Hello Hat Lovers!

With VGC 2015 coming to a close I decided to take a look back at my 2015 season. I’ll be looking at all the teams I played throughout the year.

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Hello hat lovers!

With the calendar year winding to a close and no events scheduled for December, we decided to look back on the winning teams from BC Premier Challenges in 2015. Usage stats are at the end, and to no one’s surprise, BC truly did have a surplus of Politoed and Togekiss winning teams.

01/03/2015 – Randy Kwa

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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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Hello hat lovers!

With this series of PCs likely over for me for the rest of the calendar year I decided to post the teams I’ve used so far this season. I cut 6/8 of the PCs I attended and currently have a BFL of 1/1/4/4/4/4. It could definitely be better given how I lost some of my games in top cut, but overall, I’m happy with my results so far. I’m looking to cut out the top 4s in future PCs.

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Hello hat lovers!

This past weekend I won my second PC of the season, doubling my total from last year already. I had very little practice with this team: I started testing the archetype two to three weeks ago and really liked it, but haven’t used it until the PC itself. I threw the team together the night and morning before the tournament because I wanted to try something other than Gardevoir, and I figured I could at least get carried by having good matchups. I noticed that locally, Charizard and Salamence were the most popular megas, and I assessed that Salamence / Rhyperior / Cresselia had a good matchup versus those teams. Unfortunately, Rushan and Hao, two people that use Charizard, were instead using different teams during the tournament. Hao wanted to use Gardevoir instead and Rushan forgot to bring his 3DS so he instead borrowed my Metagross rain team. Thankfully I never played Rushan because that team has an excellent matchup versus mine, and it would have just been cruel fate to lose to my own team.

Making last minute team decisions is a cardinal sin for me but I couldn’t get myself to keep using the same team when there are other options that I genuinely like, and I ended up getting incredibly lucky that this led to a win.

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