I didn't really build most of the teams I used, so I think I'll go into my thought process for every game and see if the people interested can extract anything they were looking forward to.
Week 1 - highlighter
Going into the tour, I had absolutely no idea what was going on in this new metagame. I made plenty of teams and did a lot of testing w/ Andy and stresh. The team for this week was the only team I fully built myself for this tour. My goal was to just go with something fairly standard, but I did end up adding a, at the time, fairly unconventional twist in Palkia because of how potent I had found Water to be as an offensive typing in practice games and how Palkia had fantastic offenses and a wonderful secondary STAB to capitalize on the resists on each tier.
The actual game didn't go super well, I didn't play as optimally as I'd have liked and I probably could've won if I'd managed my risks better. Hazards Regigigas was surprisingly annoying for my team, and my prep that week wasn't on point. A bunch of people would be quick to attribute that to my inexperience at the time, I disagree. hl and pdt are both incredibly potent preppers and they both know my playstyles very well. The crit was unfortunate, but it was a roll to kill as they were Adamant and it was my fault for not Strength Sapping the turn before, so honestly it was a pretty deserved loss on my end.
Week 2 - dimrah
I stole the team used by hl last week for this game. I knew dimrah had teamed with me before so I knew that he knew how much I enjoyed employing offensive teams. My gameplan for this week was to just bring something solid and hopefully outplay. dimrah is an exceptional player with an understanding of the meta that I can only ever dream of having, so I figured that my best bet of winning was giving myself an edge in the teambuilder because I considered us around the same playing level.
The actual game worked shockingly well, as one may expect when one loads full stall into a team built around Pikachu. There's not really much to comment about here.
Week 3 - cityscapes
SL's by far one of the most unconventional players I've seen. His willingness to use anything that can be used is something that makes him incredibly difficult to prepare for, which gives him an advantage prepwise most of the time. This team was built by stresh for the most part, I just made a few edits with pdt and hl's guidance which ended up making the matchup more reasonable. I figured that if I could get a decent matchup, that's more than I could ask for from a prep pov against such a diverse opponent, so I went with something that I felt would maximize how well I could outplay someone.
The actual game was fairly even. SL got me really good with the Reshiram bluff - I later learned that it was mono Core Enforcer, so Zacian-C would be incredible against his team in theory, but his bluffing combined with his history of using Reshiram as a mixed offensive attacker worked really well for him. Paralysis is a bad mechanic, but it was a fun game no less.
Pools Tiebreaker - pinkdragontamer
I think that it was around here where I understood that any one of the BH players on South are 100x the player that I'll ever be cause I'm seriously dogshit at this game, so I had to win on matchup and I proceeded to go to the king of doing that, sugar. Sugar provided me with a fantastic team that looked normal, similar to what II had been bringing the past few weeks, but overwhelmed pdt very fast with its unpredictability factor. Belly Drum Xerneas did shockingly well that game and it's because you normally expect it to run special sets (and that's what it should be running on normal teams, which is what it looked like on preview).
In the game, pdt says he could've played better, and I agree that if he had knew the sets, he probably could have played better. However, losing momentum vs HO is huge, and I don't blame him for his plays at all cause I likely would've done most of the same ones if I was in his position of not knowing the cheese. I'm also generally averse to cheesing my friends, and pdt was definitely prepared for cheese, but his knowledge of my aversion to these kinds of teams against friends combined with the appearance of the team probably messed with his gameplan a bit.
Semifinals - sugarhigh
Against sugar, I was pretty sure I was gonna lose, and lose hard. Sugar's a very respectable player and while he chooses to employ cheese a ton, I knew that he's very potent with traditional archetypes as well. That being said, if it ain't broke, don't fix it, and I did expect cheese this round, so with the help of QT, I ended up opting to go for outcheesing him. The main thing we ended up deciding on was the Skill Link King's Rock Kyurem-B, which wouldn't be something I'd bring against most people, but on paper it did pretty well against sugar.
In the game, I had a pretty good chance I'd say? I got my paralyses up, set up, and Kyurem-B was set to put in work. It ended up not paraflinching twice, despite me needing that, but I got bailed out of that misfortune by some fortune on my own. I do feel kinda bad that I had to go for that third paralysis, though, since that's not what was supposed to go down.
Semifinals Tiebreaker - sugarhigh
From last week, I expected him to be somewhat prepared for cheese coming from my end as well, and so QT and I ended up devising a very bulky team that'd likely do well vs sugar. It had checks to weather, drum, Gambit and was a pretty flexible team in general. Double Prankster isn't something I'd normally use, but against a player like sugarhigh you want to be as prepared against cheese as you can be. It's worth noting that every Pokemon on that team has its own purpose and doesn't really need any other member alive, so the idea is that you pick your sacks accordingly against Gambit.
The game was surprising. I didn't expect Dragon's Maw spam. I think that in a meta with Xerneas, Zacian-Crowned and Zamazenta-Crowned all being exceptionally powerful picks, running with Dragonspam is a very daring decision. To his credit, he brought it down to a speed tie, and I likely should've gone Zamazenta-C to mitigate this. The issue is that he had webs, so I didn't really expect a backup scarfer and because of that I don't think my choke was a really bad choke to make? It was still a choke no less, though, but I did feel like I was getting talked about behind my back by a few people after that game so I just wanted to get that out there. Sugar was 100% right to get annoyed though, losing a speed tie is a very poor way to get knocked out of a semis tiebreaker.
Finals - xavgb & willdbeast
Stresh was, in my opinion, the most potent opponent I'd faced since highlighter (except for pdt, possibly). He's a very prodigious player with very strong playing and incredible fundamentals, which most of the player pool lacks. He's able to run sugar's style, while also playing an impeccable balance game and he's also one of the very few players who knows how to use stall properly in this metagame. My angle for prep, as a result, was to reduce the amount of playing he'd be able to do as much as I could. While his prep is strong, his true strengths lie in outplaying his opponent, and I knew that if I was gonna win this, it was gonna be through that angle. I tested cheese oriented teams for a lot of the week, but I finally settled on hazard stacking stall that QT built for me. It had a very good matchup against the stuff he normally liked, but wasn't helpless against cheese either.
Will ended up being subbed in and I find him and dimrah fairly similar to prepare for, and I felt that the stall that was built would be a fairly strong pick against Will as well. It ended up winning - he memed with Cramorant and Pikachu, and as we saw in Week 2, Pikachu loading into stall isn't good for the player piloting the Pikachu team.
Thanks to
Quantum Tesseract sugarhigh PinkDragonTamer and
highlighter for preparing plenty of the teams I ended up using during the tour. I was a bit of a diva in my team selections, and I didn't settle for anything less than what felt perfect which gave these guys a very hard time and I couldn't have won the games without them. I do know that I couldn't have gotten the wins I ended up getting Thanks to
Jrdn for drafting me, thanks to
Andyboy and
xavgb for being consistent testers and thanks to
E4 Flint for helping me out in prep against some opponents when I was ranting about not knowing what to do (which happened way too often).
Kinda sad that I couldn't turn my 5-2 into a 7-0, but 5-2 is already asking a ton considering I don't really know the meta yet and I was pretty lucky to get any of the wins that I did get. Was also a pretty good score in the context of the tour, so we kinda popped off!
Fun tour, gratz UK once again, until next time :)
