Tournament VGC PL III Commencement!

[Sapphire]

Welcome back to VGC's third PL, hosted by the one and only Aldrich! We will have 7 weeks of regular season action, followed by a playoffs stage between the top 4 teams competing for a Custom Avatar prize! (Potentially expanding to 10 teams!!) The following formats will be played:

• x5 SV Regulation C
• x1 SwSh Rotation between VGC 2020 (Series 5), VGC 2021 (Series 7/9), and VGC 2022 (Series 12)
• x1 SM Rotation between VGC 2017, VGC 2018, and VGC 2019
• x1 extra SwSh or SM rotation based on signup popularity

For some general rules:

• 8/10 teams to play in an 8v8 regular season, followed by a 7v7 playoffs stage featuring the top 4 teams
• 120k budget for a min of 11 players, no max player cap
  • Bidding prices start at 3k
• Each team can have 3 managers, two of which can be bought for a TBD price (but create your teams with one manager playing in mind)
• Trades for players can happen until the start of Week 1
• No retains from previous iterations
• Standings will follow a points system, 2 points for a win, 1 point for a tie, 0 for a loss. (Tiebreakers will be specified in Admin Thread later)
• All SV games are to be played in the Open Team Sheet format, old gens are Closed Team Sheet

Rotations:
The rotating formats will be played in chronological order, such that VGC 17/20 are played on Weeks 1 & 4, VGC 18/21 are played on Weeks 2 & 5, and VGC 19/22 are played on Week 3. For playoffs, the higher seed will have their choice of format in the single legacy slot, with both higher and lower seeds picking their choice for the double legacy slot. For example, if there is 1 SM slot and 2 SwSh slots with Team A is seed 1 playing seed 2 Team B in finals, Team A can select their choice format for SM and SwSh, and Team B can choose their choice format for SwSh

Additional Notes:
The default platform for games to be played is on the Pokemon Showdown main server. All three matches must be opened before the first game starts with the same teams. If players both agree, matches can be played on cartridge, however full footage must be included.

Tournament Schedule

Manager Signups: April 17- April 23
Player Signups: April 17 - April 28
Draft: Saturday April 29 11AM EST (<t:1682780400:F>) [streamed live here]
Week 1: May 1 - May 7
Week 2: May 8 - May 14
Week 3: May 15 - May 21
Week 4: May 22 - May 28
Week 5: May 29 - June 4
Week 6: June 5 - June 11
Week 7: June 12 - June 18
Week 8: June 19 - June 25
Week 9: June 26 - July 2
Semifinals: July 3 - July 10
Finals: July 11 - July 17

GLHF everyone, looking forward to some amazing competition this year!

 

[baaaaaat]

If youre interested in playing with the Hau'Oli City Ohana this season please fill out our interest form! Also feel free to reach out to me on discord! bat#1700

https://forms.gle/9moBfTb8fH2ePN549

 

[tyo]

If you're interested in joining the most successful Smogon VGC team, let me know on discord! (tyo#2164)! We are looking for players who are very strong at Pokemon in general, it does not matter if you have never played VGC before!

 

[Makima]

I'm Violet, a manager for the Spikemuth Scream. If you are interested in our team, it would be appreciated if you could fill out our interest form so we could get a general idea of who you are: https://forms.gle/TofLzoAjBAVM6VFU9

Feel free to reach out directly to me on Discord (UberVylit#2218 or Chongjun#7192). We are interested in all kinds of players across all experience levels.

 

[yuki]

if you're interested in the joining the Aces, our interest form can be found here! Please don't put anything bad on the sandwich. This would be a bad mark on any application. Alternatively, feel free to reach out to me on Discord (yuki#0003).

 

[Zelda]

If you're interested in playing for the Nuvema Town Ninetales shoot me a dm on discord with some anime pics at Miho#2222

 

[Helios of Sun]

Hey everyone! Sorry for the late message.

If you are interested in playing for us in the Wyndon Hurricanes, please fill up our interest form here:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1...eAQm9CtWyOli3GVi2EeSFJ1A/viewform?usp=sf_link

Hope to see you all soon!

 

[tyo]

My Power Rankings (excluding my team)

Note: There is no bad team here, every team is extremely good since the player pool is so stacked. This is just my opinion on teams based on a variety of factors.​

1. Ohana
I think this team is incredible! Siddharth is one of the strongest VGC 22 players in the pool, PokeAlex is top tier in SM, PqlarBear and Teka did extremely well in NPA, and most of all they drafted Hari and Redsilver so they have the luxury of never facing against French Rain from VGC 22. Their bottom portion of the draft is also very good with Azulite achieving 6th place in the global challenge recently and JModri + YoshiandLugia are very strong SV players. It's certainly the team to beat in my opinion.

2. Ninetales
I don't know how Zelda managed to draft the same team as the past 3 editions again with his limited budget but he has and it looks to be as strong as ever. Similarly to the Ohanas, their team is stacked from top to bottom and this team definitely has the most synergy of any team in the draft with them having building partners together such as Jude + Neil and Amazemaker + MyStars. The only reason this team isn't number one is because I believe some of the bottom portion of the draft haven't seen as much success recently as the Ohanas and Justin Tang is a wild card in team tours even with his success at regionals but nonetheless, it's an extremely strong team.

3. Aces
Nearly every player on this team were ones I was interested in while making my draft plan and I rate this team super high. While I don't think this team has as much synergy as the teams above, every player is high quality and will be favored to win in the majority of the games they play.

4. Kingambits
I really like the core of Joe, Stephen, Nails, and Raghav. They have a top tier player in every generation and will definitely win any tiebreaks they potentially play in. Their draft is definitely top heavy and I don't think the bottom part of their draft is as strong as others but as long as the top 4 win consistently, they will have no trouble making playoffs.

5. Scream
I'm a fan of drafting teams with Asia based cores and this team has definitely done that. They have a group of players who have done really well in past team tours which is really valuable. This team probably should be higher up in power rankings but I'm not too familiar with Mufeng or Darko and I'm not sure I've ever seen Setsuku participate in a team tournament as a player.

6. Hurricanes
This team was the hardest to rank as they have three players that could easily go undefeated and players that have done terrible in team tours recently. They also have players like Jono and Boyt who were able to perform extremely highly in team tours in the past but it's hard to predict how they will do now as the quality of players has risen a lot with the release of Scarlet and Violet. However, as long as two of their picks in the bottom part of the draft pop off, they should be able to make playoffs since I believe MeLuCa + Ceree + CML is an incredible trio.

7. Dozos
I'm really excited to see how riopaser and Star will do in this league and they have a few other players that I think can do well too. However, every other team is very top heavy while this team only really has Eric Rios. I think it might be harder for them to find consistent wins compared to other teams but the team definitely has a lot of potential for it.

 

[Sapphire]

Here are the 4 mocks we held prior to the draft!

Mock 1

Mock 2 (10 team test)

https://pokepast.es/d6e148471782ae01

Mock 3

Mock 4

thanks baaaaaat for the nice graphics :)