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On Developing Speed Tiers Throughout a Metagame

Hey there Hat Lovers!

Today, I’m going to discuss a topic I’ve been thinking a fair bit about lately. One of the most common frustrations I see from people trying to learn the game is understanding how people come up with complicated EV spreads. It really isn’t obvious where the EV spread  92 HP / 4 Def / 252 Atk / 4 SpDef / 156 Spe for Adamant Mega Charizard X comes from. I’ve contemplated writing an article about coming up with complicated EV spreads, but realized many of them are generated first by speed requirements. In order for someone to understand where those requirements come from, we need to use a metagame approach.

For a really helpful article on the many speeds Pokemon can reach, see Scott’s Speed Tier article on Nuggetbridge.com!

Outline

  1. Don’t think in EVs, think in stats

  2. Base Speed vs. Max Speed Stat

  3. Centralizing Pokemon or Speed Stats

  4. Example: Adamant Mega Charizard X

  5. The Evolving Metagame

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Premier Challenges and Local Metagaming

Hey there Hat Lovers,

Today I’m gonna chat a bit on the new Premier Challenge series. If you’re looking for a travel stipend and/or invite to Worlds, these are going to be very important. First, what are they?

The Premier Challenge series are local tournaments. They have a first place payout of 40 CP (that’s like adding a Top 16 at Regionals to your CP) and a best finish limit of 5, meaning you can get an additional 200 CP from these local events. For more details on how this will work, check out the Nuggetbridge article on the VGC 2015 Championship Structure.

As this is the first attempt to expand the VGC tournament series to a lower-than-Regionals level of play (outside of online competitions), there’s a lot to be excited about! There are also going to be hiccoughs along the way, and today I’m planning to outline what this tournament series is going to add to our season, what you can do to help it grow, and how you can approach it from event to event.

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VGC With Hats moves to WordPress

Hello Hat Lovers!

As you may have noticed, we’ve moved from Blogger to WordPress. We’ve kept the same domain name so all of your bookmarks to our blog should still work. We’ll also be leaving the blogger version up, but we won’t be posting any new content there.

In addition to changing the blog’s site, we’re also planning for the new season. We’re going to have a new PC system for the 2015 season and we’ll be adding Pokemon as we use them. When tournament reports start coming in we’ll put the spreads from these tournaments on the PC as well. We’re also going to do tutorials that we can point people to when they don’t know what they’re doing. With ORAS on the horizon there’ll be a lot of in-game mini guides.

Welcome to the new site!

Max and Mark

25 Things We Learned at US Nats

Hey there Hat Lovers,

We just flew back from Indy, and BOY are our arms tired. What a Nats trip it was, and man did we ever learn a lot. But keeping it short, here are 25 things we learned at US Nats.

  1. Frustration Kangaskhan is definitively better
  2. Using Transform Smeargle? Breed for HP Ice
  3. Fried Pickles are incredibly disappointing
  4. Trick Rotom-H@Flame Orb is the secret play against LumChomp
  5. Stempe is too strong at Pokermon
  6. Alex Ogloza is too strong period
  7. Speaking of which, who needs Protect?
  8. Life Orb Aegislash #TheWayOfTheFuture
  9. Zapdos > Talonflame
  10. Talonflame > the meta
  11. Baseball signs… brilliant
  12. Crawdaunt is a spy, even if he doesn’t know it
  13. Hey… genuine shout-out to Pokemon for running a very smooth, very enjoyable tournament! They can do that.
  14. Don’t stay at the train hotel
  15. Noodles and Co. is legit
  16. Free samples are everywhere in the food court, which is just so bizarre
  17. Choice Specs HP Fire Greninja next to Skill Swap Technician Smeargle@Choice Scarf is the plan
  18. That still doesn’t get the guaranteed OHKO on Ray’s Careful M-Mawile
  19. Don’t give the guy without cell reception the job of texting people
  20. Choice Scarf Heal Pulse Gothitelle + Final Gambit Staraptor
  21. Juniors were born after Swellow was created
  22. Dealing random Pokemon cards can be made into a variety of games
  23. Torkoal: on Ray’s 2013 Worlds team, made T4 Juniors US Nats. On to something?
  24. NOT WITH BOAT AROUND
  25. There are other places where it’s always Friday