Hello hat lovers!

I was originally not planning to write a post on worlds given how poorly I did, but I figured it might be good to still do one, except more as a reflection on the experience than an actual report. I may or may not have also been encouraged by Mark to write this, but I think he just likes torturing me by making me look up an article picture for Gardevoir, given that this is now the third Gardevoir team I’ve posted here. I guess if there’s anything you can learn from a post where the author went 2-5 is that you really should not look up images of Gardevoir.

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Hey there Hat Lovers,

TPCi has announced the new Championship Points structure for the Video Game Championships circuit this year! There was a big discussion amongst the players on nuggetbridge.com, and TPCi listened and took their suggestions to heart. Here are some thoughts on all of the changes coming from someone who played the TCG, where the equivalent of Premier Challenges (Cities), Midseason Showdowns (States), Regionals and Nationals were part of the yearly circuit.

• What does the circuit look like?
• How important will these different tiers of tournaments be?
• What issues did we have last year, and have they been fixed?

The major changes to expect this season are less pressure to fill your Premier Challenge best finish limit (BFL) , and less pressure to attend/place at 3 Regional Championships. Why do I say this? Well…

p.s. I apoligize for the rambliness of this post. To aid with digestion, I’ve made bullet point lists at the start of each section to offer a “tl;dr” version of the article for those that just want to skim.

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Hey there Hat Lovers,

While I haven’t been playing all that much, I built a team that was meant to just cheese out a win by being surprising, while not being completely useless in Best of 3. The start to the team was to use Mamoswine, because Mamoswine is an amazing counter to Thundurus-I, and is a very good Pokemon to face Landorus-T with. The genies are the two strongest Pokemon in the metagame right now, and it seemed like a fun Pokemon to try. To pair with Mamoswine, I wanted an Earthquake partner, so I put our Salamence on the team because Salamence is amazing. After that, I wanted one more Earthquake partner, and something that could handle attacks Salamence and Mamoswine would take. While not perfect, I’ve really liked Randy’s scarfed Rotom-W, and felt it would work nicely as a DisQuake partner. I wanted an additional Discharge partner though, and that’s when I added Excadrill and Tyranitar because I already had a Rotom-W and Salamence, and felt like bluffing Japan Sand would work well. Amoonguss rounds out that core as well as it rounds out Japan Sand, so it just got slotted onto the team.

I’ve played with it a bit online and took the team to a local tournament and got 2nd, losing to Max in the finals. The team itself has answers far better than I expected it would, and I wish I had more time to play so I could iron out some kinks and get my game back on track, but I really won’t have the time in the next while so I thought I’d put up this somewhat unique team on VGC with Hats to fill the void leading up to Worlds. I mean… our new writer could finish his tournament report sometime and we could post that. But that’s crazy talk, right mc? 😛

The Team

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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.

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Man I love this .gif

Hey there Hat Lovers,

While I never check twitter, when an article gets as suddenly popular as “5 Reasons Why Milotic isn’t Bisharp,” it’s hard not to raise an eyebrow. There are some pretty inane comments it’s received, both on the site and on twitter. While the original tweeter and commenting crew later realized that the article was written in April, and thus not a current comment on Milotic, the wake of that negative press will take a couple days to cool off.

In the meantime, the attention has had me revisit the article. Looking at what I said back then and where Milotic sits now in the metagame, I was actually inspired to write a bit of extra discussion. (more…)