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VGC 2016 Worlds Information Announced

Hey there Hat Lovers,

Pokemon.com just put up the 2016 Worlds information! I wrote about the new Play! Pokemon format and what we might expect a Worlds CP bar to be set at back when the new Championship Points structure was announced. Well, we now know that bar, and holy moly is it low. Way lower than I expected, even granting the possibility that they’d lower it significantly. The 2016 World Championships CP bar for the Masters division is 350 CP. Given how accessible CP are now, with the introduction of Midseason Showdowns, and an increase in the CP payout, it’s incredible that they’ve lowered the bar this much. I’ll be talking about the US and Canada for the rest of the article, but the details for other regions can be found in that Pokemon.com link.

What does this mean for the players? (more…)

VGC 2016: A look at what’s in the format

This article is literally just a collection of images from Bulbapedia to better visualize Pokemon that have been added to the format. If you’re like me, you’re not at all used to using Legendaries, and you have little idea of what some of their competitive niches are (especially for Doubles). So hopefully this wall of sprites can help you team-build by reminding you what is in the format, and what you’ll have to watch out for. The idea for this post comes from our VGC cube draft deck.

For some great insight into these new legendaries check out this Pokemon.com post announcing the new ruleset, and going over some of the strengths and weaknesses of these legendaries.

This post will be a work in progress and I’ll update this randomly whenever I’m team-building and trying to prepare for changes in the format. I’ll be adding relevant Mega evolutions and top Pokemon as they’re brought up in conversation. With these legendaries roaming about, I’d imagine some viable Pokemon will be hoisted into the limelight as great checks/counters to the centralizing power of the new legendary-based teams.

New legendaries

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Steeling into Cut – a Belated Top 8 US (and Canadian) Nationals Report

Hello Hat Lovers!
Hayden McTavish here, new recruit for the VGC With Hats crew. I recently (well, recently when I started writing this report) made top 8 at US nationals, losing to fellow VGC With Hats member Raphael Bagara in top cut. What’s more interesting than how I did, though, was the team itself. It had some fascinating quirks in it, ones I think (because the team did do well) may warrant further examination. That said, I don’t want to present this team as a finished solution – I felt it had some dubious choices and there are definite areas for improvement. The Thundurus matchup in particular is less than ideal, and I had issues playing against Japan sand sometimes, if only because I need to make effective hard reads against salamence/tyranitar leads and it’s difficult to maneuver around bulky water + Aegislash. (actually I got some laughs when I told people I brought a Japan-sand weak team to nats, and while it likely was a poor meta call I don’t believe the matchup was altogether terrible, and the comfort factor of running this team far trumped that issue as I was pretty comfortable in the large majority of my other matchups)

But enough about the team’s flaws! here it is, with ev spreads bolded since they’re the only information players couldn’t have already accessed on pokemon.com:

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