Month: September 2014

Tickling to the Top – 1st Place Report

Hey there Hat Lovers,

This past weekend Vancouver held a couple VGC Premier Challenges back to back. It was great to see strong attendance at both, warranting 6 rounds of swiss and a Top 8 cut on both days. We had a very large crew from Victoria come out for the events (which I was kind of surprised at, and quite excited to see)! Not only that, but over the two days, everyone from Victoria came out with a good showing. How awesome! As the title of this report implies, I even managed to win one of the tournaments! So today, I’ll talk a bit about the team-building process, introduce the team, and go through my tournament experiences.

The Team

I had been playing around with this team for a couple weeks before the tournament. It started out by playing with Se Jun’s 2014 World Championship team. I’d never figured out Gothitelle before, but given that it’s won the World Championships twice now (2011 and 2014), I wanted to get a feel for how it played and how to play against it. Though most experiences where you try out someone’s team don’t work well off the bat, something about Se Jun’s team clicked with me. My only problem was really figuring out when I wanted to bring Pachirisu, as I felt Gothitelle could work in most games. Also, I just hated using talonflame and watching it kill itself whenever I wanted to Brave Bird. It was fun, but didn’t really fit my style, so I decided to rebuild it around my newfound love for Gothitelle.

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Premier Challenges and Local Metagaming

Hey there Hat Lovers,

Today I’m gonna chat a bit on the new Premier Challenge series. If you’re looking for a travel stipend and/or invite to Worlds, these are going to be very important. First, what are they?

The Premier Challenge series are local tournaments. They have a first place payout of 40 CP (that’s like adding a Top 16 at Regionals to your CP) and a best finish limit of 5, meaning you can get an additional 200 CP from these local events. For more details on how this will work, check out the Nuggetbridge article on the VGC 2015 Championship Structure.

As this is the first attempt to expand the VGC tournament series to a lower-than-Regionals level of play (outside of online competitions), there’s a lot to be excited about! There are also going to be hiccoughs along the way, and today I’m planning to outline what this tournament series is going to add to our season, what you can do to help it grow, and how you can approach it from event to event.

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Raichu & Friends

Hello Hat Lovers!

Today I’m going to talk about Raichu and some partners that work well with it. Before generation six Raichu was a terrible Pokemon, however Raichu’s base speed was boosted to 110, putting it above all the base 100s and Garchomp. Tony Cheung used a Raichu to win Washington Regionals, and Barry Anderson used a Raichu to win the Nugget Bridge Invitational. I played around with Tony’s Raichu/Gengar team a bit after Washington Regionals, and after US Nationals I revisited the team with Kangaskhan as an alternate Mega as seen in the Umbreon Team. I found that the Gengar side of the team wasn’t performing as well as the Raichu + setup side so I focused the team exclusively on having Raichu supporting an attacker. Over time I’ve been changing up what I was using on the team, but the theme to my teams has always been Raichu & Friends.

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VGC With Hats moves to WordPress

Hello Hat Lovers!

As you may have noticed, we’ve moved from Blogger to WordPress. We’ve kept the same domain name so all of your bookmarks to our blog should still work. We’ll also be leaving the blogger version up, but we won’t be posting any new content there.

In addition to changing the blog’s site, we’re also planning for the new season. We’re going to have a new PC system for the 2015 season and we’ll be adding Pokemon as we use them. When tournament reports start coming in we’ll put the spreads from these tournaments on the PC as well. We’re also going to do tutorials that we can point people to when they don’t know what they’re doing. With ORAS on the horizon there’ll be a lot of in-game mini guides.

Welcome to the new site!

Max and Mark