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th3shinigami · 10 years

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Apex 2015 Pokemon OR/AS VGC 2015 Tournament Report

It’s been a while since I entered a tournament (December 2013 was my last offline tournament, June 2014 for online). I decided to enter apex for Smash Wii U, and realized they are also doing pokemon, so I joined that as well. That weekend was hectic. If you haven’t heard about what happened, here is a good article for you. http://www.redbull.com/us/en/esports/stories/1331702598722/apex-2015-the-tournament-that-almost-wasn-t tl;dr, the tournament had to move venues, lost the entirety of Friday, ended up cramming a 3 day tournament into 2 days. Still lots of fun though. As for this tournament report, I’ll talk only about my team building and the actual games I played. I’ll leave the smash and the weekend experience to another post.

For team building, I used the same process as my last tournament report, but this time was a little different because this was one of the first major tournaments with the new VGC 2015 rules that allowed the national dex (almost all the pokemon vs kalos dex only). There were 3 key factors for picking out my team:

What was good in vgc 2014

What I was comfortable playing

http://nuggetbridge.com/articles/an-early-vgc-2015-metagame-overview/

As a preface, I was not able to do any actual testing. It ended up all being number crunching and theory crafting. I started with what I know, and used that nugget bridge article to research some of the potential new things. From there, I pieced together a list of pokemon that I would consider, and started narrowing it down from there.

I started with heatran. I knew fairy type got stronger, with pixilate hyper voice from mega gardevoir and sylveon. I wanted either a strong fire or steel type, and I got both with heatran. He also lets me check talonflame and charizard-y, 2 very popular pokemon in vgc 2014.

From there, I kept with my old theory that intimidate is really strong, so I wanted an intimidator and someone that can counter it. I loved using milotic in singles, and it looked like a solid support that could deal decent damage with a competitive boost. As for the intimidator, 3 came to mind immediately: gyarados, salamence, and landorus-t. I first tried salamence, with mega salamence, but the special set was very underwhelming to me, and I didn’t like the dragon dance or mixed set, so that was axed. Then I went to gyarados, the mega, dragon dance, and bulky support. I felt that while I liked the dragon dance set here, the typing clashed with milotic, and I didn’t need another bulky support water type. Coming to landorus-t, it had a great move pool, excellent base atk, and can be run just like a choice scarf special salamence I used last time, except it had in my opinion a better typing and stronger move pool. Even though he would be weak to will-o-wisp and intimidate himself, since I would scarfing (of banding it) I would be switching out a lot so that doesn’t bother me.

Now for my mega slot. Like I said, I looked at gyarados and salamence, but did not like either. The other new one I tried was mega gardevoir. I felt that it was lacking in moves, and the defense was lack luster. My playstyle suited more bulky pokemon that hit hard, so I decided to stick with what I know well and go with kangaskhan.

Now I was looking for a support pokemon. I could go with my other old favorite with meowstic, but looking at the nugget bridge list, a new pkmn caught my interest: whimsicott. It had so many interesting moves available to it: taunt, encore, safeguard, tailwind, charm, along with not being affected by spore or rage powder, and he had a fairy typing.

Finally to round out my team, I wanted another hard hitting bulky pkmn. I really enjoyed my assault vest azumarill, and now it even got access to knock off. The other option was conkeldurr, but I felt that azumarill just had a better movepool and typing, and I was more familiar with it so I went with that.

Looking at the team though, there were some problems. 4 move slot syndrome really hurt whimsicott. I wanted like 5 moves, and in the end, I felt like late game he does nothing, whereas meowstic had quick guard to deal with priority, charm to weaken opponents, swagger for the confusion hax, and safe guard combo to power up my own pokemon. Whimsicott with taunt encore late game when the opponent is just trying to attack your guys doesn’t help. So I dropped him. Milotic also wasn’t carrying his weight. The competitive boost isn’t enough to get kos without some special attack investment, but if I did that, he wasn’t tanky enough on the physical side to take hits. The item options for him also didn’t mesh will with the sets (rock helmet with recover, sitrus berry, assault vest). So he had to go as well.

By dropping these 2, I lost a prankster taunt and tailwind, and a bulky water with anti-intimidate support. I still wanted a prankster taunt user to deal with spore/dark void/trick room/etc. and I still wanted tailwind or some kind of speed control so my bulky pkmn can invest in less speed and still get the attack off first. I replaced milotic with suicune. It gave me a bulky water with both tailwind and icy wind. I went with both options to avoid being countered by taunt. As for the prankster taunt user, I chose thundurus. The advantage of him over whimsicott is late game, he can hit with strong hp ice and thunderbolt. He also had prankster twave, so if suicune wasn’t in, I had another way of speed control.

The final change I made was switching azumarill to bisharp. I really wanted an intimidate counter, and liked that he had stab sucker punch, knock off, and iron head. Azumarill also ended up having 4 move slot syndrome, where I wanted aqua jet, play rough, waterfall, super power, knock off, and ice punch. Suicune already filled the bulky water slot nicely, and I wasn’t as worried about the dragons with ice beam/hp ice on suicune and thundurus. Looking back, this is definitely the spot that I could change back though.

So there is my team. Of note, I made some interesting ev/nature choices that made my guys more bulky and relied on speed control. I felt this was fine cause with 2 pkmn with reliable speed control methods, I felt I would be able to get at least 1 off to let my pkmn outspeed my opponents. My thundurus for example was modest with max hp and special atk evs. I didn’t need the speed to twave because I had prankster, or if my suicune set up tail wind, and the extra damage was a nice surprise to my opponents who just assumed it was full bulk.

Here is the tournament bracket. My handle is “ksu”: http://challonge.com/apexpkmn4

Game 1 vs sync

-landorus -thundurus -suicune -breloom hydregon mawile

Me: kanga suicune landorus bisharp PMYW-WWWW-WWX9-66QK I led kanga suicune to set up tailwind, as he set up his own. I used icy wind turn two to give myself the speed edge. The breloom gave me problems, as I needed to out speed him and get lucky on sleep turns. I got 2 turn 2 wakes, and that sealed it for me.

1-0

round 2 vs ryuzaki

-heatran -slowbro -terrakion -amongus kangaskhan togekiss

Me: thundurus kanga lando suicune EJJG-WWWW-WWX9-66S6 So this was just bad by me. I honestly forgot what slowbro can do, so I just wanted to stop the trick room. In the first turn it ended up working out with her switch, but after that I just played poorly. After trick room was set up, the amoongus ran train on me, and there wasn’t much I could do. I misplayed a lot towards the latter half of the match. I found out later by Cybertron that the person I played was someone that participated in worlds before. I’m actually not very familiar with pro pokemon players. I didn’t even know who Cybertron was until recently, and he was actually in the NYC Elite tournament I was in in December 2013. 1-1

round 3 vs T-wrecked

-dragonite -lucario -slowbro -talonflame gengar umbreon

Me: thundu kanga lando heatran UKHG-WWWW-WWX9-66TH I feel like I played this one perfectly. Fake out the bird to prevent big damage, and hp ice on the dragonite. When the talonflame roosted instead of attacked on turn 2, I knew I had a huge advantage. Turn 4 was a big one. I knew if I killed the slowbro, heatran could take care of lucario, since I had a chople berry. I decided to sacrifice my guys to get the free switch in try to ko the slowbro. The fact that he went for landorus instead of kanga guaranteed the game for me. 2-1

round 4 vs kipa

-swampert -politoed -ludicolo -thundurus ferrothorne talonflame

Me: thundu kanga lando bisharp DWHG-WWWW-WWX9-66VC I noticed the obvious rain team. Ferrothorne and ludicolo deals with suicune too well, so I was left with the 4 I chose. Turn 5 I double sucker punched the swampert hoping for the ko, since I knew he out speeded me in the rain. Didn’t work out, so I was in a lot of trouble. I got the lucky flinch the next turn which sealed the game for me. Afterwards, he told me that his thundurus had no way to damage my landorus. 3-1

round 5 vs blazikenburner

-latios -rotom-w -kanga -heatran bisharp sylveon

Me: thundu kanga suicune lando DA7W-WWWW-WWX9-67WH I felt like I made 3 major misplays in this game, and I could have won this if I noticed any of them sooner. My first 2 turns were excellent. I knew the rotom wanted to will-o-wisp and wanted to take out the latios, so I just targeted it with double edge for the ko. My first misplay was switching in kanga after my thundu fainted. I should have switched in lando instead. I didn’t want to take the sucker punch damage or give him the will-o-wisp on kanga. Afterwards I realized that I made the right play the first time, because I would not have taken damage from the sucker punch with fake out. Mistake 2 came turn 5, I shouldn’t have locked myself into rock slide. Uturn or super power would have been better, just kill the heatran, who just used protect. Finally, turn 7 I should not have used fake out there, I should have just killed the heatran again, predicting that he knew I would use fake out. 3-2

Overall I felt like I played well. The weekend was quite hectic, but I had a lot of fun building the team and playing it at the tournament. I feel that if I had tested with the team more, I would not have made those silly mistakes. It definitely comes from experience. I am still having trouble with team preview. I actually asked cybertron to take a look at some of my battles. Hopefully I get a response. I definitely like my team, and im not sure what changes I would make for the next tournament I join (whenever that is). But overall, it was a great experience. Shout outs to my friend Mike who spent the 2 weeks before apex theory crafting this team with me.

#apex 2015 #pokemon or/as #vgc tournament #tournament report

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