Global Link Events leading up to Omega Ruby & Alpha Sapphire Announced (Updated)
The Pokémon Company announced quite a few bits of news outlining how the Global Link will evolve up to November when Pokémon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire come out and players move to those games inside. This is what’s left for your Pokémon X & Y Global Link events!
International Challenge — June
In late June, we’ll be seeing another International Challenge for players to grab some Championship Points. European players on the bubble for Top 16 and Top 32 will be sure to fight hard for their spots as North American players try to put themselves in the best positions possible to end in the Top 4 or Top 16 at the end of the season.
Remember, the International Challenge — May begins in just a few hours so sign up now if you haven’t!
Special Ladder
Many were understandably upset about the Special Ladder no longer offering a way to practice this season’s Standard ruleset in preperation for the National Championships taking place in the US, UK, Italy, Australia, South Africa, Korea, and Japan. Season 5 and Season 6 will, much like Season 4, offer a different ruleset than the one we’re used to — though for some of the older crowd, one of these formats may be pretty familiar!
Season 5
Season 5 will use the Singles format starting on July 15th, 2014 and has you enter the battle with 6 Pokémon per side during the battle, no items, and likely no team preview! They’re trying to replicate the type of battles we played back in the day with Pokémon Red & Blue.
Season 6
Season 6 will use the Doubles format starting on September 11th, 2014 and will not allow the top 12 Pokémon used in the Doubles ladder between Season 1 and halfway through Season 5. Otherwise, the ruleset will be the same. This is somewhat similar to the rules of Nintendo Cup ’99 where the Pokémon used on the previous finalists’ teams were banned from use.
Top 12 Pokémon in Seasons 1 to 3 are:
- Garchomp
- Rotom-Wash
- Talonflame
- Kangaskhan
- Mawile
- Tyranitar
- Meowstic
- Togekiss
- Greninja
- Charizard
- Gyarados
- Salamence
- Kangaskhan
- Garchomp
- Talonflame
- Mawile
- Rotom-Wash
- Tyranitar
- Charizard
- Landorus
- Greninja
- Cresselia
- Togekiss
- Meowstic
- Kangaskhan
- Talonflame
- Garchomp
- Rotom-Wash
- Mawile
- Charizard
- Landorus
- Tyranitar
- Greninja
- Aeigislash
- Cresselia
- Gengar
Other Ladder Tournaments
Outside the International Challenge — June, there are also multiple ladder tournaments with rulesets that may offer you a break from the competitive circuit. Please note that none of these outside the Detonation Friendly have been confirmed for players outside Japan. These events will be available to players worldwide!
Think Fast Competition: Single Battle
This tournament will be open to all players from around the world and run from June 6th to 9th, 2014 after taking entry from May 29th to June 6th, 2014. It will use the same rules you may be used to on the Singles ladder on Battle Spot, but will offer a 10 minute match time limit with 15 seconds per turn and only 30 seconds in team preview. You’ll only be allowed to play 10 games per day.
Eevee Friendly
You will only be allowed to use evolutions of Eevee in this tournament scheduled for July. The format will be Rotation.
All Star Battle
Similar to GS Cup, the format used in the VGC ’10 season, this tournament in July will allow you to use any Pokémon in the game aside from Diance but only allow for two of the Pokémon considered special legendaries (likely: Lugia, Groudon, Mew, etc) in your Battle Box. You will be allowed to use Pokémon you bring over using Pokémon Bank.
Think Fast Competition: Double Battle
There will be no team preview in this mode and you’ll only be able to bring in four Pokémon in your Battle Box and select three for each battle when you play this competition in August.
Fairy Friendly
This tournament will happen in the fall and only allow for Fairy-type Pokémon to be used. The format is undetermined.
Halloween Party
This final tournament will happen in the fall (safe to assume it will be at the end of October) and will be a Singles tournament only for ghost types. Additionally, you must have a Gourgeist in your Battle Box.
Updates: We have received confirmation that these events will be available worldwide and have included the addition of the Think Fast Competition: Double Battle.
About the Author
Firestorm is one of the co-founders of Nugget Bridge and the Community Manager for eSports Tournament Platform Battlefy. He has been playing Pokémon since 1999, competitively since 2007, and attending tournaments since 2010. He lives in Vancouver, Canada with a degree in Interactive Art & Technology + Communications. You can follow him on Twitter at @rushanshekar.
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6v6, no items, Final Destination
I’ll probably play the All Star Cup (though the lack of an actual GS Cup mode in XY sort of mucks up the format…), but otherwise the two CP events are the only times I can imagine myself wanting to log on Wi-Fi until the RS remakes. Lots of silly formats, and I’m not going to breed teams to play like 50 games in a format that doesn’t even have transferable skills to VGC. Pretty disappointing… hopefully other people will enjoy this sort of thing more than I do.
I might try to make myself stream the doubles ladder or s6 special or something because of the lack of alternatives a little, but this is… not good.
I entirely understand that VGC is not the be all, and end all of online Pokemon, I totally get that, I really do, but, it seems really rather wasteful to not be investing time and resources in a format that does nothing but grow the game for them. I’m sure people will play these fun tournaments, but, i’m fairly sure there’s a better use of the resources they have.
I mean, I really hope we don’t have to fight to be the Special ladder in the new games, and there’s a consistent place to play our format. I’m sure my view is warped, but it seems like chances to grow the game into new exciting outlets is being wasted by them playing with silly things like this.
Really psyched for season 5. The item part throws me off though as some pokemon really need their items.
Season 6 looks like it could prove interesting, more unique teams maybe?
All stars looks pretty exciting too! The only thing that sucks (though nothing to do with this tournament) is that outside of OU single battles that I used to do at events– I can never use my tank jirachi just because it’s “special”. (was that the reason? that it wasn’t obtainable in-game without an event? or was it because of serene grace?)
But yeah, these look really interesting, I’ll most likely participate.
Man, some of these tourneys planned sound awesome. If only I wasn’t pretty much solely a doubles player…
When do we get a Detonation Velocity, Inverse, Doubles, Ubers meta?
When will they give us a rule set that bypasses the mega evolution rule, so we can mega evolve more than once per battle?
Wow, they waited ’til the free trial was over before announcing GS Cup without pentagon rule!? What a money grab. I guess Pokemon is just pay2win now…
Pretty smart imo.
So is that ANY pokemon then (for all stars) ? since it mentioned specials (would jirachi, celebi and mew be allowed?).
Considering they specifically mentioned Diance as excluded and used “All Star” for the name which I believe included the pixies last time, I think Jirachi will be allowed for that event. Normally the 600 BST event legendaries are not included in tournaments but this is a for fun special one so it should be fine.
Oh my god, no team preview. I’m going to cheese everyone so hard.
These all look really interesting, especially the season 6 ladder and the GS Cup thing. Interested to see how severe limitations to popular Pokemon and no limitations at all affect the meta in general.
Man I’d love the GS cup…
…If I had any legendary Pokemon that didn’t have completely random IVs. xD I really hope the Halloween Party gets out of Japan; something about it sounds like a heck of a lot of fun to me.
Season 6 sounds really interesting -VGC but without any of the biggest names that the game has revolved around. It’ll be interesting to see how that pans out.
Ill play season 5 and 6 for sure. I might play the eevee rotation battle because that seems like it would take a lot of skill.
It will be whole Dex though.
These are cool to see, but I’m still baffled as to why Pokemon couldn’t have just added a “VGC” format into Battle Spot instead of making it part of “Special.” It’s absolutely ridiculous that out of the six seasons, we only have two dedicated to the official format.
Even though I solely play whatever the current VGC ruleset is, I’m interested in several of these seasons and tournaments.
Season 6 just sounds brilliant and fun. People are always complaining about overused mons. I’m sure it’ll be popular. I hope they repeat this from time to time.
Detonation Velocity just sounds like a ton of fun. I love to just rush through turns, press buttons and see what happens. And especially since there’s nothing on the line for it, we really should just go with it and enjoy the ridiculousness of it.
All Star Battle is just gushing with 2010 Nostalgia. I’ll finally get to bring Groudon out of the box again!!
Considering that we get another VGC ’14 tournament for CP too, I can’t see anything to complain about. I’m glad they’re giving us all these varied tournaments.
Ah, I didn’t realise that. That kind of deflates it a bit, I thought it was going to be a really interesting experiment. Ah well.
The lineup looks very exciting. After I complete the internationals one this month, I’ll be sure to IV/EV Grind to join as much of these tournaments as possible!
I’ll finally be able to use whimsicott again, in that case.
No team preview?
Zoroark FTW.
What. Gourgeist is required, but not Trenevant? I’m sensing some favoritism for the ghost/grass type this gen…
I think a way to solve all this craziness is to have a way for advanced options and a bit more options for metagames then we have already on either a patch or in ORAS. Like it’d be nice to have at least way to have inverted battles between friends if we wanted to…
While I’m sad we won’t have battle spot to practice on anytime soon, I can’t help but have one other thought – Gourgeist Tournament HYPEEEEEE!
It sucks VGC’s not gonna be around anymore, but that’s the thing we have to realize: the official format is flat rules, and VGC is a variation of THAT. In that sense, the official format’s always around, 24/7 disregarding maintenance. Now, it’s not the format of their own dang tournament, and that makes no sense, but the main way to play competitively still exists, which is probably their main concern.
As unrelated as most of these are to VGC, they sound like a heck tonne of fun to play 😀
Am I the ONLY one excited for the Eevee friendly? Granted, I’m a huge Eevee fan and competitive battler too but yeah…
Even if it’s just a for-fun tourney, I’m gonna take it as serious as I can. I just need to brush up on what Rotation meta actually looks like.
I’m excited for this one, also. It allows me to use Flareon and know that there are only a mere 6 Pokémon in the meta-game that are better than it is.
This whole “lets create a new metagame every month” idea sounds pretty cool — as much as the loss of the VGC thing is annoying, at least this gives people a reason to keep coming back to the game!
I don’t know Rotation but I’m just curious what your team of 6 will be.
If I were to take it extremely seriously, then my first 3 picks are obviously Jolteon, Vaporeon, Espeon. Still have to think about who else to put for the last 3 slots but I think I might rock a Choice Band Flareon somewhere (no Earthquake, no Rocks, high Sp.Def, and the only 2 physical attackers in the format are resisted by Flareon? WELL). Depending on the restrictions I might consider putting Specs Sylveon too.
Oh god I just realized we have way too many Wish users in this format.
Firestorm was just being sarcastic.
@Zekira Drake:
For the Eevee Cup, I’m thinking what you may have been comically referring to at the end of your post. Depending on if there is a timer for this, or not, I will “Wish” for a win, so-to-speak.
Vaporeon, Flareon, and Umbreon, can take hard hits. Stall, stall, and more good stall. Then Espeon added in to bounce attempted status ailments from my opponent.