Hello Hat Lovers!

For those who may not know me, my name is Justin Burns and go by Spurrific online. I’ve been playing VGC since the fall of 2014 where I placed in the top 8 at the first regional I attended. For the rest of the 2015 season I never advanced that far in a big tournament, but I earned enough decent results to receive an invite to the World Championships in Boston, where Max added me to the VGC with Hats crew.

Following a 1-5 performance in Day 1 of the World Championships, I spent most of September trying to find a strong team I could play comfortably with. For a few weeks I was using Mega Gardevoir, but when October rolled around I had switched to trying out Kangaskhan.

The team was very standard, but it originally had some interesting quirks, such as Explosion Choice Band Landorus and Life Orb Thundurus. Although I dislike Choice Scarf Landorus, I switched my set to that because I felt like I was lacking in speed and needed a way to deal with faster threats I might see at regionals such as Weavile or Terrakion. The team was starting to win at a greater frequency, but I still felt like something was missing. I was keeping my options open during the week leading up to the Lancaster Regional, but ultimately I decided that I needed to take this team if I wanted to do well. After testing quite a bit and making some changes, here is what I came up with.

The Team

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Hello hat lovers! Rapha here.

If you are active on Twitter you may know of the recent arguments that have arisen regarding Dark Void, unquestionably everyone’s favorite aspect of VGC. If not, to recap, some people have called for the move to be banned whereas people on the other side of the issue see the clamoring as nothing other than a symptom of a lazy team builder.

On some level this is true, but I’m really not a fan of the cherry picked targeting towards the poorly thought out arguments made by a fraction of people that happen to share a common opinion, and using that as a way to dismiss the idea. Unfortunately with a platform like Twitter, the people who are best heard aren’t those with the most compelling arguments, but rather who shouts the loudest, which is unfortunate because there are valid reasons as to why VGC would benefit from a banning of Dark Void.

This is a problem: discussions should be about whether or not Dark Void is beneficial for the game, not whether or not those who want a change from the status quo should be labelled as idiots or if they’re actually worth listening to. There’s responsibility on both sides to keep this civil and actually informative, but it often devolves into wah-wah-wah on one hand and shaming on the other, and the targeting of the people on the extremes only escalates the problem.

I’m going to do my best here not to come across as being whiny, entitled, or misinformed about how to approach problems posed during team building. Admittedly, I have also not played the VGC 2016 format yet, and my opinion on Dark Void will be on how it affects the game as a whole, not how it pertains to this rule set specifically.

I would be in favor of a Dark Void ban – Just because I share an opinion with several of the whiny people you may have seen on Twitter it doesn’t mean I represent or advocate that approach to an issue. Dark Void has issues that extend beyond just the problems with a player, and I’ll do my best quell some anti-ban arguments.

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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…)