National Pokémon Association 3 is Starting Soon
It’s been almost a year since the last season of the National Pokémon Association started, and we’re back at it for another! Last season had 12 teams with 72 players total fight it out for that #1 spot on top, which led to the Seafoam Islanders’ victory. This season we have a few changes from last season that I’m sure some people might be excited about. Unlike other tournament held here on Nugget Bridge, the NPA does not give any Nugget Bridge Circuit points.
For those who don’t know, the NPA is a team tournament held here on Nugget Bridge that lets players join together and work as a team to try to best the competition. All 16 teams play in 8 rounds with the top 6 making playoffs. The last remaining team in the playoffs will become the champions for this season. Unlike the Dodrio Cup, there are no special rules that the players must abide by. All matches will be played in the Standard format. Just a reminder the rules are:
- Players must use Pokémon X or Pokémon Y
- All matches are played in Doubles format
- Pokemon above Level 50 will be brought down to 50 for the match while those below 50 will stay as-is
- Players choose 4 of their 6 registered Pokemon after team preview
- Species Clause: No two Pokémon can share the same Pokédex number.
- Item Clause: No two Pokémon can hold the same held item.
- Pokémon must be bred or caught in Kalos
- Pokémon must be part of the Central Kalos Dex (1-150), Coastal Kalos Dex (1-153), or Mountain Kalos Dex (1-147)
Players sign ups will start August 1st. There will be weekly coverage going on throughout this season, so even if you aren’t drafted be sure to follow all of that!
Tournament Structure
- Each week, teams will go head to head in a fight to win the best of 6 games. So the winning team for the week will have to win 4 or more games. If the week goes 3-3, the week is recorded as a tie for each team. A win is worth two points, and a tie is worth one point.
- The 6 matches will consist of 6 standard ruleset matches between each member of the team.
- There are 8 weeks in the season, two weeks for playoffs, and a week for finals for a total of 11 weeks
- Each team will consist of the 1 manager and a minimum of 6 battlers. Each week, each manager must submit a roster of what 6 players they are using for the week to Duy and Biosci. Managers are not allowed to play in the weekly games, but are encouraged to help the team practice.
- Managers must post saying they’re subbing an inactive player out to put in another player. Once a player is subbed in that week, they must either play or the match will be decided on activity.
- All games will be played on Nintendo 3DS systems using Pokémon X or Pokémon Y
Managers
A thread will go up Saturday July 19th to see who is interested in managing this season. Duy and Biosci will personally decide who manages each of the teams with some input from advisors. All managers will be decided upon by the end of July 30th.
Draft
Players will have a chance to sign up from August 1st to August 17th, and the draft will be held on August 22nd (subject to change). The draft will happen in the synIRC channel #npa. The draft this year will be an auction, which you can learn about here (if you have questions about it, just comment below). As a manager’s turn comes around, they will quickly choose who to nominate and the bidding will commence. It’s recommended that a manager come into the draft with a set of players already in mind to draft.
Details of the draft will be worked out soon.
Trades
If teams wish, they may trade for players from other teams for players of their own or cash for the mid-season auction. They will first start out by proposing the trade to the team manager they want to deal with. If both managers agree to the trade, PM the trade info to Duy and Biosci using the forum PM system. Once you receive approval, the trade is official and considered done. If a trade is done mid-week, the player swap is done immediately even if the player still has a match yet to finish that week. The player can be subbed out for the team substitute or subbed in for the new player.
No more trades may be made after mid-season is over.
Mid-Season and All-Star Week
There will be a mid-season break after week 4 for teams to pick up new players in the mid-season auction and conduct final trades for the season. While this is going on, the current 12 players with the best records will be able to participate in All-Star Week.
Playoffs
The playoffs will contain the top 6 teams from the season. The top 2 teams will earn a round 1 bye while the remaining 4 fight it out to move onto top 4.
Related Posts
Nugget Bridge Update →
GS Cup Announced as Pokémon’s 2016 Ruleset →
2016 Pokémon World Championships Date & Location Surfaces →
I’ll be signing up as a player. To persuade would-be managers of my draft worthiness, I’d like to highlight my SPL performance from 3 years ago where I went 2-7 and was traded for Enosh.
im interested in joining.. dont know if anyone will want me but i’ll try to sell myself..
Although im fairly new to VGC, (started late last season)
I’ve improved tremendously and quickly.. my accolades rank among regularly topping the vgc ladder on pokemon showdown and placing 3rd in americas and 14th overall in the June International Challenge..
I’ve had some offline competition experience as well, placed in the semi-finals of my local competition(although it wasnt an official one as my area does not have those), losing only to the eventual champion.
Someone sign me!
Sign ups are open to everyone. It’s not an official tournament run by TPCi so your country of residence and age division don’t matter.
What juicy behind the scenes action will there be this year? I’m not sure, but if no one else finds out, I certainly will!
New to this stuff what do I do if I wanna be a player?
Interested as well but again no one will want to buy me, I don’t know anything about this auction or the nugget bridge synIRC Chanel or #npa or whatever but I want to know what it is, if there is a specific time I will need to be online and will I need to stay online. Still determing wether or not I want to be a manager or player.
Can someone tell me what the synIRC channel #npa is, how it will work with the auction and how will a manager pic the players they want?
This sounds like it’ll be fun to be a part of, but like the fat kid who knows it’s dodgeball day for p.e. that day, I doubt I’ll get picked. Let it be known i’m not a fat kid.
I think I might sit this NPA out. Last year I didn’t do all that great because I couldn’t commit that much time to NPA. This year I’d probably be inconsistent due to me not being high tier at the 2014 format, but can’t wait to watch!
Just a heads up to a lot of people, this is a rather elite event relative to other NB things. I think most people already know they won’t get picked, but I’m just trying to save some heartbreak in advance.
Will there be wild card metagames??
How is there no mention of NPA news?
That’s the highlight of the whole thing other than the draft commentary.
Still looking forward to this, it’s always a lot of fun
You can’t count anyone out though, doubt and fear is the key to not achieving anything, don’t fill anyone with it just yet. Every player new or old has a chance to play and make some noise, if you’re not picked don’t be upset, use it as motivation for the game and go out and show why you should have been picked.
I hope there is some sort of “player combine”. In that case we’d see talent from top to bottom and good surprises.
Be confident and stay confident ladies and gents! Even the best make mistakes and they are 100% beatable.
-Politoed Punch, rounding the troops.
This seems fun, would love to play, but probs won’t get chosen
If any manager has “tryouts” for the unknown players such as myself, I’d like to show my own prediction and building skills. I’ve been playing pokemon since RBY, and have followed the competitive scene since Gen IV. Although many people will go for the “safe” picks, make a wild decision and consider me at least for trials.
So this year, we will have a lot of team managers we had last year, too with 4 more teams to join the party.
Also take into account that there will be 6 players per team instead of 5 we had last year, and you can see this community grows more and more.
Last year, only one third of the players signed up for this were actually draftet, but given the huge amount of newcomers this year it will probably be the same, even though we will have whole whole 36 more players to play in this year´s NPA.
We also had some pretty cool reports from newer as well as already established players who weren´t as successful in last last years as in this year.
I remember that I wrote only one report and had nothing more to show than my top8 finish in Bochum last year, yet I was still draftet, and was very happy about that. The last year´s npa also helped me grow in the community more and now I´m a well-known player by almost the whole NB-community, and I think the NPA surely helped with that.
That being said, huge thanks to Talkinglion for drafting me last year to give me a chance to prove myself, and I encourage every manager to have a look at other newcomers- there are certainly hidden gems among us, and I would be more than happy to see some new faces in our community, too!
Will definitely be signing up as a player, sounds fun
Since I only been a member of NB for about 7 months I’ve never seen this tournament, but it seems like it would be very fun to play. I will definitely sign up to be in the draft whether I will be picked or not.
Can’t wait for the draft. I would loooooove to play this season.
I’ve been keeping an eye out for this. Looking forward to the draft and hopefully I’ll get to play this year. Bring it on!
This will be my first opportunity at this, just like the Nugget Bridge Major. Missing out on Regionals, online competitions seem to be my best bet. It’s the only time I’ll ever say this but, I can’t wait to be drafted.
Oh this looks like a lot of fun! I will also do my best to get drafted, though, as a mid-class VGC player I think there’s a tough road ahead. So far I’ve played at two regionals, both being the Long Beach ones. Missed out on top cut on the last one because I had some sloppy team prep the morning of (never again! haha) but this year I’m definitely looking to get more serious into my VGC career.
Looking forward to this!
Is there any chance of an unknown player really getting picked? Because I believe that I am unknown on NB and I want to play but I know that I won’t get a chance…
I think I’d be more worried about the fact your posting makes you very known.
I don’t understand what do you mean by this Scott? Plz don’t hurt me/ban me or anything else XD.
I think the fact you guys are terrible posters makes it less likely you’ll get drafted. Hope this clears up any confusion.
Thanks mate! It does.
Anyway when can we expect to see the drafting to begin? Thanks.
According to the OP, August 22nd.
I would like to sign up as a player, as it seems that this would be a really exiting event to compete in, but If I don’t drafted, I’ll be fine with that as well.
So, as a player, I would consider myself to be pretty good, as I did manage to get to Top 128 in the June International Challenge, even though I happened to experience some problems with the connection for some reason, but all the excuses aside, External.
For my teams, I do enjoy making them myself, even though sometimes I might use a Pokémon which worked for an another player, or be inspired by a successful strategy and giving it a twist of my own.
And for the team I would like to showcase is a VGC 2013 -team, which I created all by myself, par the Metagross’s EV Spread, and it worked pretty well, but if I’d still work with it, I might change the Thundurus-I a little.
Leaving this here because to absolutely no one’s surprise, reading the OP has apparently been an incredibly arduous task for another online tournament.
HELLA WANNA PLAY IN THIS!!! gonna show them I can do it! Really Excited!
If you cut a player do you get any of their salary space back? For example, if you cut a player after week 3, do you get 5/8s of the salary back for the remaining weeks?
One of the interesting parts of last season was the wildcard “home team” advantage. Since there is no wildcard this year, can we maybe replicate this in a different fashion? I propose instead of randomly ordering your 6, we implement a more strategic ordering method. The “away” team selects the top 3 players in the order, then the home team submits all 6 of their order (deciding who will play the top 3), then the away team gets to decide which of their final 3 will play the bottom half of the order. This method seems relatively straight forward and easy enough to implement.
Finally, are we going to have 2 divisions with now 8 teams like we did last year? Will schedule be released before the draft?