GGs to Europe. You never want to see tournaments decided on games like that in the end, so thanks for taking it in good grace.
I've already mentioned to a few people but worth saying publicly - its time to hang up my boots and move on from Smogon. I've been around a long ass time, originally playing 2009-2015 but never properly losing contact with old friends and then always getting dragged into the odd tour here and there - a couple VGC events in 2018, ROAPL in 2021, SPL in 2022, and now this, a World Cup in 2025, a literal decade after my last cap. I think I've realised that being on discord and everything, whilst attempting to be retired, doesn't really work - somebody will always pull me back for one more tour. At some point I need to draw a line under it, and I can't really think of a better send off than winning something with Team UK.
Massive thanks to
Cow and
Gypsy for reaching out and asking me to join the team. I was pretty hesitant, not having tons of time to commit nowadays, and realistically way off my in-game prime too. But thanks for having the faith, both when it came to prep but especially when I was slotted in to play in the knockout rounds.
Baddy Stareal autumn were all goated and had great runs too.
harshest would be better if he didn't convince himself Fire Fang Gliscor was good but he did a good job too. Definitely one of the things I'll look back on and be proud of over this 16 year "career". Old dog new tricks etc.
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Meta thoughts:
I think we read the meta pretty well and realised that you basically either run LO Alakazam, or you build specifically to counterstyle that fucker. Almost every round we spammed LO Alakazam PsySpam, Scarf Jirachi/Sciz Rain, or Scarf Jirachi HO. Occasional Celebi Terrakion stuff but its harder to be safe into LO Alakazam and Skarmory with that, so we generally went with the safer offenses the vast majority of the time. At the start of the tour, the claims that LO Alakazam is broken felt wild to me; by the end of it, I think its a very reasonable stance.
LO Volc is the other big fucker but weirdly I didn't really want us to use him ever. Whilst I think he is hugely explosive and dangeous, I don't think its actually good or consistent - it takes one moveslot choice on Ferrothorn for LO Volc to be snuffed out of the game, and I just never wanted to take that risk. He might need to be banned, who knows, but its one of those mons that is terrifying to face AND terrifying to use, just from sheer lack of consistency. I much preferred when our HOs went down other routes, like Meessm's Kyu-B builds, or my own triple steel with lead Ferro / SD Scizor / ScarfRachi.
I think there's anti-meta stuff out there, as always. I'm big on Scarf WinCons currently - ScarfChomp and Scarf KyuB are reasonably straightforward to support whilst matching up well into the trendy stuff. Something
harshest and I came back to time and time again was stall cores with support Heatran, specifically SubProtect but some other sets are acceptable too (12 Atk Payback OHKOs Alakazam...). Simple fact is Sub Heatran walls LO Volc and the FireGrass LO Zams, annoys the fuck out of the Rotom-W/LandoT MUs, and with Rains dropping Refresh on Politoed they can't really swap into him well either. It was exciting to build with this again as its very old school in style, in fact I ran a variation of a 2011 Ojama stall in the quarter finals. Maybe unsurprisingly, building with support Heatran so much meant we were also pretty high on defensive Starmie, which "solves" some of these weirder stall structures. Brine made a good call on bringing HP Ground Volc into mars/harshest for the finals, noting we'd become big on Heatran variations as our stalls of choice - think we got a bit lucky to get out of that one alive.
Team dump (no EVs because stopbeingalazyfuckanduseagoddamncalc)
https://pokepast.es/243b7a8aa8b6444e
Quarterfinals vs mad dawg (Oceania)
Ojama stall from 2011, made modern. I really wanted SubTox Gliscor to work in modern day but it probably gets blocked by too many things for it to be worth it, and we're better at finding PP wincons than we were in 2011. So I made this SR Knock Gliscor, NP Celebi, SubTect Heatran. Fishing Focus+Ice Alakazam slightly here but it would need to hit a million consecutive Focus Blasts which realistically means it won't win easily. Psychic Starmie is quite bad but Conkeldurr needs to be respected.
https://pokepast.es/7df5b497c9146451
Semi-finals vs Evakiyama! (US South)
Like I said above, not a massive fan of running LO Volc in important games cos it swings so massively on Ferrothorn techs and the Modest/Timid choice. Decided to use SD Scizor as the Ferrothorn punish here instead, which isn't super common alongside ScarfJirachi, I guess people assume they compete with eachother rather than being complimentary. Lum Ferro lead felt natural as a Rotom-W lure, Starmie check, and dropping Spikes to bring Keldeo into Scizor range. SD QA with Spike support is pretty strong into Rain. The other idea here was to make Garchomp broken by just not Outrage locking, using 4Atk mixed and just looping with ScarfRachi whenever Latios tries to revenge kill it - 4atk MixChomp is niche but justifiable when you have lead Ferro here. Was a big fan of this one, obviously soft to some things like offensive Heatran but that just comes with the archetype really.
https://pokepast.es/ce3692d1ffbcb37f
Finals vs Brine (Europe)
Didn't do anything interesting in the finals, brought a pretty standard ScarfRachi rain. The one tech here was TWave on ScarfRachi, which we used in order to try and find Volc counterplay without needing to lose Specs Keldeo for Scarf. Its also a big of a get-out-of-jail card vs opposing Keldeo who are a nightmare for this 6. In the end I would have done better with Healing Wish, could have bought me a bit more time after my Keldeo got TWaved, but at the end of the day I loaded into a rough matchup regardless of Rachi moveset, and Brine made the big plays to keep me out of the game. No shame in that.
https://pokepast.es/436113b59f0e2f5e
What I should have brought in the Finals vs Brine
I'd been prepping this from before the finals match-ups were announced, and was gonna use it regardless of the opp. Ended up getting spooked out of it when I found out I was playing Brine and that Monai was giving him some support - I'd told Monai I was building lots with Weavile, so felt like a bad idea to run it. Considering what Brine brought it was obvious that Monai hadn't passed on that info, so a bit of a shame to drop this team last minute, but it happens. The idea is similar to the semis team vs Eva - loads of teams can't defensively handle Garchomp and Breloom and instead just rely on revenge killing them with Psychics - if you can nullify the Psys whilst keeping Garchomp+Breloom alive then you have pretty easy win routes. Rather than ScarfRachi, I ended up doing EButton Steels + LO Weavile here (needs to be LO to kill LO Alakazam in 1 with unboosted Pursuit). Inspired by an SPL build from TDK/Crucify back in the Cloyster meta. You basically lead Garchomp/Breloom, take early KOs, bait the revenge kill, then ebutton trigger to trap. Weavile is very mediocre but is a solution for some teams to solve their Latios and Alakazam issues - I imagine it probably works fine over Rachi/Scizor on Rain offenses, too.
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Been a pleasure, everyone. The future of BW is bright.
