Another Regional in the books… and to say the least, it’s not been my favorite of the recent events. Before partaking in Dallas, it’d been almost two months since I’d been able to play a major event, so I was definitely excited to get back to it. I’m not a huge fan of any of our recent Standard formats, and so far this season, have been more of an Expanded fan. Expanded is more than a bit wild at the moment, but in a way, that means there’re a lot of avenues to doing well.

Or, so said my positive, optimistic self on Friday night.

Now, the positive, optimistic Christopher is generally withheld from this space—and, honestly, from Pokémon altogether. For whatever reason, that was the attitude that came out with regard to this tournament as I prepared. I think a large element of that perspective came from Xander and I’s League Cup runs earlier in the month. We basically brought off-the-wall stuff both days and it stuck remarkably.

I’m now writing this beginning portion from a hotel room in Dallas. Downstairs, the tournament is somewhere around Round 8, and I’ve already eaten and started testing for Sydney (which, by the way, is horrifyingly close to happening). As you can certainly derive from that timeline, it was not a particularly good day.

The good and bad news is that I don’t have a particularly inspiring deck profile or report from Dallas to delve into today. We’ll go over what I played, how it was a misadventure in madness, and where I think Expanded is at right now. After that, I’m going to talk a bit about where my head’s at heading into Oceania.

For better or worse, the turnaround on this next few articles for me is going to be pretty ugly: I’m back next Wednesday with the final article before Oceania. My impression from some analysis I did tonight is that Oceania is relevant to a pretty small portion of our readership, so my plan at the moment is to limit my thoughts on it to today. Then, on 2/7, I’ll offer some thoughts on Ultra Prism as a set. The honest reality: the 7th is too late for most of us going to Oceania to read anything anyway—personally, I will never know the 7th, as I’ll be crossing the International Date Line at the time. So, backed with my highly scientific Twitter assessment, Ultra Prism it is.

When I’m back again on Monday the 12th, I’ll recap Oceania—hopefully it’s a better event to recap than Dallas—and get into Ultra Prism in the context of what happened in Sydney.

This article — “The Black and the White” – Talking Texas, Exploring Expanded, and Synthesizing Sydney Standard — was originally published on SixPrizes.