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.

January 7-8: San Diego Regional (5-5, +0 CP)

Given that San Diego was the first event of the generation, I wanted to build a team that had a lot of characteristics that I knew to be effective, and one that I would be comfortable with using. For me this largely meant having Fairy / Fire / Ground coverage, an emphasis on moving first with my offensive Pokemon, a focus on having spread moves to maximize damage, and redirection, as these were all elements of a team that I was familiar with.

“Moving first” meant that I wanted to use Trick Room given that it is the form of speed control that counters the other speed control options that focus on having higher speed stats. Armarouge / Tera Fairy Specs Gholdengo / Indeedee was the Trick Room mode, whereas Hydreigon / Garchomp / Murkrow was the faster mode.

For several reasons, I did quite poorly at this event. Firstly, there were many logistical issues with preparing for the first event of the year. For one, my prep was entirely on Showdown because I could not obtain in game Pokemon on time to practice on Battle Stadium, which is where I have been comfortable in the past. For one reason or another I have never been able to see the game as clearly on Showdown and thus do not think as in depth as I would like.

Second, it was a massive personal adjustment preparing for this event compared to other tournaments in the past. Given my lack of free time and having less energy in general, I had to be a lot more deliberate with what I tested, whereas in the past, I would play as much as possible without much thought behind the decisions I made and how it affected my skills and knowledge of the game. A trial-and-error approach was not going to be conducive to success for me.

Because of these reasons, there were a number of things that occur in games that I did not have the ability to see until I played at the actual event. For example, in my round 1 loss, I made multiple mispredictions with whether a Sylveon would Tera Water versus my Tera Fire Hydreigon. I did not see until part way through game three that these predictions were wholly unnecessary, because Tera Fire Hydreigon positioned next to redirection in Indeedee would mean Sylveon was severely limited in its damage output. Also, in Pokemon, it is instructive to observe that the amount of damage an opposing Pokemon would take could also indicate how it was trained in its speed and/or attack. I saw that an opposing Baxcalibur was bulkier than usual, but I did not infer that it likely was not very fast, and it ended up under-speeding my Gholdengo in Trick Room.

In addition to these tactical mistakes, the team was honestly also quite bad, despite my best efforts. The metagame progresses far more quickly than in the past given the higher level of competition in the modern age, which was an adjustment that I was not able to make given that I had not competed in several years. I committed to the team structure some weeks before the event, which, in the context of an early metagame, might as well be a millennium. The hybrid speeds that the team had may have also worked in some past formats, but I failed to correctly assess how it would translate to Series 1, and emphasizing spread moves was also not precise: what it should have been was to correctly balance spread moves and single target attacks. I could not KO some bulkier Pokemon quickly enough because I focused too much on dealing overall damage with spread moves instead of understanding the importance of having stronger single target attacks. In series 1 also never learned how to approach Dondozo adequately and instead tried to shortcut a solution with Haze Murkrow. In the past, as a principle I have learned that the best way to handle threats is to have a combination of subtle counters rather than having a single supposed hard counter that does little else. This is why I felt that Terrakion was a poor Kangaskhan counter in the past compared to more passive and generally more functional answers like Intimidate and Rocky Helmet redirection. Haze Murkrow may eliminate Dondozo’s boosts without much effort, but because of its frailty, it was fairly easy to eliminate with Dondozo’s partners and had less function overall than Pokemon like Amoonguss and Water-Tauros. Those two may beat Dondozo more slowly, but still had a positive match up overall, and fared better versus everything else.

Amusingly enough, at the event I also went 0-10 on speed ties with Hydreigon and Garchomp, but my 5-5 record was very much the expected result given the quality of my prep and my play at the tournament.

March 11-12: Vancouver Regional (6-3, +0 CP)

To put it bluntly, this tournament was a profound disappointment. I truly felt that my prep and my team were much stronger than what I could show in this tournament. This was also my home regional and performing well meant a great deal to me. Prior to Vancouver, I had top cut 2/6 of the grassroots tournaments that I played in for series 2, and only barely missed top cut in the other four as well, having lost in the last round of Swiss in all of them to miss out on advancing. I felt very comfortable with how the team functioned and the team maintained a strong matchup spread even as the metagame progressed. Kelvin and I also spent a great deal of time and effort understanding lines and matchups. The intention behind the team was largely the same as San Diego, but the execution was more polished: have strong coverage and have an ability to move first with my offensive Pokemon, which was accomplished with a hard Trick Room structure.

Despite feeling like I really hit my stride in series 2, I had zero CP to show for it, finishing 65^th at Vancouver. I pulled one of my worst matchups in round 1 versus a former regional champion, lost, and later, simply could not covert victories in two other sets that were decided on the margins. Maybe it was acceptable to lose one of those sets, but probably not both. My six wins were all match ups that I prepared for and understood in detail. In part because I took my losses early, my resistance led to my bubbling out on points.

In hindsight, my biggest mistake in series 2 was attending only one event. In the past I have struggled with dealing with sleep and mental fatigue at tournaments, and heading into the year, I did not want to attend events outside of my own time zone because of this reason. However, I have developed mechanisms to better care for myself at events, and I am confident that I could have at least gotten points at Orlando regional and OCIC had I attended. I simply did not know at the time whether those mechanisms would be effective and did not feel comfortable making the time and financial commitment to attend those events.

I also almost rage-booked Charlotte which was held two weeks after Vancouver, but ultimately decided against it as I did not feel that it was wise to make such a last minute decision. Hindsight is 20/20, but maybe it would have been better to attend anyway. I’m not sure. It is impossible to say for certain.

April 14-16: Europe International Championship (6-3, +0 CP)

After experiencing serious FOMO with OCIC, I decided to attend my first foreign IC in London.

Preparing for this event was an absolute nightmare. After the strenuous prep for Vancouver and dealing with the disappointment of my poor performance at that event, I felt that I needed to step away from the game for a few weeks to mentally reset. This meant that I only gave myself less than two weeks to learn Regulation C and to prepare for London, which would otherwise have been adequate, except for the fact that the team that I had been building really was not performing well at all. Despite leaving for London on a Tuesday, on the Sunday before, I made the difficult decision to bail on the team and start from square one. An already shortened training camp was shortened further to less than two days.

I decided to use Palance because it was an already established team that I felt I would be able to play. I used Gothitelle instead of Baxcalibur in part because I felt that the team needed speed control and I did not quite know what Baxcalibur was supposed to accomplish on the team. I also felt that Snarl Arcanine + double healing with Heal Pulse and Pollen Puff could be quite strong against players who did not know the correct response.

Given my horrendous prep, it was a borderline miracle that I went 6-3. Two of my losses were close and a third came against a player who was clearly far more prepared for the format than I was. However, in part because I lost round 1 for the third time this season, and because the tournament missed the kicker for T256 points, I once again walked away from a major event with 0 CP.

May 6-7: Portland Regional (11-4, Top 8, +100 CP)

I wrote about the individual tournament in greater detail here but will briefly recap how the tournament stood with my season as a whole.

EUIC was one of the worst prepared tournaments, however, because of real life stuff that I had to deal with immediately after returning home from London, my Portland prep was even worse. Heading into Portland, the only idea that I found promising in testing was Chi-Yu + Iron Bundle, but I had no concept of how to build an entire team with those two. I did have those two Pokemon on my initial plan for London but still did not know how to address all the problems that the team had. Because of this, I ran it back with the Palance four and mushed them together with Chi-Yu + Iron Bundle and hoped for the best. My plan for the tournament was to rely on my comfort with Chi-Yu / Iron Bundle / Flutter Mane whenever it seemed viable and depend on the established stability of Flutter Mane / Arcanine / Palafin / Amoonguss whenever I did not know the match up well enough. Some of the team decisions were poor, but this was at least some semblance of a gameplan. Despite the suspect prep, I inexplicably top cut the tournament and came away with 100 CP. It really was more than I could have realistically expected, but between London and Portland, I still only came away with a third of my invite.

June 10-11: Fresno Regional (5-4, +0 CP)

June 30-July 2: North America International Championship (6-3, T128, +100 CP)

This is the structure that I had been working on before London, but it was not until after Portland that I learned what the sets needed to be to make the team functional, and it took a while to prove that the team needed Indeedee instead of Amoonguss to have even a viable matchup versus Chien-Pao and priority attacks in general.

The Columbus version of the team did have slightly more polished sets, but the biggest reason why I bombed Fresno came down to a grave mistake that I made in team building: Indeedee’s set was Helping Hand + Light Screen when it really, really needed to be Trick Room + Imprison. I queued into two hard Trick Room teams at Fresno and lost badly. Because the team relied so much on high speed stats, it naturally had a terrible Trick Room match up, which is a flaw that I was aware of. Having Imprison made Trick Room a very positive match up. However, because Trick Room teams were relatively uncommon in Regulation C, the calculus that happened in my mind was that my team would be more effective if it had slightly more function with Helping Hand than if it had two moves that I likely was never going to click unless I ran into a very specific match up. This simply was not correct. Maybe with more meta game knowledge I would have learned that Trick Room was more common than I gave it credit for. Maybe if I managed my time better in training, I would have learned that Helping Hand simply did not help the team enough to justify not completely flipping the Trick Room match up. I am not sure if I had the knowhow before Fresno to make such a judgment call; all I can do now is to learn from that mistake and prevent it in the future, the mistake being that it is generally not worth it to sacrifice an entire match up for only a marginal gain, a marginal gain whose exact benefit I could not even accurately quantify. There were not specific positions or match ups where I knew I needed Helping Hand, which would have been a justifiable reason to having it. I only knew that it was slightly better in merely general situations.

I made the fix for Columbus and got rewarded when I faced a hard Trick Room team that I was very prepared for, but it was not enough as I only finished top 128 at NAIC when I needed top 32.

I could have also required less out of NAIC but hit a serious and unexplainable mental rut before Fresno that lasted until Columbus. It was not like San Diego where I probably worked myself too hard preparing for an event and reached burnout, it was not like London where I needed to learn a new format with not enough time, and it was not like Portland where I had unavoidable real-life factors that contributed to poor prep. For Fresno and Columbus, I thought I balanced the grind and rest well enough, but for one reason or another, I played unbelievably poorly in local tournaments from May-June and could not secure an important second PC win and started to really doubt myself. Many of my losses came down to tactical mistakes and missing details that should have been a formality, like remembering that I Protected on the previous turn and thus could not reliably Protect a second time. I largely turned it around mentally for Columbus, but still also responded poorly after a Rock Slide flinch when I was still in a winning position. In the past I have largely been good about managing composure to such things but could not do so with my season on the line.

Looking Back and Looking Forward

I am bummed that I missed my worlds invite, but honestly, I still have a lot to be proud of this season. Not having competed since 2018 presented a lot of challenges that I could not have known about and my only goal entering the season was to enjoy the game again and to challenge myself as much as possible. I gave myself a fighting chance up until the end. In the past I have also been quite a poor team builder and instead only built upon known ideas, but with the rotating formats, this was a less viable path to take. Trusting my intuition and challenging flaws in my skillset gave a great sense of fulfillment even when some decisions turned out to be mistakes. In particular, the struggle to finally find some comfort in regulation C after feeling confident in series 2 was a challenge that I am grateful for.

For next season, I likely will not be able to attend more events than I did this year, but a full season of locals should make up for a likely higher CP bar. For all the mistakes this season it was definitely the correct call to commit 100% to building teams that had characteristics that I valued, even if it meant I would never use a lot of Pokemon and ideas that were seemingly strong. I am a big proponent of the idea that players should use the team that they best know how to use, rather than the best teams in theory, and this theory is borne out by the successes of a lot of player and team combos this year. I also felt that I made the correct call in abandoning the GCs to quell burnout, even if it meant missing out on more chances to earn CP; straining myself to play them would likely only have meant that my in-person results would have been even worse.