Sunday, Oct. 21 at the Fincastle Pokemon Gym was quite the busy day. We opened with a Mid-Season Showdown, a video game tournament that falls between the levels of local Premiere Challenges and Regional Championships. As that event was entering its Top 4 playoff, players arrived and began to open their Lost Thunder pre-release packs and prepare for the fun tournament. Several of those players came in costume to vie for the title of costume contest champion. As always, we were amazed at some of the entries. Lets look at all of these events and see how things turned out. Continue reading
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This Sunday at the Fincastle Pokemon Gym will be a day that should satisfy just about anyone’s Pokemon needs. If you like the video game and play in the Mid-Season Showdown, you might match up against the #6 ranked Junior in the World (that’s right, we said the World). If you follow the Trading Card Game, then surely you want to be one of the 1st to get cards from the newest set, Sun & Moon: Lost Thunder. If costuming and cosplay is your thing, then come vie for the title of Costume Contest Winner. That is about as full of a day of pokemon as one can fit into the metropolis of Fincastle! 
The Fincastle Pokemon Gym’s card store and retail business, Dark Moon Cards and Games, just launched a new and updated 
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. 
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…. 
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). 