I played all 5 weeks of the qualifying rounds and finished with a 4-1 record (9-2 in games) with my only loss being to the insanely cute and talented
Lilburr
I recorded this one!!
No commentary or anything, just the raw footage of the games.
I won't claim I made any of the teams I used, and truthfully I couldn't tell you who did. With that said Ireland's out of the tour so I'll paste what I used - as far as I'm aware these teams are somewhat known anyway, maybe it isn't my place to post them but hey.
I used this Week 1 and Week 2 against Lan Luu and Hennie Vermaak - I think I recorded both sets, but I never got around to uploading them. Can still do that if anyone would really like to see.
It's a pretty standard Calyrex + Mienshao thing as far as I know. I essentially told my team, "hey, I've never played VGC, I just wanna use something standard and reliable" and they recommended using Calyrex since it's the most straightforward restricted in terms of gameplan. I spent hours testing this team to make sure I had some clue what to do into every matchup I'd feasibly run into... except Calyrex-I TR lol (Caly-I, Torkoal, Oranguru, Tsareena, Indeedee-F, Stakataka) so that was terrifying to run into Week 1 but I managed to pull it out in 2 games somehow. After that I ran into a standardish Zacian team (Zacian-C, Volcarona, Rillaboom, Urshifu-S, Suicune, Regieleki) and barely etched it out in 3 extremely close games which felt super good.
The team I used vs zee, all I really knew about her was that I was not going to see Xerneas and there was a reasonably high chance I'd see Groudon so I took my chances on a minor fish and went with Goth + Kyogre. Ran into a Palkia which seemed insanely dire but the matchup ended up being fairly even as the rest of zee's team was quite weak to Kyogre outside of the Palkia. I managed to win in 3 again very close games, which unfortunately came down to Gothitelle hitting Hypnosis bc I'm bad and didn't secure the reliable endgame I should've done.
Going into what would end up being my last game I wanted to use something off the wall to try to catch Ismat Myron off guard, which unfortunately didn't work out for me as I loaded up Eternatus into another Calyrex-I. The pick made sense, I'd been pretty weak to it in the prior weeks. The games were still close - I pulled the wrong triggers at the wrong time - but ultimately didn't matter because a) I lost and b) we got 8-0'd so bop. Still a fun team, stolen from
here. I recorded these games if anyone wants to see, just let me know.
My foray into VGC was super fun, I went in basically entirely blind and managed to put up a strong 3-1 record which felt super good. Playing on cart and with 4 Pokemon at a time were both very new experiences for me that were super difficult to get used to but I had a great time and hope to play in some more events going forward, particularly Hatterene Series which
Eve convinced me to join. Also a big thank you to her for listening to me ramble during VGCWC about various things, and to
mattiemoomoo for picking me up in the first place - great manager, great player, made this tour super enjoyable for me. That's all from me, I've enjoyed reading all the posts in this thread and I'm glad my first experience with VGC was a positive one. o/