Hello hat lovers!

We have decided to greatly exceed our quota by posting a second time in 2025. This is a brief guide on the top teams that have populated grassroots tours and the ladder, Showdown ladder of course because we do not have an in game ladder because Big Pikachu wasn’t feeling very festive, including notes about variations of these archetypes. Sample pastes are provided to practice with or against, as well as a very brief overview of how each team functions. In some cases, some players who placed highly at major tournaments with these archetypes have also released their pastes publicly, which will be provided when available. These teams are what I would consider to be the teams that you should be most familiar with when preparing for this format, at least at present.

A quick note on the sample pastes: a lot of these sets are recreations, either by me, taken from other publicly available teams, or from other players who have provided similar guides online. I wish I could credit every single person who contributed those spreads, but I placed them in a personal compendium, and the pastes from this post were taken from that compendium, with the original source often being lost in the process. Just know that if you have publicly provided guides that were well informed, I have probably seen it, and those ideas may have made their way into this post as well. Thank you all for the work that you do, truly! 🫡

The F in Regulation F Stands for Fake Out Fake Out Fake Out Parting Shot U-turn Protect Fake Out Fake Out Fake Out

Japan Balance (sample paste)

Stefano Greppi VR (sample paste)

These two teams are what have defined Reg F: Incineroar, Urshifu Rapid Strike, Rillaboom to form a Fire/Water/Grass core, standing with the Reg F boogeyman in Calm Mind Raging Bolt. Chien-Pao and Landorus-I as the last two is a team known as Japan Balance, once seen as the top threat in this format. This team, however, has declined in popularity lately as players have instead mostly preferred a version with Ogerpon Hearthflame over Chien-Pao, the version that won the first large grassroots tournament in Reg F 2.0. This team is boring, soulless, and is the VGC equivalent of unseasoned chicken, but might forever remain the biggest threat of this format.

Other Variations:
After the Fire/Water/Grass + Bolt core, any two of Landorus-I, Chien-Pao, Flutter Mane, Amoonguss, Ogerpon Hearthflame could realistically round them out to form a team, with Hearthflame sometimes outright replacing either Incineroar or Rillaboom.

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This is my personal tier list of the restricteds as we return to Regulation G. Though results and other people’s opinions were considered, this is largely based on my own opinions of each Pokemon’s viability.

The Pokemon are ranked within the tiers, and lazily done so after Necrozma Dawn Wings. The blurbs for each Pokemon below I think are more important to take into account than the ranking itself. I assessed the strengths and weaknesses of each Pokemon, and others may weigh those characteristics differently which can change the order of their rankings, and some of those characteristics may be more or less important as the metagame cycles.

As far as how actionable this list might be, I think everything down to Koraidon is perfectly defensible to use at majors, and their common teams are definitely worth spending time to prepare against. The Niche Threats I think can be used if you can truly and honestly see the narrow opening that would allow them to be successful, and while I think you should still also prepare against them for majors if you have the time, you will likely be able to get away with simply winging gameplans against them, if you even get paired versus them to begin with. All the Pokemon below Dawn Wings are for content creation and for meming at locals only.

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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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Hello hat lovers!

This season I decided to fully compete again despite stepping away from the game part way through 2018 and basically not playing at all in 2019 and during Sword & Shield. Despite my best efforts, I missed my worlds invite, but will detail the challenges I faced and mistakes I made in order to learn from them in the future.

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Hello Hat Lovers,

We’re back! After eight years since attending my first one, I finally top cut a regional. This is the report of my team building process, the final product, and my tournament run.

Teambuilding

Given that I was not able to prep for Portland very well after returning from EUIC three weeks prior, I decided to use some variant of Palance for this regional  (Flutter Mane / Amoonguss / Arcanine / Palafin). Palance is a stable team that rarely gives away big advantages per turn, and while it also often only creates incremental progress, I figured that a team like this would give me the best chance of success. I figured that because of my poor prep, Palance could allow me to simply outplay my opponent even if I did lack understanding of the meta game and match ups. I also had some understanding of the archetype given it is what I used at London, and the fact that it was such an established core meant that I did not have to prove to myself with practice that the team could succeed.

I used Ting-Lu and Gothitelle as the last two at EUIC and I tested the most vanilla version of the team with Baxcalibur over Gothitelle, but did not feel either version suited what I wanted to accomplish with the team. Gothitelle felt like a sidegrade rather than something that improved match ups, and I did not want to use Baxcalibur as I felt people would know the match up far better than I did. Despite its success, the Baxcalibur version also felt like it could be something that people could overprepare for. 

After testing different ideas and Lexar Dondozo, Chi-Yu + Iron Bundle was the only duo that I resonated with and thought would be unlikely to be overprepared for, but I had no idea how to build around it. I found Dondozo too difficult to use. I figured that it would probably be okay to mush Chi-Yu + Iron Bundle together with Palance even if doing so meant that I had two Fire types and two Water types. Despite this, I second guessed bringing Baxcalibur + Palance and only submitted my teamlist on the car ride to Portland. I decided that the process that lead to committing to Palance + Chi-Yu + Iron Bundle gave me a better chance to succeed than the reasoning to use Baxcalibur, even if the Baxcalibur version was a more established team.

Iron Bundle generally has a positive match up versus opposing Palance, which was suggested to me as an important goal to meet when deciding one of the last slots on Palance. The combination of Iron Bundle + Chi-Yu also gave me an abundance of options to break Amoonguss, which I felt was the backbone of Palance’s stability. This team did have structural issues when I wanted to bring Palafin, though. Palafin was awkward when I brought it without Arcanine and Amoonguss because Iron Bundle and Chi-Yu are difficult Pokemon to switch in. My general game plan for the tournament was to bring Palance whenever I was unfamiliar with the match up, and to bring Iron Bundle + Chi-Yu if I faced Palance. This plan did not work as intended at all as I only brought Palance to one set and somehow did not face opposing Palance, but the team performed well anyway.

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