Hey there Hat Lovers,

This past weekend was a back-to-back set of Premier Challenges in Vancouver, which means I wasn’t hosting them! And you know what that means? I got to play in them! A novel idea indeed. Taking the trip over was Max, myself and our new friend and NCPA UVic teammate Wesley, who showed up out of nowhere and Top 4’d the last Premier Challenge I hosted in Victoria. We left the night before to try and get a good night’s sleep before the event; this means staying up until 3am watching Pacific Rim while pining over team decisions.

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Hello Hat Lovers!

I played in two Premiere Challenges this weekend in Victoria. These were the first tournaments I’ve played in since switching to the new format, and my goal was to win at least one of the tournaments. I’ve had a team I’ve been testing for a while now and while it has done well in practise (winning an online Smogon tournament the day before) I decided I didn’t want use it and would rather build a team focusing on Pokemon I knew would be good against the local metagame. I knew which Vancouver players would show up and what they used in the past, as well as what the Victoria players would use.

Since this tournament took up my afternoon and I went out on Friday I ended up getting home at 1AM without knowing what I wanted to run. There were a couple threats I needed to prepare for. I knew Rushan had used a Trick Room team with Slowbro and Gastrodon so I wanted a Grass type to make that match-up easier. Murray was likely to have a rain team, so a Grass type would pay dividends in that matchup as well. Hongyu was the one player I didn’t know was coming, but I wouldn’t have known what he was running anyways.

Day 1

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Hello Hat Lovers!

I attended two Premiere Challenges in Victoria last weekend. Being in Victoria, these Premiere Challenges wouldn’t have as many players as the Vancouver PCs. On top of this I’m friends with everyone that was going so I knew everyone in Victoria and everyone that was making the trip from Vancouver. Because of this I had a good idea of what I was going to face.

Since I won the last Premiere Challenge in Vancouver and posted my team I was a little worried that someone would try and counter-team me. I hadn’t been playing much in the weeks between the events so I decided to stick with what I was confident in and change one of my Pokemon to deal with the local metagame.

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Hello Hat Lovers!

This weekend I replicated Mark’s success and won a Premiere Challenge in Vancouver. The tournament was happening at the same venue as TCG BC Regionals was, so I got to see Trevore, Chase and Josh while I was there. They’re still scrubbing up playing TCG, Chase won in Masters and Josh made top 4 in Seniors. Our tournament was supposed to start at 3PM once the Juniors were finished but they took much longer than expected and we ended up starting around 6 PM.

The team I used started out as the Raichu team seen before on VGC w/Hats, and has changed over to become what it is. I’ve been shaping this team for a few months now.This is a stark contrast between Mark, whom has been making his teams sometime between 3AM and when the tournament starts. I’ve been yo-yoing in the 1400-1600 range on Showdown as I’ve been testing changes and new party members. I realized that Showdown wasn’t a reliable indication of how I would do as I was facing the same players over and over again so the view of the metagame I was getting was biased. On top of that most of the best players in BC aren’t playing by the (current) metagame. I had a rough matchup against Tyranitar so I was hoping that I wouldn’t face very many. I tried a lot of different members on the team to deal with Tyranitar and while I don’t think I’ve managed to make the team favourable against it I gave the team enough outs to be able to defeat it.

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