Standard Ruleset for 2015 VGC Season Updated
The Standard Ruleset has been updated. All tournaments that are a part of the Pokémon Video Game Championships (VGC) will use these rules starting January 1st, 2015. As many have predicted, it will mirror the ruleset used in the ΩR/αS League Doubles ladder on Battle Spot. For those who need a refresher, that means:
Standard Ruleset
- All matches are played in the Doubles format.
- Pokémon 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 Pokémon after team preview.
- Pentagon Rule: All Pokémon must have the blue pentagon on their stats page indicating they were caught, bred, or received as an official gift in Pokémon X, Y, Omega Ruby, or Alpha Sapphire.
- Species Clause: No two Pokémon on your team can share the same Pokédex number.
- Item Clause: No two Pokémon on your team can hold the same held item.
- The following items are banned:
- Soul Dew
- The following moves are banned:
- none
- The following Pokémon are banned (all forms):
- Mewtwo
- Mew
- Lugia
- Ho-oh
- Celebi
- Kyogre
- Groudon
- Rayquaza
- Jirachi
- Deoxys
- Dialga
- Palkia
- Giratina
- Phione
- Manaphy
- Darkrai
- Shaymin
- Arceus
- Victini
- Reshiram
- Zekrom
- Kyurem
- Keldeo
- Meloetta
- Genesect
- Xerneas
- Yveltal
- Zygarde
- Diancie
For full rules, download the rules document here.
Additional Rule Clarifications
Headphones
You are allowed to use headphones while playing as long as they are wired and plugged into your 3DS. The cord must be visible.
Time Limits at Premier Challenges
Due to the longer than normal timers when using the Player Search System, Premier Challenges and other tournaments where you don’t have your Battle Box locked and rules downloaded at registration can have time limits enforced manually by a judge. Time limits may also be extended if the organizer sees fit. Changes should be communicated at the beginning of the tournament alongside the number of rounds and top cut size.
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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Not sure why you’re complaining, just start resetting or just hop over to the trade section of the forum and get what you’re looking for there.It’s likely we’ll have most of what we need in circulation before the first set of 2015 regionals. I have a big collection myself from just asking around and trading out things like masterballs. If you’re not willing to even put in the effort to look for what you need then I don’t know what to say. The pentagon rule is pretty important imo. The playing field is only as even as you make it for yourself. I can’t imagine the pentagon changing anything about the strong players, if anything they’ll be the ones putting in the most effort to get what they need in a timely manner, whether that be through trading or resetting.
Also I’m very happy with these rules! I was enjoying the few games I’ve been playing on Battlespot much more than anything I did in the 2014 format. i think we’ll have a good variety of Pokemon doing well this year, it will be a good time for experienced players to get creative.
I appreciate your opinion, and you do offer a viable method. I have personally always preferred breeding and catching all my and my kids’ Pokemon for use in competition. I would not trust a trade, as I believe (perhaps wrongly?) that much of the competitive legendaries for trade are copies. Believe me though, I’ll be a soft-resetting machine to get what we need–or to get something good enough. I don’t see why anyone would begrudge me or any other player for lamenting the loss of 1000s of hours of previous work (for competitive purposes), and for knowing that I’ll need to find many more hours to breed and catch Pokemon that I already have from prior generations and cannot reasonably hope to replicate to perfection.
Nah, Sparrowmon is just a really fitting name for Zapdos
The Pentagon rule is necessary for reasons beyond restricting hacked Mons (which the Pentagon rule will NOT prevent).
It essentially acts as a metagame reset, for better or worse. Periodic metagame resets are healthy for the long-term health of the metagame.
It also makes things FAR easier for tournament organizers. Not every TO has the time nor the expertise to meticulously check move/ability legality lists for every player at every tournament. The Pentagon, while not perfect, is an effective shortcut; players will still know what is legal and what is not, and can (and should) notify judges of issues.
It also keeps a focus on the new games, rather than the old. As it is, everyone is on an equal footing of having access to gen 6 games (especially given the digital era). Gen 3 access, on the other hand, is not equal, given that GBAs, Gamecubes, and misc adapters have been out of circulation for years. And from a player perspective, I’d rather be breeding my Mons in gen 6, rather than trying to RNG on a gen 3 cart.
Can some cool person please tell me the difference between these rules and BS doubles? Everywhere ive seen the phrase “very similar to BS doubles”
Just the timer from what I can see
What rapha said, just the timer. ORAS rated battle spot and VGC2015 are otherwise identical from what I see.
Honestly Maestro, it’s been well over a year since the Pentagon rule became a thing. You know why it exists: it’s a metagame reset in order to level the playing field and make things easier to balance competitively. I don’t see why “lamenting” about it in various threads will accomplish anything other than make you look whiny. They will NEVER take the Pentagon away. Ever. Get used to it and move on.
No one cares that you, me and a few other players spent hundreds to maybe even thousands of hours setting up full-completed competitive games and buying all the 4th and 5th gen games in order to RNG pretty much everything we could ever want without relying on other people. How good for us that we could do that, but that’s in the past now. Now it’s time to move on and complain (like Flash) why GameFreak doesn’t make getting flawless legendaries easier for us. If it wasn’t for that, you wouldn’t be complaining, would you? Breeding for flawless mons is so easy that RNGing’s become obsolete in that area.
Speaking of getting rid of past-gen exclusive sets, I’ll bet Hitmontop really wishes it had Sucker Punch now, what with Mega Metagross, Mega Kangaskkhan and Aegislash running around…anyways, while I can’t actually compete in a live VGC event til Nationals, I’m still pretty excited for this year. I love both this format and the actual tournament structure. Best combo I’ve seen in VGC yet. The fact that we actually have an in-game ladder all year is especially good, and I’ll definitely be spending some free time there. Well, assuming that me and a few other players don’t inexplicably become unable to find other players online all season.
Whelp, time to start SRing for all those shiny new ORAS legendaries.
I love this board and what it does, but sometimes I’m left to realize why I shouldn’t bother to post anything that isn’t a ringing endorsement of the mainstream. There’s always someone here to characterize an opinion as “complaining” or “whining,” especially when it’s not an administrator or other favorite that makes the point. Yes, I saw the writing on the wall with the pentagon, but the final word only came yesterday. Yes, I have been preparing for it, but I’m not alone in understanding the challenge of recollecting legendaries with only one masterball per game. Sorry for even bothering to comment when so many are perched to miss the bigger point and pounce. I don’t have the means to doctor Pokemon by cloning or by adding pentagons where they otherwise don’t exist, and I have no desire to do that anyway. I expect many on this board feel similarly there, and they too likely dread competing against those who have found and will use shortcuts. That’s not really a complaint, as we all play with the cards as given, though I’m sure someone will lash out again, and yes, I have a very difficult time not replying when called out and characterized unfairly for valid points. We don’t have to agree on everything, but there’s absolutely no reason to jump on someone with inflammatory description. BTW, I agree with Flash’s point.
I’m not sure that giving an advantage to people who already have flawless legendaries from older games is necessarily a good thing if the goal is leveling the playing field. For new players, the only benefit of removing the pentagon rule would be the ability to RNG those legendaries in an older game, something that while not against the rules has never been officially encouraged or even really acknowledged.
Yes, people who are willing to clone or use cheating devices have an advantage, but that has always been true, and there’s not really an easy way around it.
I don’t think the pentagon rule gives cheaters any more of an advantage than they’d have if the rule wasn’t in place. Sorry if you don’t want to put in the time to catch new legends but I think it’s healthier for the game overall.
Did people complain this much when Soul Survivor used Ice Punch Tyranitar? That combination wasn’t even available to players without a foreign system and cart, and yet he managed to obtain one as he likely saw it as having an advantage. There was a point where connections/resources were required, and it helped substantially. It’s a player’s choice to only use the Pokemon which they obtain through their own gameplay; they should be fully aware and accepting of the impending consequences of limiting themselves in such a manner. Why? Because that’s how the games currently are.
I’m personally annoyed that competitive event Mons (Ice Punch Ttar, Surf Pikachu) aren’t evenly distributed worldwide. But to use a TCG analogue, its no different than promo cards; you have to be at X event to receive Y thing. But that is not a tournament rules problem.
I don’t like event exclusive moves at all. I wish there was some way for event Pokemon to pass them on as egg moves or something. It would level the playing field and make it easier to get a Pokemon with decent IVs.
I really have to spend a lot of time soft resetting, because I think most of the legendaries floating aroudn are editet by using powersaves, which leads to my question:
Do these mons get through the “hack-check” at events?
Well, I think most of us agree with the pentagon rule, it’s great and it should stay some seasons and then move on to an hexagon or whatever. I think it’s the best thing game freak has done for competitive play in a while. The wrong side of this is the amount of time you have to waste (name it as you want but it is a waste) to get the legendaries and after getting them you have to reset your game to get another one if you build a team with different needs. You can say that the people who is not willing to spend that time doesn’t have the required will to win or something like that but I think it’s maybe the opposite. The more time you spend sring the less time you have to practice and a great portion of the community is relatively old and has less free time than the average school boy.
Game freak and tpci want us to play the game competitively but GF doesn’t give us the tools they should. I know Pokémon is not the usual eSport and it never will be because as Masuda and Ohmori said recently, they don’t want to unhide the IVs because they want us to think about pokémon as living creatures instead of a list of parameters and that way of thinking is great because it gives some life and soul to the pixels we love but is not acceptable when they want their game to be played competitively as well to promote the games and to boost theirs sales. The young newcomers doesnt usually care about the competitive aspect but a couple of years later they begin to get bored of smashing the E4 with their lvl 100 Mega Rayquaza so they look about something else to do in the games they love and they discover the competitive scene and that guarantees more sales for the years to come.
And those both worlds (living creatures vs a bunch of numbers) doesn’t go well with each other because it harms us as competitive players. For example, for those of you that play League of Legends, you have to raise your account to lvl 30 and then you need to keep on “farming” to get runes and new characters (champions) but if you compete in a live tournament, Riot sets up accounts with everything unlocked, same with Fighting games or CoD, etc. And farming in those games means to play more games online so you cant get rewards in the currency of the game to unlock new items, that way you maybe need to spend 40 hours to get a new champion but those hours makes you better playing the game and you are having fun because you are playing. It’d be a nonsense to ask the pro players to spend 40 hours rebooting their computers until eventually they get the new champion. Because yeah, you can go ahead and spend 1 hour until you get a decent champion but you are puting yourself in an uneeded disadvantage doing so because there will be people that will have those characters with all their attributes at the highest possible levels because they spent that time or because they cheated their way to them.
To sum up, I don’t think is correct to assume that wasting our precious time resseting for a chance to get the desired spreads is something healthy to the game or good by any means, yes I’m up for the pentagon rule and I don’t want them to get ride of it but if you are going to enforce that rule, don’t force people into cheating or wasting their time in a boring reseting cicle.
Well, I think most of us agree with the pentagon rule, it’s great and it should stay some seasons and then move on to an hexagon or whatever. I think it’s the best thing game freak has done for competitive play in a while. The wrong side of this is the amount of time you have to waste (name it as you want but it is a waste) to get the legendaries and after getting them you have to reset your game to get another one if you build a team with different needs. You can say that the people who is not willing to spend that time doesn’t have the required will to win or something like that but I think it’s maybe the opposite. The more time you spend sring the less time you have to practice and a great portion of the community is relatively old and has less free time than the average school boy.
Game freak and tpci want us to play the game competitively but GF doesn’t give us the tools they should. I know Pokémon is not the usual eSport and it never will be because as Masuda and Ohmori said recently, they don’t want to unhide the IVs because they want us to think about pokémon as living creatures instead of a list of parameters and that way of thinking is great because it gives some life and soul to the pixels we love but is not acceptable when they want their game to be played competitively as well to promote the games and to boost theirs sales. The young newcomers doesnt usually care about the competitive aspect but a couple of years later they begin to get bored of smashing the E4 with their lvl 100 Mega Rayquaza so they look about something else to do in the games they love and they discover the competitive scene and that guarantees more sales for the years to come.
And those both worlds (living creatures vs a bunch of numbers) doesn’t go well with each other because it harms us as competitive players. For example, for those of you that play League of Legends, you have to raise your account to lvl 30 and then you need to keep on “farming” to get runes and new characters (champions) but if you compete in a live tournament, Riot sets up accounts with everything unlocked, same with Fighting games or CoD, etc. And farming in those games means to play more games online so you cant get rewards in the currency of the game to unlock new items, that way you maybe need to spend 40 hours to get a new champion but those hours makes you better playing the game and you are having fun because you are playing. It’d be a nonsense to ask the pro players to spend 40 hours rebooting their computers until eventually they get the new champion. Because yeah, you can go ahead and spend 1 hour until you get a decent champion but you are puting yourself in an uneeded disadvantage doing so because there will be people that will have those characters with all their attributes at the highest possible levels because they spent that time or because they cheated their way to them.
To sum up, I don’t think is correct to assume that wasting our precious time resseting for a chance to get the desired spreads is something healthy to the game or good by any means, yes I’m up for the pentagon rule and I don’t want them to get ride of it but if you are going to enforce that rule, don’t force people into cheating or wasting their time in a boring reseting cycle.
Don’t need a foreign system if he just got it traded to him
…That was his point.
That’s why it not unfair…can always be traded.
… Also my point.
If we are under the assumption that people bought edited pokemon to vgc events last gen undetected then it’s highly probable that it will be similar to this gen.
Of course even then, I doubt we’ll see anything ridiculous like illegal move sets.
As for using the pentagon rule, i believe the only reason it is enforced is to reset the meta and get rid of certain move sets unfortunately. Getting rid of edited and RNGed abused pokemon was just a side effect. A useless side effect if what I mention earlier is true because then it would only flush out RNG abused pokemon.
Sooo, on a note of importance:
What kinda Pokemon you all expecting to see the most in VGC now? Think certain currently popular Pokemon will become much more unpopular now or what?
Also, how are you personally preparing?
Flash pretty much summed it up for everyone here I think. I hope nobody misunderstood my post as “Yes this is easy! Grinding is good and we should all enjoy it,” because that is absolutely not what I meant. I think we need to complain about the right things, mostly. Right now we do just need to accept what we’re given, and I don’t think limiting ourselves by not trading or seeking help from other players is a good idea at all. You really can’t just assume that every “perfect” legendary is hacked or altered, since that is unfair to the person who spent time resetting for it and unfair to yourself. Randy caught himself a perfect Cresselia in a Heal Ball after resetting for only a few hours. There are legit perfect Heatrans and genies out there, and they’ve been there since a few days after the release of the games. It isn’t impossible, just time consuming, and that is the problem. Catching legendaries that fit our standards is too much of a wildcard. You could catch something amazing on the first reset, or it could take you days, or you could end up with something that has perfect IVs but the wrong hidden power. This is the problem, and it has nothing to do with the Pentagon. RNG manipulation is something that we weren’t even meant to discover in past gens, just like the cloning glitch that anyone can do.
The pentagon was a great reset and it was great for the judges and the players. Flash has hit the nail on the head regarding the real problem, and it’s something that could be easily solved if Game Freak has any intention of pushing the competitive aspect of their game forward. Allow the players to alter IVs within the game, introduce them in the same way they brought their own method of EV training to the table. Even just removing the connection between IVs and Hidden Power would be a step in the right direction, just give us somewhere to change the type to whatever we need. There are so many different things that could solve the waste of time issue, but we may just have to keep working without an easier method. I feel like they get closer and closer with each game to the ideal that we can all imagine, but they also fall just a bit short every time. Hopefully they’ll come to understand how important this is to players… but who knows.
I’m getting mixed signals here, guys. Pokemon: The First Movie taught me that cloning isn’t a big deal and that the circumstances of a Pokemon’s birth are irrelevant. What truly matters is what they do with the gift of life, so like, help them win those battles and stuff!
IVs and EVs are equivalent to Environmental factors and inherited factors of the natural world. Gen 6 breeding = Selective breeding. Changing IVs would bring stuff from Genetics into it… it’s just early to delve into that concept yet… (Bar mewtwo and genesect, but that is about it)
I don’t know Scott, some players seem to take a shine to Mew, who wanted to eliminate all of the cloned pokemon in favor of natural born pokemon.
You know… you don’t HAVE to use flawless legendaries to make a deep run in VGC. Would say that you don’t have to use legendaries at all, but even I use some of them in Gen 5 (as flawed as they were).
I know that there’s a fair amount of pressure from people consistantly telling others that legendaries should be “Flawless or Bust”, but that’s mostly because the chances of getting a flawless legendary is at least realistically possible (slightly more likely than the chance of finding a shiny pokemon in Gen 6 which is 1/4096). It’s just the thought that if you are going to go hard on soft resetting for a legendary, you might as well go all the way with it. But if you really feel like you don’t want to spend a super long time to obtain each legendary, getting something like 31/xx/25+/31/25+/31 for say a special attacker is probably not going to kill you. losing about 5 or 6 stat points overall is probably not going to make or break your run in VGC. Just don’t ask other people’s advice on whether you should keep something or not. They’ll always tell you the same thing. Make your own judgments.
Did anyone stop to think they made it hard to SR legends so we would use different pokes in the metagame?
If you really want the 5iv or flawless legendaries, you have to put in time. If you want flawless anything, you have to put in time.
I’m not going to say don’t use legends because everyone does, but before you think about using thundurus, why not emolga? (I know that’s a terrible example, but think about it.)