Author: crawdaunt

Complicated EV Spreads: Bulking Up!

Hey there Hat Lovers,

Today will be a follow-up to my “On developing Speed tiers throughout a metagame” article. This time around, I’ll be looking at examples of Pokemon that don’t set the speed bar first, and instead are interested in surviving important attacks. Specifically, I’ll talk about how players recognize what attacks are important, how that relates to the purpose of a Pokemon, and common themes amongst Pokemon that invest in bulk over maximizing their attack stat. My goal is to help players cue in on what they’ll need to prepare for in a developing metagame, and how they can go about doing that!

Table of contents

  1. What’s the real threat?
  2. What does your Pokemon do (and how can you help it fill that role)?
  3. What kinds of Pokemon use complicated spreads?
  4. In Conclusion

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On Developing Speed Tiers Throughout a Metagame

Hey there Hat Lovers!

Today, I’m going to discuss a topic I’ve been thinking a fair bit about lately. One of the most common frustrations I see from people trying to learn the game is understanding how people come up with complicated EV spreads. It really isn’t obvious where the EV spread  92 HP / 4 Def / 252 Atk / 4 SpDef / 156 Spe for Adamant Mega Charizard X comes from. I’ve contemplated writing an article about coming up with complicated EV spreads, but realized many of them are generated first by speed requirements. In order for someone to understand where those requirements come from, we need to use a metagame approach.

For a really helpful article on the many speeds Pokemon can reach, see Scott’s Speed Tier article on Nuggetbridge.com!

Outline

  1. Don’t think in EVs, think in stats

  2. Base Speed vs. Max Speed Stat

  3. Centralizing Pokemon or Speed Stats

  4. Example: Adamant Mega Charizard X

  5. The Evolving Metagame

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Tickling to the Top – 1st Place Report

Hey there Hat Lovers,

This past weekend Vancouver held a couple VGC Premier Challenges back to back. It was great to see strong attendance at both, warranting 6 rounds of swiss and a Top 8 cut on both days. We had a very large crew from Victoria come out for the events (which I was kind of surprised at, and quite excited to see)! Not only that, but over the two days, everyone from Victoria came out with a good showing. How awesome! As the title of this report implies, I even managed to win one of the tournaments! So today, I’ll talk a bit about the team-building process, introduce the team, and go through my tournament experiences.

The Team

I had been playing around with this team for a couple weeks before the tournament. It started out by playing with Se Jun’s 2014 World Championship team. I’d never figured out Gothitelle before, but given that it’s won the World Championships twice now (2011 and 2014), I wanted to get a feel for how it played and how to play against it. Though most experiences where you try out someone’s team don’t work well off the bat, something about Se Jun’s team clicked with me. My only problem was really figuring out when I wanted to bring Pachirisu, as I felt Gothitelle could work in most games. Also, I just hated using talonflame and watching it kill itself whenever I wanted to Brave Bird. It was fun, but didn’t really fit my style, so I decided to rebuild it around my newfound love for Gothitelle.

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Premier Challenges and Local Metagaming

Hey there Hat Lovers,

Today I’m gonna chat a bit on the new Premier Challenge series. If you’re looking for a travel stipend and/or invite to Worlds, these are going to be very important. First, what are they?

The Premier Challenge series are local tournaments. They have a first place payout of 40 CP (that’s like adding a Top 16 at Regionals to your CP) and a best finish limit of 5, meaning you can get an additional 200 CP from these local events. For more details on how this will work, check out the Nuggetbridge article on the VGC 2015 Championship Structure.

As this is the first attempt to expand the VGC tournament series to a lower-than-Regionals level of play (outside of online competitions), there’s a lot to be excited about! There are also going to be hiccoughs along the way, and today I’m planning to outline what this tournament series is going to add to our season, what you can do to help it grow, and how you can approach it from event to event.

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