Note from the Editor

Summer is coming to an end, and so is The Smog… I'm just kidding — we are not going anywhere. Today we're launching issue #21, and as usual this one is packed with a tremendous amount of content ranging from competitive topics to arts and recreation, to entertainment. I'll walk you through some of these in a moment.

In my last note from the editor, I talked briefly about the inclusion of a new tournament—The Smogon Grand Slam—to our roster of official and competitive events, which just kicked off last month, and it's coming along great. Here's a link to the sub-forum where all battles by users competing for this tournament take place. There is also some interesting news to report about the Smogon Tour, the last season of which ended almost two months ago with user ToF as the champion after several weeks of intense competition; congratulations ToF! The Tour is one of our most acclaimed events, and those of you who like to follow it or partake in it should be very happy, as Season 14 will arrive in only a few weeks and it will be the very first official tournament to support Black & White 2! For commodity, a thread with instructions will be soon posted here. Finally, as I'm sure most of you tournament guys know, the Smogon Frontier is underway and there's some interesting stuff going on there, but instead of me talking about it here, you guys who are interested should just jump onboard with the rest of the crowd and follow its development closely! Here's a link for that too.

Moving away from the competitive side of things, let's talk briefly about community projects, starting with The Competitor. The Competitor, developed and designed by Setsuna and Zracknel, is where all tournament-related media on Smogon is being announced. In this section, you can find news pertaining to generally every tournament that's being hosted or about to make its entrance to our tournaments sub-forum — sign-ups, new rounds, status updates, and even full-page stories like the ones we feature here at The Smog are accessible from this section. If you are a tournaments regular, you will want to closely follow this page, and even if you're not one, you will find the articles published here to be interesting and informative. Go check it out!

There are some exciting news from the Create-A-Pokemon (CAP) community as well — Mollux, their latest creation, was released to the public shortly after our previous The Smog release. Mollux, the Mantle Pokemon, is a Fire / Poison cone snail with a unique immunity to Water-type attacks thanks to its ability, Dry Skin. But there's just so much to say about this new little guy that I can't cover it here; however, this issue of The Smog brings with it a full article to introduce you to this latest CAP!

That said, issue #21 of The Smog comes packed with over forty articles filled with entertainment, competitive knowledge, and outstanding artwork. Our recurring series of Judge a Pokemon is taking a break for the summer, but instead, others such as Pokemon Biology, Featured Pokemon, Featured RMTs, Metagame Analyses, and other well-known titles continue to kick in with full force. As usual, there are also new additions to the featured list, including our old series of Ask the Admins, which we're bringing back to life with this release, as well as tips on how to succeed on Smogon from an Administrator's point of view, The OI Players, Top 10 Moves in OU… And much more! I personally think you're going to like this issue, and hopefully you'll enjoy reading it as much as we enjoyed making it.

Cheers!

~Setsuna