It still feels surreal that Dynamos were able to win SCL. I cannot put into words how happy I am about this, and I cannot thank
Excal and
Luthier enough for the opportunity to play this season. The season started off really rough in our DOU slot with some
unfortunate circumstances immediately plaguing our week 1, and with some unlucky turns in week 3 we struggled to find footing. Thankfully the rest of our team was plenty capable of carrying us and kept us in playoff contention thus far. After some lineup changes amid a ban of the teams' entire UU section, I got put in as a starter for the first time this tournament. I was able to go 4-2* during the tournament and as a result put us in a position to continue advancing in the tournament.
Week 1:
This team was a variation of something I came up with during OSDT
(that team) that kom had been testing against nails. They had been playing a lot of games with structures I had built for that tour in preparation for this week and this is what they settled on to bring. Unfortunately, we loaded into quite possibly the worst possible matchup for the squad and proceeded to get run over by tera fairy specs spectrier essentially from turn 1. I think a lot of what went wrong here was some minor misconceptions about the state of the tier at the time as I didn't really keep up with SV during derby and my teams for OSDT probably weren't amazing at that time either, as well as some overconfidence going into the first week. Regardless, we used this learning experience to crack down on ourselves and started doing actual metagame research to begin making better teams for the current state of the meta.
Week 2:
This team was the start of my ting-lu addiction. Gavin came up with this almost entirely independent of my assistance but I loved the build a lot and saw lots of potential in it. Priority spam in general felt really strong at the time as teams were pretty frail outside of a select few mons. However, we also ended up being quite frail as a result, in the game itself we ended up sacking a few too many pokemon to mount a comeback from the deficit we were in once we found a slightly favourable position. This game was not a great showing of the ting-lu dominance that was to come.
Week 3:
A different approach to offence. I had been talking up iron crown for a couple weeks now so we worked on putting together something that we could throw nick off with. Considering gavin and nick had been playing their prep games together thus far we felt it was a good idea to stray away from anything we had used up until then. The team itself looks pretty jank with AV wake and a scarf chi yu paired with cornerstone ogerpon of all mons, however it felt really strong in testing, and I genuinely consider it one of the better teams we came up with. Gavin played really well this game after nick gave us trick room to take advantage of with our own trick room mode however, a double protect followed by a heat wave miss put nails in a spot to win the game. Feeling pretty cheated over the current 0-3 record we decided to revisit what was and wasnt working up until that point.
Week 4:
6. Physical. Attackers. A recurring pattern in the builder this season. Ting-lu is an amazing pokemon with a stupid amount of stats and a great movepool. Throwing out hazards while debuffing the opponent with incineroar and roaring moon, progress is made gradually until eventually the onslaught of physical moves with chien pao beside them becomes too much. we made a last minute change on iron hands from ice punch to play rough that ended up costing the game amid some questionable plays during the midgame, sinistcha in general into 6 phys mons is gonna be rough though so the game coming as close as it did is a testament to the strength of this idea.
Week 5:
Going into this week I was not very confident. Our slot being 0-4 and seemingly all my ideas feeling awful since they couldn't produce results, and on top of all that I was playing someone who had lost only 2 games since derby started. I put in a lot of prep and review for this week as I wanted to make the most of my anxiety towards this game by putting that energy into ensuring I was performing my best.
I watched every replay in depth to get a good idea of esm's gameplay and learn his tendencies to give me a better idea of his turn-by-turn approach. This effort ended up paying off in spades as I won convincingly, stunning myself
as well as my managers. This much-needed mental boost reinvigorated my desire to keep giving this tournament everything I could.
Week 6:
After netting our first win of the season for the DOU slot I got the chance to continue starting. This week I was against fellow Canadian Sempra, who was similarly scary to face as they had just a strong run in OSDT making it to the finals as well as this being the first time I've ever played them in any tournament, as well as their worst result in vgc being t4 at worlds. In the lead up to this game I wanted to continue the damage mitigation approach I took last week with a different breaking swipe paradox pokemon in roaring moon. Tailwind and specs ghold made for a very oppressive immediate source of damage should I need it and iron hands rounded out the bulky side of the team.
Week 7:
Xrn is my bracket demon. I wanted to change up the formula to what we had used so far and AV ursaluna as well as wisp mew looked really good into their comps thus far, however I had a hard time making the rest of the team feel very coherent. Pollen puff mew ended up being thought of by several other people this week being played in a mirror the day before I played Xrn. I was afraid of hitting one of the archaludon comps, but felt it was too late to change the entire team. My fears were realized when I met with an archaludon in team preview and was beaten swiftly. I think theres a lot of potential in the mew set paired with av pokemon but this team was very lacking and doesn't pull off that idea very well.
Week 8:
This team is extremely evil. Sinistcha is a sleeper pick for T2 on VR and when paired with ting-lu and incin everything on the team becomes insanely difficult to take down. SD Hands is also the most threatening setup sweeper in the tier and is incredibly well-supported on this team, this makes for a very powerful combination. I didnt get to pull off the sd hands sweep in this game but it was a great showing of the sinistcha ting lu combo regardless.
Week 9:
Taking a more offensive approach to ting-lu this week I wanted to try out diancie and dragapult. While diancie didnt get to do anything this week dragapult was the star of the show, abusing chien-pao to throw out extremely strong banded u-turns to chip things in range and then late game setting up checkmate positions with phantom force. This team was really fun to use and I think dragapult is somewhat undervalued in the format right now.
Semi-Finals:
This was supposed to be my "we should ban this mon" team but I'm actually so bad and threw by not setting trick room on turn 5 or 6. either turn would have put me in a much better position to sweep with archaludon. Unsurprisingly the team is still quite broken, but the pelipper should generally be sash or bulky damp rock. I wanted to use scarf to surprise landorus as well as ogerpons, and while I managed to pull that off on T1 it let in kommo-o immediately and swung all momentum I would have gained into sempra's favour. Oh yeah, and getting infracted for playing on main server was funny.
Finals: *
While this game didnt count towards sheet nails and I wanted to play since we had prepped to play anyway. This team was a fun idea to counterteam sd hands which I felt looked really strong into my builds so far however, I would use swords dance going forward if I were to use this team. Unfortunately, in the game, I didn't commit to setting up ceruledge right away and was punished by ceruledge falling behind in damage with the inferior bulk up set.
This tournament was really fun and I developed a love for this format. Before this tournament, I wasn't having the greatest time playing this format mostly reusing in OSDT, and not even bothering to sign up for other current-gen circuit tournaments, but cracking down on prep as support and getting to play some really good players as a starter was a great experience.
vs 
vs 
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) also i do notice that without a freeze dry user ogerpon can cause a bit of trouble if you dont play your sinistcha right so id recommend putting it on 1 of the 2 mons that learn it (a-ninetales would be the one i recommend because glaciate spam from kyurem's bulky ass works wonders as a speed control option)
