Author: Starmetroid

Gravity Let Me Down: Starmetroid’s Worlds 2015 Report

Hello Hat Lovers!

I’m back from Boston where I played in the world championships. I’ll be looking at the team I played and how I ended up playing it, as well as how my matches went during the event.

Team Building After Spring Regionals:

I did commentary for the first three rounds of the Utah Premiere Challenge before Utah Regionals. One of the teams I saw used Mega Sableye, and it seemed like a fun team. One team with Mega Sableye also made top cut during Spring Regionals. After seeing this I was interested in making a team with Mega Sableye. At this point I had maxed out on Premiere Challenges and decided to play joke teams for the last two in Victoria. I brought Sableye to the first of these Premiere Challenges and I made top 4 with it (much better than the Mega Beedrill team I used the next day). Here is what I had on the team:

(more…)

US Nationals Report

Hello Hat Lovers!

Today I’m going to talk about the team I brought to Nationals. I was hoping to fill the front page with Nationals reports from more successful players but Rapha’s Nationals report is going on Nugget Bridge (sellout) and our new unannounced author hasn’t finished their report yet.

Before Nationals I wanted a new team. I didn’t think rain was going to be a good metagame choice for Nationals. I was very comfortable with Salamence & Aegislash and knew I wanted both on my team. I tested a couple different ideas but never found anything I really liked. About a week before Nationals I decided to play the same team I used at Regionals. Because Heatran was increasing in popularity I figured rain would be good. My attitude was that Nationals was going to be a free vacation and if I could make day two than that would be another free vacation at worlds.

(more…)

VGC Cube Drafting

Hello Hat Lovers!

Mark and I have been working on a VGC draft format over the last year, and recently we held our first draft tournament.

Last year before Nationals I built a deck of TCG cards that featured all the common Pokemon from the VGC 2014 metagame. At Nationals I would hand out six random cards to people and tell them that was their team. We would look at what everyone got and see who had the most legitimate looking team to try and play with.

We later tried to make a game out of this where everyone is given their team at random and everyone tries to argue why their team is better than the rest. These attempts often collapsed into a black hole of biased theory-mon and didn’t end up being satisfying. The was no accounting for player skill or RNG so it was impossible to determine which team would win. We decided that the only way to salvage this game was to make the players make their team after getting the cards and actually playing a game.

At long last we finally made a format for VGC drafting. Here are the steps for drafting:

  • Gather all players in a circle and give them each eight random cards from the deck
  • Each player takes one card for themselves and passes the remaining cards to the player on the left
  • Repeat the last step with the cards passed to you until everyone has eight cards
  • Every player is given twenty minutes to build their team on Showdown using the six of the eight Pokemon they drafted.

As an example of what you can expect, here’s what I drafted:

(more…)