SirScrubbington's VGC 2018 Teams Writeup
Hey guys! I’m back again with another writeup, this time about the teams I used in the VGC2018 format. Despite my lack of results, I really enjoyed playing in this format for the most part and found teambuilding to be really interesting. It reminded me a lot of my first VGC format, 2015 but it also had major differences which set it apart from other formats. While it was not without its problems, including fun factors such as Ally Switch and broken Z-Moves I felt it was an enjoyable format and I’m writing this report to document some of the teams which I made for and used during the 2018 season. I won't be able to provide dates for each of these events as it is difficult to pinpoint due to my lack of twitter activity for most of the season and Facebook deleting old event pages after awhile. Sorry for the inconvenience!
Pre-Season
During the pre-season for this format, I spent a lot of time playing with Kangaskhan based setup teams, as well as Calm Mind Cresselia. My first main team was built around sweeping with Volcarona, which at the time I felt was an extremely strong Pokemon especially with buginium Z. I used several other Kangaskhan based setup teams, including side-swagger Tapu Fini + CHALK, which I also felt was a pretty strong team but I never ended up using it at a live event.
Kangaskhan Volcarona Team
During the early format I was very convinced that Calm Mind Cresselia was extremely good, and was theorying it for the Australian International Championship which I was testing for in April. This team underwent many transformations, almost all of which made the team significantly worse than the previous iteration so I’ll post the version of the team which I was most satisfied with (and probably the earliest version) here.
Calm Mind Cresselia Team
[Team Paste]
EUIC Zelda Challenge 18’: Top 16
Nils and I built this team extremely early on in the format, and afterwards it picked up for a little while on ladder. We felt that the team was very strong, so we decided I should use it for this online tournament, in an attempt to win a stipend to the European IC. I went 7-1 in swiss, losing to finalist Zeen in top 16. The matchup for the team was pretty difficult, but I did my best to take the set to two close games which I eventually lost, the second on a 50-50. The match was pretty highly viewed, and some people in the chat were a little less than kind to me because of some of the plays I made but I felt like I did the best I could given the circumstances. Overall I felt like the team was very strong, and in the time since then this has proven to be true with variants of the team performing well at several regional-level live events throughout the world.
Fastbreak PC: Outside Cut
For my first event of the season, I thought I’d try using a team which I really liked - a variant of Ketchupplant’s Perish Trap team. At the time, I felt like when it was played well the archetype was strong, and it didn’t force you to play ally switch mind games which were extremely common at this point in the metagame. I ended up going 2-3 at this event, after winning two very difficult games and then losing to three extremely unfavourable matchups and after this I decided against using the archetype again. Unfortunately, standard perish trap teams just weren’t that good in this format overall as they struggled to play defensively against Tapu Lele, big Z-moves, Kommo-o and early meta rain teams. By the end of the season, semi-perish teams were quite popular (and very good) after the introduction of Intimidate Incineroar however I don’t think I ever really ended up picking up that archetype properly.
Fastbreak PC: Finalist
I felt like this archetype was extremely strong going into the AUIC, so I felt like practising using it was a good idea at this event. I ended up using a slightly modified version of this team at Oceania, but I maybe feel that this version of the team was better as it has more of an offensive presence. I lost to @AmedeeGraham in finals of this event, who played very well using the standard @MrGX_VGC Kangaskhan Goodstuffs team which I felt was a very unfavourable matchup, given that at this event most if his Pokemon were faster than mine.
2018 Oceania International: 4-4
I honestly don’t really have too many excuses for my poor performance at this event, I felt like my play was decent but I had trouble applying enough pressure to my opponents with the way my team was constructed. I had prepared the team to be extremely versatile defensively, but I felt like in most of the matchups I played I was simply unable to pick up the knockouts I needed to win games. My defensive benchmarks were very strong, however and I spent a lot of time developing them, which can be seen here. I learned a pretty major lesson from this event, which I plan to carry with me for the rest of my VGC career - Just because you can make a Pokemon live something, doesn’t mean you should. I focused all of my EV spreads on taking hits, and ended up losing out on massive KOs which really ended up costing me at this event. While I was overall dissapointed with my performance, I took the opportunity of being in Sydney to travel into the city with some of my close friends and purchased my first anime figure - which honestly in my eyes, made the trip worth it and I had an incredible time meeting international Pokemon friends who I had wanted to meet for a very long time.
Fig. 1: Best $80 I’ve ever spent
Fastbreak PC: Outside Cut
This event was held shortly after Intimidate Incineroar was released, so I decided to use a team which I had been waiting to use for a long time - Gothlax, with Incineroar support. I knew this team was going to be extremely strong once Incineroar was able to use intimidate, so I decided to test my first version of this team at this event. I ended up going 2-2, after losing to extremely poor luck round one and a strong player in Brian Amedee round three which was dissapointing however I felt like the archetype felt powerful to use, once I was used to piloting it.
Fastbreak MSS: 1st Place
After a pretty long haitus, and a lot of time to think about how I needed to change myself and my teams to improve my play I came to this event with the intention of taking home the title. I decided to use the powerful Kommo-o archetype which had been picking up in popularity as I felt it was extremely strong with intimidate Incineroar, and Kommo-o was a Pokemon which I felt was highly underrepresented (and resultingly under-prepared for) at Queensland events. I opted to run Dragon Pulse Kommo-o as it is a generally good single target STAB move, and allows for you to KO opposing Kommo-o without needing a partner Pokemon. Despite playing some extremely tough matches, I only officially dropped a set to @MogarVGC, who I forfieted to ensure he’d cut and get the CP he needed for his worlds invite. I played against @HobbitVGC in round one and in finals, which were both very fun games but overall his matchup seemed unfavourable so I was able to clinch the win. I had a lot of fun using this team, and ended up using it for my remaining games in the Trainer Tower Open - Where I finished 6-3, going 2-1 with that team. When building this team, I had a lot of help from @AvengedWerehog, who worked with me to refine my EV spreads (Gengar especially) and overall optimise the team.
I remember back in the day, I had quite a few people message me on twitter asking me for the paste of this team. Kept you waiting, huh?
Melbourne Regionals 2018: Top 16 (5-2)
After its relative success at Latin America, I found new faith in the Mimikyu Snorlax archetype which carried me through the latter half of 2017 and primarily built using it for the remainder of 2018. Going into this event, there were several teams which I had built which I felt were strong, however I was primarily focused upon using a Charizard-Y Mimilax team which can be seen below.
While I felt that this team was strong, before the event a number of teams started picking up in popularity such as the Braviary Togedemaru Charizard-Y team which I felt were very unfavourable matchups so we decided to switch to a safer team archetype practically the night before the event. We ended up deciding on a Mimikyu Snorlax team built upon the Gothlax archetype, but with Mimikyu over the Gothitelle slot.
The majority of my Mimikyu-Snorlax teams use Special Mimikyu, which was extremely popular towards the end of 2017 but much rarer seen during the 2018 format. However, I much preferred special Mimikyu on almost all of my teams as it had a favourable chance to OHKO opposing Mega Metagross and Mega Gengar without having to factor in intimidate. Overall this team was very strong, and I found that I really enjoyed piloting it however I lost to @ludicolopatrol who played extremely well while getting a little lucky and @HobbitVGC who played well and made the correct call during our set in game three. I built the team and optimised the EV spreads with @Avengedwerehog, who used the same team as I during the event and went x-3. While finishing at 9th was a little disheartening, I felt like my play was starting to reach a level that I was satisfied with once more and overall felt optimistic going onto the next format.
Post-Format
After all of my events for the year were finished, I spent a lot of time continuing to play the format while helping my good friend @Invicnati prepare for the world championships in Nashville, USA. We had both been working on variants of the Mimikyu Snorlax team, and eventually decided on two versions of the the team which we felt were the strongest - Metagross Koko Mimilax, which he preferred and Metagross Fini Mimilax, which I preferred. Overall I felt that the Fini version of the team was suited to my defensive playstyle better, and I would have most likely used it at worlds had I earned my invite and been able to attend. While I can unfortunately not share with you the Koko variant of the team and the spreads Nils had used as they are not my own, the Fini variant of the team I constructed can be seen here.
Conclusion
This year I also played in a number of online competitions, official and otherwise however as they were so great in number I decided against featuring them as it would become an extremely cumbersome task for teams I may or may not have actually taken seriously when building. I hope you understand! Thankyou very much for reading this far, and I really hope you enjoyed my writeup or otherwise found it interesting. I’ll be trying to keep up with writing these, going into future VGC formats specifically VGC 2019 Moon and Ultra series so if you’re interested, be sure to keep an eye out!
