Hey there Hat Lovers,

While I haven’t been playing all that much, I built a team that was meant to just cheese out a win by being surprising, while not being completely useless in Best of 3. The start to the team was to use Mamoswine, because Mamoswine is an amazing counter to Thundurus-I, and is a very good Pokemon to face Landorus-T with. The genies are the two strongest Pokemon in the metagame right now, and it seemed like a fun Pokemon to try. To pair with Mamoswine, I wanted an Earthquake partner, so I put our Salamence on the team because Salamence is amazing. After that, I wanted one more Earthquake partner, and something that could handle attacks Salamence and Mamoswine would take. While not perfect, I’ve really liked Randy’s scarfed Rotom-W, and felt it would work nicely as a DisQuake partner. I wanted an additional Discharge partner though, and that’s when I added Excadrill and Tyranitar because I already had a Rotom-W and Salamence, and felt like bluffing Japan Sand would work well. Amoonguss rounds out that core as well as it rounds out Japan Sand, so it just got slotted onto the team.

I’ve played with it a bit online and took the team to a local tournament and got 2nd, losing to Max in the finals. The team itself has answers far better than I expected it would, and I wish I had more time to play so I could iron out some kinks and get my game back on track, but I really won’t have the time in the next while so I thought I’d put up this somewhat unique team on VGC with Hats to fill the void leading up to Worlds. I mean… our new writer could finish his tournament report sometime and we could post that. But that’s crazy talk, right mc? 😛

The Team

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Man I love this .gif

Hey there Hat Lovers,

While I never check twitter, when an article gets as suddenly popular as “5 Reasons Why Milotic isn’t Bisharp,” it’s hard not to raise an eyebrow. There are some pretty inane comments it’s received, both on the site and on twitter. While the original tweeter and commenting crew later realized that the article was written in April, and thus not a current comment on Milotic, the wake of that negative press will take a couple days to cool off.

In the meantime, the attention has had me revisit the article. Looking at what I said back then and where Milotic sits now in the metagame, I was actually inspired to write a bit of extra discussion. (more…)

Hey there Hat Lovers, Mark here.

This Canada Day, with US Nationals only 3 days away, I thought I’d write up a fun little preview article to showcase the Canadians with a good shot at a World’s invite this year. The following list is a both a Top 10, and a clean cutoff for anyone with a minimum of 180 CP; that means if anyone on this list gets a Top 16 at US Nats, they’ll have >380 CP, which is the projected cutoff for a Worlds invite.

So who are the Canucks to look out for at US Nationals? (more…)

Hey there Hat Lovers,

Today’s post is short and sweet. I just wanted to give a shout out to Epic Games and More in Victoria BC for holding their first Pokemon 3DS tournament this past weekend! Despite being a local grassroots tournament, we had an attendance of 15 players; that’s only 2 below our last Premier Challenge at the same location! Epic Games will be holding monthly tournaments from here on out, so if you’re looking to play in the off-season, Epic Games is the place to be!

Yesterday’s tournament had cash prizes for first and second, and store credit for T4; they also had a couple giveaways of Nintendo Kirby plushies!

Epic Games is also thinking about getting a Capture Card for future events, and wants to stream events on Twitch with commentators if available. But first, they need to see that Pokemon will be a consistent event worth streaming. It’d be awesome to see Victoria’s Pokemon community rival that of Vancouver’s. The EG crew are also interested in looking into becoming a sanctioned organizer through Pokemon so they can start hosting sanctioned events including Premier Challenges! So spread the word if you aren’t already!

As far as the VGC with Hats crew did: the tournament was in Best-of-3 format with Top Cut. Max was playing a hail team he’s been toying with and I played Hyper Mode. Max and I finished Swiss at 4-0 and 3-1 respectively to make cut. We ended up facing in Top 4 in another one of our usual terrible amazing coin flips skill-offs. After that, I faced Ben in the finals winning 2-1 and taking the tourney. Also congrats to Ben and Calli for making Top Cut (and Theo for bubbling)!

Overall, super stoked to have played in a Victoria tournament; this was the first Victoria VGC tournament that I didn’t host, and the first I’d ever played in that wasn’t just a small event I ran alongside Pokemon Club at the university. It felt extremely weird to be wished “good luck” as I left the door to go to the event, but I guess that’s a thing now!

Cheers,
Crawdaunt out

Hey there Hat Lovers,

Many players bemoan the low-attendance Premier Challenges (PCs), Premier Challenge distribution, and how easy Championship Points are to get in certain areas relative to others. I wanted to know just how common low-attendance events were, which areas had better access to PCs, and what the trends in attendance looked like as the season progressed.

Today’s article is going to go over how the Premier Challenge system has gone since its introduction in the pilot series back in April-June 2014. Since then, we’ve had three more Premier Challenge series, the Kickoff Series, the Alpha Series, and the Omega Series. The dataset I’ve compiled comes from organizer reports of attendance in each series, and is not a complete dataset but just a representative sample. That said, my numbers aren’t too shabby; I have tallied attendances from 306 PCs worldwide, with 200 being from Canada and the USA.

What I’ve done is compared the series to each other within Canada and the USA, and characterized what attendances looked like within each series. I will look at the distribution of states reporting events, and also the trends in attendance, how the Junior/Senior attendances stack up, and what attendances in other countries look like. So without further ado, let’s dive in!

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