Hello hat lovers!

We have decided to greatly exceed our quota by posting a second time in 2025. This is a brief guide on the top teams that have populated grassroots tours and the ladder, Showdown ladder of course because we do not have an in game ladder because Big Pikachu wasn’t feeling very festive, including notes about variations of these archetypes. Sample pastes are provided to practice with or against, as well as a very brief overview of how each team functions. In some cases, some players who placed highly at major tournaments with these archetypes have also released their pastes publicly, which will be provided when available. These teams are what I would consider to be the teams that you should be most familiar with when preparing for this format, at least at present.

A quick note on the sample pastes: a lot of these sets are recreations, either by me, taken from other publicly available teams, or from other players who have provided similar guides online. I wish I could credit every single person who contributed those spreads, but I placed them in a personal compendium, and the pastes from this post were taken from that compendium, with the original source often being lost in the process. Just know that if you have publicly provided guides that were well informed, I have probably seen it, and those ideas may have made their way into this post as well. Thank you all for the work that you do, truly! 🫡

The F in Regulation F Stands for Fake Out Fake Out Fake Out Parting Shot U-turn Protect Fake Out Fake Out Fake Out

Japan Balance (sample paste)

Stefano Greppi VR (sample paste)

These two teams are what have defined Reg F: Incineroar, Urshifu Rapid Strike, Rillaboom to form a Fire/Water/Grass core, standing with the Reg F boogeyman in Calm Mind Raging Bolt. Chien-Pao and Landorus-I as the last two is a team known as Japan Balance, once seen as the top threat in this format. This team, however, has declined in popularity lately as players have instead mostly preferred a version with Ogerpon Hearthflame over Chien-Pao, the version that won the first large grassroots tournament in Reg F 2.0. This team is boring, soulless, and is the VGC equivalent of unseasoned chicken, but might forever remain the biggest threat of this format.

Other Variations:
After the Fire/Water/Grass + Bolt core, any two of Landorus-I, Chien-Pao, Flutter Mane, Amoonguss, Ogerpon Hearthflame could realistically round them out to form a team, with Hearthflame sometimes outright replacing either Incineroar or Rillaboom.

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This is my personal tier list of the restricteds as we return to Regulation G. Though results and other people’s opinions were considered, this is largely based on my own opinions of each Pokemon’s viability.

The Pokemon are ranked within the tiers, and lazily done so after Necrozma Dawn Wings. The blurbs for each Pokemon below I think are more important to take into account than the ranking itself. I assessed the strengths and weaknesses of each Pokemon, and others may weigh those characteristics differently which can change the order of their rankings, and some of those characteristics may be more or less important as the metagame cycles.

As far as how actionable this list might be, I think everything down to Koraidon is perfectly defensible to use at majors, and their common teams are definitely worth spending time to prepare against. The Niche Threats I think can be used if you can truly and honestly see the narrow opening that would allow them to be successful, and while I think you should still also prepare against them for majors if you have the time, you will likely be able to get away with simply winging gameplans against them, if you even get paired versus them to begin with. All the Pokemon below Dawn Wings are for content creation and for meming at locals only.

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Warning: Included screenshots and importables contain profanity and sexual innuendo

Introduction

Hello Hat Lovers!

My name is Scott Iwafuchi and I’m here to share my experience using one of my favorite Pokemon – Porygon2 (P2) – during VGC 2024’s Regulation F (Reg F) ruleset! This report will encompass the entire teambuilding process that led to each iteration of the team as well as my runs at the Portland, Charlotte, and Vancouver Regional Championships where I finished Top 128, Top 16, and Top 4, respectively. 

One of my best friends, Demitri, and I discovered the Tera Poison Porygon2 idea very early in our experimentation with the ruleset and I eventually committed to refining the team throughout Reg F. Not only did I think that P2 was an incredibly strong Pokemon, but it made the game feel comfortable and familiar to me despite some general gripes that I had with the format at large. There were moments where I doubted P2’s ability to hold up amidst shifts in the meta, but I ultimately chose to lean into my experience with the team and how well it weaponized my talents as a player, rather than try to develop something else. 

A common trend within Pokemon is the idea that teams have an inevitable expiration date and will need to be updated drastically, or scrapped entirely in order to keep abreast of meta developments. There are certain strategies, like Dondozo + Tatsugiri and Psyspam, whose rate of success rises and falls dramatically based on the kinds of teams that are popular within the field. While there is a lot of value in analyzing meta and usage trends to help construct teams, my perspective has always been: ‘Comfort is supreme’. After deciding that I would stick with P2, Incineroar, and Amoonguss, the goal was to perfect the last few slots and hone my ability to pilot the team. Let’s start by talking about the team’s origin story.

Disclaimer: The bulk of this report will be a narrative account of how I arrived at the team I brought to Vancouver. If you are looking for details about the spreads and my matchups guide, feel free to scroll to the bottom. If you are at all interested in how the team came about though, please read. I think it’s pretty fun and cool, and I worked really hard on it 🙂

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Hello Hat Lovers!

I recently made day 2 of my home regional in Vancouver, finishing 19th overall with a 10-4 record. While I would have liked to have gone further, I’m overall happy with my finish, and now that I have no more majors planned for Regulation F, I have decided to release the team that I have been working on for the past two months. There is still over a month left of this Regulation for many players with major events like EUIC still to come and I am hoping that stronger players than I can pick up the team and potentially have an even better finish. I think the CressBear archetype is really strong and still fairly underexplored. The Rental and Pokepaste are also included in this post!

Teambuilding

Regulation F felt like it had a large quantity of viable archetypes, more so than previous formats, and this made team building incredibly difficult early on. Very broadly speaking, the way to push for advantages at any stage in a meta game is to build and play more offensively even if means that you have to trade match ups, but I felt like many of the flavors of offense had too much of a rock-paper-scissors dynamic versus each other, and were overall too volatile given the sheer amount of Pokemon that they needed to cover. Thus, I decided to build a team that instead had as many neutral match ups as possible, and the way to accomplish this goal is to find a team that is stable and balanced, with the trade off being that it may be a challenge to create advantages. A team like this can prevent you from losing games quickly, giving you more chances to outplay your opponent.

While Pokemon like Amoonguss, Ogerpon-Hearthflame, and Iron Hands were considered, I identified Flutter Mane / Ogerpon-Wellspring / Incineroar / Raging Bolt as the stable core that I desired. These four provided many team essentials like offensive coverage, defensive synergy, a mix of spread and single target attacks, redirection, Fake Out, Intimidate, priority, and a good balance of power and bulk. Beyond these four, I know that I still wanted to use Trick Room given that Semi-Room teams have always been my comfort pick in the decade that I’ve played VGC, and I also wanted a Ground type to round out the Fairy / Fire / Ground coverage that I make almost mandatory on all my teams. For a balance team, it is also important to have some tools to make progress so that you are not simply turtling and surviving in your games, and because of these reasons, I chose Cresselia and Regular Ursaluna as my final two Pokemon. Regular Ursaluna has one of the highest potential damage outputs in the game, with a strong spread move and a single target attack that can OHKO bulky Pokemon like Amoonguss with minimal set up, and it does so without sacrificing bulk.

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Hello hat lovers!

This season I decided to fully compete again despite stepping away from the game part way through 2018 and basically not playing at all in 2019 and during Sword & Shield. Despite my best efforts, I missed my worlds invite, but will detail the challenges I faced and mistakes I made in order to learn from them in the future.

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