Now that I'm finally done with OSDT, I'll be trying to take a break from serious pokemon gaming for a while. Unfortunately, this next semester, and possibly the full academic year, will be incredibly busy for me. I'll be trying to avoid signing up for any major tournaments since I can't afford the time commitment they need, but I truly am satisfied to have finally accomplished something like this after years of participating in DOU. I'll post replays of my run from each round, a bit of my thought process and teambuilding through each round and game, along with all of the teams I've used across this run (pretty much emulating Z strats formatting). The pokepaste links are embedded in the pokemon icons. Note that I've made some small changes to sets over time on some teams, so they might have a slightly different set in older games compared to the paste.
R1 vs crying
Game 1: 
Game 2: 
Round 1 I was against crying, who I didn't really recognize as someone who played doubles so I decided to go with some fun teams. In G1 I figured I could just overpower with sun hyper offense, and I landed into a pretty good matchup. They had a very interesting scarf trick mew set and I might've gotten lucky with a crit on a bulky tran (bad set), but apart from that the game went pretty well. After I got rid of the rillaboom, a well-timed sub with LO urshifu cleaned through the endgame.
G2 I brought an edited version of a team actuarily had been using. I replaced fini with rillaboom and it still worked fine, so I hung on to this version of his team. Here, they led bulky lando-t on a team with no flying resists against scarf zapdos-g and it was already pretty much over. Zapdos claimed 3 kills before dying, and at that point my health advantage was significant enough that the rest of the game didn't really matter. I did get some crits after this, but again it was too late to have made any difference.
R2 vs umbry
Game 1: 
Game 2: 
Round 2 I had horrible luck and ended up facing umbry. I was hoping to not have to worry about tough opponents until at least a few rounds later, so having to prep for umbry in just round 2 was painful. Looking through forum posts, previous games, etc, I realized here that umbry generally shared teams with GMA, emma, Z strats, etc and all of them were using either pretty similar bulky offense compositions that involved stuff like sticky webs bee, moltres-g, comfey, fini, etc., or variations of the usual Z Strats offense. For both of these I realized that hyper offense had an incredibly good matchup.
For G1 I edited my old team from winter seasonals (s/o
Actuarily for help with building that one) by making it even more extreme hyper offense. I replaced politoed with eject button pelipper and scarf urshifu with band. I was pretty surprised to see rain in G1, but even so I had a solid matchup here. I got a bit unlucky with pelipper not getting its eject button proc against Kingdra's muddy water, but the meteor beam speed tie win right after that more than made up for it.
G2 I decided to use the other team I had been considering for a while. This was the first tournament game in which shift gear genesect made an appearance. I had built this team a couple months before this, but back then people had been running a lot of bulky offense/semiroom teams with p2, volcanion, etc., so I didn't really bother polishing it. Around this time though, semiTR had fallen almost completely out of favor, heatran had very high usage, and incineroar was usable but rare, which worked out perfectly for a coaching zera + shift gear genesect team.
The rest of the team rounds out weaknesses for genesect while being a viable, usable team on its own if genesect doesn't work. Wide guard peli allows genesect to ignore heatran and set up easily against zygarde. Meanwhile, rain helps the team by beating genesect's counters as well as allowing genesect to take a hit from some of them. In rain, genesect just barely lives one timid charcoal heatran heat wave, or comfortably takes an incineroar flare blitz (with one coaching boost). Zeraora can run thunder with rain, which helps deal a bigger chunk to volcanion and comfortably kill urshifu. Kingdra and tornadus both reliably beat heatran, incineroar, and urshifu, and deal major dents to volcanion, while banded rillaboom works as a good endgame cleaner, a pivot, as well as another option to get volcanion or urshifu out of the way.
In G2, I knew from preview that genesect autowon. The only pokemon that could deal any significant amount of damage to genesect was incineroar, and even that just died from a +2 leech life. Not much else to say about the game.
R3 vs Eisenherz
Game 1: 
Game 2:
Round 3 against eisenherz I was feeling pretty confident about the teams I brought last round, so I just brought more of the same with minor variations. In G1 I brought the original version of the team that I had used in seasonal finals, with scarf urshifu and helping hand hypnosis politoed. Ended up being a great matchup for ferrothorn, and I was more than happy to get mostly rid of buzzwole in exchange for losing urshifu. After that it was just a matter of keeping ferro alive and not risking a stray rillaboom superpower or zeraora close combat. The crit on the predicted zeraora switchin definitely helped, would've been a roll not in my favor otherwise.
G2 I genuinely should not have won. I brought a bad team matchup considering I knew Eisenherz had been using full TR recently (they had been posting their OSDT replays) and could definitely use it again. I fumbled through a whole lot of the early game, losing basically half of my team and making no progress. Finally, a double protect from genesect and a very very opportune switchin prediction (leech life on the stakataka slot as lurantis switched in) put me back in the game. Here the value of bulky shift gear genesect was shown again, with it just barely living after taking a +4 diancie body press and a hatterene expanding force.
R4 vs Yellow Paint
Game 1: 
Game 2:
Between these rounds, in test games Z Strats and Toxigen had both been building pretty cool new team compositions around shift gear genesect, so I tried to do the same. Some issues with the previous rain team were its general weakness to trick room, the pretty annoying volcanion matchup, and the lack of redirection to help genesect set up and sweep. So instead I tried to fit shift gear genesect into a more standard offense composition. This team is pretty similar to the usual Z Strats offense, but uses support volcarona over heatran, genesect over kartana, and scarf on urshifu over band/LO. One issue when kartana is replaced with genesect is the loss of tailwind, which volcarona helps patch up. Even so, volcarona isn't nearly as reliable at matching or beating opposing tailwind, so urshifu needed to be scarf here to help deal with opposing kartana/naganadel. This is the team that I passed around to people, and started to see a lot of usage in later rounds from Z Strats, Qwello, and others.
G1 was pretty straightforward, I managed to get zygarde in against mons that did nothing to it, allowing it to set up a DD and receive a few coaching boosts. I choked in the middle by letting it die against kyu-B, but enough damage had been done such that i could clean up the rest of the game pretty handily.
G2 I brought the same team and used it in basically the same manner, focusing on buffing up zyg a ton until it cleaned everything. The coaching defense boost on my zygarde helped it a lot in the mirror matchup here.
R5 vs SMB
Game 1:
Game 2:
Game 3:
Once again I ran into pretty tough luck, and had to face SMB in top 16. Definitely the hardest matchup to prepare for so far, but after asking around I managed to get some idea of the type of teams he'd been using, along with teambuilding advice about what would work well. Once again, the general pattern I found out about his stall team and sticky webs slurpuff team (currently posted in teambuilding competition) was a weakness to HO.
G1 my shift gear genesect offense team had been largely successful so far, so I decided to bring it here. This ended up being a pretty big mistake, as I hadn't edited the team to account for SMB's stall sets, and I ended up losing the game after I failed to break through celes/pex while setting up with genesect.
G2 I went with the sun HO team I used in R1 of OSDT, as I thought the combination of scarf tran, sub urshifu, and feint tsareena (to stop fake out and WG) would be great at breaking through his stall and webs slurpuff team. SMB ended up bringing a very interesting different team, which fortunately for me was much weaker against scarf tran. After zeraora t-waved the wrong switchin and mew got rid of zygarde with ebelt ice beam, scarf tran cleaned everything else.
G3 I was still confident with the scarf tran sun team, so I just went with it again. Once again scarf tran had a pretty solid matchup, although zeraora and dragapult outspeeding it was problematic. Meanwhile, venusaur had an amazing matchup, and since nobody had been using amoonguss lately (including me), I expected the togekiss to not be safety goggles. I got pretty lucky with both sleep powders hitting their targets and both targets staying asleep for 2 turns, allowing heatran to clean up the togekiss and dragapult. At this point I had taken basically no damage and was up by 3 mons, so the game was pretty much over.
R6 vs frisoeva
Game 1:
Game 2:
Honestly I didn't prep at all this round, I was getting pretty busy irl around this time. I did know that frisoeva was mostly a singles player and had been using some pretty bulky pivot-heavy teams. What was the best option for that? HO.
G1 HO does HO things. Click click click. Honestly it was pretty funny that my own team was being used against me here, no idea how far down the grapevine the team had to go for frisoeva to not know that I built the team and knew the sets. Scale shot zyg was a new edit though, pretty cool choice.
G2 HO does even more HO things, more clicking involved.
Semifinals vs Qwello Lee
Game 1: 
Game 2: 
Game 3:
At this point I'd honestly gotten quite a bit further than I expected to, and really needed to build new teams as Qwello had already seen all of my recently built, decent teams. Enormous s/o to all the support Yellow Paint gave with building and testing here, and to SMB for the test games and the very cool hail team I never ended up bringing.
G1 This team was originally intended to be built around specs spectrier, which I had seen yobuddy using and looked very promising. In the end we decided to just scrap the spectrier and replace it with specs dragapult. Not nearly as fun of a choice, but it could actually switch into things with its typing. Outside that, the team was intended to break bulky offense and semiTR cores. I might have been getting a little too mindgame-y, but after everything I had said about HO being a problem, I expected qwello to bring some sort of semiTR that matched well into HO.
I was pretty far off the mark in G1, but the HO Qwello did bring had no spread moves and was extremely kyub weak, so I just focused on getting a straightforward KyuB + amoong win. A risky predict paid off and with pollen puff taking KyuB back to full, the game was over.
G2 I got a little too greedy and brought a very fun sand team I'd been tinkering with for a while. I was a bit concerned Qwello might bring SMB's stall team or something of that sort, since I'd struggled against it last round, but the other main prediction of semiTR ended up being the case. I got very lucky this game, but it wasn't enough to save a meh team and pretty bad gameplay. Completely forgot specs fini was a set and ended up blundering away kommo, along with a bad predict removing my other wincon in Dracozolt.
G3 I just went back to the other team that I knew would be good into Qwello's g2 team, and I ended up facing it again. I think qwello could have been better off just going for the TR instead of ally switch, since I didn't really mind KOing the necrozma and removing the TR option. With necrozma gone, I could safely focus on a Kyu-B DD endgame, which worked out well.
Finals vs Mishiimono
Game 1:
Game 2:
Game 3:
Finally, the last set. I probably should have put in more teambuilding prep going in, but instead I just played quite a bit to make sure I wouldn't be out-of-touch during the set.
G1 I ran into a really bad matchup for shift gear gene rain, between scarf zapdos-g, volcanion, rillaboom, and a semiTR option in diancie. Only thing that could've made it worse would've been p2 semiTR over diancie. I also can't say I played well this set. I got greedy with my banded rillaboom and decided to go for a coaching u-turn, which completely wasted a turn. I also kept expecting mishi to switch out his diancie when it was taunted, and took a lot of chip damage overpredicting the switch. In the end, thunder full-paras saved me the game. Good move thunder did it again
G2 I went back to the team I had gotten pretty comfortable using, the specs dragapult + DD KyuB team. Despite me getting a pretty strong early lead, mishi played well this game, capitalizing on my scarf zap weakness. I messed up pretty badly on turn 8, where I decided to protect kyurem instead of just RP amoonguss and take the kill on volcanion. If the volcanion had protected, scarf zap would still be dead (or would have switched out), and I could have taken it further from there. Once Kyub died it was over.
G3 was honestly a pretty messy game. I tried to play too conservatively, ignoring the heatran as it wracked up chip on the team, while mishi got a good predict in to kill incineroar early. I also overpredicted by not clicking pollen puff with amoong on kyuB while I could. In the end, though, DD KyuB did clean house, and predicting non-scarf urshifu as the last mon (made sense given tailwind togekiss would go to waste otherwise) worked out.
Lastly I'd like to thank everyone for all of their support throughout my run.
Yellow Paint ,
Z Strats ,
Toxigen ,
Actuarily ,
YoBuddy ,
Crunchman ,
emma ,
Akaru Kokuyo ,
SMB ,
Mishimono ,
Qwello Lee ,
Memoric ,
zeefable ,
Frania ,
Grandmas Cookin , and all the others I'm forgetting right now. I absolutely couldn't have done it without you all. I'm really happy to finally have a big win like this under my belt, especially in the wake of my seasonals win earlier this year, but for now I really have to take a break and manage my work irl. Looking forward to more fun times with everyone.
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