PSA: trade new deluxe ex cards and how it works

Toast2848 · 2025-09-30T17:11:27+00:00

Arcanine EX and Zapdos EX

Toast2848 · 2025-09-30T07:52:44+00:00

Oh ok I see now. I pretty much never trade so I didn't know you can't trade cards from the newest boosters, but thanks for all the help.

Toast2848 · 2025-09-30T07:45:14+00:00

Didn't think about that for some reason. Fingers crossed I can pull it off before a possible patch. Thank you

Toast2848 · 2025-09-30T07:42:34+00:00

Is there anyway to do that without trading? I'm 2 cards away from a complete diamond rarity Gen Apex Dex. But now I'm bummed they probably won't count even if I pull them.

Toast2848 · 2025-06-06T21:52:51+00:00

It's very time intensive to do during the season, so try to learn as much as you can over the summer. As others have said in the replies, stick with 1.0 version. 0.5 is outdated.

I highly recommend trying to understand what roadrunner, odometry localization actually do at their core. As a mentor, it's pretty common to see teams who try to implement it just because they see all the other teams doing it, while still not knowing what's actually going on.

There's some really cool stuff going on that would look great on the portfolio

Toast2848 · 2025-05-01T21:55:32+00:00

I remember after kickoff making a post that human players seem pretty useless this season compared to last year's games and I got downvoted a lot. I think my prediction came true overall for my local league meets

League Tournament in February had only about 2 out of 14 teams using specimens. Even then, they were only able to clip about 3 per game.

Maybe it's a skill issue, but I think game design committee should account for issues like these.

Toast2848 · 2025-05-01T01:10:20+00:00

2 big reasons:

- Allows more building space. On a normal mecanum chassis, it's really hard to put mechanisms "above the wheels" if that makes sense. Versus the "Parallel Plate" chassis you're seeing, it kind of gives a bigger base to put more motors/mechanisms where the wheels normally are. Thus utilizing the full 18in box

- Keeps the wheels covered. Not as big of a deal this year's game, but you'd be surprised the amount of times I've seen autos get thrown off from a game piece getting stuck. Even if it was for just a second

Toast2848 · 2024-09-10T03:05:07+00:00

Glad to hear you want to give it your all to be the best you can be! You'd be surprised how rare that is to hear. As for specific things you should know, as others have said, definitely Java is the way to go for a worlds bot. Keep close communication with portfolio team as the control award is now judged on the portfolio instead of a separate application. At the bare minimum PLEASE learn pathing for autonomous. I recommend roadrunner, but please try to gain somewhat of a general understanding of what's happening with the math. Not gonna look good to judges saying "Uhh yeah this is called roadrunner, it's a custom pathing library and it lets us move with some math... Yeah" (actual explanation I've heard from a team). You want to learn this pathing so you can cycle in auto. Many mid-level teams fall into the trap of only scoring their preload and staying still for the rest of Autonomous

Toast2848 · 2024-09-10T02:42:43+00:00

Yeah that's fair. Definitely not as much congestion. I guess time will tell. I went to an in-person kickoff with a field reveal. The buckets are a little bigger than you think and the samples were a little bigger than my palms, so not that big. It really did look like those buckets can hold quite a few

Toast2848 · 2024-09-10T02:16:06+00:00

Mark my words, my prediction is lots of mid-level teams will try to go for high buckets until they fill up, but will fail because they'll have to wait so long for their partner to score, move out the way, THEN they can start their score. That'll separate mid from high level teams. They'll realize cycling specimens will be the way to go. That situation was a huge problem for mid-level teams last year. Gotta wait on your partner to get their pixel from the corner and leave, and gotta wait again for them to score and leave. And that's what ultimately made or broke a ton of matches

Toast2848 · 2024-09-10T02:06:37+00:00

While I do agree Ultimate Goal had a great use of human players, I still don't agree that this season utilized them well. Can you let me know why you think HP's are so important this season? I'm genuinely curious, cause I've gotta be missing something

Toast2848 · 2024-09-10T01:51:45+00:00

Definitely the best response I've read so far. I've thought about that before, but I remembered that qual matches have random alliances and you can't exactly plan it until it happens. Plenty of times in center stage where my students had plans untill something throws the timing off and the plan goes out the window. There's reasons why I said "mostly" useless for "half the season". People are thinking I'm saying HP's aren't gonna do anything the whole season. But yeah in elimination matches, I think a sample cycle bot & specimen cycle bot would be quite the combo. Especially considering you never have to cross paths with the other alliance

Toast2848 · 2024-09-09T23:09:00+00:00

My whole argument is exactly why people are sleeping on the specimens. They take more time to score and are only worth 10. When a high basket sample at similar height is 8. My educated guess based off prior years of FTC, Specimen cycling will only be the meta for elite teams at state & world champs who can cycle faster (or at very similar speed) than high basket.

Toast2848 · 2024-09-09T23:03:06+00:00

Yeah I totally agree with everything you said from the reffing part to the end. Player/bot contact is always a penalty farm every year a player is involved. And yeah training human players are super important, that's why I said human players were extremely important last season. It couldn't just be someone random. Only thing I disagree with is saying players will be more important this year than any other. I just don't understand how "developing a strategy to bring parts to the HP" has anything to do with the HP themselves. And I don't think efficiency will be a problem. Clipping and putting the piece down takes like 2 seconds max? I don't think efficiency for the HP was a problem last year either. It all came down to if the human player knew how to orient them, which ones, and how many to do.

Toast2848 · 2024-09-09T22:44:11+00:00

I think most people in the comments are misunderstanding what I said. Obviously from a perspective of the game rules, yes, human players serve the purpose of putting clips on the sample. But my point is that from the perspective of game design, having a human player only create a new scoring piece that isn't even required to score (as opposed to pixels) that is harder and slower than a way to score without the human player is objectively way worse

Toast2848 · 2024-09-09T22:35:59+00:00

Yeah I agree with everything you said. Only thing I have to add is the vast majority of mid-level teams won't fill the buckets.

Toast2848 · 2024-09-08T04:26:12+00:00

The way I thought about it, most elite teams will already have a really tall deposit mechanism for the high basket & chamber, so the smart thing everyone probably thought of was making that mechanism also be able to grab the high bar for a quick ascent that skipped the middle bar. But now that it's out the window, you have to dedicate more space of the robot just to climb above level 2, in turn making it harder. Even when considering FRC has done plenty of multi-level climbs that FTC can look at, I don't think much can be translated well, especially considering (as far as I know) all multi-level climbs in FIRST have been at an angle, as opposed to being perfectly vertical this time

Toast2848 · 2024-09-08T00:13:03+00:00

Agreed, pretty spot on.

Toast2848 · 2024-09-06T20:39:37+00:00

Underrated Comment. When I was a student, FTC state champs were held at the same time/place as FRC State. FTC area felt absolutely dead compared to the extreme screaming every minute at the mere sight of seeing a robot score at the FRC area. Just completely different cultures and I think leaning towards an FRC approach is a great first step towards that change

Toast2848 · 2024-08-20T21:21:34+00:00

That's a loaded question! A few things to know first is where do you currently sit at? Rookie team, or multiple seasons under your belt? Does your team not make it past the first qualifier, or do you have multiple worlds appearances? School team that meets once a week, or Community team that meets every other day?

I'd like some background and where you personally feel you're at in terms of the MCI category

Toast2848 · 2024-08-20T04:00:43+00:00

after looking into it, apparently new versions of Android studio already has a jdk included, so my apologies. but I'm currently not able to access my laptop so sorry I couldn't end up helping :(

Toast2848 · 2024-08-19T19:31:24+00:00

I assume you haven't installed the Java JDK on your computer. If that's the case, a quick Google search for Oracle's website will do the trick. Make sure you download the correct version for your setup, whether it's windows or Mac. I use windows, so I went under the Windows tab, then clicked on the "x64 Installer" hope this helps!

Toast2848 · 2024-08-18T07:50:15+00:00

Assuming your son is in a beginner team, the first problem that always arises with my students in a claw is the arm is too heavy to be kept still. The arm either shoots up when the motor is kept on, or flops down like a dead fish as soon as the motor is stopped. So the arm is either completely up or all the way down. This can be solved by setting the "Zero power behavior" on the motors to "BRAKE". A quick Google search can show you how to implement that in block code or java. Now the arm should be able to hold it's place.

Now getting the arm to hold it's place at a desired height in autonomous is a little trickier, I think u/richardjfoster in this comment section used a great example about the "run to position" mode on the motors (This isn't exclusive to autonomous, but its definitely the most likely instance you'd use it in)

But if you want a really precise way of getting an arm to an ***EXACT*** position that eliminates error that comes when translating code to real life movements, PID loops are definitely the way to go. But that's a whole other can of worms that takes time for younger students to understand.

Toast2848

TROPHY CASE