What We Learned: 2013 Fall Regionals Edition

During every Pokémon event, we learn a little bit about the game of Pokémon and the community that surrounds that is worth reflecting on. This Masters-centric column will appear following major events and highlight important trends and moments during the previous weekend’s events.

Really? Again?

When I was looking at the results last weekend, the first thought that hit me was, “Man, what do I even write about?” Once again, we have a bunch of familiar names toward the top of most of the events. I feel like I’ve already written a biography for people like Regional finalists Aaron Zheng (Cybertron) and Kamran Jahadi (Kamz) at this point, and we had another repeat Regional winner with Zach Droegkamp (Zach) in Ft. Wayne, who won to the surprise of no one but himself. I wrote about it after Worlds, but for all the complaining about Pokémon as a game and whatever ruleset we end up with, isn’t it interesting how consistent the big names have been the past few events? Once again, we have a set of tournaments where almost all of the top finishers were players who have proven that they were good players over the course of many events. It’s pretty telling when you look at our results page and nearly every name has an account here, a well-known alias, or is someone we’ve competed against in events for years.

This will (hopefully) be the last set of events before we see a shift in rules to accommodate the release of Black 2 and White 2, but hopefully moving forward we’ll get another ruleset where there isn’t too much near-forced RNG so players are able to maintain similar consistency to the ruleset they’re enjoying right now. Pokémon is a game with a lot of randomness and volatility, but I think the sort of thing that makes people consider lobbing their DS at the nearest wall has been mitigated pretty well between VGC 2012 and 2011, and hopefully that trend continues going forward. The first Regional of every ruleset tends to be pretty wide open, so we probably won’t see the metagame clearing up until April Regionals or even Nationals, but we ended up having a pretty clean run in VGC 2012 and hopefully that continues into the next season.

The Team Formerly Known As Seniors

While there was a lot of resentment (and maybe a little of that is still lingering for some) caused by the creation of the Seniors division in VGC from folks in Masters, this set of Regionals serves as pretty staggering proof that the system is working. While we had some strong showings from graduating Seniors last year, such as Enosh Shachar (Human) getting top 8 at Nationals and top 4 at Philidelphia’s 2012 Regional and Aaron Traylor (Unreality) top cutting US Nationals, the success of the new graduating class of Seniors across the board at their first Masters Regional can not be ignored.

The former Seniors absolutely dominated both the NorCal Regional and the highly contested Philadelphia Regional. In Philadelphia, Aaron Zheng finished second, Nitesh Manem (nachocheese999) finished 6th, and World Champ Toler Webb (Dim) finished 8th. In California, former World Champ Kamran Jahadi won the event, with Jeremy Fan (AlphaOmega) finishing 6th and Gavin Michaels (kingofkongs) barely missing the cut at 9th place.

While I’ll admit they each finished about a round better than I expected them to, I’m not sure why the success of these guys surprised so many people. They were all very consistent at the Seniors level and they’ve been practicing against Masters for years — of course they’re going to be effective players at this level. I think some people are looking at them all doing so well as a bit of an anomaly, but I’d expect more of the same going forward: these guys are all very good players and will be contending for titles in Masters for a long time.

The Timer Rule Redux

While the timer is far from irrelevant, Fall Regionals managed to be the first event since the previous set of Regionals where there weren’t many massive timer controversies. That isn’t to say no one hit the timer — I actually ended up with the timer helping to decide the game 3 times in 4 top cut matches in spite of using a pretty aggressive team — but I think it’s fair to say TPCI did a great job with the timer rule change, with far fewer matches ending due to time running out and fewer yet ending in controversy due to judge intervention over players “stalling.” I think we’d all be interested in hearing about each other’s experiences with the timer in the comments of this article since I’m sure it played a factor in at least a few matches, but even after hitting the timer repeatedly again it seemed like a resounding success to me. I was pretty shocked when I saw the battle video of my last game and saw the timer hit 20 turns when it was all I could do to hit 12 during some of my games at Worlds.

Cutting through Red Tape with a Machete

I think it’s fair to say TPCI smoothed out more than timer controversies since the last set of Regionals with improvements over some of their past miscues involving things like not hack checking the field before it was too late and allowing events to last longer than a Real Housewives of New Jersey marathon. While every Regional was run a little differently, it seems that almost all of the Regionals managed to hack check all the competitors in Masters before competition started (though in at least one stop it was after round 1 pairings were established for some reason), which is really important to ensure the legitimacy of the events even though the time investment is sort of a bummer. The events all seemed to run pretty quickly this time as well, with all of the events managing to finish at least by the early evening. I have to give a special nod to the group at Ft. Wayne, who not only managed to hack check everyone during registration to ensure no games were messed with by illegitimate pocket monsters but actually managed to start mostly on time(!) and even finished at a reasonable time after giving us a lunch break(!!).

Now if only Ft. Wayne was just as efficient at getting the results of the tournament uploaded to Pokemon.com…

Team Magma_

While they don’t tend to get the same type of respect some of the other groups of Pokémon playing friends get, I think Team Magma_ had a big enough performance that they deserve a special mention.

I_think most people just know them as a bunch of nice guys/Nick McCord’s #1 fans, but they proved they can play the game too during Autumn Regionals where they managed to get two players in the finals of the Houston regional, with Benji_ Irons (benjitheGREAT_) defeating Oliver_ Valenti (Smith_). While I’m probably going to be beaten for linking to it, they were also nice enough to record and commentate on their decisive third game, which is definitely worth checking out. Strong finishes by fellow Team Magma_ members included Tiffany_ Stanley (Shiloh_), who finished 6th in Houston, Logan_ Castro (Yellow Box_) who finished 4th in Houston, the aforementioned Dim_, who finished 8th in Philly, and Sam_ Haarsma (DrFidget_), who finished 7th in Ft. Wayne.

Meh-tagame

We had a pretty established metagame going into the 2013 Fall Regionals based on the 2012 season, which some of the results from Regionals were in line with and some were not.

Like we’d expected, the mainstays of the 2012 season were all over these tournaments: Cresselia, Tyranitar, Garchomp, Hitmontop, Rotom, Thundurus, Metagross, Hydreigon, and their similarly popular friends appeared on a ton of teams. Most of the teams, like we would have expected, were standard goodstuff teams, with a splattering of other familiar archetypes like Rain. Also like we expected, there were several players at most Regional locations using teams or partial teams based on successful Worlds teams, most notably those of Wolfe Glick (Wolfey) and Ray Rizzo (Ray).

Fortunately, there were a few surprises. In the realm between rain in Seattle and flying pigs were appearances by Pokémon like Crobat, Suicune, Jellicent, and Heracross on teams that made it to Regional finals, all of which are Pokémon that I think most people would identify as good Pokémon but who hadn’t had a lot of really successful results during the 2012 season. If you look past the finals teams to those in the top 4, you find some even more interesting Pokémon few people would have expected to do so well such as Duy Ha (Duy)’s Empoleon and Machamp and Tyler Hagan (Tyler)’s Weavile. Perhaps the most interesting case was a team that top cut in spite of using very unconventional Pokémon from DrFidget, with Blastoise, Cofagrigus, and Houndoom (more on all of these coming soon!).

Remember Kids, Always Recycle

Interestingly, most of the players who competed in both 2012 Worlds in any age division and the 2013 Fall Regionals in Masters used a team they had used previously, but the graduating Seniors did much, much better with this strategy than the incumbent Masters did.

For the graduating Seniors, Kamz got the only win from former Worlds players, taking NorCal with the version of Aaron’s Nationals team he used at Worlds. Aaron did pretty well for himself as well, finishing second in Philadelphia with an edited version of the same team. Nitesh Manem (nachocheese999) apparently used his Worlds team again, finishing 6th in Philadelphia.

Those of us coming from Masters didn’t do quite as well. Matt Coyle (EnFuego) and I (Scott) at least managed to top cut, with him finishing 8th in Toronto and me finishing 4th in Ft. Wayne. Huy was one of the few people in this section who changed his team enough that he actually had a Pokémon species change on his roster, though it didn’t work out very well for him, leading him to a finish 5-2 and 11th place, while Joe Pulkowski (sandman), who made it all the way to the semi-finals of Worlds, had an off-day and ended up finishing his tournament early.

I’m not sure exactly why this happened, but I think it was a consistent enough trend to be worth thinking about. It could be that the Seniors did better because the Masters in the tournaments hadn’t already played against their teams as frequently(and because they hadn’t posted their teams on our site…), or perhaps the Seniors were just stronger players than the Masters since three of the four of us qualified through LCQ! The underwhelming performances by the Masters Worlds players who actually had something to play for at Regionals is perhaps even more surprising than the graduating Seniors proving why they were the best in their age division last year.

No Substitute

The difficulty of the Philadelphia Regional is well established (particularly by people who didn’t do well at the Philadelphia Regional), so perhaps it is even more stunning that in an event where lots of established players had disappointing performances we had a champion who hasn’t had too much success in official events before in Matt Sybeldon (bearsfan092). If you’re surprised by him winning, don’t be. I think maybe of all the players I faced off with in Nationals Swiss last year (including the players who beat me) I would have least wanted to have had to play an extra again against bearsfan, and when he ended up finishing pretty uneventfully there I was shocked. I’ve played against him in a good chunk of PO, GBU, and live tournament battles, and he’s someone I’ve learned is a much better player than most people seem to realize. I hope this builds some momentum for him; he definitely has the potential to be one of those people I get really tired of writing about after his success in every event.

Maybe I Could Have Given It Two Pidgeys

The Toronto Regional, billed to be the weakest of the five Fall Regionals, well, was probably still the weakest of the five Regionals, but the heavy favorites faced a little more resistance than we might have expected them to. While Daniel Levinson (dtrain) got a strong second place finish and netted himself a big bye for Nationals and Simon Yip (TDS) managed a solid fourth place finish to build on after taking most of last year off to pursue being a productive member of society, in a surprise twist the rest of the top 4 consisted of players I didn’t give any lip service to going into the event. Winston Chan (Chanman) won the tournament and Shingo Fukuyado (Uwaki shin) finished in the top four, leaving some of the players we expected to finish near the top like EnFuego, who still finished 8th, and Ren Zhu (crobert), who missed the cut, out of the top four. Every set of Regionals it seems like we find some breakout players, so perhaps these guys will be the players who step into the limelight from the Fall Regionals after showing up some more established players.

That’s a Wrap

This is (hopefully) the last piece I’ll be writing about this particular metagame, though I expect not the last time I’ll be writing about any of these players. Overall this past weekend’s Regionals saw a drastic improvement in quality over this time last year, which can only be interpreted positively. Let me know what you thought of your Regionals experience and any last thoughts about the metagame before we meet back here after January Regionals with a whole new set of rules and events to talk about.

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!