Hello Hat Lovers!
Today it was announced that US Nationals will have best-of-3 matches for day one swiss. In the past Bo3 play has been reserved for top cut, as well as day 2 of Nationals and Worlds swiss. Making note of the change is very important as it changes what kind of game we’re playing on day 1.
Hello Hat Lovers!
Mark and I have been working on a VGC draft format over the last year, and recently we held our first draft tournament.
Last year before Nationals I built a deck of TCG cards that featured all the common Pokemon from the VGC 2014 metagame. At Nationals I would hand out six random cards to people and tell them that was their team. We would look at what everyone got and see who had the most legitimate looking team to try and play with.
We later tried to make a game out of this where everyone is given their team at random and everyone tries to argue why their team is better than the rest. These attempts often collapsed into a black hole of biased theory-mon and didn’t end up being satisfying. The was no accounting for player skill or RNG so it was impossible to determine which team would win. We decided that the only way to salvage this game was to make the players make their team after getting the cards and actually playing a game.
At long last we finally made a format for VGC drafting. Here are the steps for drafting:
As an example of what you can expect, here’s what I drafted:
Hello Hat Lovers!
Nugget Bridge has compiled a list of teams that made top cut in the Spring Regionals (you can find that list here). I took a tally of how often each Pokemon showed up on a top cut team (Click here to view the list) and I’m going to look at this data and see what it says about the metagame heading into Nationals.
Hey there Hat Lovers,
Many players bemoan the low-attendance Premier Challenges (PCs), Premier Challenge distribution, and how easy Championship Points are to get in certain areas relative to others. I wanted to know just how common low-attendance events were, which areas had better access to PCs, and what the trends in attendance looked like as the season progressed.
Today’s article is going to go over how the Premier Challenge system has gone since its introduction in the pilot series back in April-June 2014. Since then, we’ve had three more Premier Challenge series, the Kickoff Series, the Alpha Series, and the Omega Series. The dataset I’ve compiled comes from organizer reports of attendance in each series, and is not a complete dataset but just a representative sample. That said, my numbers aren’t too shabby; I have tallied attendances from 306 PCs worldwide, with 200 being from Canada and the USA.
What I’ve done is compared the series to each other within Canada and the USA, and characterized what attendances looked like within each series. I will look at the distribution of states reporting events, and also the trends in attendance, how the Junior/Senior attendances stack up, and what attendances in other countries look like. So without further ado, let’s dive in!
Howdy hat lovers!
I recently visited Victoria for the last two BC Premier Challenges of the season to pick any CP that I can. I chose not to use my Metagross team because I had honestly gotten bored with it, so instead, my friend OneTrueKing gave me the team he used to reach top 3 in the world on BattleSpot. I thought the team was straight forward enough that I could learn quickly on how to use it.
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VGC with Hats 