As you may have picked up if you, for some godawful reason, pay attention to my Twitter: the extremely good boys of the Exp. Share podcast, who play through Pokémon games in tandem and discuss their adventures each week, are currently running Black 2 and White 2 with my “Kingslocke” rules, after the idea was put into their head by my good friend Ben from I Chews You (the podcast about cooking and eating Pokémon, I LIKE WHAT I LIKE, OKAY!?). As well as being a nice treat for any fans of the Kingslocke who want to see someone else suffer through this ludicrously complicated tarot-based challenge run, this is a fantastic opportunity for me to get more data on how the rules actually function in practice and where they might be confusing or easily misunderstood (well… more confusing than they’re supposed to be). I still haven’t played under the revised version that I wrote after completing my Pearl run a few months back, so this is pretty valuable information if I want to keep updating the rules, or follow through on my threats to create an “advanced” version where the four suits all do different things.
Of course, seeing as Josh and Tanner of Exp. Share are doing something so helpful for me, I think it’s only polite if I join in. Again, after all, I haven’t yet played with the most recent version of the rules myself. Exp. Share has a segment called “Level Check,” where the hosts discuss the current state of their teams (including recent casualties if they’ve been playing a Nuzlocke… etc.). A lot of listeners keep pace with Tanner and Josh playing through the same game and post their own Level Checks on Reddit each week, so I’m going to start a run of Black 2, try to catch up to them reasonably promptly (I believe they normally tackle one gym per week, and they’ve just passed the third in Castelia City) and then keep pace for the rest of their run. This should be a lot less intense than my almost-daily updates on the Pearl Kingslocke, and the posts will probably be a lot less detailed (at least the first few while I’m catching up), which is good because I’m also still playing Legends: Arceus and have ideas I need to discuss about that game too. I’m not going to take time to talk much about Black 2 itself or the story (I’ll assume readers know the plot and characters), or give detailed accounts of most major battles; instead I’ll just focus on what’s happening with the Kingslocke cards and deck, with periodic updates on how my team is doing in the spirit of Level Check. Also, if I need an observer rule I’m just going to go to Jim the Editor rather than crowdsource it like I did for Pearl (not that that wasn’t also great, but I want to come up with a more refined system before doing it again; this is just more convenient given my format).
Pokémaniacal 