This is the final weekend before the Fincastle Pokemon Gym brings the Blue Ridge Regional Championships back to Roanoke. We have been highlighting some of the main features of the weekend here over the last week or two. If you’ve been following us here, you hopefully had a chance to read about our big side events, the Cosplay Contest and the Battle Fiesta. While those two are our featured “sides”, they are not our only ones. We’ve got a pretty long list of additional side events, several of which are new ones for this year, that range from large to small in size, for players of the video game and trading card game. Take a look below, we think you’ll like what you see. Continue reading
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The Fincastle Gym is hosting two days of pre-releases this weekend. Forbidden Light is the 6th set in the Sun & Moon series, which will be officially released on May 4, 2018. Forbidden Light contain over 130 cards, including 8 new GX’s, 5 new “Prism Star” cards and some interesting new support cards. While the original Japanese set Forbidden Light contains 110 cards, this expansion combines cards released of the Japanese set and a subset dubbed, Ultra Force. 
both about Sunday’s happening. The first is about a New Year’s resolution of sorts. For the majority of 2017, we adopted the schedule of hosting one TCG League Challenge and one VG Challenge each month. Gym Leader Joel thought it’d be a nice addition to post the results of those events to recognize the winners. So starting this week, we will do so. We won’t list descriptions of the matches, mostly because we can’t watch them all. However, for now, we will list the results. Our dream is to video tape both TCG & VG finals and Gym Leader Challenges and connect a YouTube channel to this site (which is not an issue of “how”, but an issue of finding the time to do so). For now, we’ll stick with listing the winners. Speaking of Gym Leader Challenges…. 
It was not officially Halloween yet, but it surely felt like it at the Gym on Sunday. Our combination pre-release/costume contest always stirs our Halloween spirit as we have had some awesome gatherings over the last few years. This year did not disappoint. As a matter of fact, we’d say that everyone “upped” their game, to the point we had to turn to some of our seasoned league trainers to help break the judging deadlock and decide the winners. Those who have walked away with the top spots in previous years had some real competition this time around. 
websites and the more accessible YouTube channels, as they both are always digging for content for their readers and viewers. “Instant decks” are often those that receive a lot of hype when a set is released, usually bound to fade away into the shadows of the deck establishment. Today’s deck is one of those “instant decks”. However, this is one that we would caution you to not write off too quickly. We’ve tested this one and we like it a lot. And, to beat the band, it just happens to fall nicely into our budget category. 
Wow. What a fun couple of weeks at the Gym! We always enjoy the weeks that surround new set releases and the accompanying pre-release tournaments, as they are nice breaks from the competitive season. However, no other events, for us anyway, ever seem to hold a candle to the October pre-releases and our costume contests. Yes, it gets pretty noisy… and yes, the Fincastle Library room was hotter than a billy goat butt in a pepper patch, especially for those in costumes, but it is worth it for us to get to see the creative side of many of our trainers. Looking at some of the amazing efforts put forth by our trainers, we wonder if we should “re-class” our contest from that of a costume event to a cosplay event. We think some of our guys and gals could compete with the best at area anime conventions and comi-cons (at little more about that later). 
Would we say we have a plethora of events? Oh yes, we have a plethora of events still remaining in October at the Gym. And don’t worry, we would not tell someone that we have a plethora, if we did not have any idea what a plethora is. We definitely know what it means to have a plethora. Sorry to say, there will not be any pinatas involved, but we hope each event will be filled with little surprises. We are sorry that we have not made the time to post here in the last week or so, but October has already been a very busy month for the Gym. Gym Leaders Georgia and Logan got their feet wet in their 1st major event of the year, the Orlando Regional. Gym Leader Marthe is knee-deep in the planning stages of the Blue Ridge Regional coming to Roanoke next May. All of the leaders have been busy welcoming and teaching new players at both our Fincastle and Lexington leagues. At times it feels like events are falling from the sky like gringos. We try to handle them with a little more grace than El Guapo. 
the prerelease events surrounding this exciting new set! The newest set XY BREAKpoint introduces more new BREAK evolution cards, as well as some new heavy-hitting EX cards and others that threaten to impact the current “meta” game in a big way.
iday, October 30th – just in time for another great Pokemon Costume Contest! The newest set XY BREAKthrough introduces a new type of pokemon evolution – BREAK evolution. Pokemon can add this card atop their Stage 2 level – horizontally. BREAK evolution adds HP, abilities and attacks, but allows the pokemon to continue to use attacks, retreat, weakness and resistance on the Pokemon below it.