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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