Tournaments SPL XVI - GSC Discussion

[vani]

Hello GSC enthusiasts! With SPL XVI underway, this thread will be used to discuss GSC related topics, whether it's about the players, general metagame trends, matches, predictions or anything else related to SPL.

SPL XVI Commencement Thread
SPL XVI Schedule
SPL XVI Spreadsheet - soon
SPL XVI Power Rankings - soon

Auction Results

GSC Cores
Likely GSC Starters
Likely Support and/or Substitute Players
Manager support

Alpha Ruiners - Siatam
Circus Maximus Tigers - Don Eduardo, Malekith, M Dragon
Congregation of the Classiest - BIHI, dice, d0nut
Cryonicles - gorgie, Vileman, eden
Dragonspiral Tyrants - Rubyblood, BKC
Ever Grande Bigs - MrSoup, ABR, Tony
Indie Scooters - vani
Stark Sharks - Conflict, Zokuru, violet river, Star
Team Raiders - BlazingDark, Chiles Habaneros, Aliss
Wi-Fi Wolfpack - choolio, Fear, D4 Repertoire

Projected GSC Starter Prices

30.5k - Conflict
20k - BIHI
14k - Don Eduardo, Siatam
10k - Rubyblood
8k - gorgie
4.5k - vani
3k - BlazingDark/Chiles Habaneros, choolio, MrSoup

 

[coco]

It’s quite evident from my words that I’m disappointed not to be part of this tournament, and it would be foolish not to be, especially for someone as competitive as me. This year’s pool is incredibly competitive (can we say that GSC has the best pool?!), and It would have been great to measure myself against the best, draw a line and understand where the journey that started 2 years ago has arrived, but unfortunately, this will not happen and this must be only accepted. Understand where i went wrong, or perhaps simply accept that winning tournaments, being a constant presence in the community, isn’t enough; there’s something more required, something I probably can’t give or see.
But still, I want thank all the people who’ve had kind words of appreciation for me, it truly meant a lot!
Well, after this little reflection of mine (hoping I didn’t bore you too much), even though I’m not a huge fan of power rankings, I want to extend my heartfelt congratulations to all of you drafted, and make a few small remarks on what I think could happen during the tournament.

Objectively, it’s really hard to farm in this pool given the skill of each player, but I believe that, despite the extremely high level, there are a couple who are slightly above the rest, like Conflict, Don Eduardo, and... Choolio.
There’s not much more to say about how strong Conflict is: his experience and results are more than enough to guarantee him the title of top notch, and one of the best ever.
Don Eduardo, aka Carapinga Senior, is in my opinion one of the best players in this tier.
You probably think my judgment is based on friendship and respect for Kenix, but I’ve rarely seen Carapinga play poorly. I truly believe he is a formidable player with incredible talent, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he will end being the best player of the tournament.
And Choolio. Even though I don’t know him very well (we played together at GSC Inv), that little bit was enough for me to understand how strong he is. And let’s not forget, he’ll be assisted by Fear, the greatest ever.
I’ve not seenGorgie playing so much, maybe because of different timing, but I’ve heard too many good things about him, so I consider him a wildcard... I’m curious to see what his battles will be like.
Siatam, Rubyblood, Chiles, BD, and Vani are all very strong and well-known players in the community, so there’s no need for introductions. Meanwhile, I’m really curious to see BIHI (the maestro) and the debut of MR. Soup, with whom I had the pleasure of sharing the experience of the GSCPL and appreciating his many qualities.
Well, what can I say? Good luck to all of you, and may this tournament live up to expectations!

 

[Vileman]

This pool is heat: a bunch of solid proven player who have been around (conflict, siatam, vani, kenix), old fuckers who came back outta nowhere (gorgie, choolio), BIHI who is a solid player but has "only" won the ribbon, chiles who has a solid yet not stellar last spl (5-4 iirc? May be wrong), and the only one without spl experience but did so well in everything that has the chance to dance with the top dogs in MrSoup.
Of course, I'm confident in George playing prowess and he has support from a noob who also did just ok last spl so, he is set to farm...
I really look forward to see how every game goes and what teams people come up with. Pumped to see such a competitive pool

 

[Onraider]

Week 1 predicts
GSC OU: choolio vs gorgie - close matchup between boomers should be fun
GSC OU: Conflict vs Rubyblood- hard not to pick conflict
GSC OU: BlazingDark vs vani - another fun one could go either way
GSC OU: Siatam vs MrSoup - logic dictates to pick the more experienced player here with multiple spls for experience, but predicting an upset
GSC OU: BIHI vs Don Eduardo - same case as with conflict

Really awesome pool for gsc this year, nothing personal with picks idrc who wins just want some high level quality games. HF all

 

[gorgie]

GSC OU: choolio vs gorgie - heh. bring burn heal bro

GSC OU: Conflict vs Rubyblood - I've seen enough prep rooms with this maniac to know how surgical he gets before the match. Granted, Rubyblood does seem hella motivated this season with a passion to prove something. And he's very capable, so this one won't be easy. Common sense says to bold Conflict until the sheet says otherwise though.

GSC OU: BlazingDark vs vani - vani is the better player here, with more tour experience. BBQ chicken

GSC OU: Siatam vs MrSoup - this one is so interesting idek how to call it. Mrsoup strikes me as the disciplined trainer who brings solid teams with solid play, going up against the madlad builder that will cut hella corners to have his way with you. how do you call some sh*t like that.

Looking forward to the show boys. Drop that game time on the scheduling sheet.


GSC OU: BIHI vs Don Eduardo - BIHI strikes me as a Soulwind (hah noob) type who knows his way well around basically every OU tier. Granted, he does have dice and d0nut in his corner so...hmmm. Idk how much influence they'll have so that will also play as a wildcard. That being said he's going up against Pinga...Sr? This man has helllaaaaaaa reps in this tier. Enough to be suuuper comfortable. I'm betting on him to cook just enough to have some fun while securing the win vs the cup winner finalist.

 

[OmBrArch]

Hi everyone, with this great pool of player this year, it would be sad to not have some posts to cover it, and maybe allow some new players to get into gsc. I'll try to post weekly, and this will be inspired by Le Don 's great series of posts from SPL XIV. I did not have enough time to post a developed PR cause of exams but it's fine, smogon did some. So here we begin :

PAIRING OF THE WEEK 1
The Dynamos break-up

[CLA] BIHI vs Don Eduardo [TIG]

28-21 <= All time SPL record => 12-7
dice, d0nut <= Visible and notable support => M Dragon​

On the left side we got BIHI, a well known dpp mainer and a great player in muliple tiers : CG OU in wcup, low tiers in SCL, and DPP/ADV in SPL. This year he'll try for the first time GSC in SPL. He got his first results in this tier this year with his final of GSC cup, which allowed him to qualify to GSC ribbon tour and to win it in the process. These are some great results for a first time and his good level on pokemon does transpose in GSC. Though we can get some doubt, will he be able to do as great in SPL ? His winstreak in Cup and Ribbon tour lack some knowledgeable wins against SPL caliber players (only vani on Ribbon tour r1 and that's all). He'll support by former GSC SPL players dice and d0nut. d0nut is well known as a manager to always have some good gsc results, with BIHI as a great pilot this could give some great results this year.

On the right side we got Don Eduardo Carapinga as the Tiger players. After keeping complaining about the GSC pool he finally got the great pool he waited for to sign up in the tier. After farming UU in SCL and a great SPL XV in RBY in the best pool at the time, he comes back to his original tier. His level in GSC is not to be proven : a win in first GSC Invitational, a 6-4 GSC record in SPL XIII and always a top player when he plays gsc seriously. He's also one of the most entertaining player, being very vocal on his polarizing opinions and not hesitating to talk in chat games, hate him or love him but it'll be fun. He's selfsufficient in gsc, but he'll be helped by his manager and compatriot M Dragon. 2024 classic winner with a 3-0 record in GSC in playoff, his help will be a + for him.

Game Preview :​

First week of SPL, Carapinga will have a lot more things to scout from BIHI than the opposite. Both players are pretty offensive so I'd say they'll both bring offense, but I could see Carapinga bringing stall to test BIHI's ability to break stalll in this tier (M Dragon has been using stall regularly aswell on his gsc playoff games this year, so I could see it happening). I'd give a 55-45 prono in favour of Don Eduardo. I'm looking forward what players will bring, they both regularly bring some innovative stuff and this week 1 could have a surprise in store for us.

So, which former Dynamo player will give the win to his new team this week ?
See you on Sat 1pm +1 ​

...

I'm taking feedback for these weekly posts, there will normally be another post to review every game each week, if u think something would be worth added then reach me out on discord ombrarch

 

[dangerk1d]

Hello! I've been a forum lurker for the last couple of years and finally made a smogon account to be more involved in the community and such, so I thought I'd make some spl predictions as my first post! I definitely have some blindspots by virtue of only casually following gsc for the past couple of spls/side tournaments, so if I snub a historic great, please know that I'm just less familiar with your play and look forward to you showing me how wrong I am in the coming weeks :l

[TIG] Don Eduardo vs Conflict [SHA]
Probably my pick for the two strongest players right now. I went with Eduardo because they seem to be on a hot streak, both in how convincing their week 1 win was but also in the games I saw them play leading up to this tournament. Conflict of course is an all time great, so I don't expect this to be easy and it very well could go the other way. Probably my highlight game for this week.

[BIG] MrSoup vs choolio [WOL]
No shade to soup, choolio is more seasoned/an established veteran, so I went with them for that reason.

[SCO] vani vs Siatam [RUI]
Both excellent as far as battling goes, but I think Siatam has the edge. Siatam is also a very original builder, which I think will give them the element of surprise, especially in best of one.

[TYR] Rubyblood vs BlazingDark [RAI]
Honestly don't feel as familiar with these two. I'm leaning towards Rubyblood because I think I recall many games where they upset someone I didn't expect? Idk, its not an informed take, so I left it neutral. Look forward to getting to know their play more in the coming weeks.

[CRY] gorgie vs BIHI [CLA]
Some of gorgie's teams in invitational (the only time I've really seen gorgie play) looked creative to the point of being "overcooked," but gorgie also seems like someone who likes to have a good time, so I don't know how seriously they were taking it. In any case, what I saw was an unparralleled level of creativity, and I think that creativity combined with the solid battling I've already seen makes them a very dangerous opponent. BIHI of course has demonstrated excellent play in multiple gens, but gorgie has been around in gsc for a lot longer, and I think that understanding of the past may contribute to a victorious future.

Very excited for week 2, this pool lowkey looks crazy this year.

 

[chio]

Hello! I've been a forum lurker for the last couple of years and finally made a smogon account to be more involved in the community and such, so I thought I'd make some spl predictions as my first post! I definitely have some blindspots by virtue of only casually following gsc for the past couple of spls/side tournaments, so if I snub a historic great, please know that I'm just less familiar with your play and look forward to you showing me how wrong I am in the coming weeks :l

Welcome to Smogon Forums !
I'm not active much into topics like this because I don't know much about the player base other than about some players who have actually played in tournaments with me, but it's clear from your post that you interest in smogon competitive GSC.
Let's watch SPL and enjoy GSC life together

 

[OmBrArch]

Week 1 games review by Onraider aminita and myself, thx a lot for the help guys.

Rubyblood vs Conflict

Game Review

Contribution by aminita
An interesting matchup here. Ruby's got a more classic offense team with lax forre golem ttar zapdos and what was later revealed to be a machamp in the back. I'd wager it's mono blsam lax to spread para and provide a defensive backbone alongside pursuit ttar to support the lax and champ. Conflict has a more unusual pseudo baton-pass team that bluffs its normalcy with a pretty standard core of zap cloy golem before revealing a smeargle and drum quag in the back. The sneaky quagsire looks to have quite a good match-up here, as almost everything besides forretress or a lucky snorlax will drop to its boosted attacks.

We start off with a lax on lax lead sequence where Conflict clicks DE twice as Ruby opts to curse up before firing off a +1 bslam. Conflict goes cloy but eats an unfortunate crit and his cloy dies after putting up a spike. The lax rests up and gets phazed by Conflict's golem, but an incoming zapdos forces Conflict's own lax to absorb the hit and rest, which Ruby takes advantage of to spin spikes away with his own golem. Ruby opts to aggressively boom with golem against zapdos which cripples Conflict's lax switching in, though I'd imagine the zapdos was the intended target, which would have opened up his machamp. Booming your snorlax check so early may seem awfully daredevil, but considering the lack of spikes and the secondary lax check in the form of ttar, the play makes a lot of sense. The zaps come in and trade a hit before Conflict chooses to pivot around with his golem and snorlax as Ruby's zapdos rests. On turn 16 Ruby makes a nice play and catches the golem attempting to boom on his zap by pivoting in forretress. He opts to spike on the responding snorlax and eats a ST'd flamethrower for his troubles. Ruby's ttar comes in, revenges the lax, and pivots to snorlax as Conflict's zapdos reveals reflect. The zaps end up trading more hits but Conflict's is eventually KO'd as the other zap finishes its second rest turn. The surprise smeargle is finally sent out but gets hit with a crushing 20.5% thunder roll and is instantly KO'd. Belly quag makes a valiant effort but it can't muscle through the zap and ttar, and Ruby starts off the season strong with a 1-0 vs the top dog.

In the situation that the smeargle gets its agility off the game could look very different. With protect chip heal and no unfortunate crits, quagsire can guarantee a belly drum off even into 2 max roll zap hp ices. Everything save snorlax drops to the +6 +2 quag, and even it has to avoid the 35.9% OHKO chance to die to EQ and needs to roll the 1/3 body slam. Unfortunate way to end to the game for Conflict but a strong showing nontheless.

Gorgie vs choolio

Game Review

Contribution by Onraider
In this game between two long term GSC veterans making their comeback to SPL after some time, we see a matchup between a double elec structure with an unrevealed 6th from Gorgie's side, and a traditional looking boom offense with a Raikou+Hera backbone from choolio.

Turn 1 we see a slightly interesting interaction in the Cloy v Cloy lead, with gorgie electing to spike, whilst choolio goes for the toxic, suggesting gorgie probably does not have a spinner in the back and wants to get spikes up asap for initiative, and choolio suggesting he does have a spinner in the back and prefers to weaken the cloy which would be more beneficial for him. Turn 7 a bit of misfortune for choolio with the crit on cloy which definitely impacted its usefulness for the rest of the game. With the turn 9 read of ice punch going very well into the golem, gorgies game situation at this point looks pleasant. On turn 14 we see choolio go egg and threaten a sleep powder potentially anticipating gorgie's lax to curse, but catches a well timed lovely kiss and remains sleeping for a couple of turns allowing lax to dent its health quite a lot. choolio tries to get something going with his curselax a few turns later, but gorgie's own lax takes it down albeit at the cost of much of its health. We see a few turns of choolio trying to setup hera in front of zap to generate some counterplay and praying for some thunder misses, but ultimately is forced to go to raikou, and we reach an eventual raikou mirror standoff for several turns. choolio is rewarded for switching in his egg on turn 92 by getting the wake up, but unfortunately for him, is punished for his greed on turn 103 for not clicking rest as zapdos takes it down. gorgie then converts the endgame with no problems, revealing the very nice mean look+perish song+dbond gengar and gets the win with a solid performance in his spl return.

BlazingDark vs Vani

Game Review

Contribution by Onraider
A much anticipated game between two returning players from the last SPL GSC pool. We see a matchup between a double rock structure from vani and a double elec offense from BD with Jolteon.
Turn 1 we get some possible information that BD's egg doesn't have sleep powder as it switches out on lax, which is later revealed as having stun spore.BD also loses a bit of momentum here with cloy bring brought on the incoming zap. Turn 9 we see vani trying to catch the lax staying in with dynamic punch, but BD scouts for it with cloy and avoids the hit with some fortune. Turn 23 BD goes for the trade of Gengar for Tyranitar with dbond and gets rid of something which was causing him some annoyance. Vani could have probably scouted for this given gengar doesnt usually switch into a tyranitar. Turn 24 BD boldly goes for the immediate boom on the full health lax, and is rewarded for his decision to do so and gets another nice trade. After some more gameplay with some misfortune for vani getting crit turn 29 on his lix, we see a very surprising reveal of SD meganium from him turn 30. However, BD reveals jolteon turn 40, and with growth pass, allows the zapdos to make significant progress in the endgame, and ultimately converts it to a win for the Frenchman. Him sacking the lax in front of zap also makes sense to bring in jolteon and setup the endgame and BD was also rewarded very well for his turn 24 boom, and gets the 1-0 start. Very interesting team choices from both players regardless, and hopefully its a sign for many more to come.

Siatam vs MrSoup

Game Review

Siatam vs MrSoup, exciting game between the best GSC record of last year's spl and the only new comer this year. Raikou vs zap lead on Siatam's advantage, revealing stall even more with skarm on t2. Mrsoup get a great thief on Raikou with his gar, which announce some special offense pressure. T5 crit allows Siatam to play aggresively with his lax and get a curse up and remove cloy early with the rare CurseThunderLax. It normally announces some physical offense, willing to remove cloy/skarm, and with this stall structure the most probable scenario is Miltank spikeless Stall. Mrsoup tries to play agressively around it with some doubles but Siatam stay stills and just and get rewarded by a body slam paralysis on zapdos on t11. I think that was a bad play, as there is probably a wak in the back, and golem could just do the same work. Now zap is forced to sleep, and snorlax can burn its two sleep turns (doesnt change much with miltank tho). Roar forces wak on the field, definitely revealing the kind of team Siatam is using. They trade eq into each other, which is surprising as marowak is likely to have rest and golem takes a lot of damage, but Mrsoup should be able to try to get his golem some life back since siatam doesnt use spikes. On t19 Siatam succeeds to get his spin with mie with opp cloy dead, spikes are definitely removed now. Zapdos doesnt land thunder through sleep talk (around 20% chances) If it landed it could have helped Mrsoup last ig but it's still worth it for siatam as it's quite hard to find a spot to remove spike. Maybe Soup should have tried to spinblock with gar and not rely on the 20%, that was a track to explore I suppose. Now Mrsoup will tries to play around siatam's stall, healing his golem thanks to the lack of spike and try to find a set up a spot for his last mon. On this kind of structure it's very probably a special attacker like zam, jynx or things like this. On t49 Mrsoup succeeds to boom raikou with gar and open the fields for his last mon. He also get his zapdos to wake up meanwhile Siatam get his miltank on the field and healbell his team members, which are now all healthy and awake. After some pivoting, Siatam get the snorlax paralyzed and finds a spot for his wak and ends trading a lot of health in exchance of a lot of health on lax and golem. This now means Siatam snorlax can go unphazed and Mrsoup must hurry up to be the first to win this game. Siatam is first with his snorlax and decides to play calmly with it when he sees the Espeon. He chooses to just rest and will just wait and use his miltank to wake it up. He uses his Starmie to nerf the Espeon by paralyzing it to let other mons go faster and then phaze it with skarmory, revealing it's not hp water cause he would have get the kill with it instead of psychic. Now Siatam can just win by using lax and Miltank wisely, which he does, and get the win. For his first game, Mrsoup got in a hard spot after the cloy dying early. His team wasnt that well equiped against stall and it was hard for him to win, maybe trying to boom lax instead of kou with gengar could have helped, but that's easier said than done. On Siatam's side, he brought an unexpected team and let his skills play out.

Eduardo Carapinga vs BIHI

Game Review

The highlight of this week begins with a cloy vs lax lead in to the advantage of Carapinga. He gets his early spike and reveal on t2 his umbreon. Surprising play as it instantlay he's using stall + umbreon classic sets are quite passive in early game, not being able to punish lax or spikers in general. But he brought a toxic set, innovative from his side, sacrificing the charm slot to be less passive into things like tyranitar, golem or other mons lacking rest. This surprises BIHI and he gets his cloy toxiced instantly, maybe he should have been scouting after this surprising t2 from Kenix, as it would have been a big mistake from a player like Kenix. Bihi reveals he uses a spinMie, which will struggle throughout the game to spin with toxic + umbreon being able to pursuit it. Around t30 we can see BIHI struggles to play around the Umbreon despite having the spike advantage so far and he tries to threaten it with cloy with a boom. But Carapinga stays calm and just spam pursuit in front of Cloy, tolerating a boom on it (really unlikely as skarm is nearly full life). BIHI after tries to pressure with his ww zap which can be problematic to Carapinga with spikes and his raikou being roar and not talk (not revealed yet tho). Although being ww means it cant absorb umbreon's toxic and explains why he struggles so much into umbreon. On t45 is revealed ttar, which is screech, a threatening set for stall teams. It decides on t46 the frail skarm in exchange of getting toxiced. A plan he could have tried to avoid this scenario is using talk eq lax to force skarm in and weaken it or force it to sleep to be able to spread screeches without trouble, but with snorlax dedge pps at 14 already, it cannot do that. The game continues to the crucial t51 where BIHI threaten the opposing umbreon of a 22% chance of 2hkoing. Seen how great Kenix's Umbreon is, he anticipates a rest and goes to Marowak to abuse it and get a SD. Though Carapinga chooses to click toxic : the zap is a major threat and is ready tolerathe the first tbolt if it means the zap is toxiced. It puts the marowak on a timer and the dbond two turn later definitely ends marowak chances to break throught the team. After this BIHI tries a bit more but without any big luck or mistake, he has no chances and nothing among these lines happen. Great game by Kenix who got the upper hand quickly with an innovative build and played the rest of the game correctly. On BIHI's side, his spl isnt compromised at all but this week 1 shows it wont be an easy ride at all for him.

some last words

As you can see we all wrote these in our own styles, feel free to give us feedback on discord or on this thread ! You can normally expect the week 2 pairing of the week post on thursday evening, see you soon for more gsc gaming !

 

[Onraider]

Week 2 predicts

GSC OU: Don Eduardo vs Conflict- matchup of the week
GSC OU: MrSoup vs choolio- both coming of a loss week 1, but picking choolio mainly due to the difference in experience
GSC OU: vani vs Siatam - another highlight matchup
GSC OU: Rubyblood vs BlazingDark - very close
GSC OU: gorgie vs BIHI- gorgie looked great week 1, and much more experienced

 

[OmBrArch]

Maybe Carapinga vs Conflict is the true highlight of this week, but if I talk about Don Eduardo again his ego will swell so bad... And we have another great pairing this week :

PAIRING OF THE WEEK 2
The Tyrant soldier facing his brother in arms

[TYR] Rubyblood vs BlazingDark [RAI]

16-13 <= All time SPL Record => 8-12
3-1 Last SPL GSC Record => 3-4
BKC <= Visible and notable support=> Chiles Habaneros, Aliss
Win vs Conflict <= Last week game result => Win vs Vani
​

On the left side, the tyrant soldier Rubyblood with his third SPL on the team. He's a proven player in current gen and in GSC with his GSC cup final in 2023 and a nice 3-1 record last year, playing in playoff. He can have a high ceiling of play when he's determined and he seems like it so far ! After winning SPL XV, him and his former team mate are willing to keep their red pixels. Ruby got the hardest pairing on w1 and got the win with some good plays and a luck zapdos vs smeargle sequence. He's now facing up a less proven player but way more threatening player.

Indeed on the right side, we got BlazingDark. They regularly played together on same teams, on French ROA Wcup and mostly last SPL. Meanwhile Ruby got retained early by Tyrants, BD was picked by Raiders for 3k. They discuss and think about GSC together all along the year and they today faceup. BlazingDark is way proven as a player compared to Ruby but I think he's close in term of level he can reach. Preparation will be decisive with such a pairing and having the help of Chiles on BD's side, to give him some exterior inputs on the prep could be meaningful this week in particular.

Game Preview
​

Both have some similar playstyles, leaning toward offense mostly in important games. On w1 BD brought an unexpected growth pass HO lacking any Normal Resist. I think it's not the kind of stuff we are used to see him running. I dont know if that team is good but it worked on a bo1 setting, and I'm still dubtous about BD's t1 : zap is the primary switch in to egg, you cant go cloy on that turn. Ig it can be fine with a clear plan in mind but on such an offensive build, I'm... dubtous as I said. On the oppositive, Ruby brought on w1 a physical oriented team with ttar champ golem, not a 6 I've seen before I think but it does make sense. I think both player for this week will try to think outside of their boxes, maybe trying to use stall ?

What will be their preparation for this fraternal fight ?
See you on Sunday 11pm +1 to get the answer​

 

[OmBrArch]

WEEK 2 GAME REVIEWS
by Onraider aminita and myself

choolio vs MrSoup

Game Review

Contribution by aminita
Mrsoup was playing it safe this week in the builder, going with ol' reliable borat. Its a solid team, but also one that his opponent has about 12 years of experience playing against. choolio was a little more adventurous with his pick, electing to bring a double electric rhydon squad decked out with a thief gar, WW zap and a curse LK lax. Double elec is a bit of a pain for vap, but it's certainly a playable MU for soup.

chool's cloyster gets the jump on Soup's snorlax lead, and promptly spikes up. Lax curses up, attempting to wrangle back some offensive momentum. The two trade some hits (+ a toxic) and Soup calls out choolio not to boom and KOs the cloy with health to spare. chool makes cute plays around the toxic'd snorlax, his gar baiting out an earthquake reveal as he pivots to zap, then getting the gar back in as the lax finally rests. choolio sends out his ryhdon to phaze the sleeing lax as Soup pivots to his steelix, midgrounding common phazers and avoiding any perish trap gar trickery. Soup and chools aren't taking any risks, and pivot to their respective eggy and zap. Soup plays aggressively and instantly blows up on chool's kou. Two zaps come in, and choolio twaves as Soup's zap hits a 96% crit. choolio sends his lax in safely and catches the incoming cloy with a well timed LK, crippling it. Soup's Lix comes in as the lax curses, and choolio interestingly decides to not fire off a +1 attack and instead go right to zapdos. Both pivot around and eventually the vaporeon is revealed, coming in as rhydon curses up. Gar takes a ton coming in on surf, and the lack of lefties are a dead giveaway that Soup uses to absorb the thief with his zap. The two pivot around, looking for openings, and the asymetric spikes start to take their toll, chipping down Soup's steelix while choolio's zap heals up safely. Eventually choolio's lax comes in on the zap. Soup's makes an unusual desicion to stay in with his paralysed zap as the lax curses, and eventually drops to a +3 Double edge. I'd guess that he was hoping some lucky thunders could bludgeon the lax down to where it had to rest to open up the vap. It's an odd play to go for but the heavily chipped lix meant soup was stuck between a bit of a rock and a hard place without many options. Lix comes in after zapdos drops and choolio isnt risking any funny business, going straight to his gar. Seeing as the lix didn't boom, zapdos comes in to minimize casualties. The lix opts to keep phazing the incoming zap eventually and heals up nearly 40%. Lix switches out and back in and eventually the lix and rhydon trade hits, which really opens up chool's zapdos to eventually steamroll the team. Vap comes in on rhydon and hits a crit surf on the gar, dropping it. Zapdos comes in and reveals hp water which removes the lix. With the snorlax at 58 with spikes up, and 1 turn of rest burnt, choolio's zapdos takes the game home.

BIHI vs gorgie

Game Review

Contribution by Onraider
An intriguing clash between first time GSC-but long time SPL veteran BIHI and one of the most long-time GSC veterans in gorgie. After last week's loss, BIHI elects to bring a double dog stall this week, while gorgie on the other hand opts for a interesting looking double elec offense with growth pass Jolteon and Rhydon to try continue his winning ways.
Since this match was a long war with a lot of back and forth shuffling, lets have a look at some of the critical moments of the game. Turn 5 some misfortune for BIHI with the lovely kiss miss on the Cloy, which definitely would have helped him to avoid some of the Golem spinning into the Cloyster switch-in sequences we saw later in the game and allowed him to keep some initiative. The next critical point in this game is soon after turn 52. Here with snorlax sleeping with 0 turns burnt, gorgie should be looking for a suitable opportunity to setup growth with jolteon and go for the win then and there. With Raikou also running thunderbolt, there was no significant paralysis risk like with Thunder, and gorgie has a good chance to just maul BIHI with the jolt. However, he gets a bit greedy and tries to setup Jolt on the Suicune on turn 57 without scouting its moveset, and ends up paying for it in the long run by taking toxic on Jolt. A better approach would have been to baton pass to Zapdos on the toxic, then double back to jolt on the incoming Raikou switch and try setting up like that. Unfortunately due to that greed, the jolt is put on a timer for the rest of the game, and is ultimately not able to get anything significant going for it and also its partner Zapdos as well. Another interesting turn to analyse is 158, where gorgie elects to take the lovely kiss on Rhydon. In hindsight, it maybe would have been a better decision to take it on Nightmie, as the Rhydon is very important in the sequences to pressure Raikou and accumulate spikes chip on BIHI's team. The game continues on for a while, and despite gorgie's best efforts to salvage something, his offense ultimately fizzles out and BIHI takes the win to get on the board in his first SPL as a GSC starter.

vani vs Siatam

Game Review

Contribution by Onraider
A good clash between two modern heavyweights of GSC in this matchup. Siatam bringing a Machamp based offense with para Egg to support, and Vani bringing an interesting forre based offense with curse p2 for curselax and Nightmie.

Nothing super crazy happens in the first few turns, with some sequences from both to get spikes up and Vani revealing giga drain on his forre in the process. Turn 12 we see an unfortunate crit on Siatam's Zapdos from double edge leading to a KO. From turns 15-16 Tyranitar stays in on Golem to chip it down with crunch, potentially expecting a spin on one of the turns, but Vani makes the reasonable play to earthquake both turns and take it out. Turn 18 Siatam commits to the trade of egg for zapdos to go for an easier endgame with Machamp. Turn 19 vani reveals the P2 as the lax curses, acting as a stop, effectively stopping it from making further progress as well. Turn 21 Siatam brings in Machamp on the P2's recover to try force some progress with the Zap gone, but Vani finally reveals his 6th of Starmie, which also is a solid check to it. Given the nature of the team, its possibly some more offensively oriented Starmie, and later reveals itself as Nightmie. Turn 29 Siatam gets extremely unfortunate again with surf critting lax, and now the game seems to be out of his grasp. He tries a last ditch effort with the Machamp, revealing itself to be running the extremely unusual rest,sleep talk, curse, cross chop set. The team choice with Egg to cripple/trade with zap and Tyranitar with crunch and possibly pursuit to deal with ghosts/psychics also makes sense in hindsight. However, Nightmie proves too much for Siatam and Vani wins the game showing a very solid performance with a cool build in the process.

BlazingDark vs Rubyblood

Game Review

Zap vs Lax lead, Ruby instantly reveals a toxic zap, opening a great opening vs curse lax. But it goes wrong instantely with golem getting crit. To compensate Cloy comes in to spike and Lax miss thunder. Now BD avoids the boom by going gar and then pivot a classic way to begin the game. On t13 14 lix got in a hard spot. Going cloy was probably the best play : it is hard for it to make progress but it allows an easy midground with snorlax abusing lix being weakened and thieved. On t17 gar comes on the rest : it either means he just want to threat boom relying on the only 33% chance of getting eqing, which isnt an ohko ; or trap gar relying on the same odds. Ruby gets some lucky talk rolls twice and BD will now have to find an other plan.
Here comes heracross, with an ok mu : zap isnt talk but there is also a gengar and a third special attacker in the back. On t27 28 ruby decides to spin in front of zap, sacrificing a lot of hp to relieve himself by removing spikes. Tho it means he will have to be relying on offensive pressure to take on lax. On t29 BD anticipates incoming lax, cause Ruby was likely to keep golem for later and booming it when he get in front of lax. So goes cloy to cover both and ruby reads it and eq. Cloy obviously spin and golem eq again. This sequence allowed ruby to heal back his golem in a range where he could come on snorlax without dying. BD decides to not surf on incoming gengar. It's the intuitive play cause it let your cloy get out of spike range. Though cloy will have a hard time booming anw with gengar healthy and he do not want to let Ruby click ice punch whatever he wants. So he decides to not surf and just keep it as a future sack, and send zap instead to try 1v1 gengar.
Ruby doesnt let this happen and pivot with golem to let lax arrives on a hp ice. Unfortunately for him hp ice crits leaving him in a potential 3hko spot, which happens with lax not even using dedge once to weaken zap. Lax was mainly useful to take over zapdos so now Ruby's main task will be to take on zap offensively. He send gar and click ice, now zap is in boom range. He pivots with steelix and get his heracross on a ice punch. Now BD got two mon to sacrified to spikes, which can be important vs a ww zapdos to avoid your wincond being brought when you dont want to, and instead get momentum when one of the sacrified die. Now hera set up on a thunder miss and ruby needs to phaze him with his zap which is now severly weakened. WW brings BD's best option, zap and now ruby must sacrifice his golem.
Gar comes in and same scenario happens, but now gar's thunder lands on hera which is forced to rest, allowing cloy in to threat boom. BD decides to sacrifies his lix on spikes and ruby see this coming and decide to go gar no not let zap in in front of cloy and give it a free thunder. Snorlax comes in and ruby decides to ice punch : this play is quite passive infront of lax resting but maybe Ruby wasnt sure if lax's last was rest ? or maybe he anticipated opposing zapdos to comes in. Anw now lax is sleeping and Ruby can phaze it serenly with zap. Unfortunately for ruby, ww brings zap again and he looses the speed tie just after. Ruby now sends gar, keeping his 6th mon hidden. We know it's a jynx but zap isnt in range of ice beam so Ruby just want to ice punch once before using it. Snorlax comes in and he can now bring jynx on the thunder. Maybe BD could have tried to dedge once to see what ruby planned to do, gengar won't be out of zapdos thunder range before a few turns. Anw Jynx is now in and threat lax with a kiss. BD logically sacrifices his cloy on spikes and let his faster zapdos in. They trades hp and on the following turn ruby sacrifices his cloyster, hoping thunder will land in order to have zap on the field in range of gar's ice punch. Unfortunately thunder misses once and not twice, letting the zap heal more health back. Zap is now in gar's range only 36% of the time but BD decides to not take this odds, with thunder accuracy being a risk aswell. So heracross comes in and Ruby tries to kill it with one ice punch + two thunders. Despite good damages rolls it doesnt make the kill => maybe just triple thunder was better to try to get the kill. Heracross setup and get some boosts and Ruby set up his last plan : booming and get jynx on the field to kill heracross. Unfortunately boom crits and jynx comes in withoutu getting lefties it would get if it killed the heracross + zap comes in directly and jynx is now in range of zapdos and thunder lands. I think this game was quite unfortunate for Ruby : beside the talk turns vs gar a lot of things went against him (thunder accuracy overall, snorlax talk rolls vs zap, gar's crit etc) but very enjoying game overall.

Conflict vs Eduardo Carapinga

Game Review

Jynx vs Nido lead, advantage to Conflict. Don Eduardo Carapinga pivot around it to scout thief but he fails landing the thief on zap because of counter. He decides to not trade thunder vs jynx, and goes back to lax, expecting the jynx to not have thief if they have counter. But unfortunately this jynx lacks psychic to cumulate both counter and thief. Lax reveals it's mono talk, probably meaning some suit or particular gameplan. Gar comes to wall it and Caraping goes to his tar to abuse gengar. Conflict tries to pivot around it but Kenix gets the right plays three times in a row, unfortunately the lax crit and the tar wont reach its full potential. Now lix comes in and scare out tytar, both goes to their spikers and Carapinga chooses to toxic first, probably revealing a spinner. But he misses and he must spikes on next turn, letting Conflict get the momentum without toxicing the cloy. Carapinga is already in a though spot with this LK'ed Lax and Conflict can anticipate the arrival of nido. T19 Conflict tries to keep offensive pressure with going with jynx on ice beam (and covering the well known Counter Nido Carapinga uses) but he punishes it with a lk and get back into the game with getting jynx's leftos and get some health back. Now that all nido moves are revealed cloy can come in safely and threaten him back. Knowing it'll probably let a zap and gar come in, Conflict tries to midground with lax to allow him to rest. Although cloy could also come in aswell and it matches well into snorlax. We get in a bit of a mindgame spot where boom is a threat but unlikely cause of gar in the back. Conflict take the bet it wont boom to rest his lax but Kenix get the read right and booms lax. We get Gar vs Zap now, Gar has a great mu now and helps playing against the zapdos while Carapinga's Zapdos is healthy and can 1v1 everything. Ice punch crits and now Gar is in position to kill zap without booming. He pivots and reveal mie which has now 59% to kill and scares gar out. Conflict decides to sacrify jynx, not having a sleep absorber is fine with zap alive and he wants his zap to rest as late as possible so keep the hps preciously. Zapdos spot is still great but Kenix reveals light screen Mie, a rare move but we get the exact reason why this move can be great. Now Kenix can go Nidoking and Conflict must keep thundering I think cause it must punish a potential spin. Unfortunately Nido get crits and it's game decisive after his zapdos also looses the 1v1.

See you soon for another post !​

 

[OmBrArch]

Hard to pick a series this week so let's highlight so players I havent covered yet :

PAIRING OF THE WEEK 3
New Gen Vani welcoming OG choolio back

[SCO] vani vs choolio [WOL]

5-6 <= All time SPL Record => 8-13
None <= Visible and notable support=> D4 Repertoire, Fear
Win vs Siatam <= Last week game result => Win vs MrSoup
​

On our left side, vani comes back for a second year in a row. He last year got a decent 5-5 and he is following the same pattern as last year with a loose on w1 and a win on w2. To present vani to people not used to the gsc scene, he is a dedicated gsc player, playing circuit all along the year and always getting decent results with a qualification for circuit championship but never getting the final win. Fully active in gsc community, he innovates and is a versatile player.

On our right side we got choolio coming back after a few years without playing seriously in SPL. I wasn't active when he was a player but he's respected by his contemporaries. Despite some unconvincing results in SPL, he had a great invitational getting 3rd place and he just got his revenge last week vs MrSoup. For his return on the big scene, choolio is helped by two great GSC players Fear and d4. This great core can do great depending on choolio's piloting. He has so far lost to gorgie and win against new gen Soup but he now faces a more experienced player and it is a good test before playing Ruby on w4.

Game Preview ​

Vani has so far brought innovative builds with a meganium on w1 and a modern Pory Golem squad. Tho this time it'll be quite harder for him to have a clear idea of what choolio could bring so I think it'll be less risky and fishy than meganium. I'd expect choolio to using offense again as it's the playstyle he prefers and have fun with, on vani's side I'd expect offense aswell. I'd understand bringing stall but choolio's teams so far had some good tools to break.

Both players need to confirmate their w2 wins, but only can make it
See you on Sunday 9PM +1 to see who !​

 

[OmBrArch]

WEEK 3 GAME REVIEWS
by Onraider aminita and myself

choolio vs vani

Game Review

Hard beginning for choolio's jynx, stealing zap leftos + missing into outplayed by opposing lax. Trades spikes and vani gets a favourable zap vs gar 1v1, luckily for choolio zap misses the thunder on lax. It begins applying pressure and it's phazed out to nido, revealing a thief set. With opp zapdos being thieved already he click ice beam but vani read it and just eq back. He decides to ice beam twice and get a freeze allow him to come back into the game. It can seem minor in the mu but it means that nido will be able to steal snorlax leftos way more easily + the back gar isn't a classic boltbeam but a trap one which now can only rely on the surprise factor. It happens on t18 and choolio decides to just give up its cloy which won't be able to boom correctly with gar healthy and zap frozen already. After this bad trade, choolio's lax can go wild. The same can be said about vani's snorlax even tho it's lefties got stolen. Both arrives on the field and choolax wins the 1v1 and forces damage on tyranitar. The far could be a big threat aswell but now around 30 it won't be able to do much even after taking out nido. choolio reveals as last a reflect thunder zap (with a trap gar, this man isn't scared) threatening every Pokemon and phazing out lax as much as it want. Tho vani plays well and get his lax to wakeup without reflect on the opposing field. In this position choolio uses his gar to try trapping the snorlax, maybe it could have been wiser to get a reflect on first to facilitate this and avoid some mindgames with dbond/meanlook even tho these are in his favour. choolio succesuflly trap lax and he can now win with zapdos.

BIHI vs Conflict

Game Review

Contribution by Onraider
A very nice matchup between two long-time SPL veterans meeting for the first time in GSC. BIHI electing to bring a NidoGarTar offense for this week, while Conflict elects to bring a double elec offense with Machamp and Rhydon.
Upto turn 28 in general, BIHI makes some good plays+predictions to pull slightly ahead. Albeit he gets some good fortune, for example in turn 12 with the rock slide miss on Cloyster, and turn 16 Thunder miss on Tyranitar. Turn 13 BIHI makes a good play to double to zapdos anticipating Conflict to go cloy on a possible surf/boom. Turn 18 he also makes a proactive play to stay in and eq the Machamp as switching out to Zapdos was an obvious switch-out to rock slide on. Theres also a nice sequence from turn 21-23 where BIHI trades health on his tar to get rid of Rhydon which intends to free up his Snorlax with flamethrower for the remainder of the game. And on turn 28, BIHI reveals his 6th of Gar to absorb the incoming boom from Conflict's Cloy.
At this point, conflict's path to victory relies upon exploiting the sleeping lax and pressuring BIHI with his double elecs.Turn 32, BIHI could have potentially doubled to lax on the incoming Raikou to generate more chances to heal back to full. Turn 33, BIHI could have also potentially sacked his ttar to bring in lax clean later, but its a tough call to make given Conflict still has his own Lax available as well. Thus, Raikou manages to muscle through the Lax, and Conflict manages to get some sort of initiative in the match. Between turn 37-39 , we see Nido stay in on Zap to chip heal a bit so thats it able to take an hp ice later if needed. Turn 46 conflict finds a very nice opportunity to bring his Kou in on the Zap hidden power, and is able to heal it to make his life much easier. Turn 49 BIHI probably tried to make a read of conflict going Zap on an eq to chip heal a bit out of most ice beam rolls, but gets punished with Lax eqing the Nido to take it down. Between turn 50-52 we see a very interesting sequence. BIHI goes Cloy then doubles out to Gar predicting the Zap to switch in, and thus to have some initiative with ice punch+boom pressure. However conflict correctly calls this play out and stays in on the double with Lax. BIHI once again goes Cloy, saving the Gar to boom later on the Kou possibly, and this time conflict get the correct call again and goes Zap on the Cloy boom. After this, the game is firmly in Conflict's control with Raikou being too much for both Zap+Gar and converts the game for a solid victory. Turn 59 Conflict could have immediately rested to prevent any ice punch freeze bs which could have led the game to a tie potentially. Overall an extremely interesting game from both players to analyze.

mrsoup vs gorgie

Game Review

Contribution by Onraider
A very intriguing matchup between SPL newcomer mrsoup and long time GSC veteran gorgie here. After finding no success in the first two weeks, soup elects to bring a zok-stall ish structure with Tentacruel as the main spinner, while gorgie elects to go for a borat style offense structure with Raikou>Zapdos.
This game is very much a clash of two definite gameplans. Soup's being to essentially to stall his opponent out of pp with his stall being able to keep spikes away always thus not compromising his mons in any way as well. Gorgie's on the other hand is to find an appropriate situation to setup a couple of growths with Vaporeon and snowball through the stall team. With a combination of the unusual Toxic+Sand attack stalk Skarm and Defense Curl Forre, soup is able to stone wall gorgie's Lax, while the Skarm with sand attack becomes a nuisance to gorgie's Lix, thus making the Vaporeon the only somewhat reliable way to make some progress. Gorgie should have been looking to create situations such as on turn 112, where the Raikou is parad/low health and the Snorlax is also similarily weakened/asleep. He should have been looking to bring lix on the Raikou rest turn, then double out to Vapo and setup 2 Growths whilst trying to dodge a Tbolt on one of the stalk rolls from Raikou. Soup also offers some luck chances with Raikou switching into some Thunders at different points in the game with para potentially causing some problems if gorgie is able to get lix on a turn where Raikou gets parad and is unable to rest. However ultimately, gorgie is not able to find an opportunity to get some Vaporeon gameplay going, and with the crit on turn 278 ultimately killing his chances, he concedes the game and mrsoup walks away with his first spl victory after a long war this week.

BlazingDark vs Don Eduardo

Game Review

Contribution by aminita
Don Eduardo is straying off the beaten path this week with his team choice, bringing a jolteon double electric squad featuring no normal resist and the very unusual curse gengar. The lax is on sleeping duty which opens up zapdos to sow chaos with whirlwind alongside the 3 other special attackers. BlazingDark has a slightly unusual team, going with what looks to be a normal wak tank stall build except without the marowak. He instead opts to bring a curse rhydon — one of the many we’ve unexpectedly seen this season. The Don’s gameplan seems to be to overwhelming the specially defensive backbone of his opponents team, which gets significantly helped by thieving the kou t1. BD on the other hand wants to stall out the game, spread an obnoxious amount of para and then force progress with the curse rhydon. This game hinged upon the spikes that Don got up early and miraculously managed to keep up for the entire game, which put enormous pressure on BD. This, alongside some good prediction and positioning let him dictate nearly the whole game. It was a methodical process of whirlwind chip, lax doubles and gar battery which eventually culminated in kou dropping and the game closing out (without jolt ever coming in). Before the game could finish we did get to see a very interesting curse gengar, which admittedly did nothing save for chipping the already battered and frozen miltank. Seems like a cool way to pressure special walls but I am a little dubious of the benefits it brings over myriad of moves gar can run. gg carapinga

Siatam vs Rubyblood

Game Review

What a game. It's a dense game and I unfortunately won't be able to cover it like I usually but just give some post games thoughts about it. Cool teams from both sides : a old school curseLkRestLax build from Ruby featuring tar as suit support and a talk marowak to help on playing around elec types. Against him a kou tar stall trading the traditionnal starmie for a kingdra, only relying on forre to spin. Mu seems hard for Ruby with only snorlax as a real breaking tool. But Ruby gets a good long lk early allowing him to take out forre and spikes advantage to his side. With this it means Ruby won't have to use starmie and Siatam's curseTar find itself Aline to break his way through. Tho this lk isn't deadly thx to a rock slide miss. Now in this position, Ruby got two ways of doing progress : double switching between zap and lax to get some spikes damages on kou and lax, forcing Siatam to do some crazy plays like staying with skarm vs zap, or just use lax as an solo breaker and try to get a good lk at some point. He obviously applied the first plan to grind a longterm advantage. But Ruby while positioning, get both starmie and zap crit, which were crucial pieces to win endgames vs skarmory. Starmie's was unfortunate but zapdos crit was definitely something Ruby could avoid and was unecessary. In the end Siatam find himself with skarm featuring drill peck vs 3 physical attacker. The tar will try to get some drops with crunch for a last try but won't gen enough to threaten the skarm with pursuit after that. I'm not sure to understand why Ruby didn't try before that to go the physical with sliding on t116 t117 and lk the skarm as soon as it's curses once, but winning odds were low anw I'd say (I did not calculate anything). This game was a good sum up why you need to be as precise as possible in any case to not let hax get you down (still funny how this review would have been way shorter if marowak landed its rock slide).

See you soon for another post !
(Tomorrow for highlight of the week)​

 

[OmBrArch]

Yo hard week but here is our :

PAIRING OF THE WEEK 4
Shark attack on Raiders boat

[SHA] Conflict vs BlazingDark [RAI]

71-50 <= All time SPL Record => 8-12
2-1 <= SPL XVI Record so far => 2-1
Win <= Last official confrontation : Week 2 SPL XV => Lose
Zokuru <= Visible and notable support=> Chiles Habaneros
Win vs BIHI <= Last week game result => Lose vs Don Eduardo
​

On our left side, Conflict plays an umpteenth year with Sharks continuing an iconic association. To present him quicly to someone unfamilar with smogon tours : he is the best player of this GSC pool. 2024 Classic winner and currently tied as I talk with SOULDWIND as the player with the most SPL wins, he's on of the all time great in this tour, even more in GSC his home tier where he is part of the historical Big3. His tour started badly but he got back and has now a good ratio of 2-1 after playing a lot of strong players. His team is currently 7th and with each week ending with close results, Conflict knows his wins will be decisive for Sharks. Alongside him we can find Zokuru, all time positive in GSC in SPL and a 5-3 last year. Conflict's more than self-sufficient but having a second brain and pov on opponents always a plus for a tour like SPL.

On our right side, we got BlazingDark back. After being the only player of the pool with 2 wins on the first 2 games, BD got dominated by Carapinga. French Mister Sauce's team also have some trouble in this tournament so far, being ranked ninth so far, and a win vs Conflict this week could be a good way to lead his team to qualifications for following weeks. His determination will be strenghten by the will of taking his revenge after loosing last year in a crazy game.

Game Preview ​

BlazingDark lost last week using one of his comfort stall, so it's very likely to go back to offense this week. On Conflict side, he can bring a lot of various builds : w1 was definitely innovative but w2 and 3 were some known 6 even tho they are not among the most popular in the tier. The decision will be taken depending on how inspiring BD's scout. Last year he brought stall and won with it, he didnt brought stall yet this year so it wouldnt be a big surprise to see him go back to it.

Will Raiders boat resist the Shark Attack ?
See you on Sunday 10pm30 +1​

 

[OmBrArch]

We're a bit late again but nothing crazy, hope u enjoy the read of :

Week 4 games review by Onraider aminita and myself

Rubyblood vs choolio

Game Review

Both players brought some teams I dont really like : Ruby’s team is your classic stall sacrificing the talk set on lax to fish with thunder and surf, and choolio is using Vileman’s Meganium team from last year, which is a bit of a fish as well, but understandable into Rubyblood ig. Ruby pulls up a great lead with landing thunder on choolio’s cloy. I really think that if the best thing you can do with your cloy is surfing the lax, then just switch out and scout for thunder. After trying applying some pressure, Ruby finally get the spin and the definitive spike advantage with it, as choolio’s cloy was both his spiker and spinner. He still has a BellyDrumLax tho with a miltank so game isnt ff yet. On t46, Ruby reveals it’s skarm is stalk, meaning the general gameplan of para slaming it with meaganium will be way less effective. It also means that Ruby’s tyranitar will be the phazer with a curse set, which could be deadly if he gets rid of miltank. choolio finds a first room to get a BD on t91 on the sleeping snorlax, and with skarm still sleeping. Skarm comes in and get a good stalk roll (curse would have been the best, dpeck is fine, and rest would have made it way harder : you cannot curse without getting 2hkoed with lax being faster so you’d have to sacrify forre to toxic the lax. It would be fine since spike war is won already but it’s not something we want to do if we can avoid it. choolio tries a second belly drum, in a way greedier way, in front of awake raikou. It finds itself in raikou’s thunder range and Ruby decides to take the odds of landing thunder again, and gets it. I think going skarm was a fine play aswell, cause choolio had to either rest or eq, he couldnt afford dedge’s recoil, but you still need to get at least one good sleep talk roll on the two following turn (or double to tar to threaten rock slide kill after snorlax recoil), with snorlax being limited because of dedge’s recoil. But Ruby just lands its thunder and just pretty much end here as Ruby says gg in the chat. choolio will fight a bit more, in vain and Ruby gets back to an even record in this tour

gorgie vs vani

Game Review

Vani for this week brought a classic double elec + gar team, with a ww zap + talk lax variation. On gorgie’s side, he brought a weird stall team with no elec and a vaporeon instead of the classic zapdos, some sand attack skarm and a belly drum lax. Both lead with their cloyster and trade spikes and toxic. Gorgie must go on his skarm quickly since he doesnt have better switch in to surf/boom combo and cannot afford sacrificing more hp on his cloyster which doesnt run rest. They start pivoting around and reveal what they got until t9 where raikou and tar decides to trades move but vani got a lucky crit para + paralysis turn, putting the tar in a very tough spot, even more since vani’s team wont let it some room to try to heal up. Gorgie continues standing and vani’s gengar reveals hypnosis on t16. Gorgie doesnt have heal bell to play around it but with 8 hb pp and 32 hypnosis, it can become a big problem on longterm, even more knowing that gorgie will absolutely need his snorlax to progress vs double elec and that the tyranitar is low on hp and wont be able to trap it or absorb hypnosis. Vani begins pressuring with ww zap but gorgie wakes up its lax after 3 turns of sleep and get a few frustrations on the reflect zap. On t32, after getting frustration crit through reflect, vani decides to not spin in front of lax and just roar, letting a lucky cloy in, allowing gorgie to spin. Vani get its spike back on t40 and gorgie, facing many dangerous options like spinblock with gar or cloy booming opposing cloy with getting the speedtie, he decides to not take any risk and not spin, just absorb the potential boom with skarm. Vani decides to go the long term option with spin blocking with gar, and now threatens out skarm. Blissey comes in and get a light screen up and after a few pivoting around golem/cloy, vani gengar comes back on the field allowing a small try to tyranitar to get back in on thunder if he get some good damage rolls. Gorgie gets these rolls and make these worth it with a big eq, killing gengar and allowing gorgie’s cloy to spin without a ghost in the back. With this trade, gorgie is back into the game, but his cloy is still low on hp. Zapdos get back into business, with now being even more threatening cause cloy wont be able to heal back health lost on zap ww. Seeing its death is unavoidable, cloy tries to get a spin on t66 on sleeping lax but the lax rolls dedge and cloy is now definitely dead, giving vani the definitive spike advantage. I will stop analyzing here, vani now got a decisive advantage and just need to keep pressuring with special threats + snorlax. I do believe mu was really hard for gorgie, but team isnt great and he landed a bad mu, happens. With some extraordinary plays from gorgie maybe he could have get back into the game but vani played well enough to secure the win.

BlazingDark vs Conflict

Game Review

Contribution by aminita
Conflict brought an interesting team this week that aims to spread paralysis with a curse bslam lax, stun eggy and thunder kou,and then break with a screech tar and a vaporeon. The team also has some creative movesets, using both a protect tyranitar and the rarely seen leech-seed eggy. BlazingDark brought a cool squad with cloy, zap, monolax, a moonlight umbreon, golem and the rare moltres. The team seems to be a spin-off of the classic version with kou > zap that I’ve seen Conflict use, but I don’t know if he’s the teams creator. Both players lead cloy and immediately get up a spike and trade status. BD’s umbreon shows its value early, landing a toxic and chipping the eggy significantly. Conflict makes some nice plays to get lax in cleanly on zapdos after already chipping down the golem, but his bslam lax is bullied out by the reveal of the ST monolax before it can get any value. Screechtar comes in as an effort to scare the lax out and eats a nasty crit from double edge. Luckily the following rock slide into the -1 lax flinches, and the lax gets scared out. Nothing wants to take a ttar hit so cloy takes a ton from rock slide, and protect lets ttar heal while cloy gets chipped down even more, and also scouts an aggro boom play. They cloy then booms and takes down the eggy. Both ttar and umbreon come in and Conflict lets his ttar get tox’d, which I’m not sure I agree with. I’d guess he was calling out BD attempting to take advantage of a potential kou switch-in, and also had paraflinch + accuracy on his side in case he got the call wrong. Nonetheless, the umb hits the toxic and now BD’s monolax looks especially threatening. BD attempts to switch in his own lax on a potential kou again, but instead a lax comes in and a follow-up cloyster prevents it healing up as it curses. Cloy booms right away on umbreon which means Conflict no longer has an emergency stop to the monolax. If BD can somehow get it going the game could be over. Snorlax is able to rest on the ttar and BD makes some good pivots to play around the screech drop with zapdos, but eats another crit as he switches the lax back in. This is very unfortunate but I don’t think this needed to happen. The ttar was already in zapdos tbolt range and I don’t think it was necessary to double lax on the kou switching in, as it already could burn sleep and set-up on the kou, the back vap, and potentially the snorlax given the right conditions. This crit really does suck and BD sort of has to trade the lax off for the tar and hope for a rest roll which he unfortunately doesn’t get. Conflict switches in vaporeon to revenge, then doubles to lax as the zapdos comes in. From here the lax curses up, gets a bslam para on the golem trying desperately to play around lax and breaks the team. Moltres is able to revenge it but at this point Conflict’s vaporeon seals the game. A little unfortunate this week for BD but I think the second crit was avoidable and that made a significant difference in the outcome. Moltres looked like it could have been quite threatening, but had limited opportunities to switch in. It may have been able to come in on turn 33 instead of the zapdos, but the ttar did actually live a sun boosted charcoal flamethrower after spikes and poison most a majority of the time, so its hard to say.

Siatam vs Don Eduardo Carapinga

Game Review

Contribution by Onraider
A much anticipated matchup between two of the biggest stars in the current GSC scene. Siatam electing to go with a big 5+vaporeon style offense, while Don Eduardo goes with a very interesting Raikou based offense with dual psychics in Egg and Zam, and a noticeable lack of Zapdos.
Turn 2 we see a reveal of some potential information about Siatam's team as he elects to go for the toxic immediately on the opposing cloy rather than spiking up, indicating he may have a spinner in the back to have some control of the spike war, which later proves itself to be true with the golem reveal. Kenix gets a bit unlucky with the back to back toxic misses turn 2+3 and finally lands it the next turn at the cost of some of its health due to Surf. Turn 14 we see the reveal of the very uncommon Leech Seed Exeggutor from Don Eduardo, adding some intrigue as to what the rest of its moveset could be, but we are unable to find out as it blows itself up immediately on the next turn on the Zapdos switch by Siatam. Another bit of bad fortune for Don Eduardo on turn 16 as his Snorlax misses lovely kiss on the spinning Golem, potentially indicating a very offensive oriented Lax by him as well. Turn 21 is an interesting turn to look at. There is an interesting mindgame of Zam psychic vs encore, and the Cloy staying in to boom potentially on a psychic, or switch to Lax on an encore enabling it to heal again with rest. Don Eduardo goes for a sort of midground play by switching his own Cloy in to cover both boom and a possible Lax switchin, while Siatam avoids this entirely by revealing his 6th of vaporeon. Turn 23-24 we see great predictions and guts from both players. Turn 23 Don Eduardo predicts the Golem switching in on a thunder and correctly hp ices there. Turn 24 he goes for a read of Siatam switching his Lax in on a Thunder to save the Golem for later, however Siatam correctly makes a gutsy play to stay in and earthquake to take down the Raikou. Turn 25 Don Eduardo makes a questionable play to go back to Golem and pays for it with it dropping to the earthquake as well. Turn 27 Siatam makes the decision to sack Cloyster to bring Snorlax in cleanly, given that spikes will be permanent for the rest of the game. Although it could be argued that preserving the cloy-boom could be useful and that he could have switched Vaporeon in, he makes a practical decision as such to avoid any nasty encore loops on vaporeon and some spdef drop shenanigans potentially as well. Turn 28 is another interesting turn to analyze. The "safe" play there would be to rest with Lax and have it be able to deal with Zam with sleep talk later on. However, as Don Eduardo does in the game, if the opposing lax switches in on the rest, things could get very messy if its a curse earthquake Lax, especially with lovely kis still on the table to use. Thus, Siatam makes a nice practical call to predict Lax coming in and Double Edges it turn 28. Both trade damage on each other and Siatam's goes down turn 29. Turn 35, Don Eduardo gets a nice predict in on the Golem booming, and sacrifices the lax on it.
Thus we reach a very interesting endgame of Zam vs Gar+Vapo. Siatam needs to play around encore with Vaporeon basically and try to roll a growth from a sleep talk when healthy enough and try to sweep with surf like that. Having another switchin with Gengar is also useful to cancel out encore if needed. Don Eduardo on the other hand must hope for favourable sleep talk rolls, and he has some chances to take the game especially with some spdef drops etc. Turn 39 Zam tries to conserve some pp by not using psychic, but maybe this wasnt necessary at that point and could have been saved for a later occasion, as Siatam gets to keep his Gengar and also have a sleep turn burnt on vapo while it being relatively healthy. As a result, on turn 42 and turn 43, Siatam is offered two windows with sleep talk to roll growth and have a winning endgame, but unfortunately isnt able to get it. Turn 56 Siatam manages to finally get a growth sleep talk roll, but unfortunately isnt able to get the rest roll the next turn to make the endgame won, and Zam is able to take down both it and Gar for Don Eduardo to come away with a win after a very dynamic and interesting game.

MrSoup vs BIHI

Game Review

Contribution by Onraider
An interesting matchup between the defending GSC circuit champion, BIHI and the runner up of the 2024 GSC Invitational MrSoup here. BIHI electing to bring a classic looking stall this week with Umbreon as the firelax check, while Soup opts for an interesting looking offensive structure with Gengar being the sole normal "resist". The first critical point of the game comes early on with Soup getting the freeze on Umbreon with his Jynx. This would prove pivotal, as without the Umbreon to pressure Soup's Gengar later in the game with pursuit, it is able to spinblock more effectively and cause a lot of pressure for BIHI in general. Turn 18-19 MrSoup makes some proactive plays to get Cloy in on the Skarm rest, then toxicing the incoming Starmie with a good prediction. Turn 23 BIHI reveals lovely kiss Snorlax rubbing a bit of salt in the wound after Cloy missed a toxic in the same turn. However, based on this, MrSoup could have surmised that this is monolax(especially given Umbreon present in the team structure) and gone Gengar turn 24, but makes a questionable decision to go Exeggutor turn 24 to threaten sleep to force out the lax at the cost of a large chunk of its health. Turn 37, MrSoup is quite fortunate to get the 1 turn wake on cloy, which potentially ended up to be game deciding in the long turn as it is immediately able to establish spikes to pressure BIHI. We see whirlwind Zap revealed turn 38 by Soup, which proves as a very pivotal tool to pressure BIHI's team through accumulating spikes chip throughout the rest of the game. Soup also makes some pivotal plays such as the turn 51 spinblock to keep this going. Turn 58 we see the reveal of the uncommon rest talk Jynx from Soup, as it elects to take the lovely kiss from Lax this time around. Turn 60 onwards, Soup's Zapdos is able to successfully pressure BIHI team with thunderbolts and whirlwinds, and with some fortune on turn 65+66 with raikou not rolling rest, is able to take it down as well. Gengar manages to successfully trade with lax on turn 72, and BIHI's team eventually crumbles to Zapdos and MrSoup walks away with the win this week to reach a 2-2 score after a rough initial couple of weeks.

See you tomorrow for highlight of week 5 !​

 

[OmBrArch]

Week 4 was great, now is our :

PAIRING OF THE WEEK 5
All time SPL player vs Best SPL XV GSC player

[SHA] Conflict vs Siatam [RUI]

44-30 <= All time SPL GSC Record => 13-11
3-1 <= SPL XVI Record so far => 2-2
Win <= Last official confrontation : Week 3 SPL XIV => Lose
Zokuru <= Visible and notable support=> None
Win vs BlazingDark <= Last week game result => Lose vs Don Eduardo
​

On our left side, here is Conflict again. Nothing surprising to have him again on highlight of the week, being the best gsc player of the pool. After two rough weeks, he is now on a 2-0 win streak (even 3-0 in theory but w2 game was particular). He got an important win last week to get the tie for his team and he is probably confident about the future of his SPL XVI.

But on our right side : if there is one player who could destabilize Conflict, it's him : Siatam. He's now a staple of the GSC scene : first SPL appearance in 2023 with a hard but not unsatisfying tournament, he ended the next edition with the best record of the pool being 7-3. Known for his surprising teams (bliss without soft-boiled, standard golem off with smeargle/wak in the back...), he has been playing some more standard squads so far this year, but standard teams I personnaly didnt expect him to use so it's still a surprise in some way. This week could be crucial for Siatam : he's 2-2 so far and lost last week : winning against Conflict would be a great performance and get him back on a good dynamic + beat a key piece of sharks for his team.

Game Preview ​

When they fought each other for SPL XIV, Siatam brought an original Scizor Offense and Conflict brought a standard double elec + egg team. Siatam's strategy fell flat and Conflict got a clear win with it. I'd expect Siatam to use some more standard offense than what he used 2 years ago. On Conflict's side, he has only brought offense so far and I think he'll keep on : siatam recent scout doesnt really give any reason to bring stall honestly.

Is Siatam going to take his revenge ? Or is Conflict going to keep asserting dominance on the GSC pool ?
See you soon on Sunday 9pm+1 for the game​

 

[OmBrArch]

I am hella late lmao but I hope u'll enjoy the read anw :

Week 5 games review by Onraider aminita and myself

BlazingDark vs BIHI

Game Review

Lead in favour of BD who gets a lk and a thief on opposing talk lax. BIHI quickly reveals a jolteon offense meanwhile BD got a jynx team with a suit tar instead of the classic golem. They both traded spikes early and BIHI started pressuring with zapdos early. To abuse the sleeping snorlax he begins to pressure with steelix but he cant do much problem cause of reflect and get surprised by fire blast on tyranitar who doesnt get punished by eq but just a roar. Turn after gengar clicks ice punch to absorb potential boom and abuse the weak eq thx to reflect, but I think it was an error cause zap could do this job aswell and health was required to manage cloy and beat lax offensively. Unfortunately for BIHI, BD doesnt get punished for this as cloy's toxic misses on zap, but it get paralyzed instead when it tried to 1v1 zapdos, to support snorlax defensively (sleep zap first and then use lax when odds are lower to land thunder). With this good management and no steelix left, BIHI got into a spot where he's close to loosing. But he lands two good thunders on lax and sacrify cloy to prevent snorlax from resting again. Gengar comes in to pressure with boom but just get absorbed by tar, and now jolt comes in to rk and will try to 1v1, abusing the weakend lax. Jolt gets one growth and land two thunders before lax takes it out on its second talk.
But now its in range of zapdos and BD gets scared. He tries to conserve it, hoping to heal it later on a sleeping zapdos, and sacrify the hypnoed jynx. But BIHI punishes the bad line chosen by BD by resting his zap to get it back to full. Jynx doesnt wake up and zapdos now just win vs the whole team. BD safe win path was probably to abandon his snorlax and rk zapdos with ice punch (it was in range), comes on lax with cloy and boom, and then boom again with gengar. BIHI could have tried some double switches to avoid this but it would have been really hard.

choolio vs Don Eduardo

Game Review

Contribution by aminita
After winning with it last week, Don Eduardo doubled down on the alakazam pick, opting to bring it again alongside a zap-cloy-lix structure featuring monolax and a curse-champ. Alakazam has some nice synergy with the monolax here (and the champ to a lesser extent), as while it can’t remove ghosts in the way a pursuit mon can, It can use gar as an entry point to gain tempo and wreak havoc. I’d guess the flex moves of champ and zam would together cover the eggy/starmie/forre MU, so something like hp bug and fire punch or fblast and toxic.
choolio on the other hand brought a quite classic jynx gar golem boom offence team, decked out with double thief. The lax here is a ST eq set, which does make me worry about the team’s ability to take on an opposing lax with eq coverage. The reflect zap does help out, but to me it still feels quite iffy.
T1 we see a jynx from chools as Don sends out a zapdos, and the two trade hits, revealing the jynx to be thief. The Don makes some nice plays to get cloy in and spike as lax tries to absorb a thunder and then plays around the jynx punish getting his ST lax slept and the cloy’s relatively inconsequential lefties stolen. Don’s lax comes in to deal with the jynx and burn sleep and is punished by a golem coming in and threatening to spin. Don’s cloy comes in, gets the spike back up as jynx comes in, and the Don makes a very aggressive play, immediately clicking surf which drops the golem attempting to wrestle momentum back on the expected lax. “Don’t try those vs the pinga man.” chools manages to get his own spikes up but Don gets the momentum back by doubling from his zap to his unrevealed champ to punish the lax response. The champ is looking scary at +1, but a reflect zap and a rslide miss force it out before it can do much. Lix is the zap response and it takes a ton from 2 hp ices, and gets a poor roar pull into cloy. Both players pivot around and zam comes in on the gar, before doubling right back to champ on the lax. chools zap gets stung by rock slide but retaliates by crit-KO-ing the lix pivot. Don manages to get the champ back in safely and after a curse it’s staring down a 50% zap with no reflect up. Here choolio opts to click reflect first( which seems slightly un-optimal as 81% of the time it’s just an extra round of lefties for the champ,) before sacking the zap after getting a tbolt off. Jynx comes in and looks scary with spikes up and inconsistent LK sleep turns. Lax doesn’t get a favourable ST roll and the gar comes right in to force it out with only 50% hp and 3 turns burnt. Both players switch around and Don’s zapdos eats an unfortunate crit surf from cloyster and dies when it could have been very threatening otherwise. Zam takes down the cloyster but the incoming lax prompt Don to sack his own cloy to spikes. Champ comes in, all poised to get a KO. There’s quite a few possible lines here (stay in/go gar, if gar then lax doubling on the zam, staying in with champ to predict lax etc) but choolio gets the call right, going gar on cross chop and simply booming the champ, and suddenly the game is neck and neck. Jynx and lax are poised to sweep if sleep turns comply, but Don’s lax will win on the spot if it can get healthy and get a curse off. Unfortunately for choolio luck wass not on his side after the zap crit, and the Don’s lax walks away with the game. Zam didn’t have much of a showing this game, but thanks to Ruby piloting Don’s last-week’s zam team it’s still in good standing, winning 3/3 games so far this SPL.

vani vs MrSoup

Game Review

Contribution by Onraider
A clash between two top modern GSC players here, Vani electing to bring a traditional boom spam offense with a Raikou+Heracross backbone, while MrSoup elects to go for an interesting looking heal bell based stall, with Cloyster spikes and Umbreon as the Firelax check.
Turn 1 we see Soup reveal the uncommon ToxLax as it lands on the opposing Cloy whilst avoiding one coming its way. Turn 5-6 Blissey reveals itself with Heal Bell showing the nature of the stall, and reveals Light Screens turn 7 which is typical. Turn 19 Vani's Lax manages to para Soup's Skarm before being phazed out, and due to a nice full para next turn is able to accumulate more chip on it with surf from Cloyster. Fearing a potential Explosion to really cripple the Skarmory and make it unable to switch into Snorlax reliably later, Soup switches out to his Snorlax, which the Cloyster is ultimately able to trade with on turn 23. Vani manages to position his Snorlax nicely turn 25, and after setting up a Curse, reveals Self-Destruct to create a very nice trade with the Skarmory on turn 28. In hindsight, Soup could have potentially used Heal Bell turn 25 to possibly not have this happen. As a result, MrSoup's team becomes more exposed to Vani's Heracross(unrevealed at the time). Some good fortune for Vani turn 29 rolling and hitting a Thunder through Sleep Talk and also being able to para the Starmie as it spins, really putting MrSoup on the backfoot. A nice play by Vani turn 30 to switch in his Exeggutor as Soup goes Blissey to Heal Bell, and as a result Soup reveals his last of Umbreon which is also his sleep absorber.
Vani goes for the boom next turn hoping to trade with Umbreon and make the Heracross endgame much easier, but it manages to roll Charm through Sleep Talk and manages to live to tell the tale. Turn 33 we finally see the reveal of the Heracross from Vani. Turn 37-38 Soup makes the decision to give up Blissey in exchange for chip on the Hera and hoping Umbreon and the rest are able to manage Raikou+Hera. Unfortunately for him, Turn 41 Vani's Raikou reveals Crunch, and thus after some effort and Spdef drops, it is able to break through the team and Vani secures yet another impressive win.

Rubyblood vs gorgie

Game Review

Lax vs Cloy lead in favour of Ruby but he misses his toxic on t1 and the snorlax will do a great job by weakening and paralyzing cloy. It gets phazed out. Ruby reveals some kind of raikou offense meanwhile gorgie reveals a mono lax with a tyranitar, indicating a potential suit tar. Thanks to early cheap damages on cloy, ruby wont be able to keep spikes up and end up just getting a boom on starmie. Gorgie begins pressuring with zap but lax comes in and reveals lk, landing on zapdos. It's not your usual plan with lk lax but zapdos is a whirlwind set so ig it'll relieves some pressure on raikou's shoulders. Snorlax curses and gets a crit on tyranitar. It was obviously going to do good damages but the direct kill opens the path for the back zam which isnt revealed yet. Marowak comes in, using the screech from precedent turn, but Ruby got an exeggutor and as we go along it seems like it doesnt have hp bug, so Ruby's quite safe vs it. Ruby tremove spikes from his field thx to the paralyzed golem which cannot get toxiced by forre anymore, and continues to apply pressure on opposing lax. It's the key for gorgie's win, it just need to remove golem and it could win by itself. But it must also do a lot defensively aswell, vs leech egg for example which ends up getting a crucial boom on lax. Now Ruby has only golem's boom left, which can be absorbed easily by zap, so he must win quickly, but the alakazam get into a spot where it can win by itself if well played. It kills the forre and doesnt risk vs the sleepy zap, who wakes up indeed. He manages it succesfullly with lax (not kou to avoid giving some space for opposing snorlax) and alakazam finds a spot again to get a second kill on marowak. Zap comes in again with the threat of twave, and gets a kill but now with encore, zam can win against it. Snorlax comes on the encore and Ruby gets his 75% roll to get the kill, which closes the game pretty much : Ruby didnt take the safest line to close the game, which was going golem to threaten boom, and when zap hp water and kills, now you encore and heal raikou. Anw Ruby doesnt get bullshited and get his win.

Siatam vs Conflict

Game Review

Here is our highlight of the week, which wont keep its promise unfortunately. Conflict gets spikes first but he reveals his umbreon early, which finds itself quite passive into the forre offense brought by Siatam. Both players starts pivoting and Conflict tries to spin first with golem but he fell into Siatam's trap, surf lax. It's a difficult shot but he can now get the momentum and tries to pressure to compensate. Snorlax curses and lk the phazing tyranitar, but misses the crucial fire blast on incoming forre. It was a clear ohko and meant that golem death wasnt that catastrophic cause Siatam wouldnt be able to spike again. Now gengar comes in to soft check and Conflict tries to heal his raikou. But after some unpleasant paralysis on it earlier, it gets paralyzed again and get crit by snorlax. From here not much to say, Conflict will keep on fighting but Siatam's gengar with hypnosis will put some good work and some decent plays + some luck again will confirm the win for Siatam.

some news

reviews arent dead, just some difficulties this week (was out for like 2 days, and found some of my writings deleted, next time I wont forget to save text somewhere else aswell.
I planned to do a short review for mid spl instead of a highlight, but in the end I only had time to finish this. I'll see what I feel like prioritizing next week between a highlight or a review.

See you soon for more content !​

 

[aminita]

"Halfway point" -- Interesting mons/sets
yeah this is only up to week 5... oops... If anything is out of date, that'd be why.
The GOOD:
100% WR, 8/2 KD
Courtesy of The Don and with some help from Ruby, zam's been having quite the season this SPL. It's been brought in 3 games with a 100% winrate, being pivotal in some and admittedly more of a benchwarmer in others. It's speedy encore, 32 recovers and powerful psychic alongside passable coverage options can make it quite a threat, especially with spikes up. It's unique among special attackers in its ability to punsish rest loops and create checkmate situations with encore, and psychic drops can be quite potent if you dont mind the 16 pp. It's also a quite neat gengar punish if hypnosis has been scouted, and if gar booms the zam then can open up the monolax sets it can be paired with.

//
Zam applies a lot of pressure to the gar/lem/vap in the endgame, forcing vap to rest and switch, thus forcing the golem and gar in to take psychics. Zam isn't exactly a hard check to vaporeon as if it can come in asleep at 100% and get a growth roll, the vap should plow through. This doesnt happen here and the zam clinches out the game in a quite impressive showcase.

//
Zam provided value here with it's tricky use of encore, managing to punish lax on the boost and zap clicking hp ice. It also managed to pick up some nice KOs to clean up the game with it's power and speed.

//
Not zam's best game. It is able to effectively pressure gengar out but doesn't do much else aside from chip lax with psychics. Still manages to pick up a KO on a cloyster sack which helps pads its stats (lol).

The OK:

(Sand attack) 50% WR, 1 steelix irritated
We've (sadly imo) seen 2 sand attack skarm's used this year. In theory it's a kinda cool way to cheat the skarm-steelix dynamic without needing any outside help or good spikes control, but it also makes skarm even more passive than it normally is. Both times we saw it it also had toxic which dissuades cloy and golem taking advantage, but does absolutely nothing to forre. Furthermore, neither skarm had curse, deviating from it's standard role at actually checking (and checkmating) non flame/thunder snorlax with any degree of reliability. Toxic + sand attack + rest talk might be able to force lax rests before pivoting to a phazer but it's less reliable than any standard skarm.

//
The sand attack skarm finds a home this game against a steelix, and it effectively dissuades it from booming. It is also able to annoy Gorgie's eggy and absorb a LK from his lax. A spikes defense curl forre picks up the slack and acts as the teams dedicated main snorlax check, and a tentacruel is effective at removing forre and cloy spikes. I'm not a fan of this team in general, sand attack notwithstanding. Even with a crunch ttar the MU into ghosts + spiker looks irritating and the forre is fundamentally unable to keep up hazards in a mirror.

//
This skarm does not find a lix this game, and does not do much besides spread some status to the rest mons and blank the non curse snorlax. Seeing a vap on stall is cool but what is this teams game-plan into a curselax? especially if skarm is pressured to rest beforehand. It just looks flimsier than any stall team has any right to be. I wish it was st toxic curse set here but I'll admit the lax of good spikes control into a steelix could be a source of irritation.

me complaning about sand attack

In the case of sand attack I just don't like the idea of RNG based counterplay being an accepted part of the tier any more than it has to be. This game is already a mess of dice rolls but defensive play that fundamentally hinges on luck and nothing else is not skill expressive and makes the tier worse by making it less consistent. I'll admit In the case of dissuading booms it is funnily enough not really rng reliant, but this is not the case for skarm checking a curselax or the rare rock slide lix for example. Banning sand attack has no real collateral on the rest of the tier, removing the variance it adds and making the game more conducive of skill. It also opens up the slate for mean look pass umbreon to be looked at and potentially reintroduced to the tier.

If this ever goes through we should ban other cheese moves that only add RNG and nothing else; like confuse ray and swagger. Missy fishing for RNG with perish cray trap is not a healthy part of the metagame. For the sake of consistency here, subpar moves like supersonic should also be gutted.

(Leech seed) 100% WR, Virtually no HP recovered
The ever elusive leech seed eggy has surfaced 3 separate times so far this season. Second gen leech seed kinda sucks as it hardly even activates, but it is quite capable at forcing switches. We saw conflict pair it with stun spore which slows the target enough to actually get the chip from leech seed which was neat. In all 3 games it did very little- save from pressuring lax to switch out and take spikes. It also helped Conflict's eggy take less from an umb pursuit, as the effect actually activates when the pursuit hits on the switch.

(the move did the same thing every game so i cba to give each game a blurb)




The BAD:

50% WR 0/4? KD
Rhydon has shown up 4 times, missed a few rock slides and generally has done very little. Despite this, It's managed to squeak out a quite decent 50% WR. It's been an OK role player and poses a threat in theory, but in every single appearance so far it hasn't managed to break through anything at all. In practice it has been too annoyed by cloyster and suicune and vaporeon and It's seeming inability to hit rock slides to make a noticeable impact.

rhydon

0% WR, 2/15 body slams para'd
Sorry Vileman. With a decent speed tier and some coveted moves, meggy is OK. SD/Synth/Bslam/EQ matches up nicely into some offense teams and is generally an effective spreader of para- specifically onto skarmory, but often does little else into stall teams.

//
Tough luck for meggy fans, as it runs into a ST skarm immediately, and only gets 1/11 paras (iirc), including 2 chances on the starmie. It does very little else. Losing the cloyster (the sole spinner btw) by turn 3 certainly didn't help the meggy succeed either.

//
Meggy just can't quite make it work here. After hiding in the back most of the game, meggy is too afraid to take a toxic from the healthy cloy to do anything. It gets to boost up on jolt and at +2 faces down a +2 zap, but can't land the para to win that 1v1.

If any player wants to chime in (maybe postseason) about their picks and correct any of my misinformation that would be greatly appreciated :]

 

[OmBrArch]

Week 6 games review by Onraider aminita and myself

gorgie vs Don Eduardo

Game Review

Contribution by Onraider
A fun matchup between two long term GSC veterans and also two of the most bright personalities of the GSC community in this one. Gorgie brings a stall this week with stalk Hera and Spikes+Spin Cloy, while Don Eduardo elects to bring an interesting looking offense with Rhydon+Vapo which we will discuss more later.

Turn 4 we see the reveal of the uncommon HP Fire from Gorgie's Skarm, potentially anticipating Forre to switch in to set spikes. Don Eduardo's Lax manages to chip Gorgie's Ttar well with the Double Edge crit+ Earthquake on turn 8. Turn 13 we see Thunder Wave revealed from Don Ed's Zapdos, indicating a more offensively leaning Zap with Whirlwind as well potentially. Turn 21 whirlwind reveals Rhydon from Don Eduardo which serves to act as the main Lax check for his team, also benefitting from the paras from Zapdos as well. Turn 38-48 we basically see Don Ed's Zapdos chipping Gorgie's team quite a bit in general with nice Thunderbolt+Whirlwind clicks.

Turn 55 whirlwind from Skarm reveals Vaporeon from Don Eduardo, and we also see the very unusual Substitute from it the next turn on the Raikou switch. Due to Kou rolling rest on the stalk, Vapo is able to setup a Growth, and reveals the uncommon Hydro Pump and hits it twice to take down Kou. Turn 60 Gorgie elects to burn the sleep turn so that he can wake up guaranteed the next turn, as Don Eduardo sets up another Substitute. Unfortunately for Gorgie, the next turn he both misses the Megahorn and also gets crit by the Hydro Pump, really putting him behind in this game. Gorgie's lax comes in, and Don Eduardo sets up a couple more Growths before Baton Passing to his 6th of Starmie on turn 64. Don Eduardo manages to avoid crits on the next few turns during the Recover spam, and lands an important Surf turn 69 and recovers the turn after as well to put him in a position to finish off the very chipped Snorlax. Turn 72 Starmie manages to get a free Substitute on the Cloyster sack, thus effectively ending any chances for Gorgie to try and make a comeback after sacking it and getting some chip heal on Lax after switching it in afterwards, and thus forfeits. Don Eduardo thus comes away with an impressive win with a very interesting team, albeit with some good fortune going his way as well.

Conflict vs choolio

Game Review

Contribution by aminita

Battle of the Dinos. Conflict’s team is built around a ST bslam curselax, and features 2 normal resists in ttar and lix. Zap and cloy provide the essentials and a twave starmie provides spin and para support for the team. The ttar’s set is largely unrevealed, but with the backup normal resist and the para support I’d guess it’s screech rslide suit and a filler move. I’d also imagine the lix would be a standard curse set over bslam/dbreath to simplify the skarm MU with a normal resist still in the back. Choolio has elected to bring what looks like a quadruple boom team featuring both eggy (running thief no less) and gar. The cloy zap and lix sets look pretty standard and a ST eq lax provides a much needed defensive backbone. The team looks quite solid with lots of offensive tools to find a way through an opponents team. I am curious on the specifics of choosing a thief eggy here. I think it’s a good set but I don’t see anything it enables, though maybe a specific abuser of a lefites-less-zap isn’t necessary.

T1 we see a zap from Conflict and the eggy from Chools. Thunder misses as eggy reveals thief. Chool’s lax comes in and fires off a DE as the zap misses for the third time in a row. Zap finally hits one and lives the next DE by the very skin of its teeth, being forced to rest and take yet another hit. Chools nicely anticipates conflict not wanting to take another hit, and switches to his zap as Conflict tries to go cloy. Conflict’s lax comes in and curses up twice, trading spikes and toxic for 40% on the cloy and a first try para. The now slower cloy is pressured to pivot out or boom away. Conflict tries to midground with curse but an aggressive surf forces him to rest, and he gets phased out by Chool’s steelix. A ttar gets dragged in and doesn’t want to linger and switches to zap as Choolio goes to his eggy (which does not cover fire blast tar in the slightest but does check most ttar clicks and would have covered the starmie that is still unrevealed.) Despite zapdos making up for its earlier inaccuracy by sleep talking two thunders (and critting one), it still drops to 2 psychics. The eggy however is in ttar pursuit range, and gets promptly removed. Choolio sends out lix and roars the starmie switch right back into ttar, but on the next turn he gets called out attempting to predict one of the water types coming in and his zapdos eats a rock slide. Lix is able to come back in but eq is clicked as cloy comes in and finally gets up spikes. Zap comes in which prompts Conflict’s lax in which in turn is answered by a cloy. Cloy gets a toxic off and pivots away to gar, and the lax doesn’t hang around. From the revealed mons it’s a reasonable assumption that the lax has no coverage for the gar. Choolio doesn’t risk it anyway and tries to check the lax set by going back to cloy and is met by the now revealed steelix last. The cloy tanks an EQ and interestingly chooses the cover-all option of explosion. Both players pivot around and Conflict is able to pivot his ttar in as the gar comes in but is hit with a first try hypnosis (and no early wake). There’s a whole lot of switching here and the zapdos forces the lax to rest. Some nice plays let choolio chip ttar with an EQ, phase starmie on the switch and additionally take down Conflict’s own lix. That kill does however let the mie get spikes off permanently. Conflic’s mie doesn’t want to test its luck vs the lax and tries to take advantage of the rest click with his own ST curse lax and comes in on 2 rest ST rolls. He takes one double edge and tries to curse up, but a follow up double edge crits and the lax is basically dead. Conflict tries his best to play around the lax threat, using ttar to bait an entry for the cloy, which gets the boom call correct on the lax somewhat greedily staying in. I think in this scenario going zapdos would have been a completely reasonable play for choolio, as It covers pretty much every possible play here (thunder accuracy admittedly could get forced which is a little bothersome). Post boom the zap comes in and Conflict sends in his mie. Having no other option he clicks twave, but the yellow magic doesn’t activate and zap gets the rest off. Ttar can’t seem to wake up and dies as the zapdos gets out of sleep turns and hits its thunders, closing out the game. A well played game on both sides. Chools made neat plays to get ahead this game but also had some good fortune that made it pretty hard for conflict to wrangle the game back.

vani vs BIHI

Game Review

Contribution by Onraider

A rematch from the round of 16 of the 2024 GSC circuit playoffs here between BIHI and vani. Vani elects to bring a double "rock" type of offense with Starmie, while BIHI elects to go for a boom-oriented offensive structure with a Raikou+Vapo defensive backbone.

Nothing super crazy in the early turns, Vani makes some nice double switches turn 5+6 to position Snorlax in very nicely vs Raikou. It reveals itself to be Curse Earthquake lax and manages to get nice chip on BIHI's Golem turn 8. Predicting BIHI to switch out, Vani makes a nice play the next turn and Double Edges the incoming Exeggutor for some very nice chip as well. Turn 18 BIHI switches out his Lax vs Zap, possibly indicating this is a rest-less Lax which was mainly looking to chip heal by switching in. Turn 20, BIHI reveals Crunch from Raikou, thus making Vani's Lix a much more reliable switchin to it. Turn 29, BIHI's lax reveals Thunder, thus potentially showing like a 4 attacks type of lax(DE,Thunder, EQ,Self-Destruct). Vani gets a bit of luck with the Rock Slide flinch on the next turn as well. We see a lot of repositioning and doubles from both for several turns after this. Turn 43, Vani gets some good fortune again with the Toxic miss from Cloy on the Rapid Spin. However he lands the toxic turn 46, and ultimately gets rid of it in the next few turns for a lot of chip on his Cloy, and no spikes up. BIHI is put into an uncomfortable position with the Screech on Vapo turn 56, and manages to roll rest the next turn at the cost of taking a ton from Rock Slide with 0 sleep turns burnt.

After sacrificing lax, BIHI goes Exeggutor Turn 58 thinking it is safe on the Tyranitar. However, Vani finally reveals the 4th move of Fire Blast and takes it down. Turn 62, Vani gets very unlucky to miss Thunder on BIHI doubling his vaporeon back, which would have probably ended the game then and there. However at this point, with 2 booms available to Vani with Cloy and Lix, he is very much ahead, and forces trades with those to ultimately clean up the endgame and come away with a nice win and a impressive performance.

MrSoup vs Rubyblood

Game Review

Will be fixed soon

Siatam vs BlazingDark

Game Review

Will be fixed soon

See you soon for more analysis and highlights !​

 

[OmBrArch]

Here is the comeback of the pairing of the week :

PAIRING OF THE WEEK 7
Both are in a 3 0 winstreak
who will get his fourth ?

[TYR] Rubyblood vs vani [SCO]

16-13 <= All time SPL Record => 5-6
3-1 Last SPL GSC Record => 5-5
4-2 <= SPL XVI Record => 4-2
BKC <= Visible and notable support=> None
choolio, gorgie, MrSoup <= Last 3 wins => gorgie, MrSoup, BIHI​

On the left side, we got Ruby who so far cofirms the good results he had at the end of last year's spl. Seeing signups getting better for the gsc pool, some people doubted if Ruby would be worth the retain and so far he proves them wrong. After a mid start, he got good wins against struggling players in the pool. The end of the season wont be easy with a notably w9 vs Don Eduardo, but he must get rid of another tough opponent this week.

Indeed on the right side, here is vani. After a decent SPL last year, his former teammates on Scouters decided that they wanted him again as their gsc player. So far, their choice reveals to be the right one and even more these last three weeks. Tho, vani havent faced so far the most successful gsc players of the pool : Carapinga on w8 and Conflict on w9. These are for sure some hard pairings and getting as much win as possible before facing them is a good idea. There is the potential for a great season, and the difference between a good and a great season will probably show up in these last 3 weeks (and playoffs obviously !). But for now he must prove that his last 3 weeks werent just wins vs struggling players, but the start of domination on the gsc pool.

Game Preview​

Vani brought two good preparation on the first 2 weeks and since then he kept bringing more standard teams. Standards worked fine so far and i dont know if there could be a particular idea that could fit Ruby's scout. Also no stall brought yet on his side, if I had to bet I think we see no stall today. On Ruby's side we got a bit of everything, some stalls, some physical offense some special ones etc etc, hard to guess from here honestly. And so..

Who will get stopped ? Who will get a fourth win ?
See you tonight on 8 pm +1 9 pm +1 to see who wins !​

 

[OmBrArch]

Week 7 games review by Onraider and myself

BIHI vs Siatam

Game Review

Contribution by Onraider
An intriguing clash between 2022 GSC circuit winner Siatam and 2024 GSC circuit winner BIHI in this matchup here. Siatam this week elects to bring a Tentacruel based stall with Tyranitar as his firelax check, while BIHI elects to bring a Steelix based offense with Alakazam as pace control and Machamp as a breaker.

Lets have a look at mainly some of the critical and noteworthy moments of the game. Siatam finds a nice opportunity to get spikes up turn 17 with Forre on the sleeping Lax without much trouble. Turn 32 instead of spinning he elects to surf potentially anticipating an incoming Gengar to spinblock, but the Surf lands into the Zam and it encores the Tenta the next turn as well. Turn 42 BIHI switches out his Lix out of the Forre not wanting to get unnecessarily chipped by HP Fire despite having a curse boost up. Siatam finds the chance to spin on the Fire Punch-less Zam as it switches out into Zap on turn 48. Turn 59 Siatam lands a nice Toxic on Zam as it recovers to put it under more pressure. Turn 63 BIHI is fortunate to avoid a higher roll on the Double Edge and manages to rest with Lax, albeit the odds were in his favour given the speed tie as well. Turn 70 BIHI makes the committal decision to boom cloy on the incoming Tenta, and we can see from the rest of the game that the lack of a fighting resist allows his then unrevealed Machamp to pressure Siatam more freely from then onwards. Turn 84 he finally reveals the 6th of Machamp, and it starts to wreak havoc against Siatam. Turn 88 Machamp crits and takes down the Skarm just after it managed to Toxic it earlier. The next turn Machamp claims another kill with Raikou after taking a Thunderbolt. Turn 90 Siatam brings in his Tyranitar to try gain some footing in the match again on the sleeping Zapdos, but the bird manages to roll Thunder on the Stalk which also unfortunately paralyzes the Ttar. Turn 92 it does manage to Rest up, but this is certainly not an ideal situation at all for Siatam now, with his CurseLax potentially being his last saving grace.

We see it trying to get some Curse setup going up initially but BIHI'S Zam forces it out by encoring the rest on turn 98. It once again tries to get something going from turn 102 onwards, and actually takes down the Zapdos turn 107. The next turn BIHI makes a misplay to Encore Lax on the Sleep Talk but the Lax elects to Rest again on that turn and BIHI is able to Encore it on the next turn as a result. Between turn 117-121, Siatam is somewhat unfortunate to roll some Rests on the Sleep Talk and also to be SpDef dropped by Psychic, but takes down the Zam eventually turn 121. Turn 126 we see the reveal of Flamethrower from Siatam's Tyranitar and it takes down the Steelix quite freely. However this allows Machamp to come in, and BIHI avoids any misfortune and lands the Cross Chop to take down the Tyranitar. This seemingly leads to a potential endgame between the 2 Monolaxes trying to win speedties and crit each other after the Machamp eventually goes down to poison whilst taking down Forre, however BIHI gets some great fortune and crits the Forre on the Cross Chop and lands another on the next turn to take down the Snorlax and come away with the win in this matchup.

choolio vs Chiles

Game Review

Beginning of the game is to the advantage of Chiles who prevent choolio from spiking and get a great thief on raikou with his egg. But after some good thunders with raikou, he forces lax in and get to spike with cloy. Chiles takes the opportunity to go forre and spike aswell. After a first surf from choolio, chiles absorbs the second one with egg and will get some good psychics on the opposing raikou now forced to sleep. Raikou struggles to limit egg so choolio goes dnite. He ice beam once into the lax and then twice into the coming zap : chiles anticipated a dpunch but choolio decided he could try to snipe the zapdos, snorlax hadnt burn any turn of sleep yet. In this hard spot, Chiles decides to go starmie to force an elec move on the next turn (either thunder or twave) which gives a spot for golem to come. Golem is in range of 2 ice beams so he decides to boom directly and we can see as a result of this sequence that choolio took a big lead. choolio now knows the full 6 of chiles and can adapt his plan around it + he weakened well Chiles lax and zap. His only problem now is how to manage starmie with this weakend raikou. Indeed Starmie quickly comes on the field and avoid a toxic from cloy thx to sub : the nightmare set was pretty obvious since there was a golem alongside it, toxic was probably a bit passive from choolio, but with his advantage he could just verify it honestly. He reveals now a vaporeon to soft check starmie, which is very problematic for chiles with his weakend zapdos and he’s now forced to go egg. They weakend each other a bit and choolio probably understanding that this egg didnt have any status move, decides to go steelix and to boom with it. I’m not sure about this choice, thiefegg for sure was hard to handle for this squad and going lix was comprehensible, but booming seemed a bit premature : lix could still absorb some booms and just get some roar.
Anw here was his choice and chiles does the best play going forre to absorb the boom, keeping his starmie and zap alive. Tho here comes the real deal for Chiles : he lost his golem early, still got spikes on his field and doesnt have any booms to pressure snorlax. Chiles Zapdos doesnt roll thunder infront of lax but rest instead, going back to 0 sleep turn burnt. Seen how bad Chiles spot was, I think he should have tried some more sleep talk to pray for some thunder and maybe a paralysis or a crit to have a chance, maybe with his own lax later idk. Instead he decides to go starmie and to get a few surf before fainting. Now egg comes in and chiles tries to boom it, hoping for a choke, but choolio doesnt do the error and absorb with cloy. Chiles maybe still has a chance if he rolls thunder twice through sleep talk but he doesnt and get boomed by cloy which didnt switch out to not let it burn sleep turns too easily. That was a hard game to analyze honestly because it had a weird management of ressources, but if there is one lesson to learn from it : dont try too much to fish for paras with zapdos, you might seriously need it awake and ready.

Conflict vs Vileman

Game Review

Contribution by Onraider
Vileman finally gets a start in this edition of SPL for GSC, and he goes up against one of the GSC goats in Conflict. Conflict elects to bring the infamous Kingdra stall which has seen some use by him in tours here and there, whilst Vileman elects to bring a Moltres+Exeggutor based boom offense with Raikou as a defensive backbone.

The first major situation of the game occurs turn 8 and onward, with Conflict setting up a couple of Curses on the Cloyster and chipping it heavily with Double Edge in exchange for getting Toxiced and also letting Vileman get Spikes up. Vileman goes to his normal resist of Golem turn 10 to try phaze the Lax out, but Conflict makes the correct read and Earthquakes on the switch, and Vileman is hard punished as it crits and Golem is taken down immediately without doing anything in this game. Vileman brings in his own Lax turn 11, and interestingly goes for Double Edge instead of trying to match Curses like you might typically expect. However, Conflict makes the correct deduction that the Lax is running Self Destruct, and saves his lax by switch to Misdreavus turn 12 as indeed, Vileman's Lax blows itself up to no avail. Turn 13, we see Vileman try to get something going with the Moltres to regain some type of foothold in the match, but Conflict reveals the Kingdra which is probably the thing Vileman did not want to see most in front of his firebird. Conflict finds a nice turn to bring in Lax on turn 16 as the Raikou Rests up, and manages to heal it back as well on the next turn. The next major moment occurs turns 37-38, with Raikou first rolling the highest roll of HP Ice, then critting the next one to not even give a chance to the poor Exeggutor to explode, further extending Conflict's advantage in this game.

Nothing much happens till turn 53, where Misdreavus rolls Toxic on the Sleep Talk to put Vileman's Cloyster on a timer, and it eventually succumbs to it on turn 65. At this point, Conflict is clearly winning, and the crit on turn 73 and speed tie win the next turn to take down Vileman's Raikou shuts down the game entirely, and Conflict comes away with the win with a very nice performance and a good team bring for the matchup.

MrSoup vs Don Eduardo

Game Review

Zap vs Egg lead in favour of Carapinga, Zapdos doesnt stay in because of its ww set, and MrSoup goes directly to the boom. It ends up in a great trade for Soup who removes Lax early. Carapinga is first to spike and pressures first with his zapdos, get a twave on Soup’s zapdos and he can now use tyranitar to face zapdos. Snorlax gone for Carapinga means it’s now very weak to special attackers including zapdos, and he must play carefully around it. The rock slide answer is steelix, who decides to trade eq once, and then Carapinga surprises Soup with a fire blast to get the kill. Here was a good example of how good hiding your best option in gsc to get the surprise effect. Tho it’s not terrible for MrSoup : steelix main task is to check defensively snorlax and he isnt needed for it already. It still could have been a good boom but it should be manageable. MrSoup’s answer now is cloy, who can send a big surf or threaten zapdos with a toxic. Carapinga reveals gengar, which absorb the surf, and he now do a double to machamp, anticipating the snorlax which is MrSoup’s play indeed. With zapdos paralyzed, Machamp can be dangerous for Soup, and so he decides to stay with snorlax to get damages. But machamp doesnt curses and just cross chop, understanding MrSoup hard position. But Machamp misses and lost a crucial turn. Now Machamp is 55 % and decides to curse, anticipating Soup to not stay in again and if he does then it’s only 55 % chances to get 2hkoed. But Soup stays again, and get the 2hko. Now Soup got a real advantage which he must convert into a win.

Zapdos now comes in to phaze Soup’s Lax, letting the paralyzed zapdos in again. Again tyranitar comes in and click rock slide, which doesnt have any good switch in. Cloy is chosen and decides to surf on the turn after, prefering immediate damages on gengar/tyranitar rather than a toxic which could fall flat. Carapinga reads it and go zap to absorb surf and it can now pressure again with ww and tbolts. On t22 Soup decides to send his zap : I dont know if his choice was deliberate but here Carapinga got 61 % chances to 2hko, without taking in account paralysis odds, but he doesnt get these odds neither and MrSoup can now rest. I’m really surprised by this choice from MrSoup, he just gave some really good chances to Carapinga to get a free kill.

Anw now Soup’s zapdos is in a great spot to just win by itself, even more after landing thunder twice through sleep talk on tyranitar and every hopes disapear for Carapinga after his boom with cloy got absorbed by the hidden gengar. This was an entertaining game, quite unlucky for Carapinga unfortunately, but he still has a lot of games coming to improve his record (when I’m writing Tigers got good chances to qualify for playoffs).

Rubyblood vs vani

Game Review

Ruby brought a lix offense featuring tar lead and a gengar in the back meanwhile vani opted for a misdreavus stall with kingdra, like Conflict did earlier that day. Ruby get to use his zapdos quickly and decides to try to fish for some paralysis on opposing raikou, but after a first attempt he then tries to rest, but get crit tbolt by raikou, getting the kill on the zapdos. That’s unlucky but I also feel like it could have tried to rest later in the game without taking the risk. Anw it doesnt change that zapdos death’s is a real pain cause it’s really useful at pressuring skarm and misdreavus out, hopefully he got a gengar to help with the skarm but misdreavus will be a bit more problematic. Around t23 it reveals that misdreavus is talk tox bolt, meaning that ruby’s lix can play around it without problem, only thing is steelix wont make progress without spikes, and removing skarm isnt important in the mu with fire lax (lix + fire lax was a surprising choice in the builder from Ruby, as they dont really work together, it can maybe have some synergy with offensive tyranitar I suppose). Vani finds a room to set up spikes on steelix on t33, that was pretty much unavoidable. Ruby’s spike will come a little after, finding a spot for spiking in front of kingdra, which still deals a lot of damages with surf. Now Ruby can begin using lix offensively and as forre comes in, Ruby reveals gengar to spin block. Vani decides to stay in with forre and tect to get a little of hp back and scout what moves gengar runs, on the other side Ruby switch out on tyranitar. Vani scout a second time and Ruby slide once. At this point he could have hidden fire blast anticipating the second tect, but vani takes the bet that this tyranitar is tbolt, knowing that this tyranitar is in the lead and that his season was full of cloyster offense so far. His bet is rewarded and he now spins. I wouldnt have taken the bet personnaly but it worked fine. With spin spikes and tect revealed on forre it probably means that it lacks toxic from Ruby pov, and so he decides to just keep on sliding, but his main problem now will be to find a spot to spike again, probably on a sleeping kingdra, or a sleeping skarm but I dont know how he could force skarm to sleep. And rightly so, Ruby forces kingdra to sleep with rock slide. He doesnt go to cloy directly, probably cautious about a direct surf and goes to snorlax instead. Vani decided to rest and try to burn a turn of sleep in front of snorlax : the snorlax rolls the double edge and also get a crit. That’s unfortunate for vani but with the advantage he got in this game, I think staying wasnt necessary. Even without the crit a simple dedge would have been problematic, and there was no good ways for Ruby to punish misdreavus since lix doesnt have spikes to make progress. Ruby uses his steelix to force skarm in and use this as a chance to spike up. I think that was a great plan for Ruby, understanding that his chance to win was right now or never, and that he must use cloy more recklessly to pressure right now with lix/tar even if it means getting poisoned. Ruby doesnt wait and use lax to force misdreavus in, and then directly go to steelix to begin pressuring with a few curses and beginning roaring to try get some chip damages on pokemons, kingdra in particular. Tho game is still winnable for vani, his forre is healthy and can try to spin and force gar in. Forre finally arrives on the field thanks to a roar and Ruby decides to eq to try to get a lot of damages on forre, thinking that he could try to have a last final spikes to pressure a last time. But on vani’s side, he does a big error by clicking hp ghost. Spin was the safe play cause if you get spinblocked then it means that steelix will have to wait before making progress, meanwhile the greedy hp ghost leaves steelix full with 3 curses and only works if gar comes in. I could understand the play if it was Ruby’s last spike, but if you do the math quickly you can understand that cloy could have one more last spike, and so you dont absolutely need to go gar on that turn.

Now forre get sacrified to spin and Ruby will now need to find a way to spike with cloy, cause it’s not easy at all : vani’s team doesnt give a lot of room for it. But even before this, Ruby’s tyranitar will get on the field and will abuse the fact that kingdra isnt a switch in anymore and get a crit on misdreavus and then the kill on kingdra. With misdreavus dead, now the firelax can win easily and just a few booms allow Ruby to get a 4th win in a row.

See you soon for more analysis and highlights !
Also you guys might have noticed that I messed up with the week 6 post when I was preparing this one, I'll try to fix it as soon as possible.​

 

[OmBrArch]

Week 8 games review by Onraider aminita and myself

Chiles vs Vileman

Game Review

Contribution by Onraider
A fun matchup here between two elite GSC players here. Chiles electing to bring a double fighting Zap-less offense, while Vileman makes the call to run a double "rock" type offense with Starmie as the hazard control.

Let's have a look at some of the important moments of the game. Vileman reveals Starmie turn 10 and tries to Psychic the next turn predicting an incoming Gengar potentially. Chiles reveals his trademark El Bicho turn 14 and it draws out Vileman's Zap the next turn on the Megahorn. Vileman revealing Thunderbolt on Zap the next turn potentially indicates its a Rest-less zap with some utility options like Whirlwind etc. Turn 17 Vileman doubles to Lix expecting an incoming Raikou/Snorlax on the Thunderbolt and indeed the Snorlax comes in. Chiles reveals the Lax to be Curse with Earthquake as Steelix Roars it out turn 19. Turn 20 Golem tries to get a spin in but unfortunately gets crit by the Lix whilst doing so, giving Vileman a notable advantage in the match. Turn 26 Vileman elects to blow up the Cloy on the boosted Lax having done its main job of setting up the Spikes permanently, and then he goes Steelix to try and match the Lax. However, Chiles gets a bit of good fortune back as he crits it with Earthquake and puts Vileman in an uncomfortable situation. Turn 30 it probably would have been better for Vileman to go to his own Lax and start the Curse mirror as it definitely favours him as the Stalk Lax(which eventually ends up happening in the game). However he gives up his Tyranitar for free essentially after some missed Screeches and Lax waking up and Eqing.

Turn 33 onward the aforementioned Curse war begins and goes until Turn 80, and essentially its boils down to it being more favourable to Vileman due to having more pp to burn with Rest+Sleep Talk. In hindsight, maybe Chiles could have gone to his unrevealed Machamp much earlier to force some play instead of wholly depending on the crit as was in the endgame here. However after turn 80, between Cloyster booming, Heracross Megahorn and the Machamp Cross Chop, Chiles is unable to find any crits, and Vileman's Lax mows through Chiles' team to deliver the win to the Chilean player.

Rubyblood vs BIHI

Game Review

Both leads with their cloyster, indicating some raikou quite probably. Ruby goes for the toxic first and BIHI for spikes, and Ruby decides to not spikes on t2, but instead to delay it to later and instead to have the early pressure with zapdos. Ruby doubles to snorlax on the obvious raikou and can now do some progress with his (probably offensive here seen lead cloy) snorlax. It just dedge and BIHI reveals a rhydon, this rhydon get a crit on the lax and put it around 30 % of its health, hopefully the lax lands his lovely kiss and boom on the turn right after, taking to its grave BIHI’s cloyster. To continue, BIHI chooses his lax and Ruby his golem to get the spike off as soon as possible. BIHI goes for a eq to punish the golem and goes for a body slam after it, trying to catch the cloyster who could try to come in to toxic it. But Ruby stays in and just eq, golem has completed most of his work this game so he can play aggressively with it. Snorlax’s body slam doesnt catch the cloy but it paralyses the golem who’s now slower than lax. Golem is now in a situation where he’ll try to boom, and BIHI tries to catch it with rhydon, but Ruby just eq again. His play covers rhydon well and if snorlax stays and eq, Ruby could go machamp on the turn after threatening an ohko with cross chop and would cover well rhydon aswell. With this rhydon asleept now on the field, ruby decides to not try to get one more eq which will probably land into a mon in the back, but to go cloy instead and cloy will always be a good choice if he can spike. BIHI’s choice in the end is heracross, and Ruby’s cloy now find a perfect spot to spike. BIHI goes to his raikou, and so does Ruby after spiking since he doesnt really have any other answer anymore. Now they face up and try to sleep or paralyze each other : Ruby got thunder so he’s favoured on short term to get a para meanwhile BIHI’s got tbolt for the longterm. But Pokémon gods decides to favor BIHI who can now use his snorlax. He’s slams and paralyses the cloy which was chosen by Ruby. BIHI goes back to raikou to avoid a toxic on his lax which maybe lack rest. Now we are in a raikou vs cloy situation, and Ruby does a good midground going golem, covering thunder or a double to snorlax. BIHI indeed doubled to his lax anticipating the raikou, and now just slam : I think he anticipated Ruby to go a second midground to cloy, which covers well eq and rhydon. Honestly it would have been a good play from Ruby, but ruby decided to just go for the boom and removes the snorlax which was a key tool for BIHI in the matchup. Maybe this slam was a mistake in the end, going Heracross was maybe better but going zapdos on that turn for Ruby was a possible play aswell : the numerous possibilities for Ruby did put BIHI in a really tough spot, and the boom from cloy and golem were also a big threat since BIHI cant absorb them with Raikou since it’s his only elec. After the boom trade, Ruby pressures with his zap and we end up in another situation where the two raikou face each other, but this time BIHI doesnt have a snorlax to abuse this situation. On t29, Ruby reveals crunch as his 4th move on raikou, meaning it had good chances into the raikou 1v1. BIHI tries to outplay these drops by pivoting with heracross and rhydon on crunch and thunder. On t38 BIHI gets a paralysis on Ruby’s raikou and decides to pressure it with heracross, and to curse up and try to 1v1 this sleeping zap. Heracross got the perfect stalk rolls at the start, getting some rest when thunder land, and a megahorn where thunder miss and can even wake up on t46. 1V1 goes on and zapdos slowly get the advantage back and BIHI switch out his heracross. BIHI does a good sequence, pivoting around with raikou and heracross to get his heracross back in shape at full health, and now reveals moltres in front of raikou. BIHI kept meticulously kept Ruby’s raikou at full health to prevent it from resting, and improve chances of setting up sun without getting thundered. Unfortunately raikou lands his thunder through para and sun and is now forced to rest. Raikou doesnt land a single thunder during moltres sleep, and moltres didnt hit a fire blast during the sleep neither, meaning that Ruby couldnt rest with raikou. On t84 Moltres wake up and fire blast, and Ruby clicks rest anticipating it and is now back at full speed and full health, with 2 turns of sun left. This joy is short, BIHI fire blast and get a crit which ohko this raikou, and Ruby will now rely on zapdos to 1v1 this moltres. This crit is huge, now Ruby doesnt have any long term answers to opposing raikou and will need to win quickly and offensively. This raikou arrives on the field and Ruby reveals his machamp, which can tank a few tbolt. Machamp get an eq on raikou and curses on the second turn, while BIHI sent his heracross, not risking to loose his raikou which is a vital defensive piece. Machamp and Heracross face each other and seeing the heracross setting up, Ruby goes to zap and forces BIHI to sacrify his rhydon, the raikou being to weakend to risk a thunder paralysis. Ruby goes again on machamp while raikou gets back to full. He gets a curse and forces heracross to come in again, but machamp even with a crit doesnt break through it. Ruby decides to go cloy and this cloy is now a real deal for BIHI : every team member are vital for defending vs zapdos / machamp, and the less vital moltres is threatened by surf, so it cant absorb it. BIHI goes moltres and cloy get paralysed, and on the next turn game pretty much end : BIHI decided to go raikou to cover surf and a switch to zapdos, which seems like a good midground but Ruby read it and decided to boom, probably expecting this switch, and thinking that he had good chances of winning even if the cloy ended up booming moltres. Indeed, raikou and heracross both spent a lot of stalk and rest pp and both doesnt have a single turn of sleep burnt yet. After this boom, zapdos does land its thunder and win, giving Rubyblood a fifth win in a row !

Don Eduardo vs vani

Game Review

Contribution by aminita
Espeon makes its SPL debut this week and of course it’s a Carpinga pick. This guy really seems to like his fast psychics. Espy has been put on a very offensive team here, with no normal resists and 4 booms. Eggy takes the lead slot and with thief it’s good way to soften up a team for the psychic onslaught. Cloy does cloy things and gengar carries hp water* to get guaranteed ttar chip to open up the espy later on. Snorlax is rocking a curse SD set, looking to blow some holes through the other team and potentially trade with the other lax for the benefit of espy, and kou patches up the teams special weakness sans snorlax. With how he played, I’d strongly wager that the espeon was not sub. Vani has a nice, quite classical looking machamp offense squad. He starts off with a a ST zap, a mystery snorlax set (though I think it kinda has to be ST on this structure, it’s otherwise very weak into zap) and an ice beam cloy which is a nice idea to soften up opposing zaps or eggy for the back-champ. Crunch ttar is an excellent partner for champ, and matches up nicely into the gar/eggy/espy. Vani’s own eggy is a team player and classic champ support, and opts here to run para over sleep. Last but not least we have the machamp, which ended up only revealing EQ. Half the team already looks annoyed by fortress, and especially with the ice beam cloy I’d expect to see some fire coverage on Vani's 6. Snorlax could have been ST flame, eggy hp fire, or the machamp an all out attacking coverage set.

Eggy is able to get its thief off on zap immediately, and the Don pivots to kou, not wanting to trade just yet. Vani makes a heads up play and thunders anticipating a switch and gets rewarded with a nice para on kou. Vani’s lax gets to come in on a full para but refuses to take a any chances with the cloy response, letting Don spike up for the low price of one double edge. Vani’s own cloy comes in, but a heads up kou switch on a toxic allows Don to deny spikes for now. Don goes to his own lax as Vani does the same, and opts to curse up. Vani wins the speed tie, and gets off a juicy 37% double edge. He gets the zap in on an ambitious earthquake and trades it off, hitting 2 thunders and managing to take the lax down to 11%. Cloy comes in to revenge the lax (and reveal ice beam), but once again kou comes in and spikes are denied. Don makes the lax play again and catches Vani doing the same, and makes a cloy double anticipating Vani to go to a normal resist (and also covering a YOLO double edge). The lax switch also rewards him with some lefties recovery which is huge for living spike down the line. Don then doubles to eggy as he anticipates a cloy switch and trades a 64% psychic for spikes. Gar comes in anticipating a boom but is instead chunked by ice beam. Ttar then comes in and eats a hefty chunk from tbolt into hp water but is able to take the gar out with crunch. Cloy comes in and tries to be threatening, but is met with Vani's eggy. Not wanting to pull the boom trigger just yet, Pinga tries to pivot around with kou. The para’d kou instantly eats a spDef drop, so Carpinga has no choice but to go eggy and is lucky enough to get a favourable trade with sleep powder for Vani’s stun spore. I think Don tries to predict ttar coming with his cloy switch, but seeing as Vani kept the eggy in he opts to use his well preserved lax and removes the eggy with boom, which is massive for espy. Vani sends out his lax as cloy comes in for Pinga. Cloy clicks toxic which is relatively noncommittal and will nicely punish the lax if it tries to switch in later. Double edge won’t quite 3HKO for Vani, but the cloy booms quickly and is able to remove the lax. Booming there is a little interesting to me but I think it makes sense. If the lax switches immediately then It’s quite low if it switches back in, and booming now prevents any troubles with lax being ST, resting up and catching the boom with something else. From the composition and moves of Vani’s first 5 it’s quite reasonable to expect a champ in the back. On paper gar can be the missing 6th, but with crunch ttar and not coming in earlier on the cloy, it makes little sense to be still hiding in the back. Either way the espy is poised to sweep. After the boom both hidden mons come out, espy growths on the champ, avoids a potential hp bug crit swindle and is able to sweep from there. It's pretty cool to see the relatively unsung espeon not only show up but to also take a game in SPL. It was a nice showing as it distanced itself from zam in it's ability to push though crunch ttar (admittedly with some help) which is a good selling point.

*It's cool to see water here over something like dpunch. While i am of the opinion that dpunch is stupidly broken on gar, espeon only needs a little nudge to muscle through ttar, and hp water is a very consistent way to do this. No need to open the pandora's box of dpunch luck if you dont have to.
(sidenote: I negelcted to mention it but marowak was also a possible lastmon which would have made things a little more tricky)

choolio vs Siatam

Game Review

Game begins with a surprising lead mu : egg for choolio and a surprising zam from Siatam. Zam reveals twave and thief, accepting the idea of getting slept apprently, meanwhile this egg doesnt have leftos neither and is thief aswell. Both stays on the field to not have one of their other mons getting stolen their items, and choolio just boom in the end, which seems a satisfying trade for Siatam. Siatam goes gar and choolio zap, and Siatam justify this choice by clicking hypnosis, but it misses and zapdos get a tbolt. Gengar finally hit his hypnosis Now Siatam goes to snorlax and choolio to steelix, he probably understood Siatam plan and lix covered gengar correctly aswell so it was a good play. But choolio switch again to cloy : lix can just phaze lax and without spikes it wont do much progress, so he kills two birds with one stone by scouting his set and find a good spot spiking on another move than dedge (normally). Indeed Siatam decided to dedge so it’s either its only physical move or just saw the cloy coming : it’s a weird play to me tho cause zapdos punishes both plays better, maybe he absolutely wanted to punish roar but that’s weird to me. Now that he clicked dedge into cloy, it continues and will get cloy down to 21 %, meanwhile the cloy after spiking tried to punish the gengar in the back with some surf. Not a big fan of these surf aswell cause it sacrifies a lot of hp and gengar doesnt have much reason to come, a boom is unlikely and hypnosis landed already + surf is just really bad into lax while toxic is okish cause it means it will take some good damages when it’ll arrive on the field. Anw as it arrives in range of a dedge kill, Siatam get scared of a potential boom and go gengar to absorb it. choolio kept surfing, trusting his initial call : to me booming here from choolio wouldnt make any sense, it would be very weird reasonning, but I understand not risking snorlax so maybe I would have gone zapdos, but that’s a hard play to make, opposing egg didnt remove your zapdos so you probably want to keep this advantage as much as possible. So this gengar takes surf and choolio doesnt sacrify his cloy but go steelix on a tbolt, and start phazing. Zapdos reveals it runs reflect, meaning no stalk and phazing bring cloy on the field who can now spikes easily. Zapdos comes in and wake up instanly. Siatam snorlax arrived on the field in the process and spam dedge, even in front of steelix : with a zam on the team, a mono set is possible relying on zam to be a perpetual answer to gengar, force it to boom to make progress and find his way through like this. This steelix curses and phaze, and choolio will get some good reads with it, damaging opposing snorlax, but it ends when flect zap arrives on the field again. It set up the screen to nerf steelix and choolio decides to now use his snorlax, which will struggle aswell tho because of reflect. Indeed zapdos will just spam tbolt on it and get a para without giving up too much hp and then go on tyranitar which could abuse this paralysis with some rock slides. For choolio, this tyranitar is a big threat, his cloy is low, his steelix is healthier but his health will be crucial to gatekeep the opposing lax. So he decides to go on his own tar, threatening an eq. Siatam understands how good his tar is and abuse the fact that choolio absolutely need to click eq by going cloy and threaten it with surf. So choolio goes zap and cloy reveals ice beam, meaning he pretty muched bluffed having surf. Tho even if it did some good damages on zap, this zap now get a lot of momentum because the opposing snorlax is quite weakened and cant come in easily. But his tar is still healthy and threaten it back with slide so it’s ok. This time choolio goes lix, Siatam now knows the whole 6 so he doesnt take risk. Tar did slide and just switch out to zap and get a reflect up while choolio went on lax to rest. So does he, and Siatam does the same thanks to the reflect. After burning a turn of sleep choolio goes lix and goes for another short phaze sequence. Indeed cloy comes in, and choolio is forced to go on lax since his zapdos is in kill range from ice beam. After lax came in, he goes on tar probably expecting either a boom or an ice beam. Siatam ice beamed which deals 25 % and clicks it again on next turn, accepting to take a rock slide, since he doesnt need much hp to get a boom later on. But what he didnt see coming was that this tar had tbolt : it’s an existing move on offensive tyranitar but we usually seen it more on the lead set than when it’s in the back, so Siatam probably expected a fire coverage set and choolio get a surprise kill.

choolio now got numeric advantage and a steelix which could go wild. To revenge kill the tar Siatam goes zapdos and tbolt, which is absorbed by the steelix. At this moment there is a small mindgame between tbolt and the unknown hp, Siatam tbolt again and choolio goes lax to avoid an hp. Hopefully choolio roll rest and now get in a good situation with his lax. Zapdos reflected tho so it can now phaze it and make some progress until the opposing zapdos finally arrives on t56. It forces lax to come in and give a new spot for choolio’s lix to phaze. It forces gengar in, giving it a chance to land an hypnosis. choolio tries to absorb it with zapdos but Siatam reads it and click ice punch, putting it in a ko range and forcing choolio to give up his cloy. After this sequence choolio goes lax, not scared of a potential boom apparently, because of the two good normal resist in the back. Siatam doesnt take the risk to miss hypnosis and just go zapdos on the eq and reflect. Zapdos phazes, bringing a steelix which phazes aswell despite the threat of a potential hp. Gengar is forced in again and this time land hypnosis, protected by the reflect so not much risk. Snorlax absorbs it and gengar blow up instantly on that turn.

We enter a 3v3 featuring choolio with zap tar lix vs Siatam with zap tar lax. choolio goes zapdos which has a good mu vs opposing zapdos, and siatam on tyranitar which is the best mon he has in this situation. choolio decides to sacrify his zapdos and tbolt this tar to get damages, Siatam didnt try a read and slided correctly.

The follow up is lix : it has a lot of potential in this endgame infront of this mono lax which wont be able to do much against it, also booming zap could give a path to win for his teammate tyranitar. Siatam decides to click eq with ttar to weaken the steelix feeling like it’s the safest play, and choolio chooses to eq. Honestly I’m not sure about Siatam’s play, tyranitar with reflect could have put some work against steelix with screech if it has it, but also vs tyranitar after lix boom. Tho he didnt want to let steelix curse freely and thought eq would be enoug. On choolio’s side, eq was his only play i’d say, boom would be a big fish (still a possibility tho, siatam must consider it) and roar is way too passive and curse doesnt really work if tar just eq twice. So tyranitar get killed by this steelix which now has 31 % of its health. Now Siatam’s goal is I think to at least have a reflect up when lix booms and his lax as healthy as possible and as close to wake up as possible, or just to kill steelix. To follow this principle, after tar death he goes zap and reflect while lix ww. It can now curse meanwhile siatam stalk and curse aswell (i think not stalking was better, you wont do much anw so let’s just be certain that you’ll be awake and not roll rest). So this lax wakes up and deals some small damages with dedge on the cursing up lix. Seeing the steelix getting back some health, siatam decides to switch out to zap, but steelix started to phaze and now is a big deal : there is no reflect anymore, snorlax will take a ton from eq so he cannot stay and is forced to zapdos, but this steelix can phaze again, rack up spikes damages and forces lax to sleep again. Siatam tries to pivot, with reflect he can try to wake up his lax but eq always does a ton. It ends up in some kind of pp stall these eq from steelix but choolio finishes this game by doing the good reads and kill snorlax, leaving one last boom to remember the last zapdos. So where did Siatam messed up ? Probably around t70 and t75, Siatam may have misjuged the position here. I’m thinking that on t70 going zapdos and just hp to kill steelix as soon as possible could work, relying on the fact that choolio would need to win a tie and land dynamic punch vs snorlax to win. But this was an incredibly hard endgame to analyze so I cant imagine how it was for players (they did not spend a ton of time on these turns tho, maybe they should have) Was a fire game.

MrSoup vs Zokuru

Game Review

Lax vs zap lead in favour of mrsoup, zok directly goes to forre to toxic and spike on it. In the process this lax cursed and then revealed eq so Zok pivot back to zapdos to force some poison damages and a normal move next turn. Zok goes to forre to absorb it but MrSoup decided to rest and now Zok must loose two turns to go on golem and phaze it. So this snorlax is back to full and Zok lost some hp on forre but he got spikes up, so good management I’d say. Roar brought steelix on the field and both goes to their zapdos to absorb eq. They trade thunder and Zok get a paralysis on MrSoup’s zapdos, allowing him to go on snorlax and set up a curse. MrSoup went cloy and decide to toxic before spiking, the good choice here as snorlax sleep it with lovely kiss : with a golem in the back you had no guarantee to keep spikes up so that was the only good choice. Now this cloy slept, snorlax get a second curse and Soup tries to pivot around it with lix and zapdos to let it die from toxic without loosing too much health. Snorlax ends up dying, not killing anything but putting both zapdos and steelix very low, 20 % asleep and 23 % respectively. Now Zok sends tyranitar and click flame meanwhile Soup reveals a starmie, which could be quite problematic since Zok doesnt have a lax to answer it. He goes on zapdos on the spin to get a thunder and some health back with leftos. MrSoup went back to his lax and can now set up some curses again. Forre comes in and spike + toxic again and then switch back to golem to get a boom : he probably wouldnt spin anymore so he decides he can play it offensively. But Soup is aware of that and absorb the boom with zapdos which was slept and weakend already, so a fairly good trade for him. After this boom, Soup goes on mie again to try to spin, but Zok reveals his last when he sends gengar on the field, preventing a spin. Starmie decides to twave it, helping his steelix and the tyranitar he havent revealed yet. Meanwhile gengar thunder through para and get a paralysis on this mie. It tries to recover, fishing for a thunder miss/paralysis but gengar land his second thunder and kills this starmie. Soup is forced to reveal his last, tyranitar which is a big pain for Zok’s team which doesnt have any answer to rock slide. Tho his gengar is really healthy and tank a slide from tyranitar to get a boom on it dealing around % of its hp. Zok now goes to tyranitar, his only weapon to deal with it and eq, Soup on his side understands that he’s in a bad spot and will need a lot to win, and so decide to dynamic punch which lands. With confusion and speed tie odds, Zok prefers to give up his forre and go on zapdos which can kill this weakend tyranitar. It’s the turn to MrSoup to sacrify a mon, his weakened steelix, to manage zapdos with his lax. Lax decides to rest since he’s close to be in range of a 2hko, while zapdos directly switch out to tyranitar. This tyranitar reveals screech and forces Soup to abandon his cloy this time, to get back his snorlax without drop. It absorbs a screech again to burn a turn of sleep again and sacrify his tar to get back lax on the field at full with his 2 turns of sleep burnt. Tar tries to screech again but misses this time, giving this lax a free eq. Zok decides to switch his tyranitar out, probably thinking that he could try to screech this lax again later if it’s forced to rest by zapdos. But this wont happen, Zok will get a decisive crit on snorlax with his zapdos, getting the kill after dedge reckless damages.

See you tomorrow for a post about the highlight of this regular season !
​

 

[OmBrArch]

Hi everyone, here is the highlight of the week, in fact, the highlight of this whole regular season I think. These two players got the best records in gsc so far and the team who won the week is guaranteed to go in playoffs, and it's the last game of the series so we couldnt dream of higher stakes for this game.

PAIRING OF THE WEEK 9
Crimson or Gold, which colour will the King of regular season wear ?

[TYR] Rubyblood vs Don Eduardo [TIG]

6-2 <= SPL XVI record => 6-2
16-13 <= All time Sheet record => 20-9
BKC <= Visible and notable support => M Dragon​

On our left side, third time he's presented here so I think I dont have to present him again : Ruby ! In the last highlight, Ruby had a chance to get a fourth win in a row. He won that game and he's on a five-game winning streak since that post. Tyrants this year arent as dominant as they were last year, and Rubyblood this year is their best soldier. In this winning streak Ruby brought some stall, but mostly offense. He must finish this winstreak against the other best player of the pool. As I'm talking score is 5-4 in favour of tyrants : a win vs tigers would guarantee a qualification, and a tie would rely on Shark's results to qualify. Ruby will probably have to carry his team into playoffs with his game.

On our right side, Carapinga's here. He did dominate this season and his two loss involved both some unfortunate sequences. His team should make playoff in most scenarios, with a lot of good players with great records like badummy and Don Eduardo obviously. With a very offensive playstyle (he stalled once on w1 and that's all) we've seen a bunch of innovating squads (ls mie/ lix champ zap/ talk toxic umb) and he was one of the players whose games were most eagerly awaited. He must win one more time before playoffs to guarantee a qualification to his team.

Game Preview :​

I predict offense vs offense without a doubt, it's the best playstyle and I dont see a particular reason for one of them to stall his opponent. Ruby used quite a lot of physical offense so far, so I'd predict a switch to special offense. On Pinga side, I hope we have another new innovating build, or maybe the comeback of this talkToxic umbreon which did put such a great work on w1 ? Really hard to say, looking forward to see this build.

So, Crimson or Gold ? Will we see both in playoffs or does one of them not make it ?
See you today 11pm +0 in less than 3hrs !​

 

[Vileman]

Turn 30 it probably would have been better for Vileman to go to his own Lax and start the Curse mirror as it definitely favours him as the Stalk Lax(which eventually ends up happening in the game). However he gives up his Tyranitar for free essentially after some missed Screeches and Lax waking up and Eqing.

Easy to say in retrospective knowing the sets lol.. usually when you see hera you gotta at least suspect snorlax is boom . If you see the gamestate up till that point it could be the classic eggy hera team which uses eq boom curselax, and if I had known machamp was in the back 100% I would have been even more suspect of that set.
Trying to contain the Lax so I could later on win with my own was probably the best imo