VGC Fall Regionals 2014

[Talon87]

Thought we had a thread on this. Whoops. Well, catch-up time:

• two weekends ago was Philadelphia, PA and Phoenix, AZ
• last weekend was Houston, TX
• this weekend is Fort Wayne, IN and San Jose, CA

I guess the biggest highlight thus far is that Aaron Zheng placed 1st in Masters at Philadelphia and then flew out to Houston one week later where he managed to place 3rd. I think that this pretty much secures his seat for Worlds though I could be mistaken. It definitely otherwise puts him in a favorable position.

I wanted to go to Fort Wayne, just a two-hour drive away, but real life's gotten in the way and so I just wasn't able to make it this year. I'm hoping to be able to attend a later regional if there's one as closeby as Chicago (2.5 hours) or Louisville (4 hours), but we'll see. It's okay anyway. The team I have on the gamepak is not a team I could expect to win the event with anyway, and everyone at the top of the VGC world would know the team I've borrowed from Gebebo so that's kind of pointless too. Once I get better (1600+ on the Smogon VGC ladder? :o ) I'll make a more serious effort to attend a regional.

That hasn't stopped some new friends of mine from going to the TCG event though! I know four people who will be going to Fort Wayne, two of whom have a decent shot at making the top cut and one of whom is hoping to win the entire thing. We'll have to see what happens. I don't know of anyone who streams the TCG events so I'll probably have to wait to find out late Sunday night whether any of my friends won or not.

Back on the topic of VGC, this is the final regional weekend that will be using the 2014 rules. Everyone's excited to find out whether 2015 is going to be NationalDex or whether it's going to be ORAS HoennDex. I think that ORAS HoennDex would prove more fresh battle-wise while NationalDex would prove less frustrating team building-wise.

[rotomotorz]

My friend placed 6th at PA

[Heather]

Thats started already? If i want to do anything i need to get started breeding. Like, now. And i need HAs too. Ugh.

[rotomotorz]

Well Fall Regionals typically follow last year's rules and Winter and Spring, along with Nats and Worlds will use VGC 15 rules

[Talon87]

Originally Posted by Myles Fowl II

Thats started already? If i want to do anything i need to get started breeding. Like, now. And i need HAs too. Ugh.

Focus on creatures in both the HoennDex and KalosDex first. Then move to other creatures found in the HoennDex. Once we find out what the 2015 format allows, you'll be able to figure out the rest from there.

You have roughly four months to prepare. Winter regionals last time were held in January, covering the weekends of January 11-12, January 18-19, and January 25-26. But this time they will reportedly be held in February. So you're not in any sort of mega rush. It's still best to get some things prepared in advance if you can, though. Even if the ideal moves and EVs change between now and January, you'll at least have a 5V or 6V parent to make breeding go quicker.

For more information on which cities have been confirmed for Winter Regionals 2015 or Spring Regionals 2015, click here.

[rotomotorz]

Yeah hopefully I'll be showing up at Virginia so that'll be fun

[Heather]

Hoenn and Kalos? Well, I guess I can do that as the team I've been planning on is all Kalos. Here's a rough sketch of what I'm going for:

Scolipede @ Charti Berry/Coba Berry
Speed Boost
Defensive or SpDefensive
Protect
Swords Dance
Baton Pass
Steamroller

Lead this alongside Greninja, and your opponent must instantly play pick your poison. Take out Instant-Threat-O-Tron 3000 Greninja first only to realize "oh crap I lose" Once Scolipede's gotten through the Swords Dance woods, or take out Scolipede first, wasting time piercing Berry protection, only to let Greninja ravage your side of the field, your opponent must choose wisely whether he'll take a lytic or lysogenic infection, so to speak.

Staraptor@Choice Scarf
Reckless
Speedy Phys.Sweeper
Brave Bird
Close Combat
Double Edge
U-Turn

The Starly line is my Ash's Caterpie. truly, it is, and while choice locking is a dangerous affair, I have confidence in Staraptor to be a good Baton Target in Case I either leave ZardX or ZardX has fainted, but it will more oft be the former. This is, again, a pretty standard set, and very viable even in Doubles.

Greninja@Expert Belt
Protean
Speedy Sp.Sweeper
HP Grass
Surf
Ice Beam
Dark Pulse

Standard Greninja set with the Expert belt I came to love from OU laddering. Instant Threat-O-Tron 3000, and will almost always be leading because of the interesting ways this can be utilized with Scolipede.

Charizard@CharizarditeX
Blaze>Tough Claws
Physical Sweeper of some manner
Dragon Claw
Dragon Dance
Fire Fang
Earthquake

Just like old times, with a new twist in Mega Evolution. A Dancing Dragon(ite) substitute with Fire STAB and Tough Claws, its got enough neutral spread across all its moves to do some serious damage after a DD or two.

Aegislash@Spooky Plate
Stance Change
Special sweeper/minor physical investment
Shadow Ball
Sacred Sword
Shadow Sneak
King's Shield

Pretty standard set here. I grew attached to this in my OU laddering quest. And then there was the time it won a PP war vs Stall Clefable...

Cloyster@White Herb
Skill Link
Physical Sweeper
Icicle Spear
Shell Smash
Rock Blast
Spike Cannon

SMASH HIT INCOMING! Of course I'd put some faith in something that managed to whale a mono-water team I put together once singlehandedly. With weather wars, ZardY is a likely commonality, until Rock Blast clips its wings. Grass types taste an Icicle spear, and for everything else Cloyster doesn't get walled by and die to, there's Spike Cannon with enough neutral spread to get it through the day.

This is a slight variation of the original Transposition of my first serious OU ladder Squad to VGC from a while back. With Weather wars rampant, I've kept this team from depending on the skies to succeed, hence using ZardX, as I can't have Dancing Dragon(ite) in VGCs as of now.

Now, if there's no Evasion Clause in VGC, I have an idea for a Cloyster replacement that can have two variations depending on whether status-hitting Steels is mandatory or not.
Here is the first variant that doesn't care about steels.

Umbreon@BrightPowder
Synchronize
Specially Defensive
Toxic
Double Team
Charm
Moonlight

Total Taunt bait, yes, but if your opponent didn't bring a Taunter, a Steel type, or a Poison type, it's death by poison for at least one or two Pokemon. Aura Sphere? Higher base special defense than Arceus and Special defense investment makes that not a huge threat and gives ample switch time. All the other sure-hits (No, Vaccuum wave isn't a threat either, if that's even a sure hit) fail to land SE and are just as laughable, physical or no, with 110 base physical defense. which can be invested in at the cost of some HP. Even without it, Charm can make an EQ laughable, and I'm unsure of this, but it may affect both enemies in Doubles, making it a HUGE boon to teams insisting on MegaMom or other notable physical powerhouses, and it places a ton of pressure: do you switch and risk other teammates getting Toxic'd, or do you stay in knowing those pokes will likely be dead soon anyway and hope to the RNG for some amazing crit? When I battle a certain friend of mine, whether or not he uses this can sometimes make predicting the outcome much easier. And if it can't toxic you to death, it can most certainly win a PP war at least once. One of the few things that can pose a large threat to this is MegaLuke, which can be solved with a Switch to Staraptor and an EQ.

Let's say MegaGross is holy crap OP and running rampant.

Sigilyph @ Flame Orb
Magic Guard
Specially Defensive
Psycho Shift
Cosmic Power
Stored Power
Roost

For one, not Taunt Bait, two, I've seen this setup defeat Arceus. That's right, I saw this thing set a god on fire and watch it burn to death as it whaled on it uselessly. And there's Stored Power for the non-Darks, which after a few Cosmic Powers...You get the idea. This thing has taken on squads chock full of legends and made the legend user ragequit after half his team has died due to mostly burn damage. I fear this thing for a reason.

That's about everything.

[rotomotorz]

We have a RMT sub-forum. Make a thread there

Also Greninja is hardly as good as you make it out to be

[Talon87]

I didn't mean that you need to make a team of six creatures that are all strictly KalosDex+HoennDex. I simply meant that if you have a team of six creatures in mind who would be supremely good in bring-6-pick-4 Doubles matches that you start off breeding the creatures that are jointly KalosDex+HoennDex and work your way down from there.

By all means, you can try to make a team of nothing but creatures natively found in both games, but it's likely to mean that you'll be playing with a handicap relative to other players.

Anyway, this isn't really the right thread for this conversation. I don't want to squash it =\, but I'd like the thread to be more focused on tomorrow's games that will be played in Ft. Wayne and San Jose. By all means, make a Rate My Team thread in the team rating subforum if you like; or make an RMT post in the competitive battling thread if you like; etc.

[rotomotorz]

There's a fairly reasonable chance that VGC 15 will be limited to either just Hoenn Dex or a combination of Kalos and Hoenn dexes

[Talon87]

Originally Posted by rotomotorz

There's a fairly reasonable chance that VGC 15 will be limited to either just Hoenn Dex or a combination of Kalos and Hoenn dexes

Which is why I've encouraged him to start with things that are only native to both regions, then to work up to anything that's native to Hoenn regardless of Kalos, then .... Anyway ...

Fort Wayne, Indiana:

For Ft. Wayne tomorrow, the only name I recognize that has been reported to be in attendance for sure is Mancuso. His name has come up in the Smogon VGC chatroom a number of times when I've lurked, and I even chatted with the guy once about a week and a half ago. He's from northeast Ohio, I believe he said. And he took 5th place last year at Fort Wayne. Scott (as in that Scott) might be there as a competitor? I don't know. It wasn't really clear to me from his preview article. He made it sound like he will be there but he also made it sound like he doesn't have a competent team, so I'm not sure if that's just him being modest or if he plans to attend but only as a Nugget Bridge representative and possible commentator for the event. We'll see. I think it'd be cool if Scott competed, so I'm hoping he was just being modest when he said he only has three Pokémon.

Interestingly, 2014's Nationals runner-up, Adib Alam, will not be attending. He was there last year, taking 7th place, but I guess he's just been way too busy with his senior year studies to make time for Pokémon this season. To be fair, the fall regionals are at a really bad time for a Purdue student. The third week of October is pretty prime territory for a lot of teachers to place their midterm exams and/or to make midterm projects due. I don't blame him at all for deciding against giving VGC his entire weekend (and a solid $100 or two of his money in hotel fees and the cost of gasoline), but it is disappointing since presumably other college students will be there.

Scott is putting his money on Collin Heier, who from the impressions I've gotten these past six months seems to be something of a rising star in the community. You can read a recently-written article by Collin right here. In it, he kindly relays to us his history last season: didn't make top cut at Ft. Wayne, only made Top 16 at St. Louis ... and then attended two more Regional events (wow ) and managed to make Top 4 at one of them and get 1st place at the other. At Nationals, he was 6-3. And then as for Worlds ... he placed 3rd, losing only to Sejun Park who of course would go on to win the entire thing. So yeah: even if last year's Nationals runner-up isn't going to be at Fort Wayne, its Worlds 3rd place player is. Yikes. Gonna be a fierce competition for sure, I'll bet.

Fort Wayne apparently isn't famous for being a super crowded event, yet there were gobs and gobs of people on Nugget Bridge's forums saying that they planned to attend this year's. Given the surprising turnouts at Philadelphia (300+) and Houston (200+), I wouldn't be surprised to see Fort Wayne post some large figures as well. Actually, come to think of it we should already have a handle on those figures. Maybe I can ask someone who knows.

San Jose, California:

This one I know a lot less about. Obviously I was interested in Fort Wayne, having been hoping to be able to attend it for months now. (Sigh ... ^^; Next year, maybe ...) But I do know at least one thing about San Jose: Nationals 2014 Champion Alex Ogloza will be there. So it promises to be another electrifying arena as hopefuls for the 2015 crown look to dethrone Alex while Alex seeks to prove that he's more than just a kid who got lucky. I'm interested to see what team he brings. He won Nationals 2014 with a rain team at a time where rain was perfectly poised to edge out the trending teams of the day. With his team being public knowledge, he's going to be forced to try a new strategy from the ground up or else stick with what he knows but risk that everyone else knows it too and can dance circles around it in an evolved meta.

Scott mentions a whole lot of names in his preview of the event that I don't really recognize. I recognize Duy Ha (since he commentated all this year), but it's not really clear to me from the article whether he'll be participating or not. (Doesn't sound like he will be.) Scott does mention that Nugget Bridge's own in-house champion will be in attendance, Anthony Jiminez a.k.a. DarkAssassin. So that's someone else I figure I should be keeping an eye on. But yeah. Not much else to say about San Jose from me just yet. ^^;

Expectations:

The past two weekends have seen a modest surge in Mega Mawile usage. I wouldn't be surprised if players, anticipating this (and having had the benefit of two weeks since Philly to make any last-minute changes and play test things), have shifted towards a more aggressive anti-Mega Mawile position with the likes of Charizard, Talonflame, and Garchomp. As someone with a borrowed team that runs all three of Charizard, Garchomp, and Mega Mawile, I know a thing or two about how she can still do her best against these guys (especially Garchomp, who abhors Tailwind), but that still doesn't make them any less threatening.

I don't know how poorly I would say rain has done since (iirc) Aaron Zheng himself was running a Politoed and he obviously went on to take 1st and 3rd place at two of the three regional events this month. But I'm willing to say that it will have a harder time of things this weekend. I would expect Tyranitar and Charizard to be kings of the weather wars this weekend. If I'm proven wrong, though, and this weekend sees rain teams kicking ass, then it might be quite the bittersweet ending to Politoed's VGC career this season: because Poliwag was not in the original HoennDex and thus Politoed could very possibly be illegal in VGC 2015 if TPCi decides to go with a HoennDex-only format instead of a HoennDex+KalosDex joint format or an all-region format. We'll just have to wait and see.

[rotomotorz]

Mega Mawile is also likely rising in usage because its a Hoenn Pokemon and is more than likely legal in whatever VGC 15 throws our way. Its much harder to re-make a team if you have to remake the core because what you brought to falls is banned now.

[Heather]

I'm going to wait for '15 season rules to come out and hope to god that they allow Kalos Pokemon. I have no idea how to build a VGC team from Hoenn Pokes - I just don't know the region and its pokemon well enough as later gens have given me all I need, except in the case of Umbreon being Gen 2, but if I have to use GenIII and only GenIII...my chances at doing anything in '15 season are boned. Which kinda sucks as my dream is to get far and if I somehow make it to worlds give a shout out to all you guys here. If it wasn't for you guys, I wouldn't ne into comp so much beyond screwing around with Sitrus BellyJet, Story clones, and Karen teams. Of course, I said its a dream. Emphasis on dream! But it would be nice.

So if I'm stuck in a Gen 3 format...Is a Light Metal Metagross worth it? Because I do have one I can breed from... Maybe a Flygon? Maybe Salamence? Mawile and Garde are going to be running amok for sure, I have a Mawile with some decent stuff on it to use as a seed...Gardevoir, I also have, just need to IV it and EV it correctly. But I can only bring one of those...

You can see the struggle.

[Princess Ana]

>Light Metal Metagross

Not really. Low Kick and Grass Knot aren't really issues. Stick with Clear Body, since Intimidate is hilariously common.

[Heather]

Alright. I figured if there were any HAs I had I might as well try to use them if they were viable and use that pokemon as a breed seed.

[Talon87]

While we wait for news on today's VGC events, a status update on the TCG side of things:

Originally Posted by Talon87

I know four people who will be going to Fort Wayne, two of whom have a decent shot at making the top cut and one of whom is hoping to win the entire thing. We'll have to see what happens.

Apparently Mr. JWittz himself was in attendance at Fort Wayne as a competitor, managing a respectable score of 6 wins, 1 loss, and 2 ties. (For those curious to know how TCG matches end in ties, click here.) He tweeted a photograph yesterday of the players who managed to make the top cut in TCG Masters which you can find right here. Sure enough, both of the two players I mentioned yesterday who stood decent shots at top cutting did in fact place in the top 32! Looking at the official site's explanation for how the TCG top cut works, we get this:

227–799 	9 rounds 	Record of X-2-0 or top 32, whichever is greater (5 rounds) 	Top 8

The table reads a little confusingly to me, but I think what it's trying to say, based on JWittz's tweet, is that the Top 32 advance to the second day of the tournament whereupon they compete in a 5-round secondary qualifier to determine the top 8 players who will advance to the playoffs. So thirty-two players survived to Day 2, but of these only 25% will be lucky enough to even qualify for the playoffs. Here's wishing the best of luck to both of my friends today.

[Talon87]

Double post for legibility's sake.

Some VGC news is starting to trickle in. Mr. Mancuso tweets that he is currently 3-0 in Swiss. Also, apparently Fort Wayne held a Premier Challenge yesterday to tide the VGC players over while they waited for Sunday to arrive. Here's a photograph of the Masters standings at that event. As you can see from the list, a number of names are conspicuously absent, suggesting that they may have opted to sit out the Premier Challenge so as to not give away their surprises before the big event tomorrow (today).

Scott Glaza has also tweeted this disappointing update:

Lost round 3 to a cheese team that will do no better than 5-3 and with where that will put my resistance that's pretty much gave over at 2-1.

Loss was a team preview error; picked to play a normal game of VGC instead of how to best stop probable cheese, which was the wrong decision.

First tweet's a little salty, maybe, since I think it remains to be seen if Scott will even manage a 5-3 record himself or not. But yeah, it is disappointing to lose to a team that you know won't win the entire event when you felt confident in your own team's ability to do precisely that. Oh well.

Scott also shares this picture in an earlier tweet, suggesting that Fort Wayne's attendance for Masters was 243. Not bad! It definitely seems like the days of 64-people-in-attendance regionals are over and done with on this side of the Rockies. 243 for just Masters, never mind all of VGC period, never mind for the entire event (VGC+TCG) period, really suggests that VGC has gained more recognition than ever before. I feel like that's certainly been the case in our own neck of the woods! I can only imagine that as we press on into the future they will either end up making VGC qualifiers a two-day event (just like the TCG) or else they will start creating more regionals per season (GOOD!) in an attempt to spread things thin a bit. Because having eight rounds of Swiss only to tell players that they can't make the playoffs unless they scored 7-1 or better just seems way too harsh to me. And that's technically not even what Scott reports: he reports that "0.54 people" with a record of 7-1 will be sent home! So you could technically be that one guy who scores 7-1 and still doesn't get to compete in the finals! Man.

[Talon87]

According to this tweet, there were exactly four players at lunch time who had a score of 6-0 at Fort Wayne. With two rounds remaining, exactly half of these players were guaranteed to leave today with at least one loss in the preliminaries. And none of them had any guarantee that they'd make it to the Top 8. That's pretty wild, though it was great news for the numerous players then sitting at 5-1.

Fast forward to 6:44pm and Scott has these things to say:

Originally Posted by NBNostrom

7-1 did indeed miss cut. Think we need some adjustment here @AlphaZealot...

Yikes. So someone managed to score 7-1 and still missed out on the top cut. Yeah, that's pretty crappy. To be so good that you only lose one out of eight games while playing in Swiss amongst the best of the best ... only to be told that because you happened to be randomly assigned players who were on average crappier than the players assigned to the other 7-1s that you'll have to pack your bags now and head home. Not sure who it happened to (it wasn't Scott) but my heart goes out to them all the same.

Originally Posted by NBNostrom

Ft Wayne's VGC Regional atmosphere was the worst I've seen. Many players below x-2 were mad + blew the rest off, x-1s+ were unduly stressed.

Enjoyed social aspect but the actual VGC Regional was a big let down. Will likely be attending a different Regional this weekend next year.

Not sure why this would be the case. A, many of the players at the event come from out of state anyway, so it's not like the general atmosphere at Fort Wayne should be any more or less toxic than the atmosphere at relatively nearby venues like Philadelphia or St. Louis. But B, while it can be frustrating to know that you have no hope of making it to the finals once your score is 6-2 or worse, I've always been told that VGC goers don't take the winning so seriously and that they have a fun time at the event regardless of how well they do. This was even the case this very afternoon with JWittz in the TCG portion, who was 0-1-2 shortly after the midday break and knew he wouldn't be top cutting. He tweeted pretty pleasantly, saying that he could now loosen up and just have fun. And that's what I've read so many VGC players historically report that they do once they realize they aren't going to make top cut. So again, I don't really understand why the mood was so sour at Fort Wayne ...

... Aside from the single obvious elephant in the room that is the only having eight rounds of Swiss despite over 240 players being in attendance. The rules clearly suggest that you should have nine rounds of Swiss in that circumstance. And both Philadelphia and Houston, iirc, had playoffs between the top 16 players, not the top 8. (I could be wrong about that second one, but if I am then it's just another thing that needs to be changed.) So I guess I don't understand why the tournament organizers only held eight rounds and why they made the playoffs exclusive to the top eight players.

Anyway, while I'm sorry to hear that people had a shitty time at Fort Wayne (though I guess it gives me some consolation for not attending ^^; ), I guess part of me is selfishly glad that Fort Wayne might have "fucked up" and scared off a lot of out-of-staters. A, because that may mean less people attend next year from out of state which in turn means less competition near the top of the ladder. And B, because it may mean that the out-of-staters push TPCi to relocate the Fort Wayne regional to a different city in Indiana under different management. There's no one in Lafayette qualified to run the event (seeing as we didn't even have a league before 2014 and the only one we have is just an undergraduate-run college club), but there should be plenty of people in central Indiana who could host it. I know we already have Nationals in Indianapolis every year, but I would love to have a Regionals event there as well. Only an hour's drive away, lots of convention halls, etc. Probably not gonna happen, but I dunno. Fort Wayne isn't exactly known for being the most amazing city in the state, so it's always felt weird to me that other states get to have their regionals in big name places like St. Louis, Philadelphia, or Orlando while we have to have ours in podunk Fort Wayne.

Originally Posted by NBNostrom

ended up 5-2 and then got paired up to 6-1 Maurice, who I have eliminated many times before. Did not do so today...

From this tweet of Scott's, it seems he ended up scoring 5-3. I think that that's respectable, to be quite honest, and that he has nothing to be ashamed of. But I also think it puts him in range of owing the one guy he lost to earlier today an apology. He was saying earlier how that team was a gimmick team that could only at best hope to win 5-3. Well, you only won 5-3, Scott. Is your team a gimmick team? Obviously you don't think so. And maybe that guy doesn't think his is either. What you call a gimmick, maybe he felt was "anti-meta." Oh well. I'm glad Scott played and I hope he will continue to play. I'm sorry to hear he didn't have a pleasant time at Ft. Wayne and I hope that he'll reconsider his promise to not attend next year if indeed it is hosted at Ft. Wayne again.

To be continued!

[Talon87]

If some players had a rotten time at Fort Wayne, others surely had a blast. I have to imagine that David Mancuso did in the end: because he won the entire thing! :o

Originally Posted by MancusoVGC

Just won Ft Wayne regionals. Won the PC and the main event giving me 160 more CP!!!

That is pretty incredible. He not only won the Premier Challenge yesterday but he also won the main event, the Regional tournament, the very next day despite everyone knowing what his team was. Wow. That just goes to show a) how solid his team is and b) how good of a player he must be.

Here's the list of players who managed to place in the top 8 at the event. We have a name now for the poor guy who 7-1'd and didn't make it: Kyle Epperson. I don't know who you are, Kyle, but you've got my sympathies.

Moving on to San Jose ...

Here's the list of the top 32 players in San Jose's Regionals Masters division. Of these, only the top 8 moved on to the playoffs, it sounds like, just like with Fort Wayne. :\ However, unlike at Fort Wayne, it looks like there were no 7-1 casualties this time. In fact, on the contrary: it was a lucky 6-2 who just barely made the cutoff, with all other 6-2s not making it. I recognize a few of the names in the list, but none of the ones in the top 8. :o Probably my own ignorance for half of them, but maybe the other half are new faces? That would be pretty cool.

The fact that I don't see Alex Ogloza's name anywhere on the list, coupled with the fact that he's seen in photographs on the Nugget Bridge twitter feed that talk about commentators/announcers, makes me wonder if he sat this one out and has decided to just have fun commentating or something. O.o I wouldn't have expected that. In fact, I could've sworn that Scott wrote in the NB article for the event that Alex would be participating. So I wonder what happened?

Click here to watch the remainder of the San Jose regionals! Looks like they're streaming this one. We're down to the Top 4, I think.

[rotomotorz]

Originally Posted by Talon87

That is pretty incredible. He not only won the Premier Challenge yesterday but he also won the main event, the Regional tournament, the very next day despite everyone knowing what his team was. Wow. That just goes to show a) how solid his team is and b) how good of a player he must be.

I mean that isn't terribly hard as despite everyone knowing your team no-one has had enough time to make a counter team for it. As a player I'm pretty sure many of the top players' playstyles aren't a huge secret. I don't know how good or popular David is but knowing one's playstyle doesn't mean you have an advantage

[Talon87]

Originally Posted by rotomotorz

I mean that isn't terribly hard as despite everyone knowing your team no-one has had enough time to make a counter team for it. As a player I'm pretty sure many of the top players' playstyles aren't a huge secret. I don't know how good or popular David is but knowing one's playstyle doesn't mean you have an advantage

Who said anything about changing your team around? It's an information war: simply knowing Mancuso's movesets gives his opponents an advantage he lacks on them. Don't tell me you've never been in games where you have to ask yourself whether the other guy is running A/B/C/D or whether he's running B/C/D/E and you're agonizing over ordering with respect to A or ordering with respect to E.

I stand by my assessment: it's impressive that he took home 1st despite forfeiting so much information to his opponents. I'm not saying it's impressive that he managed to make Top 32 despite this (though that's impressive in its own right). It's impressive that he managed 1st. It's the sports world equivalent of playing with an arm tied behind your back. "I don't care if you know my entire team. I have nothing to hide. Bring it."

[rotomotorz]

I mean knowing what he has isn't terribly helpful if you can't adapt to it. Obviously when you play against him you can eliminate some potential moves on his Pokemon but there's hardly ever going to be something extremely groundbreaking in someone's moveset which you shouldn't already be prepared for. For example if you have a Pokemon that can have moves A-E you should fully expect to see both anyways, and while it may give you an advantage it isn't something that would change the game that much

[Talon87]

Originally Posted by rotomotorz

I mean knowing what he has isn't terribly helpful if you can't adapt to it. Obviously when you play against him you can eliminate some potential moves on his Pokemon but there's hardly ever going to be something extremely groundbreaking in someone's moveset which you shouldn't already be prepared for.

The San Jose championship round just showed how wrong this attitude is. Champion (in later interview), commentators (during game), and spectators (during game) were all talking about how the runner up lost because he had no idea what to expect on the champion's Jumpluff, a rarely-seen creature in VGC 2014. Had Shreyas (the San Jose champion) done what Mancuso did in choosing to reveal his team to the public the day before, he couldn't have done what we just witnessed him do.

[rotomotorz]

Well, I suppose that if you want the element of surprise by using uncommon Pokemon than yes team reveals would hurt you tremendously. But unless Mancuso used some rare Pokemon nobody expected(or surprise moves nobody expected), my point still remains the same :/