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Published on April 27th, 2014 | by Scott

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What We Learned: 2014 North American Regionals Edition

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

The last retrospective I wrote was for last year’s World Championships, so there should be plenty of information to go over this time! Since last year’s Worlds, we’ve seen an entire season’s worth of North American Regionals, about six months of a new metagame developing, and the biggest burst of growth VGC has seen in recent memory. This edition of What We Learned is going to be a little more metagame-oriented than usual because I think there are more pertinent Pokémon topics than human topics at this point in the season. I don’t have thoughts on quite the same variety of topics as usual this time, so I’ll go a little further in-depth than usual into a few particular metagame trends I think need some extra attention before the various National tournaments between May and July. I know I normally just kind of trigger nostalgia with this column, but this time I’d keep reading if you want to improve your game in this format too!

Gee Willikers, People Are Playing VGC

I do want to start us off with some lighter reading, however. I think the first subject should be the most important story of the 2014 Regional season, which is that the attendance has been pretty fantastic. Admittedly, numbers started out predictably rocky with the final BW2 Regionals in the fall sometimes only drawing enough attendance for seven rounds of swiss. I don’t think anyone expected too many people who weren’t actively chasing Championship Points to attend a bunch of events early in the season given that we were still playing BW2 with XY released thanks to being tied to the TCG Regional schedule. I think what was surprising was just how large the spike for XY was: players are now going into most Regionals expecting a 16-player top cut and nine rounds of Swiss now, something that no Regional was close to large enough to require during generation 5 (also because I’m pretty sure AlphaZealot just made up that that was a thing that could happen during Winter Regionals).

With average Regional attendance having dropped some in 2011 after switching to Black and White and dropped again (perhaps more accurately, spread out over more events) in 2012 after Regionals shifted to work within the TCG event structure rather than the travelling circus system that was being employed previously, XY feels like the first time in a few years there has been really serious forward momentum for Pokémon’s competitive tournament play. There are a ton of factors you could look at for why this is happening: Pokémon X & Y added a bunch of positive factors, including the flashy Mega Evolution feature, improved game mechanics, much more exciting-looking battles, an in-game Wi-Fi ladder that actually works, a big nostalgia kick from the generation 1 starters being available in-game, and many generation 1 Pokémon getting big competitive buffs. There were plenty of positive moves on the administrative end that helped a lot too, such as prize support incentivizing players going to multiple events much better this year through stipends that rewarded play over the full season instead of just individual events, each Regional season being spread out over three weeks so players could attend multiple events, the promotion the competitive side of the video game got from the 2013 Worlds stream on Twitch, and events being run much, much faster this year for the most part. The bottom line, though, is that the game looks extremely healthy right now even with some decline in attendance from winter to spring.

What will be interesting is to see if this growth can be maintained over the course of the sixth generation. Maintaining the initial surge of hype when a new game is released and turning into any sort of sustained growth is difficult, as interest in basically all game series tends to spike with new releases and then taper off until just before the next. I do expect that US Nationals this year will be even larger than US Nationals last year, which was already the largest we’ve had in VGC. Europe’s events should have even larger attendance increases, though the long gap between the release of X&Y and any sort of official VGC event in Europe will make it more difficult to capitalize there on the excitement X&Y brought in the same way the North American circuit was able to. I will admit I’m a little worried about forward momentum given the lack of easily available ways to play in-game: the special ladder will no longer use the same ruleset as VGC after May 15th, so players will have to actively seek out opponents or use simulators to play with the official ruleset. Hopefully, this doesn’t cause too many players to move on to games that are a little more easily accessible. I am a little confused by the lack of strategy involved in making a ruleset that only uses a relatively small portion of the total pool of Pokémon as a bit of a marketing gimmick, which has led to some metagame problems I’ll get into soon, and then not even offering a way to play said gimmick format in-game because the default doubles ladder doesn’t have the same restrictions. I guess at this point all we can do is see how things play out, but this may be a problem for the rest of the generation with the official ladders in-game not having a pentagon restriction.

Kangaskhan, Queen of VGC 2014

I don’t know that the Video Game Championships have ever seen a format dominated to quite the same extent by a single Pokémon as VGC 2014 has with Kangaskhan (maybe 2010 Kyogre), and we certainly didn’t see anything like this at any point during generation five. I don’t want to draw too many value judgements here: while I don’t think Kangaskhan’s Parental Bond was balanced very well, it’s here and we need to deal with it as players. With that said, I think the metagame as viewed at the North American Regionals so far has been a little indicative of a region that has traditionally been painfully slow to adapt to large metagame threats. I think short of a couple brave souls who might say Charizard-Y, if you ask almost anyone with any experience in VGC 2014 what the most important Pokémon to counter is and which Mega Pokémon is most likely to lead a team to a tournament victory, Kangaskhan is the clear winner to most people. The question I have considering that is, “Why isn’t the metagame a little more centered around Kangaskhan?” What I should be writing about here is how centralized the metagame is around Kangaskhan… but right now, it both is and it isn’t in some ways.

I guess my point is that if you know Kangaskhan is the most powerful Pokémon in the format (it is) and that a large percentage of top players will be using it (it’s won about half of the events so far this season), why on earth would you make a team that doesn’t plan to use it extremely well or counter the heck out of it? It is completely insane to me, for instance, that a Pokémon that annoys Kangaskhan as much as Aegislash does was almost totally unseen in North America in the Winter Regionals, even if it may be worth noting people who think throwing it on their team will stop Kangaskhan by itself are equally foolish. I think most people understand you win in this game by using the best threats better than other people or by countering those threats better than other people, so why are so few people actually trying to do this with Kangaskhan? Crazier yet, why is Mawile, the Mega with the best combination of general strength and ability to frustrate Kangaskhan, being used so infrequently? It is little wonder to me that Ray Rizzo (Ray) seemed to have such an easy time last winter in Massachusetts given how hard his team countered Kangaskhan, as well as other common threats Talonflame and Rotom-W. He had Mawile, he had Ferrothorn, he had Rough Skin + Rocky Helmet cheese, he had two Intimidates, and he had Will-o-Wisp. He followed up his Regional win with that team by finishing 5th at another Regional with exactly the same team after it was published and could easily have done even better than that with a few different rolls. It’s interesting that so few people seemed to notice this that history was allowed to basically repeat itself when Spring’s best Mawile team, this time piloted by Collin Heier (TheBattleRoom), finished 3rd and then 1st on the final two Regional weekends of the 2014 season. These guys seem to get that countering Kangaskhan and other obvious metagame threats is one of the main ways you can win right now — why are so few other players working to do this as well? Kangaskhan isn’t some small time Pokémon you can just expect to outplay, it is the metagame. You will absolutely face too many good players using it in almost any CP event — and definitely at any of the upcoming National tournaments — to get through a major tournament without a great plan for Kangaskhan.

That’s not to say using Kangaskhan well and finding good ways to eliminate Kangaskhan’s counters, enemy Kangaskhan, and common teammates of enemy Kangaskhan isn’t also an equally viable way to win in this format. Using the best Pokémon and protecting it well enough is always going to be a viable strategy. I think it’s really important to have a great plan for the mirror moving forward, though — if you watch game three of the Kansas Regional finals, for instance, Ben Irons (benjitheGREAT) and Greyson Garren (GreySong) both lead Kangaskhan/Amoonguss and play it out exactly the same way. The power of their teams is obvious: getting to the finals is a huge deal, and I think their cores were both good examples of how to win with Kangaskhan in a vacuum. However, I think it’s pretty obvious watching that match that whoever’s Kangaskhan woke up first was going to win, and that’s probably not a strategy for the mirror either of them will bank on going forward to Nationals. Their situation in game three is before looking at other factors in the mirror that quickly end up out of the players’ control, such as the frequent Garchomp and Salamence mirrors that happen with these teams. The most successful Kangaskhan teams so far have been awfully similar, and I think that’s going to be another potential pitfall going into National tournaments that the players who will do the best are going to have found great ways to avoid.

Kangaskhan is going to be queen until at least Worlds is over this year. The best advice anyone can give you for teambuilding right now is to either use Kangaskhan better than anyone else or to counter Kangaskhan better than anyone else while still being able to handle other matchups. No one should delude themselves into thinking they can just make whatever team they want and try to “outplay” it. 2014 Kangaskhan gets compared to 2010 Kyogre a lot as far as their general strength, so let’s take a trip down memory lane and look at the top cut teams from Worlds that year. Oh hey, six of eight teamsused Kyogre, and one of the remaining two that didn’t had three Grass-type Pokémon and focused on exploiting it. Outplaying starts with outplanning. I think we can all agree any Pokémon that is so powerful it can make Rocky Helmet an item good enough that most teams should probably be using it is a Pokémon worth focusing your team around exploiting in one way or another.

Metagame Holes: Steels, Fairies, and Appliances

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Limited formats always have exploitable holes because of available Pokémon having their counters artificially removed by the regional Pokedex restrictions, and with how shallow the pool of Fire-type Pokémon is to begin with, it is unsurprising that there is a giant lack of quality options this year. While the introduction of Sun as an important matchup has certainly helped it, the once esoteric pick of Rotom-H rising to almost the same usage as probably the steadiest remaining defensive Pokémon in the format, its cousin Rotom-W, is probably the best indication you will ever see that the pool of Fire-type Pokémon available is inadequate. The rise of Fire-types is indicative of some changes in the cores of teams spurred by type chart changes in XY. The whole Fire-Water-Grass core thing has always been less popular in doubles than singles, and I think people are wanting to fall back on it in VGC this year more because it is convenient in the sense they need some of those typings to deal with other things rather than for their strength as a unit.

Fire-type Pokémon, specifically, are gaining popularity because they help stop Sun, they help deal with dark horse Worlds MVP candidate Mega Venusaur, and they offer an important resistance to Fairy-type attacks provided by the newly introduced Fairy-type, which is the other main factor that has shaped the 2014 metagame along with Kangaskhan. I think without Fairy-types and without Kangaskhan, we’d be looking at a metagame that is very similar to what we saw in 2012, except with Mawile replacing Metagross and Aegislash being a much more obnoxious replacement for Scizor. The impact of the introduction of Fairy-type Pokémon has a chain of influence that is a little hard to follow at a glance. To start toward where I see the beginning, people are still going to use Fairy-weak Pokémon like Garchomp, Salamence, and Tyranitar almost regardless of what counters exist. They are too good at their jobs to ignore and are very important checks to important metagame threats like Kangaskhan for the Dragons and opposing weather for Tyranitar. No one should have expected a large drop in those Pokémon because of the introduction of Fairy-types with how important it is to use as many of the most powerful Pokémon as can be done cohesively to win consistently. Instead, what the introduction of Fairy-type has done is pretty simple: the counters to Fairy-type Pokémon and the counters to the counters of important Fairy-type parts of common team cores.

This is where the problem with Fire-type Pokémon scarcity kicks in. Once a mostly horrible type for anything other than helping with Scizor, Metagross, and Amoonguss, Fire suddenly gets a desirable new resistance AND gets to exploit the other big impact from the introduction of Fairy-types: Steel-types becoming more important by gaining an advantage over a new, important type. While Steel-types were toned down a little this generation by losing a couple resistances, they were probably already the best type in the game and they now have a strange new relationship with Dragon- and Fairy-types, where Steel mostly beats both related types and Dragon mostly loses to both related types. As a result of their inherent power, the Dragons remain important enough that usage of all three types have stayed at a pretty constant rate of use over the last few months and their usage is likely to continue to be similar for the remainder of the season. The problem here should be obvious: we now have Steel-types being large problems for two, or in the case of the still-fairly-popular Double Dragon teams (even with Dragons doing decently against most Steels), three members of the opposing team. Countering enemy Steel-types is very important for teams that are using these cores!

Fire isn’t Steel’s only weakness, but with many teams having a Dragon, Fairy, Steel, and Mega Pokémon of their own, team slots are limited for additional protection against Steel-types. One of Steel’s other weaknesses is Fighting but with the Fairies already present in the game, countering them and the two most popular Steel-types (Aegislash and Mawile) not having much trouble with Fighting-type Pokémon, Fighting isn’t a very good solution to Steel anymore in XY which has lead to the previously popular Conkeldurr falling off the face of the earth. Ground is good from a typing perspective — Mawile, Aegislash, and Bisharp all maintain their Ground-type weakness in spite of their secondary types — but the practicality of most Ground-types is severely limited. The only really common Ground-type this year is Garchomp, who is present on essentially all double Dragon teams, but getting a bunch of Earthquakes off this year is pretty challenging given the lack of strong Earthquake-immune Pokémon in the format without former mainstays like Cresselia, Landorus, Thundurus, and Tornadus present. This sort of leaves Fire-types as the obvious solution given that they aren’t reliant on spread moves and can actually do super-effective damage to all the popular Steel-type Pokémon. I think the reliance on flimsy Pokémon like Pyroar and Talonflame this year by many players sort of speaks for itself: players have had little choice but to fall back on some sketchy options.

Like countering the big threats effectively, another thing that wins championships is not using excessively flimsy Pokémon unless it is absolutely necessarily, and when it comes to Fire-type Pokémon in the format, that’s pretty much just Rotom-Heat and the two Charizard Megas. I think this has gone a long way toward creating a very predictable situation where most non-Charizard teams are going to have one of Rotom-H, Talonflame, or have problems checking bulkier Steel-types effectively. I think this is a big failure in the format: players shouldn’t need to rely on such a small group of Pokémon in order to have a balanced team, especially in the case of the Rotom formes where players are kind of being forced into using an inferior Pokémon because it has weaker alternatives. 27 of the 40 top 8 teams from the recent Spring Regionals had Charizard, Rotom-H, or Talonflame on them, 6 more had Tyranitar filling a similar role, and 3 more had Chandelure, accounting for a total of 36 of 40 teams. Additionally, one of the remaining four is solving the Steel-types problem with both Garchomp and Hydreigon, the best anti-Steel Dragons. The pool of options to deal with Steel-types is a little underwhelming and it’s fairly obvious that most teams need the Steel-type removal Fire-types provide, especially considering that they’re also one of the only forms of efficient Amoonguss removal in the format given the lack of solid Psychic-types and Flying-types available. Perhaps this predictability will be another thing future top teams can exploit…

Old and Young

To back away from metagame narratives for a moment and switch to a human one: hasn’t it been bizarre to see the juxtaposition of the success of the rising young guys and the return of prominence of some of the older players? There’s a lot of turnover in the top 16 this year so far compared to last year, but what we’re left with is pretty interesting.

The top three spots right now are all players who played in the 2010 World Championships for the United States: the 2010 US National Champion Wesley Morioka (Wesley), the eventual World Champion Ray Rizzo, and Omari Travis (BadIntent), who acquired an amount of CP I thought was only possible in the Junior division with 350 from Regionals this year after not really playing live events during Generation 5. Another player who returned after being absent a generation this year is 12th place Thomas Mifflin (PBB), who also qualified for the 2010 World Championships. 2009 National Champion and 2011 10th place Worlds finisher Mike Suleski (OmegaDonut) is sitting in 8th overall right now, and in the spots below him you’ll find Greyson Garren and Stephen Morioka (Stephen), both of whom also played in the 2011 World Championships. Several players in the CP tie at 16th have played in the World Championships of days gone by as well, such as Paul Hornak (makiri) in 2008, Trista Medine (ryuzaki) in 2011, and Tony Cheung (Chinese Dood) in 2012. Trista, Stephen, and Ray all qualified last year, as well. This has been quite an amazing season for a lot of the decorated older players.

The rise of the old men hasn’t stopped the kids from rising up, as there are a number of players who have participated in the modern Senior division in the past near the top. Last year’s Senior US Nationals runner-up DeVon Ingram (dingram) is in 4th in Masters right now, and former Senior and reigning Masters US National Champion Gavin Michaels (kingofmars) is pretty comfortable in 7th. Gavin’s opponent in last year’s National finals and fellow former Senior Enosh Shachar (Human) is part of that 210 CP tie at 18th, and former Senior World Champion Toler Webb (Dim) at the bottom of the aforementioned tie in 21st. Another younger player doing well this year is Ashton Cox (linkyoshimario), who has been one of the bigger surprises of the season and is currently in 13th.

The group of Worlds favorites this year is sort of brought together by the remaining players in the top 16. 11th place Zach Droegkamp (Zach) and 14th place Ben Irons both made their first Worlds appearances last year, but have quickly become players who look like they’ll be annual attendees. 5th place Collin Heier, 6th place Michael Lanzano (JiveTime), and 15th place Blake Hopper (Mrbopper) are pushing for their first Worlds appearances after all spending some time in that group of players many people would expect have gone to Worlds based on their ability, but actually haven’t.

What most of these players have in common is that not only are they elite players, but I think in most cases they’re most of the players that people who have been following XY would identify as the best players in North America. I’m sure everyone would like to have two or three swaps they’d make to make this list their all-star team, but I think it’s awfully close to what you’d expect looking at the field honestly. While it is cool in itself to have this hodgepodge of players near the top, as usual the results so far are a great example of why people who act like being consistent in this game is a matter of luck should probably stop making excuses and find ways to win. Almost everyone near the Worlds invitation bar this season has an amazing track record and a majority of these players have been to Worlds before. While the luck-based elements exist in the game, there’s a reason the players we expect to see near the top tend to manage to mitigate those elements well enough to end up there. It’s worth working to understand the game better if you want to be as successful as these guys, because I’d say most of these players have proven they belong where they’re at.

It’ll be exciting to see if it’s one of the old guys or one of the young guys who come out on top in July, though…

Dark Void

Dark Void is another one of those things that has gotten swept under the rug a little bit as the season has gone on because as players we just have to deal with what’s in front of us, but I think it’s an interesting discussion topic.

The practical impact of Dark Void — and Smeargle by extension — has been very low so far. The only Masters top cut appearance by Smeargle was on Randy Kwa’s Spring team, which is probably noteworthy because it actually isn’t a very traditional example of what makes Smeargle powerful. In many ways, Randy used Smeargle a little more as a Togekiss surrogate in the sense it had the option of using Dark Void, but primarily the Smeargle on his team created pressure with the threat of Dark Void and used Follow Me to allow his other Pokémon to make plays in a way that’s a little different from what players are traditionally afraid of with Smeargle. I think when most of us think of a Smeargle team, we think of something more like this team by Arue that Tanzying translated. While that team has some clever quirks, the expected core is there: Smeargle (though not with the standard Transform in this case), Mega Kangaskhan, Talonflame, a non-Mega Intimidate user, and some other high-stat Pokémon to close the team out. The question sort of becomes the following: why aren’t more people playing this sort of team, and if they are playing it, why hasn’t anyone been successful with it in North America yet?

I think there’s a bunch of potential answers here. The simplest is that maybe Smeargle and its common team cores simply aren’t as strong as it is annoying and that players are choosing to use more conventionally powerful threats. I think treating that explanation as the answer would be pretty foolish for the most part, though I guess you could sell it as a cause in the sense of many weaker players only seeming to be willing to use things that are very similar to what has already worked in CP events. I think the better answer is that many players are (perhaps wisely) risk-averse, and that Smeargle is a Pokémon that introduces a large element of risk to both sides. With many unpredictable factors including Dark Void’s miss chance, the difficulty of scouting items efficiently in a best-of-one when Lum Berry is at least a decent item choice on almost everything, the randomness of Sleep duration, and the inherent potential of Smeargle to either win or lose games on its own with the ability Moody, I think it is perhaps not so surprising that players have chosen to go other routes early in the season. With the majority of the play so far this season being single game matches, a Pokémon like Smeargle that might work out more often than not, or that might work once you have better information, is a risky play when it always has that chance of a double Dark Void miss leading to a quick deficit in remaining Pokémon that will probably lose Smeargle’s trainer the match.

Given that it’s never safe to take more than one loss in Swiss at a Regional, player behavior leading to little Smeargle use makes sense… but I suspect it will continue to make sense as the season goes on, which is good news for Smeargle. With US Nationals looking likely to cut most X-2s and having a second day of Swiss that is purely best-of-three, Smeargle’s risks are a little easier to mitigate. Of course, there are other ways to mitigate some of that risk, too — Randy not relying so much on Dark Void to begin with was probably the ideal way to play Smeargle at a Regional, and in the Famitsu Cup most of the Japanese players using Smeargle opted to go with Own Tempo instead of Moody to remove that element of risk. I would expect that Worlds LCQ and Worlds, which are purely best-of-three, will further see increases in the use of Smeargle and Dark Void… especially if it continues to seem like a minor threat and players start thinking they don’t need to worry about it. In events where players can only take one loss safely, it is just as dangerous for players to have a large weakness to Smeargle as it is to use one, because taking what can amount to an automatic loss puts the player in question in an extremely precarious position. Perhaps more players will back off countering it a little now that they can probably take an extra loss.

I think the way I’ve talked about it to this point is also a little misleading in that Smeargle’s greatest strength is the psychological pressure it puts on its opponent more so than what it actually does. It is an absolutely terrifying Pokémon to face down in team preview because while most players can sit there on a message board and say that Smeargle is weak because their team can do X and Y and counter Smeargle+whatever, the Smeargle player isn’t obligated to pick it every round. The real danger of Smeargle is when it is on a team that has multiple modes it can run effectively. By forcing the opponent to bring predictable Smeargle counters to avoid starting out in a situation where Smeargle can just open up with Dark Void and dominate, the opponent is likely to open themselves to other combinations of threats from Smeargle’s teammates. Being able to change directions that way without spending a Mega slot isn’t something most Pokémon can bring in this format, and forcing that reaction in players — both within games and before them — is Smeargle’s real impact on this format.

Regardless of its current use, Smeargle is one of those Pokémon that has forced players to react to it a little bit in the team creation stage so far to avoid having nearly unwinnable matchups. Most teams have a Lum Berry now, and many Pokémon holding Choice items have shifted to carry Sleep Talk. Smeargle also really causes people to rethink excessively slow teams where most of the Pokémon present would be easy Dark Void bait. I think it’ll be interesting to where its usage ends up as we close the season and perhaps equally interestingly, how the usage of sleep counters change over the course of the season. I think the part of Smeargle’s current low usage I didn’t touch on is that it is sort of universally hated in the West (and, if Keewan is any indication, Korea), but I would be really surprised if more players aren’t willing to draw the ire of their competitors if they think it’s the best way to win the bigger upcoming events. Hated or not, we’re stuck with it, and it is strategically interesting enough in best-of-three play that I’d expect the debate about whether or not unbanning Dark Void was a mistake (it was) will be reignited soon enough.

Wait, What Happened Last Game?

While we never ended up with an editorial about it because a certain wannabe YouTube celebrity who said he was going to write about it didn’t, I do want to comment on the lack of battle videos this year because it is a huge problem. The absence of battle videos is pretty important to the players in the battles and to the community as a whole for different reasons.

The most important problem to me is that players not being able to look back and watch their own games after a tournament makes it much more difficult to improve. Anyone who has ever been to a Pokémon tournament knows that players have incredibly selective memories. Everyone would have won if only it wasn’t for that critical hit, or that Rock Slide flinch, or if only their opponent had made that play that they “should have made”! I actually tend to encourage this behavior when people complain to me at events: I think the way I wrote this makes it pretty obvious I think that behavior is silly, but most people aren’t going to make real strategic adjustments based on a single loss on the fly effectively. I think most players end up in a better place by not taking the blame short term than they would be in by beating themselves up for making errors that lost them the game. In the end, though, players aren’t going to improve by blaming the game, and I know when I was trying hard to improve one thing I took very seriously was watching the battles I lost over and over. I spent a lot of time trying to understand what I was thinking during games and what I should have done better. I think not having battle videos available after tournaments is denying players a really important opportunity to grow. At some point after tournaments, players need that chance to reflect… unless the goal is for most players to actually think it wasn’t their fault they lost. Which it always is.

The other big thing is that not having battle videos greatly limits the amount of battles aspiring players can watch. I’ll spare the “at least it stops some scouting!” element of this, but I think even the most paranoid players should be able to acknowledge that it’s important for the health of our game to get more people playing it and to keep people interested in it. A big part of how that happens is having games online to watch. While watching live is always more exciting, having cool battles on YouTube to point new players at is a great way to get people into the game. For more experienced players, having those battles to look at and learn from as the players make the right or wrong decisions is another important part of growing as a player. I’m sure most of our readers have noticed, but the Nugget Bridge YouTube account is looking pretty sparse right now compared to last year when we were getting videos from 40 or 50 players after every event. For the most part, the only XY videos right now are from stream archives because of battle videos not being available. Can you imagine how bad of a spot anyone trying to learn about XY would be in right now if so many of the PTOs hadn’t been so fantastic about working with us?

I don’t want to dunk this one too far into ground too much because I think I’m preaching to the choir. Essentially all players hate not being able to save battle videos, and I haven’t gotten the impression more official bodies are especially excited about it either, so it kind of just seems like we’re all stuck in a situation we don’t want to be in. The lack of battle videos has sure made this a really frustrating this season, though, both as a part-time player and someone trying to grow the competitive scene.

11 Regionals in: The Effects of Mega Evolution

I don’t know that I’d say Mega Evolution as a mechanic is exactly a hotly contested topic, but it has become something more players are discussing may not have been as good for the game as we originally thought. I do still disagree here — while Kangaskhan is pretty outrageous, I think most of the other Mega Pokémon have introduced really fun gameplay depth. Mega Evolving Mawile, Manectric, Charizard-Y, Tyranitar, and Gyarados at the right times can be the difference between winning and losing. While Kangaskhan, Venusaur, and Lucario tend to want to evolve immediately, they were all pretty unplayable before this year, so Mega Evolution making them relevant at all is impactful. To this point, the only really successful team with no Mega Pokémon has been Enosh Shachar’s Winter team, so looking at the usage of Mega Pokémon is a pretty good indication of perceived power right now. I’ve gone ahead and thrown out Pokémon that aren’t normally seen in their Mega Evolved formes like Gyarados, Tyranitar, Gardevoir and Garchomp in this table, though you can assume there would be at least a couple of each of them other than Garchomp under each column, especially the comparably powerful Mega Tyranitar. However, a couple uses is pretty underwhelming next to these guys…

I included the usage percentage on top cut teams in both sets of North American Regionals as well as during the Battle Gloria Qualifiers in Japan because I like their sample size a lot and because it happened largely between the two sets of North American events. While I don’t have precise enough data to accurately say that the Megas that aren’t listed here were used on less than 5% of total teams because we don’t have Megas denoted in most of our data, I think that it would be an accurate assumption. Venusaur’s stats here are also super inflated by its non-Mega forme and it is included mostly because it became much more relevant as a Mega during the more recent North American Regionals and toward the end of the Battle Gloria circuit.

The point: there’s a really fun variety of most Megas in this format, with most of the best capping out at being on about a fifth of all teams and a majority of the rest appearing at usage rates that would indicate a strong niche Pokémon that can be built around. Except for one.

Effects of Globetrotting

Here’s a fun stat that isn’t about Kangaskhan: if you had to guess, how many Regionals do you think the average player currently ranked in the top 16 attended? If you guessed three, you’re warm — all of them attended at least that many (Benji getting DQed once totally counts). I can’t provide an accurate average because I have limited data, but eyeballing what I know and looking at Play! Points, here are some general stats. It looks like only five of the top 16 attended only three Regionals (not pictured is Tony who is technically tied for 16th in CP on 2 events). It looks like another four attended five or more Regionals (which I believe was exactly six events for most of them), leaving about seven players who attended exactly four. Without trying to use faulty statistics too precisely, the average top 16 player needed a little more than 4 Regional appearances to get where they were. The follow-up to this is probably obvious: is that good for the competitiveness of the circuit that players need to/can play in more events? Is it good for the growth of the game?

I’m still not sure. I think it’s fairly obvious that being able to play in more than three events has had a positive impact on a lot of players in the sense that even ignoring the CP circuit, we like going to Pokémon events. We like hanging out with other players, and at points most of us will even admit we like Pokémon. I do think that it creates a system where players who put more money in are much more likely to get stipends out: even in the 32-64 range, only 13 players received CP from fewer than 3 Regionals. To me, that’s mostly a good thing, because it provides a lot more incentive to keep going to events even for people who either don’t care about positioning for Worlds very much or for players who know they’d need a super deep Nationals run regardless of how well they do at their last Regional. While players need to attend more to finish high, maybe they can justify an extra event now knowing that they’re much more likely to get some cash back from doing so. I think that continued incentive is cool, and I think it’s actually really good for the circuit that the difficulty of events has become much more consistent in difficulty as dedicated players travel to toughen up events that might otherwise have been weaker. To me, the fun of being able to play in more events was really clear in Madison two weeks ago, which was absolutely overrun with top players compared to the version of Madison Regionals I attended in 2012. The event was made much more exciting with better players present and more on the line, and amusingly, most of the players travelling to get extra CP didn’t actually manage to take top spots from the local Midwestern players anyway. By about halfway through the tournament I’d kind of decided I’d make sure I was at a Regional during the last week of Spring Regionals next season to enjoy that energy in the tournament again, and I think that’s a sign of the system being successful from a competitive standpoint.

I’ve always kind of felt like as a player, one big problem with Pokémon in general is that there are too few opportunities to play. With the change to Regionals and the addition of Premier Challenges, we seem to be heading in the right direction. I know it’s something that people who can’t afford to travel as much as some other players resent a little bit, and the current system isn’t perfect, but I think people like Benji and Tony are pretty good proof you can still rack up a ton of points on relatively few events if you’re good enough.

Onward To Nationals

This ended up going much longer than I expected it to because I wrote more about fewer points, but hopefully I got people thinking a little bit. This column will probably resume after European Nationals, assuming we get enough team data that I actually have something to write about. In the mean time, good luck to the European guys as they prepare for their events and to those of you attending Premier Challenges. Definitely attend these events and try to help the people around you enjoy themselves if you can — we want those events to be well attended so they are expanded!

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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