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Published on October 19th, 2013 | by Scott

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2014 North American Fall Regionals Preview Part 2: Arizona

Another weekend, another Regional! On October 20th VGC returns to Arizona, a state that that hasn’t seen a sanctioned VGC event in recent years in favor of relatively nearby areas like Southern California and Texas. Of course, those Regions aren’t so close that players who attend those events won’t have to put some effort in to make it over to the event, and with Texas having a tournament next week, the lower concentration of VGC players in and around Arizona, and the excitement over Pokemon X & Y, we’ll probably see Arizona having an even smaller VGC Regional like Northern California did last weekend.

To revisit last weekend, we saw Thomas Mifflin (PBB) take out Omari Travis (BadIntent) in what some viewers were shocked to discover was, in fact, actually a VGC 2013 event and not a surprise VGC 2010 event. The top four was rounded out by two more veterans in Mike Suleski (OmegaDonut) and Paul Hornak (makiri). The implications of this top four are worth looking at: the 2013 VGC season in North American Masters was largely dominated by younger players. First we saw some Regional wins by recent graduates, most notably one right off the bat by Kamran Jahadi (kamz) and eventually one by Aaron Zheng (Cybertron), both of whom were first year Masters last year. The strong Regionals season for the youngsters was followed up by a 2013 National final that contained a first-year Master taking on a second-year Master with Gavin Michaels (kingofmars) taking on Enosh Shachar (Human). Worlds was more of the same, and not even Ray Rizzo (Ray) getting back in the action could stop the rise of of the former Seniors, with Aaron Zheng finishing the highest of any American Master in 3rd place and Enosh Shachar being the only other American in the top cut. While the young guns showed up all year, there seemed to be some regression among many of the older players, which contributed to a disappointing finish for the country as a whole at Worlds.

It is particularly interesting, then, that in the first event of the new season two verteran players who didn’t make a real attempt at the 2013 circuit made it to the finals of the first event in the 2014. While it’s been a few years since they’ve taken the game too seriously, I was a little surprised at how many newer players didn’t even know who these guys were. Omari Travis was among the favorites going into 2010 US Nationals and was the only undefeated player in Swiss that year, eventually winning a trip to Hawaii to compete in the World Championships, where he finished 3-3 in the tournament at a point where I think 3-3 was a much stronger record than it is now given how many representative were coming out of Japan at that point and how far ahead their metagame seemed to be compared to the rest of the world at the time. Thomas Mifflin qualified for Worlds that year as well, marking his second Worlds appearance after qualifying in VGC’s inaugural season in 2008, though it ended up being cut a little short by an unfortunate disqualification. While they’ve both been out of the game a few years, they were once among the most respected names in the community, and I certainly hope we see more of both of them this year. Any sort of game is better when most of its more legendary names are still playing, and even as someone who was just kind of getting into VGC as those two were getting out, I thought it was a lot of fun to see them come back and do so well. Hopefully, they’re able to keep it up this season, because the North American circuit could definitely benefit from their competition after last season.

Arizona Regional

Difficulty Rating:

/ 5

(One and a half Cacturne out of five)

Tournament Organizer: Patricia McCan

Last Year’s Winner: Silly template, there was no Arizona Regional last year…

The Story: While I don’t think putting VGC in new places is necessarily something that should be expected to start off with small turnouts, the timing of XY’s release causing the tournaments to run a generation behind in the Fall will likely lead to a smaller event here. While Northern California was small in a way that made the tournament hotly competitive because there was still an above average amount of the “hardcore” types, I would expect Arizona will probably just be small all around, with about half the big names attending as last week and probably a drop in total attendance to go with it.

That’s not to say there won’t be anyone here: the most interesting part of this tournament is that most of the top cut from last weekend will be attending Phoenix as well! I detailed Pleasanton finalists Omari Travis (BadIntent) and Thomas Mifflin (PBB) pretty extensively in the opening, and they’ll be back trying to rack up a healthy chunk of points before most other players even get playing. Even making it to the top four would put either of them at 200 or more points two weeks into the season, which is a pretty crazy possibility when you consider that it only took 274 CP to make Worlds in 2013, and with 16 invites this year, last year’s bar would have been only 240. While I’d expect those numbers to go up this season with players being able to travel to more than three Regionals and Nationals awarding more points than last year, the opportunity to build an almost insurmountable lead right out of the gates is there for these guys.

Also hoping to build on their strong early seasons are three other members of Pleasanton’s top cut, Mike Suleski (OmegaDonut), Paul Hornak (makiri), and Matt Souerby (matt). In the case of Mike Suleski, I was pretty ecstatic to see he’d chosen to bring the team he’s been using in Nugget Bridge’s NPA, where he finished tied for the best regular season record at 7-1. It seemed like for every tournament preview of the past year I was writing about how his team choice was holding back his skills, but that we all knew the former National Champion was still inside him.This time, he brought something that was strong enough to give him a chance to show off his skills and it paid off for him. I hope to see him continuing to finish near the top of tournaments this year, because that’s where he belongs. Paul Hornak was perhaps the member of the top four who’d fallen off the edge of the world the least in recent years, as he ended up with a respectable 162 CP last year in spite of not playing in Fall Regionals in favor of TCG and was a game away from qualifying for Worlds in both 2011 and 2013. Matt Souerby is someone I know basically nothing about as a VGC player and am aware of mostly from his presence in the  TCG community, but he’s done pretty well in the only VGC events I know of him participating in, and he took Paul to three games in top cut last week, so he’s done well so far and it’ll be interesting to see how he does this weekend with a little more spotlight on him.

Largely the players who did well in 2013 had a terrible weekend in Plesanton, but this week a partially new batch of 2013 success stories will try to start another good season. Duy Ha (Duy) is probably eager to put generation 5 behind him after finishing a game out of Worlds all three years, losing in the top 16 of 2011 Nationals, the final round of 2011 Worlds LCQ, the final round of 2012 Worlds LCQ after not playing in Nationals that year when it was the only other way to qualify for Worlds, and then finishing tied for 13th in CP in 2013, 2 Championship Points short of Worlds. Duy has kept a positive attitude in spite of being probably the most ill-fated player in VGC history, and he’ll look to add to the 50 CP he got last weekend with a bigger finish here. 2013 US National Champion Gavin Michaels (kingofmars) didn’t quite have his plan for Cincinno/Primeape figured out last weekend and wound up in the 50 CP range as a result, but hopefully he used his copy of Pokemon X and/or Y to play Pokemon-Amie and figure out what cutemons do to help him prepare for this week and avoid starting another season of underwhelming Regionals performances. Stephen Morioka (Stephen) will make his first appearance of the season Sunday (this time for real), and while he tends to fly under most players’ radar a little bit because he’s a modest guy and doesn’t spend too much time in the eye of the community, 2013 US Nationals’ only undefeated player in swiss should be on everyone’s radar this time. Ben Irons (benjitheGREAT) will also be making his first appearance of the season. He won his first event in 2013, made the top four of his second, and then seemed to tail off a little bit, but he showed at points last season he can play at an elite level and will be looking to get another hot start to work toward a second Worlds appearance this year.

The known part of Arizona’s field is rounded out by a few other players who have had some high points in their Pokemon training careers, but who aren’t positioned as favorites in this event. Len Deuel (Alaka) is going to keep going to events until he is a favorite and definitely wants the win more than anyone else, but after a 4-3 finish last week he’s going to have to engineer a better run than he had last week if he wants to even get into the top cut. Kamran Jahadi (kamz) was an unfortunate final round pair-up with Omari away from making top cut himself last week, and he will probably redeem himself this week assuming one of the hundreds of players he asked for a team actually gave him one. Alison McDonald (Fishy) won a Regional in 2012 and made top 16 of Nationals shortly after, but has been breezing in and out with the wind since. Chalkey Horenstein (Chalkey) had a pretty solid run at the beginning of last week, but wasn’t quite able to finish it out. I always get conflicting reports about whether or not Natalie Kaspszak(maski) is actually playing Pokemon these days or not, and I think we have possibly ended up in a bizarre situation where her father and perpetual simulator ladder opponent Dadski is the bigger threat, particularly after hilariously knocking out 2012 Canadian Nationals Runner-up and 3-3 Worlds finisher Mike Papagianis(skarm) out in the first round of the 2013 Worlds LCQ. Rushan Shekar(Firestorm), completely explicably, finished 5-2 last week, so I guess everyone’s favorite community organizer-but-definitely-not-competitive-battler has earned a mention in the auxiliary threats section here. I expect Rushan will be especially effective if the weird time warp from last week continues, confusing him and leading him to believe he’s participating in a tournament taking place at a time where he cared about winning.

The Smart Money is on…:  Stephen Morioka (Stephen). While there are several players who have a good shot at this one I try and pick to pick the favorite here, and I think that’s almost a no-brainer this time. Stephen had the highest 2013 Worlds finish of anyone here, the second highest Nationals finish of anyone here, and the most points of anyone here from 2013 Regionals… it’s hard to argue with that given that we’re still playing with the same ruleset. I’d expect big finishes from Omari Travis and several of the other players who did well last week as well, but this is Stephen’s event to lose.

Attending this event? Join your fellow competitors in discussion on our forum.

About the Author

Scott started playing VGC in 2011. He finished 17th at US Nationals, then lost in the final round of 2011 Worlds LCQ. He finished 10th in the 2012 World Championships and qualified for Worlds again in 2013 after going into US Nationals second in CP. Instead of playing, he commentated at US Nationals and the World Championships in 2013 and 2014. Follow him on Twitter @NBNostrom!

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