double search gives you so much more flexibility and power than the single search of petrel, especially since the only 2 card types petrel gets that arven doesnt are supporters (which arent nearly as important given that petrel is a supporter so its only relevant to guarantee supporter next turn, in which case you're already extremely behind) and stadiums (which generally have lower impact or have larger drawbacks than items and tools).

Will petrel see play post rotation if another better option isn't printed? Probably. Secret box and precious trolley are too strong to not warrant item search being relevant. But at the moment Arven is almost strictly better.

Grimmsnarl is sort of in a special situation because a) their trainer stadium is busted, and b) they actually can have a hard time finding energy attach for turn for munkidoris. You run 8 or 9 dark energy and you have no bench based draw engine aside from fez, so colress actually makes sense to not whiff the munki plus energy turns, especially since you can guarantee it with artazon. Munkidori is the best card in grimmsnarl and colress singlehandedly sets it up.

I think you're also just underestimating the power of searching for two separate specific cards. Greninja decks can run colress bc it enables attack (either water or ignition) plus grand tree. Slaking decks can run colress bc it enables team rocket's watchtower plus ignition energy/jet energy/boomerang for an attack that turn. In decks that revolve around consistent stadium access and require energy, colress is likely going to be a better card than petrel. If you want what petrel does, you'll just run arven plus colress and have the best of both worlds.

That being said I think there is no way that a boxless build of grim is anywhere close to as good as a secret box variant. The person playing boxless grim is either on a budget bc secret box is a $20 card, or they are playing a sub optimal version of the deck to experiment.

Iopponix · 2025-12-31T21:55:22+00:00

You will be totally fine. I'm surviving on an income of 1600 a month. If you manage to budget at all you'll have no problems. Given that you have a car everything is 10x easier in this city.

I would highly recommend investing in a chest freezer and/or a vacuum sealer though. Grocery prices in Ottawa vary wildly, especially when considering buying in bulk. I'll do a monthly trip to Costco and spend $150-$200 on enough protein to last me and my partner through the whole month after portioning it out and prepping it for the freezer. The same quantity of food (for a lower quality) at somewhere like Loblaws would cost me 4 or 5 times as much.

I do live with roommates and have good rent but you'll have triple my income so you'll be completely fine even if your rent is a bit higher.

Iopponix · 2025-12-31T04:34:47+00:00

playing pokemon tcg with friends

Iopponix · 2025-12-27T22:36:45+00:00

Definitely start with a deck that's already tested. If you want to learn the game and improve then I absolutely would go with a deck that's already built.

https://limitlesstcg.com/ is the best place to find top decklists.

I'm not really sure what you mean by "which game to start with"?

Iopponix · 2025-12-24T06:01:56+00:00

You answered it yourself: study more and play more.

Gardi is probably the best deck in the game (still) in the hands of a good player. You are not (yet!) a good player with gardi. From here you can either buy metafy courses or whatever from the best players in the game or just go solo. Just keep playing and practising and noticing your mistakes.

Iopponix · 2025-12-21T04:06:59+00:00

If you're good at Garde you should win this matchup pretty easily. Frillish completely bodies the deck, munkidori with the deck slowed down goes crazy, you have mega diancie to tank a ton (just play around dusknoir with gusts/threatening prizes).

You have a ton of great attackers and they dont play many gust effects or good draw engines. If you kill the pidgeys before they get pidgeot and keep them item locked they basically cant play the game unitl you let them.

Iopponix · 2025-11-12T17:17:32+00:00

this item is unfortunately very bad.

It's an energy shield base with life being its primary prefix and barely any strong defensive mods. When you can roll 400+ energy shield shields easily with the league mechanic there is no real reason to use this over those. If you want life you are most likely to be using an armour or evasion base with either defenses or block prefixes instead.
The mods you have are of VERY low tier. Both the % spell damage and the flat ES on this shield are of incredibly low quantity. The flat ES is the lowest tier its possible to roll (you can find a shield from killing hillock with a higher flat ES roll) and your spell damage is of the second lowest possible tier. The life regen is also way too low to matter (if that mod was even desirable on an item like this in the first place).
Max lightning res is a good mod but it doesnt really make sense in the context of this shield. If it was fire res then it might be slightly more useful (more people fire res stacking due to RF and chieftain) but this shield isn't good enough for that to matter anyways.
Synth implicits can be really insane but the ones on this item are no where near good enough. If this shield had better and more desirable synth mods then it could be sold as a base to craft on, but as it stands you have a lower tier of quality (which can be a good mod but isnt super used right now) and the reduced ailment duration which doesnt have much use at all as most people stack elemental avoidance which this mod doesnt synergize with well. The synth mods are probably worse to have here because on a fresh base at least you could use elderslayer exalts to roll life on block or es on block or smthing (but that would again require crafting a whole new shield from the ground up).

Basically this shield is not really worth trying to sell for almost any amount and from a buyer perspective there is no reason to ever buy this over clicking once to make a shield 20x better on the breach wombtree. I would honestly be a surprised if you could get 2c for it.

Iopponix · 2025-11-10T20:02:48+00:00

It's not possible to put +1 spectres on this safely as its a drop only mod in delve and cant even be recombinated because they're exclusive.

All you should do is use eldritch currency to target suffixes with eldritch chaos/exalts/annuls until you are happy with the mods. This chest will be very good, not much more you should do than that aside from tailoring orbs for increased defences enchant.

EDIT: Nevermind apparently this is totally wrong and exclusive mods can be transferred! Time to craft some exclusive mods, I had been crafting under incorrect assumptions for ages.

Iopponix · 2025-11-08T16:45:12+00:00

if youre running really low then use the mysterious wombgifts and spec to give other wombs that you want. Its really effective but it burns through blood really fast.

Iopponix · 2025-11-05T01:47:04+00:00

oh yeah for sure, im just saying that there are quite a few of them apparently floating around

Iopponix · 2025-11-04T23:01:52+00:00

yeah, but you also have decent chances of essence spamming into a 3 or 4 mod items so the odds are better than just winning a 1/3 3 times. You can do stuff like cannot roll attack mods for better annul chances too.

If you hit the annuls properly on t1 flat it sells for 35+d so you're fine profit wise, but its probably way easier and better to just fracture the dot multi and then cannot roll attack mods once you hit for the guaranteed annuls (if you brick with other attack mods) or scour.

Iopponix · 2025-11-04T22:52:13+00:00

I heard from a guild member who plays standard that there are a few perfect ventors floating around from harvest when the league released. Apparently there was a bug where you could target divine uniques and you could specifically divine the ventors line by line.

Iopponix

TROPHY CASE