Lucas Horta

I did not pay for a blue checkmark to make this one tweet on principle. Sorry you had to read it as a thread rather than one continuous text. I would love to hear everyone's opinion on this. 13/13

I will be adding a support ticket, but my voice alone is not enough. If you believe the current penalty on drawing extra cards is overly punitive, I suggest you do the same. Support tickets can feel like shouting at the clouds, but they actually listen. 12/13

Prize penalties used to involve drawing physical Prize Cards. It broke the game in even worse ways. I am sure everyone knows the horror stories behind quad prize and N into donk. But now Japan has single or multi virtual prize penalties, rather than 2 or 4. 11/13

An argument for this is "it is on the opponent for screwing up," and that is not wrong. But it is a matter of what competitions are for: do we want the players who make the best plays or the ones who make the fewest technical mistakes to win? What holds more value? 10/13

I have been AHJ/TCG lead in multiple Regionals, ICs, and Worlds. This is one of the most frequent infractions at these events. I have even tried tallying how many DPCs became effective game losses until I realized it was most of them anyway. 9/13

This fix alone would have turned all 4 DPCs I faced into games with no handicap. Any potential advantage is completely nullified, depending exclusively on the skill of the opponent to make the right choice on which card is best to remove. 8/13

For example, if you overdrew, your opponent would look at your hand, pick a card, and you shuffle it back in the random portion of the deck (keeping any Iono or Drakloak order intact). If you look at 9 cards with a Pokegear, the opponent chooses 2 from the 9. 7/13

For drawing or looking at extra cards, every other competitive card game currently uses a fix invented over a decade ago: the opponent gets to choose which card out of the set goes back into the random portion of the deck. 6/13

Second, it uses an element unrelated to the infraction (prize cards needed to win) to mitigate potential advantage acquired (access to information or cards). Our current fixes use randomness to fix the game state, leaving it potentially more broken than it was. 5/13

As a judge, I have been trying to voice my concern about the penalty for years. First, it is either a game loss with extra steps or does nothing, which makes it incredibly inconsistent in effectiveness, especially for decks where prizes are not win conditions. 4/13

In both scenarios where I made a mistake that resulted in a DPC, it was game 3 and I was rushing, pressed for time. In order to effectively play three games, I had to either play suboptimally or eventually make mistakes, and twice the latter happened. 3/13

I had a total of 4 DPC rulings in my games: 2 in my favor and 2 against. I feel like both in my favor did not do much as my opponents never got to 2 prizes in those games, but the 2 against me were effectively game losses where I would have won otherwise. 2/13

91/1433 in Curitiba. 8-4-1. One of my losses and my tie were me screwing up and getting DPC penalties. Wouldn't change anything and would recommend the list for Houston/Seville. 80 points towards my Ace Trainer because this is the only major I'm playing this season... probably.

That was an exciting finals! Congrats Ryuki Okada おかぴー on the win and Natalie Millar on being the runner up! History in the making! #pokemoneuic2025