Companion Chronicles: Lucas: 5 - Sandwiches and GLC

As the late, great Ser Elton John once said, "..it's 10 o'clock on a Wednesday, vlog time."

While Nate has been preparing to play in the upcoming Pokemon Trading Card Game Atlanta Regionals, I am going to see the Lion King Musical in Tampa that weekend. So, I am just hanging out playing around with a few decks, helping the kid theory craft + build his ATL deck, and focusing on a GLC (covered in Lucas: 4) tournament that takes place tonight (4/9/25).

Before we get into Pokemon TCG and everyone checks out, I gotta show off some sandwiches from the last two days. In the first image is a grilled cheese I made Katie. The crunch on it was stone cold perfect and after taking the cross section, the center cheese had no integrity. Exactly what we're looking for. I didn't apply enough butter, making it a tad dry, but luckily Katie made some tomato soup to dip it in.

Up next is an Italian sub I had from Cerrato's Italian Market and Deli in Melbourne. I had one of these for lunch one time and it was good as hell, so I figured I'd pop in on the way to East Coast Anime for tonight's GLC tournament. I didn't think of taking a picture until I was full, so here's a nearly-finished sub pic. Trust that it was good as hell.

Back to Pokemon. In the last GLC tournament, two weeks ago on 3/26/25, I lost in the second round, putting me in fourth place and just out of the prizing. No packs. No badge. No problem, really. All of the games were close and it was my first time using the deck, so we can't always win.

Since then, new BANNED CARDS in GLC had been announced. For those unfamiliar, this is just the 7th ban wave in the 5-years since GLC was created. The banned cards? Double Colorless Energy and Twin Energy, two energy cards critical for my Colorless deck to function.

Just because the ban ruins my deck doesn't mean I don't agree with it. Between the two now-banned energies and Double Turbo Energy, this deck cheeses that fact that all of these energies are slightly different to run three cards that do functionally the same thing. This is against the spirit of the single-copy format, but hey, that's what the ban list is for. I ain't gonna cut 'em from my own deck before the homie officially bans 'em just cuz of spirit or whatever.

Thankfully for me, this ban takes affect on April 24th, giving me two more chances to get my colorless badge before the deck falls apart. Today and April 23rd, two weeks from today. I gotta Ricky Bobby this shit.

Deck list for Posterity

Round 1 - Spread Electric

Game 1 went smoothly against my and Nate's buddy, Eddie. He's been mostly working on a standard deck and hasn't put much time into his GLC deck lately, but we've played a good amount of GLC practice and his deck just doesn't seem to have the juice to beat mine. My deck runs really damn fast compared to his and this game was no different. 1-0.

Round 2 - Water

This deck started similar to game 1, but I don't spend enough time cultivating my bench and it actually gets pretty close near the end. I was a couple prize cards ahead, still, but if I drew poorly for a few turns I was in serious trouble. 2-0.

Round 3 - Less-Turbo Colorless

This was, by far, the closest of the three games. I got off to a much weaker start than my opponent, but was able to quickly get ahead in prizes due to some slightly careless play on his side. His deck isn't quite as fast as mine, instead trying to spread damage with a Spinda, fall behind on prize cards while stacking damage all over the board, to eventually combo that damage with an Iron Jugulis to knock out a 2-3 of my Pokemon all at once.

Thanks to me being the greatest to ever do it, I have a plan for this. I use my Parallel City, an interesting card that affects each player in a special way depending on how it's facing. MOST of the time, you aim the blue side towards your opponent, limiting their bench size to 3 Pokemon. This time, however, my entire bench is damaged and just waiting to be wiped out. To protect myself, I use the Parallel City to limit my OWN bench, allowing me to discard two damaged Pokemon, and prevent some easy prize cards for my opponent. I am able to squeeze out the game with some luck in the end and close out 3-0.