Author: Starmetroid

All This Yelling Is Making My Throat Sore: Spring Regionals Report

Hello Hat Lovers!

Today I’m going to show the team I used to get 7th place in Washington Regionals and 2nd in Utah Regionals. Mark also took 2nd at Washington Regionals with this team (be on the lookout for his report on Nugget Bridge). Originally we were only going to Washington but once the Nationals Stipends were announced we decided to fly to Utah to give us a better chance of earning a stipend.

Going into Regionals I didn’t know what I wanted to play. My goal for Washington and Utah was to get enough points to earn a travel award to Nationals and to get a Worlds invite without needing points from Nationals. Getting two top 16 finishes be good enough so I decided I needed a team that would be able to go X-1 in Swiss reliably.

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3 Reasons Why Mixed Blaziken Is Better Than Physical Blaziken

Hello Hat Lovers!

Last time Mark looked at why Milotic isn’t a very good Pokemon despite looking good on paper. Today I’m going to talk about why physical Blaziken is a bad set and why mixed Blaziken is superior. Think of this as a public service announcement to help educate those using non-mixed Blaziken.

Physical Blaziken is something I see players use at the lower ranks on Battle Spot and Showdown. These teams make for easy wins because they’re easy to counter. You can use physical Blaziken and have a decent win ratio as you stomp on the scrubs while dropping matches against more experienced players. The problem is that when you get to higher levels of play your opponents will be able to handle Blaziken and put the chicken down.

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Premiere Challenge Update

Hello Hat Lovers!

I won my fifth Premiere Challenge last weekend. The tournament only had 6 masters so this post is more of an update then an report.

I played the same team that I used for the last PC:

The only changes I made were replacing Meteor Mash with Iron Head on Metagross and getting better IVs on my Politoed and Terrakion (0 attack on Politoed and 31 HP on Terrakion). As with the last PC I knew that this team would be good against the Victoria metagame.

I want to take a moment to talk about how ridiculous 6 person tournaments are. If a 6 person tournament doesn’t sound prestigious you don’t know the half of it. Of the 3 rounds we played I got paired down twice and didn’t face the players that got second and third. The player I faced in the last round got fifth place and was one more critical hit (from a Leaf Blade no less) away from beating me and winning the tournament.

This brings me up to 300 CP. Since I’ve maxed out my best finish limit at PCs I can now go full NFG for the rest of the Premiere Challenges this season. I’ve had a lot of team ideas that are probably really bad that I’ve been ignoring until now.

~Max

Dropping Raindrops & Rocks: 1st Place Premiere Challenge Report

Hello Hat Lovers!

I played in another Premiere Challenge in Victoria this weekend. I didn’t expect to see many faces from Vancouver, but we got a couple players come over to play. I needed to reach the finals in order to get CP from this event and I needed to win in order really make it worth it.

The Team:

After the last set of Premiere Challenges in Victoria I decided I want my team to be ready for each event before the day of the actual event so I decided on my team two days in advance and assembled it the night before. I decided I wanted to use Terrakion and Thundurus as I could stack the odds in my favour with Rock Slide and Thunder Wave. Thundurus can also use Swagger on Terrakion to power it up, which is an idea I’ve been wanting to use all season but never made a team to do it with.

Me and Mark originally had Rotom-W and Weavile on this team. I found that these two Pokemon weren’t working out as well as I would’ve liked so I dropped them and added the rain duo to help out against Pokemon like Terrakion, Landorus and Heatran.

The team was stacked with fast Pokemon, but every member of the team had a respectable amount of bulk. When Terrakion’s 91/90/90 defences make it the frailest Pokemon on the team you’re doing something right.

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The Dream: 4th Place Premiere Challenge Team Analysis

Hello Hat Lovers!

Last weekend all of us at VGC w/Hats played in a pair of Premiere Challenges in Vancouver. Since improving my best finish limit was difficult I was looking at test out a new team we came up with. The week before the Premiere Challenge Mark faced a team on Pokemon Showdown using Mega Gengar and Whimsicott with Fake Tears. Mark won the battle handily but was intrigued by the idea. He sent me a message about wanting to build a team around the duo. A few minutes later I came up with a draft that seemed promising.

I started with M-Gengar, Whimsicott, Terrakion, M-Salamence, Suicune and Thundurus-T. Salamence was quickly scrapped as the only reason for using it was to have an alternate mega evolution. We tried out Charizard for a bit but then decided it didn’t help against the Pokemon Gengar had trouble with. We then decided on using Metagross as it could function without mega evolving.

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