lucariojr goes to tournaments: a photo album and storytime

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Howdy!! I'm lucariojr, former VGC mod, player since 2009, writer of /some/ analyses, and local Pokemon tournament organizer! I like Rowlet, Pokken Tournament, Splatoon, and I haven't been around here for a while so I felt the need to reintroduce myself!

Anyway, I top cut Dallas regionals and am currently at 144 CP. Used a team of Sitrus Berry Tapu Lele, Marowak, Porygon2, Careful Flamethrower Celesteela, Dragonium Sub Salamence, and Assault Vest Gigalith. I'm not spelling out my team because I don't remember EV spreads (they were mostly 252/252), you can pretty much figure out what it is from that description I think, and the team is a bad version of Ryuzaki (Trista)'s team she used on stream that one time. Quick thoughts: I don't like Marowak very much because other Marowak vary so much in speed, Salamence is bad, and I think bulky Lele is alright.

Quick thoughts on the tournament: I'm proud of one round where I basically lost turn 1, but got a TON of info out of my opponent, mainly how fast his Marowak was, and basically swept the other rounds. I also don't know if the miss onto Collin's (TheBattleRoom) Metagross (my set with Collin is HERE) with Shadow Ball mattered much because APPARENTLY a 80bp non-STAB attack isn't super strong so idk if that mattered much. But it's the thought that counts, right? Other than that, I think I saw the gap between me and the players who made deeper runs in Top Cut when I played both Collin and Sam. These guys were thinking far ahead of me, particularly with their leads I think. I don't think I'm the strongest player in the world, but I was very happy with my mentality going into and during the tournament. My stomach was a little upset and I was getting over a cold, so usually between rounds I'd just sit in the bathroom for a minute or so (because lord knows there is a LOT of time between rounds) and I think that helped me clear my head a bit. On the other hand, some opponents would tilt or even get super angry if I got any luck at all, and subsequently make dumb mistakes like not using the stronger move to guarantee a knockout. I do remember some chill opponents like my round 3 and 1 opponents who were content to roll with the punches.

Socially, Dallas was a lot of fun! I got to meet up with old Team Magma folks who have graduated from playing the game to staffing events and found some people like SamVGC, Jen Badamo, NailsOU, Yellowbox, etc. I'd list you all, but you're already in the photo album I'm about to list anyway. Also met Bolimar, Slippingbug, and Deadlyshoc, who are some pretty alright Pokken players for the folks who don't play Pokken because it's on the WiiU and that system sucks. Shoutouts to Brandon Mitchell, the guy I rode with. Pretty sure he has a VGC username but idr it right now, but he has been to worlds and stuff in the Senior division before in VGC13/14. Didn't really introduce him to people because usually he was nowhere to be found!!

Without further ado, here's the photo album for Dallas! Please do not feed the Rowlet.
psyche, here's an imgur link. no tags yet because i'm a lazy beach http://imgur.com/a/wIhAU


For Athen's Regionals, I used the same six that Jibaku and blarajan used, except I didn't have neato techs like Perish Song and Nature Power. Obviously a strong six, but I feel like I didn't have the same mentality going into this tournament, and I choked my round ~3 match despite nailing an Araquanid switchin with a Stone Edge earlier in the match. I dropped with 3 losses because I was hungry and tired, basically. BRING BACK LUNCH BREAKS! Sam H. (not SamVGC), a local who goes to my PCs went 7-2 but bubbled. I think he goes by samhippie on Discord, but I don't know if he has a Smogon username.

Once again, met a lot of cool people like blarajan, TheMantyke, and so on. I think this might be my first time meeting blarajan in person? This time though, I met more local players from Tennessee and Alabama who promised me they would come to my tournaments and I will be very sad if they don't drop by!! Also met some folks who I see in some Pokemon VGC Facebook groups, so that was nice to see. Also want to shoutout some other people who I see often but don't know if they have usernames and don't want to put their real names out randomly. Oh yeah! Shoutouts to Aiden and the junior division for being fun to watch and do Z-Move dances with! Your parents are equally cool people, if they're letting you on Smogon to read this.



I think I'll want to write more later, but I kinda want to be done with it for now. Sorry if you came in here looking for cool team insights; my teams are pretty unspectacular, or at the very least I don't put a ton of thought into them usually. My advice would be, to people coming into this thread for such things, to follow people like Nail's lead and play literally hundreds of games on showdown/battle spot. I also wrote this pretty quickly but I figured I've put this off long enough!

Stay tuned for part 2: lucariojr organizes tournaments: another photo album. I'll go into some detail about how I advertise/organize/staff/stream/prize my Premier Challenges, and soon to be Midseason Showdown!
 
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