Speed Control: Options and Analysis

Hey there Hat Lovers,

Today’s article is going to be a further discussion on Speed in the ORAS metagame. There are many things that aren’t 100% in Pokemon; you have inaccurate moves, flinch chances, critical hits and more. The best players look for ways to either give themselves consistently favourable RNG rolls, or avoid random chance altogether. The former is a discussion I briefly brought up a long while back in my article “The Blame Game.” Today I’m going to focus on an aspect of the latter: ways to avoid random chance altogether. And possibly the most predictable thing in Pokemon is not move accuracy, not flinches, not crits, not random burns or freezes, but Speed.

Why you should think about Speed

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From zero to hero: a Rotom-W story

Hey there Hat Lovers,

This past weekend was a back-to-back set of Premier Challenges in Vancouver, which means I wasn’t hosting them! And you know what that means? I got to play in them! A novel idea indeed. Taking the trip over was Max, myself and our new friend and NCPA UVic teammate Wesley, who showed up out of nowhere and Top 4’d the last Premier Challenge I hosted in Victoria. We left the night before to try and get a good night’s sleep before the event; this means staying up until 3am watching Pacific Rim while pining over team decisions.

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No Sleep Until Clear: Victoria Premiere Challenge Report

Hello Hat Lovers!

I played in two Premiere Challenges this weekend in Victoria. These were the first tournaments I’ve played in since switching to the new format, and my goal was to win at least one of the tournaments. I’ve had a team I’ve been testing for a while now and while it has done well in practise (winning an online Smogon tournament the day before) I decided I didn’t want use it and would rather build a team focusing on Pokemon I knew would be good against the local metagame. I knew which Vancouver players would show up and what they used in the past, as well as what the Victoria players would use.

Since this tournament took up my afternoon and I went out on Friday I ended up getting home at 1AM without knowing what I wanted to run. There were a couple threats I needed to prepare for. I knew Rushan had used a Trick Room team with Slowbro and Gastrodon so I wanted a Grass type to make that match-up easier. Murray was likely to have a rain team, so a Grass type would pay dividends in that matchup as well. Hongyu was the one player I didn’t know was coming, but I wouldn’t have known what he was running anyways.

Day 1

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Metagame Trends – Speed Tiers

Hey there Hat Lovers,

After writing my article “On Developing Speed Tiers Throughout a Metagame,” I figured I would re-visit the concept with a bit of an application article on how VGC 2015 Speed Tiers are shaping up. Today I’ll look at some defining Pokemon for VGC 2015, what speed control is in the format, and how to plan around those two in combination. The group at Nuggetbridge has once again provided an invaluable Speed Tier list courtesy of “Level 51,” so be sure to thank him for this discussion!

Defining Pokemon of VGC 2015

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Terrakion & Bisharp

Hello Hat Lovers!

Today I’m here to talk about Terrakion and Bisharp as partners on a team. I’ve been using both on a lot of teams in testing and found they compliment each other fairly well.

I’ve been seeing these two show up together on a lot of high profile player’s teams. Aaron “Cybertron” Zheng and CT Mikoto Mikasa both used these two on their team to win Premiere Challenges. Both players used these two along with their Mega Salamence + Redirection combo.

I’ve found that these two can fit on most teams (I wouldn’t expect them to go well on a Trick Room team) and often were my safe leads against teams that I didn’t know what I wanted to do against.

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