Warm-Up Challenge
Regulation M-A ⬝ Official Online Competition
The first official tournament in Pokémon Champions has officially come to an end. For our first event, I had a lot of fun. I expected it to be fun, but thought it'd be a lot less predictable with the small roster and even smaller item pool.
I'm quite proud of my overall performance. I had a rough Day Two, but my day one and three were better than I expected, bringing me up to a 60% win rate. (...)
Were there things I could have done better? Absolutely. There was one glaring mistake in particular that made the tournament significantly harder than it had to be (one you won't find in the screenshot. But I think this was a great start to a new era of VGC, and I'm excited for what comes next on Champions.
Table of Contents
| Game | Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | L | W | L |
| 2 | W | L | W |
| 3 | W | L | W |
| 4 | L | W | W |
| 5 | W | L | |
| 6 | W | W | |
| 7 | W | L | |
| 8 | W | W | |
| 9 | L | L | |
| 10 | W | W | |
| 11 | W | L | |
| 12 | W | L | |
| 13 | L | W | |
| 14 | L | W | |
| 15 | L | W | |
| Wins | 9 | 8 | 3 |
| Losses | 6 | 7 | 1 |
| Final Score | ||
|---|---|---|
| Wins | 17 | 56.77% |
| Losses | 6 | 43.33% |
| Total | 30 | |
| Final Statistics | |
|---|---|
| Rating | 1,589.133 |
| Placement | 15,718 |
Rumination and Moving Forward
The first thing I would do different is bring the right Pokémon. That screenshot up above is the team I intended to bring, and the one I bred for.
So funny story regarding my Sylveon. You might have already noticed this, but I ran a Sylveon with the ability Cute Charm and not Pixelate. That was by accident. I went to grab one in Scarlet & Violet, but only had one that was right nature, wrong ability. Did not want to risk Home → Champions issues with an Ability Patched Sylveon, so I went to find a Hidden Ability Eeveelution to breed. Bred a Hidden Ability Umbreon, but it was the same gender as the Sylveon. Bred the Umbreon until I had one that could breed with the Sylveon and had the right Ability, which took about an hour. Then I finally bred the Sylveon and Eevee, then evolved the correct Eevee into a Sylveon before putting it back in the box. Before I could open Home, however, I got a call from a family member and had to run an errand with them. When I came back, I put the wrong Sylveon into Champions and didn't notice the ability was wrong until my first match.
Fun fact: Sylveon with only Normal moves does not do that well against Dragonites I explicitly brought a Sylveon in to respond to. Sylveon made it to Games 1 and 3, and after that I decided I'd rather play a five Pokémon team for the tournament. Sylveon does a lot better in Ranked now that it has the right ability.
The team that gave me the most trouble during the tournament were Sand Mega Tyranitar teams. I don't know if I was getting outplayed, or if I was playing extremely weird teams, but I could just never get a read on when they would Mega Evolve Tyranitar to re-set Sand. I figured they would do it a second time as soon as my Charizard Mega Evolved into Mega Charizard Y to set Sun, but nope. Or I'd delay Mega Evolving (with Double Protects) expecting them to Mega Evolve at the same time and set weather second, but that never happened either. It was really weird.
Easiest match-ups were easily Mega Froslass or Mega Gengar Perish Trap. Charizard wins the weather war against Froslass, and it was really easy to maneuver around Gengar & Incineroar trying to stall against Charizard Y & Garchomp with Double Protects, Heat Wave, and Earthquake.
Ability: Chlorophyll
EVs: 164 HP / 20 Def / 4 SpA / 252 SpD / 68 Spe
Timid Nature
- Giga Drain
- Leech Seed
- Amnesia
- Protect
The Pokémon I had the most fun using was probably Venusaur. I originally played a more traditional, offensive Venusaur in Ranked, but that wasn't working as well as I wished it would. While looking through its movepool, I noticed it had access to "Amnesia" and got straight to work.
This beauty's survivability is amazing. It's EV trained to outspeed any relevant threat under Tailwind (if memory serves the only thing that Venusaur had trouble outspeeding was Mega Excadrill and Mega Dragonite during testing), put as much bulk into Sp. Def as possible, enough HPs on top to survive Mega Froslass (the Pokémon that gave me the most trouble offensively), and the rest into Defense (and a single point of Sp. Atk) to complete the bulk. I didn't realize until writing this article that I could have saved stat points by taking a Calm nature and put the remaining points into either Defense for even more bulk or Sp. Atk to give Giga Drain some more oomf. Oh, well, live and learn. It's fixed on my Ranked team now.
Most matches with this beauty went as followed: Lead with Charizard and Venusaur, Charizard instantly Mega Evolves to set Sun and trigger Venusaur's Chlorophyll (boosting Venusaur's Speed enough to move faster), and either Amnesia to build bulk, Giga Drain to take down a Water-type threat against Charizard, or Protect if I expected the opponent to use both of their Pokémon to attack into Venusaur. Leech Seed was great for matches where the opponent brought Pokémon that didn't take much damage from Venusaur's Giga Drain normally but could still take hits from a Grass-type move; that move rarely actually helped with Venusaur's survivability.
This was also my first time using Sneasler. As far as I'm aware, this is a standard Sneasler build, so I won't dwell too much on it, but it was super fun running two Fake Out Pokémon that could help stall out Sun on the rare teams where I went up against another Sun team and lost my own Pokémon that greatly benefitted. Sneasler being a great nuke was a bonus.
Conclusion
I've always loved Sun teams, so I'm really happy I got to play one again. I didn't play competitive in Scarlet & Violet, and weather isn't a mechanic in Z-A, so it's been a good while since I could play with something I was so familiar with. I think the only other strategy I've been this familiar with was Justified teams with whichever Sword of Justice was good at the time.
I've already made a few tweaks to this team for use on Ranked Ladder and potentially the next tournament. Like I already mentioned, Sylveon's ability was fixed and Venusaur's EVs have been redone to give it an extra three stat points (though I'm not sure how often I'll notice those three extra points). I've also thought about a few Pokémon I might bring differently to a Dragonite or Mega Tyranitar fight (other than the fixed Sylveon). Unless the meta drastically changes, or unless they drop a new batch of Pokémon into Champions sooner than expected, I think this Sun team will last me a good while.