So I guess we just need to hang around for a few minutes for for a few people to To come in is that cool with you guys? Oh, yeah And if you want to just go through everyone actually we can we can just kind of introduce you guys tell us a little bit about yourselves and Your your experiences in Pokemon what it's like previous and Experience you've had competitively and how long you've been playing just a brief overview Kunal do you want to kick us off because you are the king of the kings so good way to start to kick us off today Yes, so I'm Kunal. I started playing VGC at live events in 2019 your start in Sun series I ended up getting my world's invite for 2019. I played at Worlds and Then I continued that here in 2020. I've got top 32 at Dallas and I mean since then I've just been you know, I didn't play in Playership one, but I've been playing events I've been around Cool, thanks so much Kunal and Krim I My my my qualifications are are nearly zilch Legious likes having me around for all of my my color commentary I won the last circuit in the flinch squad Aside from that. I mostly maintain in that kind of area. I'm consistently Top 25 top 50 top 10 on both ladders showdown You know in-game, but you know that aside I don't have a whole ton of like real-world qualifications here I just I work with Lee a lot and we do some team building together When he played botch him he took my team last time. So Unfortunately didn't do as well with it as we had hoped but you know, that's it. That's me I'm here. I'm the backup resource for basically the entire crowd No backup dude. Thanks so much and a lot of you out there will know and cost there So I'll let you take it away my friend because you're more than comfortable buying the mic. Ah, you say that it's all a front That's the trick. Um, hey guys, um, so basically I'm cost. I was gonna say no right before right Krim You weren't flexing at all. I see Sorry about you consistently top 10 and 25 on both It's all I have is I mean, it's solid It's so solid and Prunel forgot to mention that he usually builds the winning team So that's something that he should have mentioned Or at least at events as well. But anyways me I am a I started in VGC 2016 I've been playing quite a few years. Um, I mean I was a bit of a scrub in the beginning I might still be I think other than that. I've just literally Buggum on second hand I stream I try to do content creation, but I fail and I Asked as well whenever I have the opportunity to so hello And well, thanks Costa, sorry there I'm just pulling messages up and getting so distracted, but that was awesome And finally we'll end with with adi how you do me and thanks again for coming over to the stream tonight with us all Yeah, thanks for having me. My name is Adi. I started playing back in 2017 I actually got into the game watching Lee's videos on my commute to work every morning. And I I caught my first regional in 2018 in Madison regionals I qualified for the world championships in 2019 and then Playing online. I managed to win the rose tower challenge back in April and got sixth place in the North American Players Cup the first ever at It is amazing accomplishment. So yeah, very good, man. And big congrats on that as well. So that is a cast Of our panel tonight and for all the tuning in now We are going to be discussing players cup from the The first players cup that we had that's recently just finished and obviously the announcement of the second players cup Which is starting this Friday. So it's kind of a topic tonight We want to kick off talking about players could warn the teams that we've seen do well from that event The finishes certain players have had and just go over a brief kind of overview of those Finishes and teams and it's going to help you kind of get a grounding of what to expect Going into players cut to which is like I say starting this Friday and playing series five rules unexpectedly because Myself thinking it would probably be series six. I'm a little bit disappointed. It's not But we are ending up playing Series series five again. So I don't know if we want to kick off quickly with that and just get your thoughts Were you surprised that it was series five or are you kind of expected it or I mean, it'd be nice just to hear what you guys think about that little debacle that's obviously went on there with them The rule set Um, I was a little surprised when they announced that it was series five because I you know there was like that whole mix up where Pokemon home was saying it would be series six and then the website said series six and then it switched back to series five Um, but overall I think it's probably better My personal opinion is that like while series six is very fun I think the method that they used to come to that balancing decision was not the best So I'm a little happier that series five ended up being the competitive format. Yeah No, that makes a lot of sense. I mean, I'm not happy with either, but you know I feel like from series one on we've like progressively degraded in my opinion You know, like I I was having fun in series one like series two, but like, you know I feel like we got to series five and we kind of got locked into Kind of what's really available to us and what we can what we can use I feel like I like a little bit of the creativity was kind of lost um, but I just agree a lot and I think that a good way to to show that is to look at the players cup teams, right? There were so many different teams and like unique ideas that were presented In the first player's cup Like we saw comfy be used and you know get placed insanely well We saw things like in plus gorilla boom. We saw Cinderace mylodic teams, right? Like not like hyper offense Cinderace, but you know more of a balance take on it um We saw colossal come back and like a totally new form, right? And I think that's like it really speaks to how how much series how variable series five was I guess um No, I I totally get what you're saying like I I don't disagree with you You're gonna you're gonna probably all you guys see me and Kunal like disagree on a number of things despite being good friends in real life Um, but yeah, no, I I felt it was more or less after we got going into series five But there were definitely some surprises like by the time we hit players cup I I yeah, I have to absolutely admit that like I you know, I didn't walk into players cup expecting to see as much of what you just described as I saw You know, I definitely expected to see a lot more of the standard things that I had been seeing on ladder Just over and over and over again like good Yeah No, sorry say no after you please Yeah, one thing that like the medicaid was really diverse going into the qualification stage of players cup But once we got to the second stage, I think it partially because only 16 players were playing but it really became a lot more centralized If you look at the top eight teams seven or six of the top eight were dragapult teams with firewater grass cores One team was a cinder race team with a firewater grass core Uh, so I don't think they actually varied that much. Obviously the Pokemon they used to facilitate those cores were very different be it or shifu or be it colossal or be it some like Exkidril but that being said the medic came really centralized quite a bit and It's made it so that there's A lot less diversity, I guess Now I can agree with that for sure. Yeah, and costa do you want to finish this one off for us? What are your opinions on it? I mean I was gobsmacked Because I just no only because I think that tpci don't tend to Have the clarity behind the decisions they're making so you kind of like always wonder Well, I mean is it for a reason is for b like give us a bit more information please So we can understand the thought process but obviously I think that when series six did come along I felt like there was still a bit more to explore from series five even though it had pretty much been centralized Um, but I was you know, really excited with series six. Um, so you don't usually get c vgc going ahead and having bands mid season Let's say although, you know, obviously the circuit is offline right now But um, it's interesting seeing the 10 was a top 10 or top 15. I don't remember Top 10 from both singles in both singles. Yeah, yeah so I mean, it's interesting seeing that spin off with it and then just Seeing tpci say, okay.  They're probably going to be changing it and they're going to be putting it to series six in the next Um stage i'm assuming but then again, you never know because isn't that what they didn't Uh, uh players cup one. I think we started off with the series four. Where am I wrong? I think I think it was series four kicked off with and then it changed the series five Yeah, and then I mean either way, it's all right. It's still going to be a format that we've been experienced with It's not going to be a completely new one So sure, it's going to be a bit rusty with series five for those who haven't been Living on showdown right now. Um for the past one to two weeks. Um partly I have been living on showdown I should be doing another thing But um, yeah, but uh, it's going to be exciting. It's going to be really interesting to see if people are going to be Spamming Santino's team everywhere. They're just going to be trying to copy the top Let's say 16 that we've got like uh that you've got the paste of as well the website too because there's some really interesting teams Like adi was saying there's a lot of centralized cause around the firewater grass and then you have Incinerals everywhere toad kes drag pulp everywhere Um a couple of sands you didn't you didn't actually see as much colossal actually in the top 16 um, obviously Santino having the only one there, but um I I do expect to see a bit more colossal because people will be a bit more interested in seeing that quick method of just going ahead and just Risking it all because having colossal unless you play quite defensively and smartly ahead of time It is kind of that pokemon that you do expect to see go down turn one if a wrong play has been made Even in dynamax form. Yeah. Yeah, that's awesome. Thanks costa and I do agree with you I think the biggest problem with the whole rule set change Errors whatever it was is the clarity the communication that we didn't get and that creates obviously a lot of us Assuming and and kind of come into our own conclusions about it when a simple message out there to say what had happened would be It would clear everything up and I think that's something to maybe take forward um As an organization going forward. I think it would make Um, it would make things a lot better in the community and it would create a lot less tensions when There's not necessarily a reason for it being there people make mistakes all the time.  Um, so we don't know what's happening. So we're left to make our own decisions, but that's another uh That's another question for another day to look at but um getting into the stream tonight We need to discuss what players cup is. I think it's a good place for us to start So players cup, uh, there will be new players out there that aren't aware of what the players cup is It is a tournament run officially by the um the pokemon company international They are running an online tournament obviously with the covet situation at the minute We can't have live events So this is to kind of compensate those live events and have an online system Which is run around the world in the different rating zones that the pokemon has Players are going to be able to partake in a online tournament this weekend starting on friday running through till sunday evening playing 15 battles per day and they will get a Ranking at the end of it and the top 256 players from the uk north america Latin is it as well? I think and then I don't know what the numbers are for the last one But then the top ranked players from those regions will then get through to the next qualification stages It's all played on the switch um And it is double battles as well, which is the normal vgc a rule set which is um all You can find online and obviously we'll be showing those slides throughout this this presentation and talk today, but um How important adi i'm going to come to you first. How important Are the results and really understanding as a player going into players cup two this weekend Understanding and really knowing the teams have done well in players cup one Do you think they have like a massive bearing on shaping players cup two and what players will kind of tend to see going into this tournament? Yeah, definitely. I think that If you're not familiar with a few of the top teams in the Series five meta game and then you're going to be a step back because those teams are all very strong And you really want to know your game plans going into that. I think those teams especially We talked a little bit about the colossal team that did so well That's a really really strong offensive team And so if you don't know your game plan going into a colossal matchup You are probably just going to get run over by that colossal And at least you could make it a little more difficult by having an idea of what you want to do How to how to counteract it? How you want to uh deal with that such a strong offensive threat? similarly We talked about the teams that revolve around dragapult and firewater grass cores that are a little more balanced And so it's literally with those teams. You really have to know how to Power through those really really strong defensive cores that A lot of pokemon just can't deal with and so you need a combination of pokemon to do that And so just being aware of these common teams namely colossal namely Dragapult firewater grass and also sun. I think is another really common team Knowing how you're going to approach those matchups will give you a huge leg up in qualifying for the players come to Yeah, that's so important. I think I think it was one of the first things I thought of when the players Two got announcers like how many players are going to be running Santini's team Or a very similar cause to that with the colossal and in your opinion What would you what would you say is the kind of the best countermeasures in the format that we've got at the minute to To deal best with with that colossal dragapult lead that's so threatening and it's not just a dragapult Colossal lead it's kind of like the urshifu or the primarina that we sometimes see paired with that as well to kind of prop that steam engine If you've got any kind of favorite Obviously, I don't want you giving away any of your secrets if you'd be playing this weekend But I mean if you were just to give some advice to to newer players How would you what's your best approach to dealing with with those threats because it's obviously the biggest kind of number one Thing that we're looking at right now Yeah, so the first step in approaching that matchup is making sure you don't get run over by the colossal And so you have to have ways to put pressure on it Usually with a water type or a ground type that can echo it As well as just like ways to switch around and protect and not you know get KO'd But the real scary part of that team is the choice band Rillaboom and so once Colossal gets his gmax bulk lift up and is doing one six chip damage to every single one of your pokemon at the end of each turn Almost all of your pokemon are going to be at 75 60 health And then after your dynamax is over that Rillaboom can come in and clean up So just being really aware of what pokemon you need to keep alive in the back So that you can deal with that really powerful endgame threat allows you to Uh deal with that match up a lot more a lot more effectively And so some of the things that I like to do is you can lead redirection in a pokemon that kaos colossal And then they they can't set it up right away a lot of times or alternatively I like to dynamax tokyus that seems counterintuitive But once colossal is done with its dynamax its stab rock move is meteorobe Which is a charge up move and so it really can't get colossal Colossal really can't hit tokyus after some of this dynamax and of course Rillaboom isn't great to tokyus dragapult isn't great to tokyus or shifu isn't great to tokyus They don't really have great ways to deal with it. So that's my personal favorite measure that fits on almost every team Yeah, that's really well put my uh, I really I think that's really great information, especially for the new players and not just new players I think just all players in general. I think it's such an important matchup to understand and have a set game plan against because like you say If you go into it and you're kind of not prepared for it will just run through you and The the problem is with players cup the qualifier and rounds is it is best of one So you kind of want to mitigate those those problems as much as possible So having the preparation for specific matchups like colossal and things like that It's going to make it a lot easier and you make your run a lot better in the tournament because Like I said, I think everyone can probably agree that we're probably going to see a bunch of colossal teams this weekend going into the players cup so Just having that matchup down is definitely a good starting point for a lot of players Is that do you guys have anyone else want to chip in with that matchup or anything to do with colossal in general? Because it is quite a big talking point after santine. He did win the players cup one with that core Yeah, so actually sentino just did a very very extensive team report on his uh colossal team that went up on I believe 17 or 18 page How much was it? I was 19 90 And in in that uh report He goes over pretty much every matchup that you can expect to face And so he talks about how which is the sun matchup. How are you approaches poor yon? How are you approaches lapras? and one of the teams that He said that that he mentioned that he just has an auto loss. We just know what to do against is a confi plus a goudra Right and he says If you face this good luck, I don't know what to do I mean, I thought that was funny, but something like I would highly recommend going and reading that team report Think looking at how he approaches his matchups and kind of using that as a basis To figure out how you plan to approach the colossal matchup going into players cup Yeah, no, that's really good advice. Where is the um, do we have the link for the um for the team report? Is that on um, I can drop it in your chat real quick. Oh, that would be amazing. Thanks so much kinala That'll be really useful. I think for a lot of the The newer guys coming up. So there we go. And yeah, there we go. So actually Yeah, nimbasa city post and they featured that so yeah guys make sure to check that out It is in the um the chat now So like I said, I think kinala makes a good point check that out because It probably covers a lot of things that you can pick up in little nuggets of information there that are going to be useful Going forward In addition to that as well If you are interested in using the team or are you using a similar team? Like that's a great place to start because he has this whole pace there Um, and as I said, he does talk about how to approach every single matchup Yeah And I think that comes back to like a really important point I'm kind of diverting us a little bit here But I think it's the the preparation that he put in for that tournament And you can see the preparation is meticulous like a 19 page document on matchups alone in the team build I mean, it shows how much work he's put into that So, you know, that is a good example of you know, if you're wanting to reach That kind of heights that he's reached That's the kind of length that sometimes you have to go to With these teams and if you know your team inside out if you're super comfortable with it That also helps because knowing your matchups Is like the probably one of the biggest things Going for you and giving you an advantage in tournaments like this in general So yeah, really good points there and Costa Krim Do you have anything you want to chip in with before we move on to our next points? All I cost to lead it off Oh, that's cheeky. I was wanting you to lead it off first I I I baton pass to you Ah, well, I kind of rejected it. But anyways, all right fine. I'll accept it. Um, well, I mean with Colossal, obviously it's gonna be Oh, I say obviously it could Be a very big thing that we're going to be seeing with regards to usage of the place Placed up to now on the coming weekend But you have to remember that there are going to be a lot of people they're going to be trying That they're going to be prepared for it. They're going to be having the counters to it So it kind of it's very interesting because here you're going to be seeing the clash of usage meta Um, where you're going to be seeing people that it'll be more prepped And then it's just all about you covering all your bases as much as possible You have to be able to recognize Um, what counters are good against it how you can counter those counters? Obviously, it's down to what's in you're going to be running But like everyone has been saying so far It's all about flow charting and just being aware of your matchups If you're aware of your matchups, you're aware of your strengths and weaknesses You see Santy's, um, 19 page, um, a post there will report should I say So it it just takes a lot of thought in you just Got to like practice and get the experience But the main thing of course is to feel comfortable with your team If you feel comfortable with your team, you've played enough of matches You can recognize what kind of on the spot things you need to try to go for, you know, like with regards to either leads or For example, overall game plans for mid to end game Then you're going to be fine But obviously in the end of the day, you're just going to have fun with it because We've just talked about over obsessive themes of match of flow charts of matchups of this of that We could go on all day, but um If you do want to do well, you've got to be prepped But of course remember you're gonna you just try to have some fun It's best of one anything and everything can happen best of one. Trust me. So yeah, keep that in mind You know picking up off of that That's that's exactly kind of why I wanted you to go first because this is this is like what I wanted to touch on It is best of one So I feel like that's that's really different from when we do like the flinch squad circuit or what you normally see Like in the past with pokemon best of three So um like my team that I played uh for the flinch squad circuit Notoriously the games that I lost were my game one And then I would pick up game two and game three and that's how I'd get through So it's maybe not the best idea to take a team like that and then try to apply it to a best of one Format like this And so I think that even when you see things it's important and best of one to be prepared for anything Even some of those small different texts that you may not expect, you know, like maybe you see mixed colossal You know, I mean now is it going to be super common? No, but can it throw you off and cost you a game? Yeah, probably could so You know, there's definitely in a best of one format You have to be prepared for a lot more and that's where having a lot of experience or time putting in Put in on playing just in general will help you be aware of the possibilities that you might encounter Now it's obviously always better to lean in favor of what's more likely But it doesn't mean that you should be making decisions that could cost you the game if it's something else that you know exists Now that makes a lot of sense And I think the the big part of this is you've got to get it through the qualifier to get to that next stage Where where it will eventually be best of three And that's the the problem a lot of the time because best of one is we know Playing competitive all of us for quite a long time. It's not the most reliable means to Have an outcome to an event, but luckily the numbers are quite Large for qualification in each rating zone like we mentioned before let me just see if I can actually pull the the rating zone and the qualification Things up here because I I think it would be useful to kind of have it on screen and then we can We can talk about it a little bit From there so you can see yeah, we've got it is confirming that North America have 256 players then Europe with 256 Latin America again with And then Oceania with 128 players. So Going in we mentioned this briefly before we start the stream What were the the kind of the last bar? Kind of rating levels that we know that qualified and I think we were pretty sure it was around I think a safe bet was 1680. We don't know how long it went with Qualifiers from the Europe rating zone and canal. Did you say it was like 1640 from the US or was it a little higher? Yes, so the u.s. The lower end was like 1645 to 1650 Europe the lower end was like 1675 ish Yeah, Oceania, we had some from even you know, like higher end 1400s qualify On America, I think the I don't know for sure about Latin America, but I think the general rating was like upper 1500s Uh To like was the was the lower end for that? Yeah, so I mean that there's some it's quite good kind of Numbers to look at if you're wanting to qualify and you know The beauty about the tournament in itself is you can get to that Rating you can get to like 1700 if you're in Europe for instance You get to 1700 and you can stop playing then you don't need to continue anymore And you're pretty much certain to have locked your place into the next round and that goes the same I think across the board in all rating zones if you get to 1700s, uh, it looks as though from players won Experience the qualifiers there that number is going to guarantee you into the qualification to the next round So that's always a good target to kind of aim for Going into this and then not You know not risking it from that point because there's no point from previous information that we got we know That's going to be safe enough. Um, adi is anything that you want to cover Else because obviously we we haven't got you for the longest time tonight So it'll be nice to be able to get a bit more of your thoughts And if you want to steer the conversation in a certain direction before you head off Be good to hear some input from yourself on this Yeah, I think that that's the first key for me is knowing your goal your rating goal Uh, I like I'm already going for 1700 as well in in Europe. I think 1700 is safe in north america You're probably safe at around 16 80 60 70 for sure And so knowing that goal and stopping when you feel comfortable with your score rather than playing all 45 games Because there's no guarantee that like if you go on a losing streak in your last three games You don't have a chance to get those points back And you really don't want to drop out of player stop qualification with a few unlucky losses at the very end of your run I think the other Small like optimization that I have for doing well in tournaments like I see is I really like to play my games later In in during that so the tournament goes from friday until sunday And so I think it's actually like friday midnight gmt or something like that. I don't actually yeah Yeah, but so I like to play my games later. Obviously playing 45 games on sunday will Playing the games later the reason I like that is because Uh, you can imagine two different players who are also both at 1600 rating One who is eight and oh just starting out and is probably going to Finish at 1700 or higher than that the other player is like 23 and 15 and it's almost out of their run And to sort of plateaued You'd imagine that the player who's 23 15 is a little worse But you're much more likely to face that player at which towards the end of On like sunday or on saturday rather than at the very beginning when the players who are at 1600 Have won almost all of their games But you're getting the same number of points for playing both of them And so that's why I like to play a lot of my games towards the end of the qualification period So I know that i'm getting as many points as possible and i'm generally facing a little easier players at every possible rating When you say at the end, sorry li when you say at the end. Do you mean Sunday 45 or do you mean saturday sunday because you're gonna drive me crazy now What my personal preference what I like to do is uh, I don't play at all in the first day And then I start playing on the second day right as everyone is allowed to play their next set of 15 games because that's when uh The players who are like 15 70 if you get matched up with one of them and they played 15 games That's like not as difficult as someone who is again like five and oh But that's right out those players who have just started playing the second set of 15 games So you really I think maximizing the uh Like you want to play people who have played many more games than you right those Sort of plateaued and so Ideally you start playing for me at least I start playing Right as the uh second day or the third day it starts and then make sure that I'm at a comfortable level So I don't have to rush all of the games into the last minute on sunday Yeah, that's that's a smart that's a smart strategy. That's going like a step further, isn't it? It's not just the tournament start and you jumping on at the first hurdle and thinking right Let's get to get to this mark as soon as possible and then have and maybe a bit of a rough time We kind of thinking about it stepping back a little bit and actually looking at the actual tournament as A bit more strategical than they're normally just diving in head first And I think that's a really good way of looking at it like you say you're going to pick up maybe those Less stronger players at the end of the tournament, which is going to make it easier for you to get that point goal And at the end of the day, it's not about winning this tournament It's not about getting the highest ranking You've got to look at it as just getting to a bar and getting over that bar and as soon as you do that Just you can finish, you know, it's not you're not getting any glory for getting any higher There's no kind of medals going out for for getting number one. No one really Cares about that to be honest It's just getting through to the next stage and it's kind of a means to an end. So doing it in that kind of Manor I think is very very smart. I think adi that's a it's a really good bit of information for players We've got a little question here from Cameron block block you too.  Well It's a bit of an open-ended question. I think I think if you can play this weekend I think you should play Um, whether or not you can play double lm or not. I think it's always a nice opportunity to get some practice in And you you're likely going to face a lot of tough top players. So it's always good to try and play Um, it's just a question of whether or not you'll be taking a spot up from someone that could play Obviously, that's the moral of the the question there So that's um something to think about as well because there are only a certain limited number of spots But if you qualify you get through and you can't play then, you know, you've you've earned that So no one really can take that away from you. So it's it's a bit of a there we go Cameron That's my two cents on it. I'll leave it up to you mate Well, I mean the issue with uh, that is like you said Lee It's literally down to if you're blocking someone by beating them and they're trying to go for it And they have an account of all that but also if you're not going for it or I'm not sure if he means by purely Playing the double elimination stage like because they're unavailable or do they mean By accounts like whether they signed up because there's gonna be a lot of people That still won't have their accounts signed up and they're still gonna play and they're not even gonna be Counted in as well and they're just gonna be like going off to twitter next though. Anyway, yeah That's a good point cost that actually before we go any further if you haven't signed up yet And you are looking to sign up make sure you link your your nintendo account to your play pokemon account You can do that through the play pokemon page. There'll be a guide with how you can do that in game And on online It's all online where you do it and the the accounts will link up and then after that's all done sign up Otherwise you won't get through to the qualification stages even if you hit that that higher rating Which is a little bit unfortunate. I think they've been a bit clearer about at this time in the sign ups They're making sure that players know then and be aware of this Before signing up because I mean it must be devastating if you signed up in players cup one Didn't realize this got the rating and then Qualifying rounds came out and your name wasn't on there because you didn't link your account I mean I'd be devastated doing you know a couple of players that that happened to so You just make sure if you are signing up obviously sign ups closed tomorrow evening Um, so make sure that you do do that beforehand if you are planning on playing this weekend So adi anything else you would like to mention obviously we've just I'm sorry I'm kind of jumping on you every time here, but I know time is ticking away And you're gonna have to jump off in a minute, but if there's anything you'd like to kind of um finish on before we We have to say bye. Bye. That would be um, that'd be great Yeah, I do have to run but uh, first off, thank you so much for having me It's been a it's been a blast and I really enjoyed doing this I also just want to quickly plug my own youtube channel Ck49 where I do a lot of in-depth breakdowns of top teams as well as interviewing A lot of top players who have recently done well in tournaments So if you like the sort of breakdown that I gave in like the first 20 minutes, uh, please make sure to check that out I really appreciate it Definitely check out the youtube channel. I was only made aware of it It's such a dude. We need to get the word out because yeah, the content on it is amazing You guys out there will really enjoy it. It's really useful really informative stuff So make sure you do check out all the the social stuff adi is on the the screen right now So make sure you drop them a follow on twitter and obviously go on sub to his youtube channel because it is full of good stuff So adi, thank you so much man for coming on It's sad to lose you so early on in this but hopefully we can do another one of these Maybe after qualifiers, maybe we look at The the next stage of this it'd be really cool to have you on again and get the gang back together and do this again So yeah, thank you so much for coming on. It's been a pleasure. Yeah. Thanks. I'm looking forward to Cool man. All right, dude. Well, we'll we'll catch you Four of us He's gone Now maybe make some really really great points Yeah, and I've gotten a look at some of his content like it's it's pretty comprehensive from what I've gotten to look at So yeah, I would also recommend to go over there and check it out Yeah, so like even though a lot of the teams that uh, he Interviewed players for on his channel. I was even like, you know, I was a part of the building process Or I saw the building process happen and even despite that I was still learning stuff about that building process About how the team works by watching those videos. So he really does a great job of going in depth with those players He's a lot of big names on the channel. You know, he has uh nails nick navar He is uh, john evidence. He is raga. These are like, you know insanely good players that play at the highest worlds level, so Uh, I think it's a great resource. You should definitely go and check it out And I'm sure that he'll have reviews coming in after players cup two as well Yeah, undoubtedly. I think it's just gonna kind of ramp up a little bit in the content keep coming Yeah, so definitely check that out guys I'm just going to throw his socials up again on the screen just so you can check them out. Let's um, obviously use twitter at There we go down below. Yeah, you can check it all out and use youtube at ck49. So yeah, there we go that was adi but really great to have him on like you say and um We're going to be moving on to the next stage of this chat. We've obviously talked about how you can enter Ways in which you can approach the tournament being the best of one qualifier We touched literally on on santine's team, which was the winning team from the tournament. So Um, where do you want to go from here? Do you want to have a look at the the top eight and what other kind of architects because Colossal isn't the only team we need to prepare for this weekend Obviously, there are a lot of other teams that performed extremely well over the weekend Um, sorry not over the weekend, but obviously over the um over the tournament The span life of the tournament itself Um, so there's lots of combinations here that you you need to also be aware of and have game plans for but um Does anyone have anything that they would like to kind of kick us off within this next segment of the uh the evening Yeah, so if you look at the player scout finals teams that are on screen right now I think the first thing that a lot of people are going to see is that row of inciners from top to bottom first all the way down, right? Yeah To the toky kiss you're gonna see a lot of real abooms a lot of poor young twos a lot of premarines So these are all pokemon that are Very very good mid ground pokemon And what I mean when I say mid ground is they're pokemon that don't rely on speed control too heavily They don't rely on supporting pokemon. They don't need to set up to do damage They're pokemon that you send out onto the field and you have pressure with them in one way or another Right, so incin has fake out. It can click parting shot. It can click snarl sometimes He can click flare blitz to do damage It can also click burning jealousy, which is a move that not a lot of people thought about before player scout one And a burning jealousy, you know is a great counter to pokemon like cinderace or or bisharp or dragapult Because if they dynamax anything with dynamax and boosts. Yeah, yeah, you just burn them Right toky kiss. Obviously, it's great. It's been great since the start of this format You know, it can dynamax it has 50% chance to crit if it holds the scope lens Um, it's you know, it's redirection as follow me. It has great coverage. It can run yawn. It can run babirri berry You know, there's just so much set coverage with it Dragapult as well. It supports all of these pokemon very very well with max moves Phantasm dropping both opponents defense for pokemon like xcadrill or insin Um air stream boosting speed For or shifu potentially right dragapult can click surf to proc colossal weakness policy So these are all pokemon that are like You have to know what common sets they have what teams they're on uh and to expect when you see them on the field Yeah, no completely. I think like we just had a uh a comment up there from uh, that's a plus one fail He's he's saying that no vena venus all in top cut from last time that's it's surprising And I I completely agree with them. I'm surprised that there is No sun in there at all, you know, that's one of the archetypes that I would have thought would have done extremely well going into season season well the first players cup, you know um considering how dominant it was on the rated battle ladder in series five But to kind of not see any of it in top eight Is it just an indication that players are over prepared for it knowing that it's going to be one of those calls that A lot of players kind of are going to be using so the over preparation for that means that it hasn't done quite so well or is it just Probably not kind of hit its peak yet and kind of an online Official tournament yet. I know we likely to see a lot of that coming into this This this weekend coming up So I feel like I can probably speak on this a little bit considering I The team that I used in the flinch squad circuit was uh was partly sun Okay, um, it was venu torcal But I mean it wasn't what I would consider, you know, like full-on sun-based team, right? I think that one of the biggest problems with it was like you said There was a number of people who were like as you could say over prepared for it But I do think that that's dropped off a little bit since then like i'm not seeing Like before I had to basically plan on every toga kiss or every incineroar Probably having like safety goggles every bravery being lumbary like, you know So it just had a lot of ways to kind of prevent that So I think it was a combination of that and the fact that there's smarter ways to maybe be playing venusaur Then the typical way that people just assume like i'm just going to sleep powder spam and then you know That's how I want to use my venusaur So, you know, that's that's what a lot of like maybe the more Inexperienced players probably took to when they just jumped off with it right away So that I think that kind of contributed to what we've seen from the first player's cup And I think that maybe it changes a little bit with the second player's cup because there are some aspects That that venu can take care of like for example If you can get venusaur and sun and then you can get urshifu next to it lots of times That's a great way to try and handle peasy Stuff like that. It's one of the few things like with life orb that can deal with a clifery Or what you commonly see for redirection, which is a lot of fairy So I think they you'll see more of it. Is it the best thing in the world? I don't know. I mean, there's there's still a lot of rng that has to go into it as well You know if you're going to run life orb venu, which is probably more stable for some of your game plays And not have to rely on sleep powder too much then that's good but I mean Lee can pull up my pace and you can see that on my team. I had wide lens I I had to I had to depend on that more But that the I think the final point I want to touch on with sun especially with venusaur Is the fact that like going back to what I was saying earlier when I played with it I lost a lot of my first games and then I won my games two and three And I think venusaur was a little bit stronger for me in a best of three format Then it was in a best of one because after I could identify those items and figure out what people were using It was a lot easier for me to like reformulate my game plan come back and attack it in a completely different way Anyone else want to hop on that? I think another reason that we didn't see a lot of sun in players cup top cut is that um So sun venusaur especially is like an amazing pokemon sun is probably one of the best archetypes in series five but a lot of what sun does is um Kind of shut down or not maybe not shut down, but it's not pop against dragapult insinuer Right insinuer one of its most common items with safety goggles And insinuer, you know when when sun is up venusaur can hit insinuer with max quake, I guess But insinuer is hitting it back with the flare bullets that's doing 90 of its health Right venusaur doesn't have great ways to hit dragapult and dragapult can click max air stream into it and so uh On top of that also pokemon like tchar turning off the sun for their xcudral is like Generally going to be pretty positive against venusaur And so a lot of what sun does is relying on maintaining a perfect position and maintaining perfect speed control That's favorable for you And that's very hard to do Consistently and reliably I think And so a lot of the a lot of the people in players cup kind of opted for this Like tokya kiss dragapult xcudral team because it's a lot easier to Maintain a reliable position and it's a lot easier to pivot out of unfavorable leads Uh, and that's that's kind of the the main reason I think that we didn't see a lot of sun And lee's got that up right now with the safety goggles I think before in players cup one the percentage usage on that was like 40 So you can see that it has dropped because I mean it is you you are using it for some different things But that doesn't mean that you're safe by any means to just like Freely click a sleep powder into incineroar, especially in a best of one like format where you're going to be put putting You're going to be gambling a lot on that like right off the bat Yeah, and I think and I think that's evident from the top cut as well itself you see there's a plethora of dragapult and incineroar everywhere and um, there's also ferrathons as well, which I know that torque all can deal with but if you put it in the right position you get rid of the torque all venu can't do much against a ferrathon. It's just in a like 1v1 it eventually at some point. Um, but uh, I'm not sure I think The venus oil is so strong. It is so strong, especially with the life orb and all that And then you've seen like in the euro cup for example We saw a lot of venus oils and that was uh series five So we saw venus oils and dustlops being paired up Next to each other you thread in the trick room so you can have torque holding the back Or you just go an ally switch or even helping hand get rid of the main threat and try to bluff it out so It is a bit surprising But when you look at the top cut and you can start picking up to why there isn't as much venus oils because You just you can see some pretty good counters to it not counters, but It just these are players that have played their games out Like they've played the top level to reach the top cut of players top. So Having even the slightest tools in their availability They're going to be able to take advantage and try to do the best they can and They were able to go and kick out venus oil completely and allow a drapey on them Somehow I don't know how they did that but you know, I mean fair play to giovanni polanco right there. Oh my lord We had an interesting question actually just a kind of segue for a moment from computer kids He asks do you think series season six teams would perform well in players cup two or only teams from series five? So who wants to head up this one? um, I think that 90 percent of teams that are good in series six would not be good in series five I'm gonna agree with that. I think the one exception is some variation on like a beat-up to raki on team um, there was a there was a to rakan team that I faced in the rose tower lcq And it was like draga pole to raki on uh, garrados arcanine p2 among us or something something similar to that um And that team that team actually didn't have beat up on the draga pole They just use to raki on as an offensive lead and they could max the draga pole or they could max the to raki on And I think that kind of team Is like the closest to a series 16 that would do well um, yeah But other like other than that, I think a lot of what's good in series six is kind of countered by tyranitar existing or cinderace or rillaboo toga kiss Yeah, toga kiss, especially. Yeah Uh, the what so there's one exception actually Uh, a player named roxen did very very well in players cup series five. He used a team of drakes old korbanite arcanine Uh, gastron. Yeah, and his team his team actually did not have a single pokemon band From moving from series five to series six Yeah, wow And so his I think that his team like drakes old stuff is probably going to be very good in series five still Yeah, in spite of You know the and pokemon coming back I've seen a lot of really like um inspired, uh drakes old like plays and stuff too like, um, I know that, uh luigi who we've seen before in rose tower and etc. Was uh having some fun with a wheezing and choice kind of drakes alt and uh Being able to pull away the uh, the hustle accuracy at the same time I I mean Now do I think that that's something you're gonna see a ton of here? No, but um, it's there's definitely some interesting ways to play It that I think are still yet unexplored. So Um, I wouldn't be surprised if you encounter something like that. Yeah, that's true and there's canals Throwing up the poker piece there from I guess team uh from the players cup. Um, I don't know Let me just see if I can grab that because I can't seem to grab it from the uh from the chat all I can seem to do is get um Is just to get the hide or unhide button which is not ideal for me right now But um, can I could you drop that in the private chat? Just in the background and I can pull that up for the guys to see on screen here as well It might be worth looking at that'd be awesome. Thank you so much, mate But yeah, it's it's a good point. I think you know, I I personally wouldn't feel super comfortable about using um a series Six team in in in this tournament, especially the qualifying round. I think The pokemon like that that have been banned been banned for a reason, you know, uh, they are the You know, we're not beating about the bush. They're the strongest Pokemon that you've got available to us Um, so you're kind of putting yourself Maybe not on a disadvantage almost, but you know There is the little bit of a disadvantage that you're going to put yourself with By not taking advantage of these pokemon that are available to us again. Um But yeah, there we go We can see the team on the screen now, which is uh the kovonite the dracosalt Grim snarl Gastrodon of canine and really good. It's a nicely balanced team, isn't it? And you can see something like this because of the the synergy that you've got in there A lawn between the typins and and the texts that are there I mean, you can see why it's done well and something like this If you're well versed with it and you know the team inside out I could see you doing quite well that you know and and the actual tournament itself. So Make a lot of sense to touch on too Like I think being anything that you're familiar with Is probably going to be a a little bit better for you to to to roll with going into this instead of trying to jump onto something Last minute, especially for those of us that haven't been playing for a longer time, you know um I've I've found in my experience that usually Jumping in with something that I'm not as familiar with is is a little more disastrous than if I jumping into Games with something that I've played a lot. So I'm much more familiar with the scenarios and what I need to do and what my game plans are Yeah, and that's something that I wanted to touch on as well is Especially for this format of tournament, right? It's just an online. I see they're best of one games You're playing a set number of games every weekend or every day for the weekend and so You're going to get a lot more value on average Out of a team that you're very comfortable with and you understand the board states of Then you are from trying to find the perfect team and you know put it together for this tournament Yeah, look we agreed A team a team that you're comfortable with right you're going to know exactly what your Idea is like what what your goal is in every board state, right when you see two pokemon in front of you This is how I want to position my board and my team in front of these two pokemon Right and it's it's a lot of like familiarity with the team and understanding damage rolls and understanding What pokemon you can switch and when is like That's going to get you a lot further in a best of one tournament than trying to find the perfect ideal series five team is Yeah, there is no perfect team. Yeah, it's just that there is no perfect and there's always going to be Some holes on the boat Yeah No, but um exactly that it's just being like now saying like everyone's saying It's just being able to on average handle Any average team across from you. So just in the end of the day matchups, of course Knowing how to go into the game because obviously a big point is Matchups, but the the main issue with matchups, right when you're like, oh, I've got a bad matchup against this Point or something like that is Okay, sure you can have a bad matchup But do you have a counter to it? Do you recognize that this is a bad matchup and do you have a way out of it because then it feeds back into team building? So team building is so essential and you have to absolutely try to Fill in as many holes as possible, but there's always going to be something that You're going to be weak to so it's just being able to recognize that and maybe that's where Perhaps rng comes into play Maybe some other Inadvert tactic that you have to try to go for because of the situation, but Yeah, there's a lot of good questions here That's some really good advice though guys I think that like what you're coming back to being more comfortable With a team then rather than looking for that team that's gonna Maybe be Something that's like meta breaking or you're hunting for that meta breaking team or something like that It's always a better idea to fall back on a team that you know inside out and that is the most valuable information I think that you're going to get from all of us tonight. I think especially going into a qualifier You know, like we mentioned earlier on it doesn't matter about winning this event. It's not about winning It's about just hitting a rating number And then you can you can then concentrate on that that perfect team that you've you've got on your mind For the next stage of the tournament and that's what you need to to really think about Get through this first step with something that you know that you're familiar with and then go from there but For newer players and maybe haven't played that much series five that kind of the ones that I want to Just hit on a little bit here and nappy actually Asks a really good question Because of all the issues that there are around it being series five and not series six It does leave us a little bit At a deficit for places to practice at the minute So he asks is that any tools that we can recommend using in order to prepare for for this tournament coming up? Which is a great question. Um I mean the showdown that would be my my initial And probably my only place that you could really Go to unless you've got friend groups Yeah, and there are actually have been quite a lot of tournaments set up on twitter by a number of people And practice movements and things like that but outside of that. I don't know if you guys know of anything else Um where people can go to practice or Yes mounts silver actually runs two events every week Uh, and they have been running series five tournaments recently and they're just best with three tournaments, you know You show up. I think they run on on two states and thursdays And so uh, those three we've got one more chance And in addition to that like we mentioned there's a lot of people that are setting up I think they're referred to as friendly tournaments on on twitter Where you just go on battle spot you go to online competitions and you can sign up through there through code post on twitter And the way that works is like you have like two hours or whatever to ladder and it's just like essentially a ladder Where you're just laddering against other people in the tournament and whoever, you know has the highest rating at the end is first place So essentially what an old saying it's the perfect Practice that you can ever think of and try to get into a scenario Because um it literally is emulating best of one series five in the form of a ladder Yeah, absolutely. It's um super josh coming up here currently watching and But uh wonder what this chat is about so For josh and anyone else that has just jumped in recently and thinking what the heck is going on What are these guys talking about we are talking about players cup at the minute There was um, obviously the players cup one which finished not so long ago We saw santini win that event and they have announced a players cup two which will be starting this Friday Sign ups are still open. You can sign up on your switch. Just make sure you link your nintendo account before You do sign up. Otherwise, you won't be able to qualify But this is the tournament that we're talking about josh and to anyone else We're talking about preparation what teams to expect coming into this event and um, how to the best prepare really and what things to think about going into the event in general I think it was quite a It was an interesting topic of mine and I picked and asked certain people to come on them I I feel like we're very privileged to have These players here with us tonight with their insights and knowledge that they can provide and help Especially some new players in the the format and not just the new players I think even the more experienced ones there's a lot to learn and it's always nice to hear other people's opinions on on These sort of things and help you get into a good place and a Mindset, I guess going into the tournament to get you Hopefully qualified for that next stage really so yeah, that's what it's all about. Um We're just talking about um Well series six teams going into series five which wouldn't work. Um, but yeah I think other archetypes as well are worth mentioning and Going into this because we've obviously covered the dragapult the incineroar stuff the sun matchup colossal Is there anything else that any of you would like to touch on that you think might be quite popular? I think one thing I would mention is I think from the the list of Top cut teams that we saw one that really jumped out of me that I did really like and it was one that I think We might see a little bit more of maybe not and In this early stage the qualifier rounds of the tournament But maybe in the next stages is a team by I think it was allister Um, I think he's an australian. Yeah allister sandova. Um, and this team really caught my eye I think he he was featured on um, amity graham's youtube channel playing the team Really interesting concept because it it kind of just looks like a generic P2 team, but he had a really interesting incineroar set on there with um flareblitz and earthquake Um, and did he have close combat? I don't know if he had close combat, but it was a really interesting It wasn't your generic kind of incineroar set Yeah, but it did it did do the supporting job as well And I think it'd be good to maybe touch on a few other calls that you guys Can see being popular what to expect kind of going into it if there are any that we haven't mentioned already And maybe some certain sets on pokemon that you could see maybe doing well And I know johnny mentioned A little while ago. He did say any wild picks you feel would be good in the ic But I think that's probably a question that will come back to right at the end So do remind us johnny I think it'd be more fitting to end the stream on something like a hot pick from from all of us before we head off I'm trying to think of fire types now. I think we now had had a really good list of um Common core stuff that you can expect to see he can probably rattle it off faster than any of us Yeah, so I think some of the cores we haven't talked about are Like general cinderace offense So urie won the invitational uh before the players cup with cinderace bisharp And yeah cinderace general is a very good monitor generating offense, right? It's it has libero So it's changing its type it always has stab and all of its moves And then it just gets a disarmament of moves, right? It gets Uh balanced so you can run max airstream. It gets max steel spike. It gets max fighting and So you can never guarantee what's on it either. Yeah. Well, I mean for for players cup you can right because you have team sheets, but Well, yeah, okay. Yeah, but then we saw urie also have giga impact that yeah, giga impact usually Yeah, it's especially useful for taking out like rotom's in one shot exactly exactly And then there was also like offensive laprists started to pop up Where the laprists was just fast and you you paired it with like winscott or talon flame And the laprists just had life warp, right? And and that's something that you know prior to series five We had only ever seen light clay laprists And the goal is you know set up screens and have them for eight turns and that's sort of trickerman win with conch was kind of like the idea before that Yeah, no, I think offensive laprists is definitely something to to still watch out for like I I played it a whole bunch of that That was kind of like my backup team to my uh, my my torque the new one um And I think that it's it's strongest suit is being able to pack something in the back like um av conch or Like drago vish or whatever that can actually already kind of take a hit And then throw up a screen in front of it and just give it like that one extra turn that it might need to live Whatever it's got to live just to really be able to start destroying something or doing some real damage Not to mention the life orb laprists itself doing a ton of damage I mean like if you watched it like the way I used it was with like thunder blizzard freeze dry hydropump like no protect whatsoever And I mean when you launched off like a life orb max blizzard and just watched how much damage it laid into a Faro thorn it was impressive Yep, and then the last one that I think is really really important to know is the poor guns e-matra and Everybody hates everybody who loves to to say that poor guns. He's unhealthy and it's Not me I mean more so than sleep powder venus or like No, no, no, no, I take that that venus or is the worst for me, but um, pz is right up there pz Yeah, pz if you can't beat them join them guys. I don't say anything. I'm pz Like or she flew in the back, you know, it's it's brutal. It's brutal I'm just an emotion of the show where we get to complain about ally switcher Ah Geronadon Barrest, you know, there's a hot pick. Yeah. Yeah. There you go. Yeah, absolutely I see me. I'm not sure if I'm uh If uh, Phil's still in chat, that's a plus one, but I saw him release a video on barris cuda and um, alakazam, which was very very interesting Um, basically a lot of fun early format But I mean now that we've got in senator kind of like shuts down the uh, the barris cuda idea for the most part I mean any intimidate kind of kind of just slows it to the point just to the point of where you can kind of stop it up I I do think that braviary deserves a mention as far as something that I expect to see at least a little bit of because I've seen it more recently on ladder and being rather successful and being able to stop up a lot of cores or gum up some things Um, having lumbary on it. It's super useful against things like the venosaur stuff Um against burning jealousy Um against yawn, which are common texts that we're seeing more and more of like we're seeing more burning jelly For burning jealousy and senator aside from just torcal having it We're seeing more yawn toga kiss than we were before in fact I think if you take a look like even in the higher rankings toga kiss like if they don't have protect They probably have yawn like it's it's I think it's it's fifth most popular move In fact, I can I can confirm that right now it is so You know, I would say that uh, is it the best choice? No, but I wouldn't put it out of out of your team building plans because I've seen some great teams just totally dropped down to a good bravieri team Yeah, so I think bravieri is actually really interesting It was something that I had wanted to mention this uh during this chat Because if you look at the player's cup top cut teams, right almost every team has an incineroar almost every team has a dragapult And bravieri is a pokemon that is Very very good against both of those pokemon right dragapults available max phantasm Dragapult clank can't click max warm wind versus it because it's gonna get it's gonna proctify it Um incineroar intimidate prox that define it and then dies, right? It's good versus real boom. Uh, it's pretty good versus amungus. It's pretty good versus like Uh, I I would say it's solid versus tokyu kiss. It's not the best. It's good versus her shifu and so The the other big thing about Bravieri is that it actually takes advantage of cinderaceous and a very similar way to how bisharp does and so teams like with Her and bravieri with cinderaceous or with dragapult is actually Something that I think is very interesting moving forward and something that I haven't seen a lot of in series five yet Yeah, that's a really good point. I think um, it'd be interesting now I think it's probably a good time I have a look at the because japan had there that kind of their own tournament, didn't they uh outside of the player's cup Um, it'd be good to have a look. I'm surprised. There's no bravery On these teams as well kuno because I think you make an extremely good point when you just like making Observations about the the trends of pokemon that are in that top eight You would think Where are the bravery there because if the if there was a team with that on and you've got decent answers to things Like colossal within that team You think it's going to take a lot to kind of beat that pokemon Um and a lot of hard work to kind of get around it because of the the coverage that it's got move wise and Um, yeah, there's been a lot of rock slide bravieri now too, which is yeah Something you didn't see like when we had players cup one. Yeah Oh, it's one of the staff I've been seeing as well staff said I could try to get wind up as well I do was running that for a while. Yeah. Was it yeah Yeah, yeah You could just dynamics it as well kind of treat it as if it is your dynamics and then You know pop the surprise of it being a staff at the end of it where you can then choose which move to lock into Yeah, there's a period during there's a period during series three, I think Or series two even before series three I think it was series two canal because I can remember you talking to me about this And just the device on sand was like one of the best sets because you get the scarf tail end And bravery just compliments saying so well both as a dynamax pokemon and as like You know scarf you turn to bring in your tea tar for your extra drill like just interactions like that were very cool Um, absolutely. So I'm a big fan of bravery. I I also do expect to see it in this player's cup for sure Do you think a good partner to it could be indeedy? Finally chance. Um, I can see it. I mean maybe doddles as well just in case on venus or matchups I feel like it's just gonna absolutely obliterate Some to you at least the venus or matchup if it's paired We've seen a lot of interesting stuff with it I've also seen it used to go to fact with like, uh, riperear as well and where they just like banded it and then No, don't I don't know if you have you remember Yeah, no, uh, that's uh, that's that's a pretty interesting tech I I mean, there's other things that it can do that with right? Like I mean in the same aspect that cinderace can boost up speed and boost up your attack so can bravery. So Um, I I would say that there's a number of Pokemon that we have available us to us out there that can really benefit from that I mean that could just as easily be a tyrannotar or something. Yeah That's a good point completely.  So I will um, I'll I'll kind of bring it up now but um, obviously with the majority of the world having the players cup like I mentioned, um, Japan had their own kind of standalone, uh, which was the decisive battle tournament. Um So there's 150 qualified players I'm pretty sure their qualification ran similar to ours if not at the same time as ours Um, I'm not really too sure on the details But they're the the top four teams that you can see and they're not too far away from what we're seeing kind of Obviously the trends with incinero toga kiss. Um, there's a lot more cinderace though Um in this top four than there is in the uh, the rest of the world's top four Uh, which is interesting and I wonder if it's a point on it. I mean Japan is much more At least that diverse Well, they're and they're also a lot more used to the best of one format. Very true Yeah, that's so whereas the rest of us are very much like a best of three format usually up until Obviously covid hit and we've started doing things a little bit differently Hmm. Yeah So anything you want to mention about this kind of top cut kunal before we move on from it? Um, so I think I think it's pretty interesting that we see a lot more cinderace here And that sun happened to win the event. I think that that is like Not an accident. Um I think that the reason also that we didn't see a lot of cinderace in north america is that it's very weak to sun teams on average and It doesn't seem that way right because cinderace has air stream and it has it can run pyro ball and those both destroy the venus or Yeah But cinderace is also pretty vulnerable to sleep It's pretty vulnerable to teams that can set up trick room, which some, you know, something's generally carry their dust globs It's not that good versus togikis um And then one of the big things I think I don't have the first place japanets paste But incinerator on sun teams is very good versus cinderace as well because if you carry burning jealousy The cinderace has like it just cance dynamics in front of the instrument Yeah, right always your means for answer is just burned and then you lose Yeah, or their only option is to just stay a fire type Which is usually not all that great in the face of Incineroar and probably whatever you have next to it. Exactly. Yeah Yeah No, that's some really good points there We'll come back to that in a minute because we just got a question from dinky donk Did you guys go over the ladder system how the ladder system works? Should I play all 45 games? Well, I know if I Made the cut so we did briefly talk about this a little bit earlier on and and the different rating zones around the world and what kind of Is a reasonable rating to get to know that you're going to be probably qualified We kind of set a bench of 1700 would be probably safe across every rating zone. Um, but you could probably go as law is 1680 the us probably an easy number Europe 1700 1680 1700 and then the other rating zones are a little bit lower. Um, if you're in oceania, I think what did we say? It was like 1300 1200 But yeah, generally you don't need to play all 45 games Unless you you need to unless you're struggling at the end and you need to get to a bit of a higher rating Then I don't really feel like you need to finish all 45 games Unless you want to feel fun and just see where you end up. Of course. That's always um Something to think about there as well. Um, but getting back to What were you you were saying can I like think you make an extremely good point? and You know the one thing that was mentioned earlier on in the the top cut from our players cup was that there was Literally no venus or tall and the top eight, but you see when move across to japan Honestly, they there's a venus all sitting at the top and like you say amongst all of these cinderace and And a single drag-a-pull I guess Um, the use of drag-a-pull actually the lack of the use of drag-a-pull, um surprises me quite a lot You'll notice that all four still have incineroar though and yeah, it's just everywhere Well, yeah, yeah, this is true So the the lonely indeedy there, but um, yeah, I mean Do you think this team here on on the top is kind of Maybe an insight of what's to come in in the the qualifying event possibly and what teams will do Very well in this qualifying event Or do you think it's just kind of a a one-off where they've they've built a very solid team and and that's that's that And we're not really going to see Um the success rate of sun too much more than than what it has been here I mean having played a very similar team to that for most of this format I think that you are going to see some of it It's really going to matter though about how well you can play it because it's like kunal said with that team Like there's not a whole lot of mistakes to be made when you are playing that team So to jump on it now It would be a mistake if you're not like super familiar with it Yeah, so I think um That team is pretty interesting because a lot of sun teams don't like they're built very differently They had they generally have the dust clops or the how to ring with the tricker mode Um, yeah, and I just I just posted a paste in the private chat of what like When I hear the team when I hear the term Vgc 20 series five sun team like this is the six pokemon with the sets that I think of Okay, let me put I think it's the standard I'll just pull that up. Okay. No, I won't be one second Okay, so here we go Okay, so we got the toko the g max venus. So This clubs the tyranitar tokykiss and charizard. So yeah very very strong In I think as well like yeah, it does that's kind of what's conjured up in my mind when I think to series series five You know, I always think back to uh So what's a lot of james becks run When he was trying to get to number one on the ladder with with the kind of the build this build almost very similar And yeah paired for the variations on that too Like you're not always gonna have body press yon torcal like some of them like like for example Like on mine that uses hadering to set trick room like it's just a straight up offensive torcal because that is part of my follow Me like cliff area peasy answer or cinder ace answer. Etc. Etc. Yeah And it's a variation How does team this like quote-unquote standard sun team differs from the team that won The trip and tournament right where that team didn't even include any kind of trick or mode They just had tokykiss and urshifu and they said yeah I'm I have offense and I'm gonna use my offense to beat you And that's you know, that was the the goal of that team um I think a lot of the sun teams that you're gonna see are gonna be closer to the one to to the pace with dust clops uh in that They want to have the trick or mode and they want to Generally have like a tyranitar or riperior maybe a gigalith That will excel in that trick room Yeah, absolutely. That's mostly for the sun mirror as well Yeah 100% like having I mean and you have to be wary of stuff like all the sudden seeing like Zard with heatwave just like wipe out your trick room mode I mean, that's why dust clops is a little more common than like hattering per se Um, just because you don't want to get wiped out by spread attacks I mean, I do really love that variation of team there. I say I love it. I hate doing up against it but um, I love using it because Um, it's just it's the whole idea of having the multiple modes on your team and um, it You know, like gives off the bait of oh, look, I'm a super hardcore sun team or something like that But then the dust clops and tyranitar Mode is just so scary to go up against if you don't have the correct answer And if your opponent has played you into that position where you can't do anything because they just got Told just there as well if it's scope lens. I think that one was scope lens wasn't it? Um, yeah, well, there you go. Um, it could just go ahead and just boost itself It it's just you got multiple like it's just so many good Pokemon on a team that You know, you don't originally think that okay They mix and match well, but they actually do because you just got that flexibility Um on going about your play and they're just all such really good ones, you know Like most of them being not most of them being banned, but I mean, yeah Three of them aren't they? Oh, I say most of them NDD and yeah, yeah Yeah, pretty much all of them That's again, that's like if you if you look at like the NDD version of that team or whatever I mean to me, that's where it really had the strength for sun being able to Block the fake outs and stuff like that change terrain in the face of rillaboom Um offered a lot of lead options, you know, um Like NDD venisaur was a real option to lead I had scarf urshifu on my team so that I could you turn out into stuff And take advantage of sun really fast so I could have dual options as far as what I might see coming my way Now it meant that I had to rely on sleep powder more So on my team you saw stuff like wide lens because I I had some big game plans that were absolutely Depending upon me hitting a sleep powder And so it was more worth it to me to be able to hit it than it was for me to be able to do damage with it Um, but should we should probably move off of sun because we've we've talked a lot about sun today foreshadowing Yeah foreshadowing. Yeah, perhaps man, perhaps Okay, if before we move away from sun, I will just say if you guys had to Let's say name two pokemon name two pokemon for our viewers at home Um That you feel are best suited to to kind of matching up against that that's standard sun team the tita Charizard you just had to name two and that's quite difficult But like up the top of your head You could only bring two and it was your choice. What which two would it be? I'll give my answer at the end Um, I would bring Incinera and one of draga pult or gudra if the only matchup I had to beat was sun Those would be my two friends That's fine. Yeah, that's a nice answer. That's that's absolutely fair. Um Yeah, I'm gonna kind of agree with kunal. Um snarl Especially against uh, that team has has had a lot of success Especially snarl with resists to what that team is So or what what kind of damage it can put out? Um As far as picking a second one with it I mean Nobody really likes to see the mirror of tita versus tita, but tita is decent against sun Um, it would probably be one of my personal picks if I were going to try and go up against it And part of the reason why it was on my own team I'm gonna have to do the same. I'm sorry. It's just gudra because I was using gudra a lot in um the uruk up and It's just it's such a bulky mon that you really don't want to go up against if Especially you run that kind of core um of a team because Uh, it just has for example, you don't have the incineral variation. You could have the comfy's Um, which just have ally switch. They've got the floral floral healing. They've got, you know, all of that priority trick room I'd probably just say Comfy and gudra just because it adds a bit of shenanigans to it as well You could either go weakness policy gudra or you could go av and try to go and dig a drain into Sapsipa gudras to try to go you can even have mixed gudra. That's the thing about gudra. You can both run special and physical so I think it's just it was so good. I was loving gudra because it just got rid of all of my sun issues and It's just such a solid mon when going into that match up But obviously they're You know incineral is just such a good option As you can see from the top cut as well and with everything going by these people knew what they were doing It was full of them. So don't expect not to see incineral again. No, definitely Um before I hear your answer, I actually want to add one more pokemon that okay I think that I have not seen anybody except for fevzi mentioned this pokemon And then I'm thinking something too safety goggles rhodum heat is incredible against sun Yeah, that's a very good pick at same thing venus or cannot touch it Charizard cannot touch it Torquil cannot touch it Togikis cannot touch it right like you have the four sun pokemon completely beat by goggles rhodum heat Yeah, if you need something that specifically answers just sun, that's a very solid choice. Yeah, definitely. I do The rhodum heat is also just good in general I I think it's a lot better than people give their credit for because It beats a moongus as well You know the electric coverage is solid if you have speed control. It's good versus premarina, right if you get a nasty plot off It's pretty solid versus lap versus well for the same reason It's you know, it's like fire coverage is just generally very good electric coverage is very good Setting electric terrain with your goggles pokemon so your other pokemon can't go to sleep And I mean, I mean, I think we all know like why rhodum is such just like a generally good pokemon Right. It has great stats. It has like a generally pretty good move pool It's been good across the board for many many formats. Yeah. Yeah, also like it doesn't need much support You can run it bulky. You can run it fast It's it's very very much a standalone pokemon that you can slot into a lot of teams. I think It's true because you've got willow isp as well. You've got speed control aspect of it with electro web You've got options with it and even allies, which if you're that daring but in the comp that you're saying Um, it would be more as just being that standalone mon that it is itself The counter to so many mons or should I say archetypes? Yeah, I love rhodum here. I think it's such a good shout My answer was going to be incinero and gujra there, but uh, can I love is it coming out with that straight away? So that's like i'm copying you, but I honestly know I think gujra is a great shout I think from my discussions already. I think you can make a call of incin bravery and gujran And it's a good starting point if you want to go kind of anti-matter at the minute But um the the final three pieces are up to yourself to put together But things like rhodum heat. Yeah, definitely a pokemon. You know, it's always a pokemon It's that a little bit on the the side of an anti-matter pokemon You know, you don't see it generally we saw fevzy play a really strong team with it Actually on ladder n series 5 and he did very well with it He was constantly in the top 50 on his streams and things like that with it So it's a good example of that pokemon Coming in and disrupting those sort of kind of popular cores that we're seeing and especially if there's not the dust Clops there to kind of support those teams They don't really have too many options there uh to really to get rid of it and um You know, you can build up around that and make it a very strong Threat for your opponent. Um, we've got uh infested tenno I also need to give collin a big shout out for the raid. Thank you so much collin and welcome to everyone coming over For those that you are new, uh, we've got kunal. We've got costa and crim We are covering players cup uh preparation for players cup two starting this friday So hopefully it's entertaining for you guys. We've kind of been through the bare bones of the tournament the previous players won Um results things and we're just discussing teams and and best ways to kind of approach the tournament in general right now Um, so next on the agenda. Let's have a quick look. So we've covered um sun San dragapult talk a kiss. We haven't really touched on too much We've kind of briefly talked about dracos or covenite, uh gastro stuff Lapras we've briefly talked about pz We have mentioned but we haven't went in depth. Um It might be worth going into pz because you're not at the minute as well. It's obviously with series five um Kind of finish series six is the main format at the minute. Obviously. We're not playing that on players cup But polygons a a huge threat at the minute in series six Do you kind of see that carrying on into into players cup this weekend? Is it something that we're going to have to be? Well prepared for or do you think not so much? I think like with the inclusion again of like things like taranato I wouldn't be worried about it as much as I would be if I was playing series six That would be my my first thing Um to think about, you know, you've got a lot of different options now With the band pokemon allowed again, and I think they pair up and match up against things like pz That have kind of been let loose a little bit in series six They match up a lot better against them and kind of take away A little bit of the anxiety about playing those sort of pokemon that can kind of explode and Go to town and you if you're if you make a wrong move or a little bit unprepared for them So um, I think that if there are Only two teams that you prep for for players cup. They have to be sun and poor yonzi I think those are the two teams that require prep beforehand that you are not you can't go into the ic and say If I face this i'm just going to figure out how to play my way out of it during Like you have to know exactly We all laugh because we all know it's true and yeah So uh poor yonzi teams are generally Uh, you know, they're poor yonzi clafari. They generally have insinor. They generally have urshifu Some of them have like a pokemon like talon flame or like whimsicott that will give you that priority speed control um And so I the struggle for a lot of people is How do you break through this poor yonzi and clafari lead where clafari has friend guard? It has follow me and it can even protect right and just like that friend guard around longer for the poor yonzi and then poor yonzi is lowering your speed with max strike and then You know when you finally managed to kill one of these pokemon The urshifu comes in your pokemon or lower speed and it just gets to you know throw attacks into whatever it wants to yeah, and so one of the ways that we saw people counter this for players cup is Uh by using a lot of ally switch ghost pokemon. So ally switch dustclops ally switch dragon bolt and duck pond in particular Is a player from italy. He placed a top four in the european players cup And one of his main ways to beat poor yonzi was ally switch dragon bolt Where do you lead dragon bolt plus? I think it was lapris that he used for I forget which pokemon And his method of beating poor yonzi was the you ally switch and if the poor yonzi predicts the ally switch, right then You know, they have to make a hard read either they predict the ally switch Or they go for a neutral move like max dark to try and cover for it Yeah, and going for a max dark doesn't you know, it's it's not generating the momentum that they need out of poor yonzi's max terms Yeah, so that's a very yeah I I think that some of the other common ways to try and counter it is get anything with a solid resist like I think stew even mentioned it in the comments like versus sand so titar I think is is not is not a bad play against it. Um Maybe to rally it on in some ways. I think snarl is another good way to handle it though Um, I think that if you go in if you lean into pz and you start snarling right off the bat it does kind of Nerve up to the point of where you can kind of play around it, but you know, none of those are really like The best answer to pz, right? I think li had a really interesting way of attacking it by just deleting the clifery with Like a life orb gengar and then having urshi food sitting there next to it to just close combat and rip out the pz's heart so Yeah, I think it's when I've been doing that though on series six I feel like it's not something you could really get away with in series five if i'm completely honest with you I feel like you get away with it a lot more in series six because there are a lot less archetypes to kind of prepare for in series Six then there are in series five. So I think that that helps you kind of attack that combination A little bit easier and a bit more freer But where I was playing like yeah life orb gengar and then the urshi food next to it where I could always get the The ko onto the clifery Unless they were ridiculously Invested in special defense and then and then obviously like banded urshi food always going to pick up the knockout on pz So it kind of cleans up that lead without very much resource But I think because of the slots that you I mean you could maybe do it But it's it's kind of fitting in something that can consistently knock out the clifery in one turn without setup And allow maybe urshi food to do the same in that respect. It's always something to look at I just think it's maybe harder to implement in series five And a and a solid team build Um where you're covering lots of different archetypes that we're aware of then maybe a smaller pool of archetypes that you've got in series in series six, so I don't know if it's It's it's definitely a way of looking at it But I don't think it will be as easy to do that maybe and I think you're really looking at like like Kunal said about The player from Italy who it was utilizing It's a smart way of doing it utilize an ally switch To kind of be annoying against an annoying offensive pokemon and and you know really limiting your opponent's options there They're gonna have to make a read and if they get that read wrong then, you know 50 50 percent of the time You're gonna come out on the better side of that and that that's good You know without having to specifically prepare for that team you've got a game plan and you know Most of the time you're gonna come out on the better side of it, especially in the best of one format So that's the kind of the I think the smart way of looking at it But there's nothing wrong with looking at like a just an all out offensive mode as well If you've got if you've got the the room in your team to do that then definitely go for it It's an interesting way to go about it. I mean personally I prefer trick room and you know like then I can sit in there like with the team like I had And just follow me away and utilize eruptions or expanding force, etc Etc and then that just really eats away at it regardless of the friend guard or the clifari standing there clicking follow me Um makes it much more difficult and then PZ every time it's dropping whatever it's hitting is Benefiting you while you're sitting in that trick room Yeah, that's a good point. We've got stew there saying trick room PZ is something to be aware of though Drop an electric coverage is certainly a turn one play to be cautious. They call it and they're they're gonna use it and they have it Then yeah, it'd be interesting to know the stats on Trick room PZ these days because I'm not sure how many are running it, but it is definitely a thing I mean, I definitely know that I was still running it and it's just because you have that Flexibility of being able to say listen, I'm not just gonna go and drop your speed straight away I'm just gonna set up for my trick room on in the back. It could be ferrathorn Start setting up the opponent doesn't have any ferrathorn answers or it could be I don't I don't even know it could be any trick room sweeper But um, I was gonna say going back on to the talk of PZ I've been trying to deal with it as well with um, like you said canal you were talking about the italian player I've been trying to use a lowland marrow act because at least you cover for lightning Rod at least try to say the electric type coverage there and that's always a threat because You can have ally switch there But at the same time you have to be conscious about the huge amount of damage output that marrow act actually has so It's kind of a gamble I've been pairing that up with for example, like a corvinite where corvinite doesn't care about speed drops It's just going to be dropping your speed instead and it has a good match up against corvinite against claferi as well So there are there are venues to it But it's all down to if you want to go direct into getting rid of your opponents Claffery and then the pz Or if you want to just slow it down like rim was saying which is a really good strat as well You could waste the dynamics turns to with that. Let's say for example arc an iron which out speeds and go for the snarls Yeah, I think that's a really that's a really good example as well costa to just kind of get across to players that There are it doesn't need to be like one way for dealing with this this particular Like pairing, you know There are like innovative ways always to like dealing with certain threats And I think the example there is great with the the corvinite and the lala marrow arc is really unique Where you're kind of having that ally switch support But as well as that, you know with the mirror armor ability on the corvinite You're really kind of punishing the pz if it goes for anything Well, basically any attack honestly, you know and no matter what situation you're putting it in an uncomfortable position And that's a way of dealing with it and you know those two pokemon fit nicely into a really solid build You know, uh, whereas maybe more my point before was creme that I don't know if gango would fit into many Or something yeah, yeah the clafferry right away whatever whatever you want to use in that slot No, I know what you were getting at. Yeah, um, but yeah nice examples. I think And really interesting kunal come back to your original point there saying that obviously sun and then Pz other the two teams that you would definitely 100 prepare for going into this tournament Um, I think one of the things that I I was personally looking at when you look at the um, the top cut of The the the previous players cup. I'll just pull that up here for us to take a quick look at Um, again just for a reference here. Um I'm thinking okay drag a poll to incinero Togekiss and instantly I'm like, okay laprists does an amazing job here Can we see are we gonna see are a lot of players going to be thinking that and thinking We have touched slightly on on offensive tailwind laprists Are we going to be maybe looking at quite a few of those teams popping up with maybe the talon flame replacing the whimsy cop there because it gives you the coverage against really boom and Um, what Venus or yeah, you know, so And yeah, I think I think it could do it could basically Happen in that case because um talon flame it can also have quick guard absus as well If you want to get really cheeky and shut down any priority moves too because overall talon flame is really good Um, you just need to be able to understand when to bring it and if you have to bring it in the back as well um Because it's a good one to go up against especially imagine if it has like safety doddles Good luck trying to stop it if for example, you try to cheekily dynamics Who knows like you can just you can jump uh with talon flame It gives you that access to try to grab momentum as long as you're in a good spot But obviously this is series five talon flame has a bit of a better time than series six compared to series five, but um It's still a viable option to be honest Yeah, I think I would also expect to maybe see a little bit more of the special t flame Well, I mean lots of people will be running flare blitz But I feel like the higher up on ladder I went the more I saw special fire move t flame So it was like mixed. I'm not saying full special here Um, I think that that does make use of some of its abilities because I mean you intimidate a talon flame And it becomes pretty worthless pretty fast and incinerator is a very popular pokemon Yeah Yeah, I think uh, I also think that while lapras looks pretty good Uh, one of the big issues with lapras is that sand is very popular, right and lapras is not good versus t-tar or or Real boom is the big one that I was going to bring up because a lot of tea so lapras is good against Uh, rilla boom is you know, if a room is on that team, you have to play against it very differently You're not able to use lapras to its full potential and so Uh, if you do play and teach lapras My advice would be to make sure that you have specific targeted answers to rilla boom to t-tar Uh, maybe to like x control, right these pokemon that can tank through lapras's attacks and You know stall them out Because that's that's really the problem with lapras, right especially offensive is It's lapras does not have the best offensive stats. It really doesn't and so now Something that Is very important for it is being able to get kills while it can While it's dynamaxed because once the dynamax has it has a very hard time securing those kills You know, it's relying on hyper pump. It might be relying on blizzard. It might be relying on thunder Right because it needs it needs the base power of those moves for its dynamax to do enough damage Yeah, yeah I mean it's only additional benefit is that it can set up for some other things in the back with either Thunder to stop sleep as max electric or setting up rain to boost something like drakovish And obviously veil being the other big one But I mean it it's only going to carry you so far So like null is a hundred percent right like if you're if you're not going to plan I mean this this goes across the board too Like we just talked about all these pz counters Like if you're going to build a pz team and go into this and you're not going to Prepare yourself for what we just discussed as far as pz counters, then Maybe that's not the pz team to be running You've got to be ready for whatever is coming your way for the main portion of your team My hot take for the lapras if you do plan on going running with the lapras would be to try to fit in the covenite I think it really does Compliment the sand match up as well as the rilla boom match up for the lapras is because Is especially if you have like a bolt up maybe an iron defense set But I'd probably lean more towards a bolt upset It just gives you that viability to just go ahead and 1v3 Europe or an if those are the three months He has left in the back because especially if you have a raw avail set up for yourself It's just going to do everything for you Because that's what I've been experiencing and it is such a good feeling. That's a really good show I like that a lot. I think yeah, like you say you're all about the covenite tonight. I am. I am on the covenite train. I so am It's not bad pokemon either especially at the minute. I think with the the mirror armor. It's it's very good It's a good way to counteract incinero to a certain extent, you know So yeah, I like that combination a lot and it gives it gives lapras players or people that are thinking about lapras a lot to think about going into The event this weekend Um, all right. Well, that is really good. Like what have we got left to discuss? We talked about quite a lot so far. It's been really good I just want to say thanks again to all you guys for coming out and obviously everyone that's in the stream tonight It's uh, it's really great to be able to do this sort of thing And hopefully it's useful to you all and getting the insights from these great players that we've got with us tonight Obviously can I'll cost that in crim and just getting a bit of a headspace around getting prepared for Going into players cup two this weekend. So cindy race. Have we really talked too much about cindy race yet? We haven't talked a great deal about it. We saw How well it did in the um japan cup. We've briefly talked about it There obviously the um the japan Players cup was um, but we did discuss some counters too Yeah Do you expect it to be quite popular? I think I probably expect it to be one of the the most seen pokemon this weekend. I would say um But again Um, sorry, I think cindy race is going to be definitely popular It's you know, it's one of the go-to pokemon for Players who are trying to play the ic and get to their rating as fast as they can Right and it's a very reliable pokemon in terms of doing that You don't have to play long games you can get through all 15 of your games and you know like a couple hours Because cindy race just as I said earlier just generates offense every turn you know your Cinderace is always putting pressure on your opponents and they're forced to deal with it Instead of playing a positioning game and so Just you know by that merit alone It's naturally going to be a pokemon that a lot of players just kind of flocked to because This pokemon is pretty easy to use You know, I'm going to send this pokemon out and I'm going to do damage And I'm not going to have to worry about anything else um and so I think a lot of what also makes cinderace good in kind of a similar vented dragonpole is Uh, cindy race is very very reliant on the pokemon around it to take advantage of what it's doing And so a pokemon that you have to watch out for our bisharp or my lotic are um Like rillaboom can take advantage of it very well uh And so these are all like, you know, when when prepping for cinderace you have to think about First of all, how are you answering the cinderace on the lead matchup? If if someone leads cinderace into you, what are you leading into it? And how are you going to stop it from snowballing off of its three dynamics turns?  If there's cinderace close to airstream, how are you going to avoid dying to the bisharp assurance that's coming after it? Or how are you going to avoid uh letting the endgame my lotic sweep you? Right stuff like that Yeah, absolutely And so I think a very good team to look at this In this case is I just linked in the private chat It's the team that uh john evans and nails used in the first place And jody used it as well.  Yeah, i'm just gonna grab that now And get the screen share back on It's gonna say a bit impatient that crim Yeah Give me give me a minute Okay trigger fingers. Yeah, okay. So we got yeah, this is uh, I I know this team Really nice team. Actually, I think addy's got a really great video with Jonathan and Nils on on the actual team and going through in detail. So definitely Check that out. We we linked it earlier and I'll link it again at the end of the the uh The stream for you guys to check out, but we've got the melodic the grassy seed there the um Rilla boomer sold fest the choice band tyranitar. That's a really nice pick. I do like that I think it's a bit of a surprise factor as well. Uh, the the life orb Cinderacee uh incineroar claferi and that makes up this six So, yeah, do you want to if you got anything you want to Mention about this team canal because you're quite familiar with this one as well. I think Yeah, so this so uh, generally senderace teams are very focused on The lead map, you know getting the lead right generating enough offense to just sweep the game This team actually does It uses centers in a very different way. It uses senderacee in such a way to Play like a more positioning oriented game Not dynamicsing super early just kind of getting the perfect board position Taking off kills like getting picks where you can and then end gaming very well with either cinderacee or ttar or mylotic Um, and so one of the main ways that we see that is the claferi has sing right Yeah, sing is very good In this game, uh, because you have you have a 55 chance of just disabling your pokemons your opponents dynamics, right? It's just gone and then i'm closing them to rage as well The instant has burning jealousy Yeah, this the cinderacee is burning jealousy, which neutralizes the opponent's offensive pressure as well Mylotic does that as well, right your opponents are Kind of forced not to use Their primaries or their primary max moves against you Yeah Rillaboom is you know good at repositioning good at doing chip damage So that the tarantor can come in click choice band rock sled or the cinderacee can come in a dynamics later I think that helping hand is a really cool thing too on melodic Especially next to cinderacee. I considered the same thing because You there's a lot actually a lot of ko's that you can pick up having that helping hand And lots of times you do want to be able to lead the mylodic with the cinderacee For fear of the fact that they may lead something with intimidate, right? So Um, I think that that's a really nice tech to see on that Yeah, and a lot of it with the real agreement as well or the mylodic is the grassy seed benefits But yeah, it's not carrying the coil, but it's still getting that defense boost, right? Yeah Helping hand grassy glide is hitting, you know, it's hitting laparous. It's hitting rhodums. It's hitting premarina And it's taking out a lot of threats to the steam very very well Yeah, the choice helping hand plus choice band t-tar is killing the dust globs. It's you know, it's hurting the p2 and so this team is able to Like hold steady in front of a lot of Common cores that are trying to generate offense as fast as possible And that's a very different take on cinderacee that I think is interesting Yeah Yeah, I think you're right just it kind of shows that it's a momentum It's kind of like stalls out the momentum from the opponent's side It's like you're just trying to stout out with your initial leads for example I mean obviously dependent on matchup, but um, I feel I like you said for now It's kind of have cinderacee in the back as long as you've gone ahead and you've kind of weakened Your opponent's pokemon to start off with or just kind of force them to get into a position where they get Crawled out from cinderacee dynamax in the back And a lot of the time when players see cinderacee and team preview they're they're instantly thinking about leading against the cinderacee as well So automatically you're leading it in the back It kind of gives you the advantage straight away because if you can deal with those lead combinations that are meant to be the answers to cinderacee then They've got no chance to come back late game with the cinderacee to come in and with its dynamax turn still to go You know, it's it's it's a nice Alternative way of looking at using cinderacee rather than just chucking it in up front and then clicking the Gigantamax or dynamax button turn one and going from there Even though that is an option and it does work sometimes, you know But I like I like the flexibility of this team's gotten obviously the offensive Kind of build that it's got to it as well. So, uh, yeah, it's a really nice nice example And probably a good one to look at and study. I'll throw it out in the chat for you guys If you'd like to check out that poker piece there A bit more in detail, but definitely want to take note of and some of the ideas in this build Really good to talk about. I don't know if there's much else to really mention about cinderacee, you know, I think that kind of Sends it up pretty well. We there was one more team I wanted to go through and that was the team that Yuri used in the uh, the champion's invitational the right Yeah, that's the other side of cinderacee, right where you're Very offensive. You're trying to do as much damage as possible And I let us well Yes, act to support a lot too I mean 100 with that team like whatever you whatever you're clicking pretty much except for maybe like max flow Whenever is helping your team almost no matter what you have on the field. Yeah, exactly exactly Uh, and I mean this team like it won the the kickoff invitational for good reason, right? It has Very very offensive, uh, pokemon on it has wood hammer on the railroad instead of grassy glide It has the bisharp with uh, I believe in the focus so it has, you know more longevity on the field It has the assurance as this um The tokyo kiss was Uh, it it had dasunglemon heatwave actually didn't have airstream Uh, and it was the barrier. So it was a more supportive tokyo kiss actually on this team Um, but this you know, it's another it's like the perfect example Of the other kind of cinderacee that I was mentioning where The the one that we looked at prior is more defensive and more gain momentum over time and this one is like I'm going to win this turn and you have It's on you to stop me It's got the dustglobs premarina set up too that we've seen a lot of people used to to great success So I mean he didn't necessarily have to be running cinderacee all the time There was always that threat in the back depending on what he was looking at staring down the other six Yep. Yeah, exactly Yeah, and it's just you know, this team has so many mid ground pokemon. It has the real boom It has the premarina It has the tokyo kiss that don't really cared that much about the speed controller the the state of the board Yeah, they're you know, they're able to do their thing and that's why they mesh so well with both the cinderacee and the dustglobs mode Where they can go fast or they can go slow. It doesn't matter because they don't care Yeah, yeah, it's that multi mode kind of flexibility that the teams that you see on the top usually have Because it just allows you to reposition yourself dependent on the situation and the board play being able to switch from one mode rapidly to another and Because yeah, you see the hyper offensive kind of like state of play of it with the Combination of the cinderacee and the bishop, but then you've got the bit more You got the dustlops in the back or in the front should I say And the tokyo set up paired onto it So it's really interesting to see these teams how well they perform and there's a lot of thought put behind It which and you can just see the synergy between them. It just really works It honestly does as long as you position yourself Appropriately and you see what you need to do ahead of going into the game Yeah, yeah I think leads are like well, I mean, they've always been important, but super super super important in this format I mean like you do not want to sacrifice yourself down to by leading something That could potentially be a Completely blow up in your face if they set put out just a completely different lead that you didn't expect Like hot counts it. Yeah. Yeah Exactly So, I mean you do kind of have to split yourself like down that line to be able to handle whatever you're going to handle That's why I am a big fan of like teams that can kind of slow down um A number of these common cores and then you try and dynamax later as opposed to just trying to go for the kill Right off the bat. Hmm. Yeah Think a team that we haven't really talked too much about is kind of just this one David is team with the the p2 the dragapult prim Cinear or really boom and tracking. It's kind of like your standard good stuffs team I know I mentioned it earlier with alistar's build with a bit of a variation on his There it is with the incineroar there and then that was a team. I really liked but For consistency alone, I think this team is one to definitely be aware of going into To this weekend. I think especially with the track young That does give you some nice options against things like charizard Um, obviously tyranitar as well. Um, and and certain ocean food variants. Um, That we may or may or may not see, you know, so That's definitely a team. I think a lot of players need to be because it's it's so versatile I think it's probably one of the more versatile teams that we've got in the format of the minute at least That particular build it feels like it's got The tools to kind of and some most things in the former or at least that's in my mind It feels like that that that way, you know what I mean I think that it's worth mentioning too that you've noticed on a number of these teams going down to that you've got the combo of Incineroar and rillaboom Which does allow you to do things like Throw and it allows you to get in fake outs despite indy D Which I think is pretty important in a number of ways and have double fake out in general has obviously worked out for A number of these teams going down this list of top teams Yeah We just had a question uh, uh, did uh, it's from nat to be chill. So thanks nat Did magnazone get mentioned covered already? We haven't actually talked at all about magnazone yet. So be interesting to maybe Throw it out to you guys to see what your thoughts are on magnazone I think we're going into series the end of series five on the ladder Magnazone was really starting to kind of ramp up its its usage And you've seen a lot more of it at the end of series five just before the ban list was announced So it kind of felt like the momentum of it was about to kind of get really like kind of explored almost But it didn't obviously get the chance with the ban list coming into effect So we didn't really get to see the most out of it unfortunately But do you think we'll see much of it going into this this weekend? Just want to say one thing before I felt like for now was going to go for it. So I apologize We saw Japan as in Due due fashion as they always do. Um, they're ahead of the game We saw them in their japan in the tournament that they had that it placed the top four I think second Magnazone correct. Yeah Yeah, so it's a very very interesting pokemon to Bring as long as it doesn't face sand But then it has The ways that it could go around I think especially in takuto's team He might have had a babiri berry on the toad just as well And he's got yeah He's got double redirection as well to kind of support it as well. So That definitely helps out a bunch, doesn't it? I think you saw the standard set though when you just pulled it up on picolytics Like I mean it's its main goal is to like flash cannon Like max steel boost up defense a whole bunch and then just start going for body presses after the fact I'd be interested to see what the number one used item is on it at the moment and And ability for that matter. Yeah weakness policy sturdy So, I mean, I've seen that also used effectively and well not really effectively But in the face of a number of different things like so it's I think it's it struggles like so it's not so great against sun, right? Um, it despite it being able to like thunderbolt to charizard, I guess or something like that But I do think that weakness policy sturdy is an interesting aspect that you'll have to take into account if you're going to see a Magnazone because it then can retaliate like if if they don't double target the magnazone And they have a sun team and they just blast away at it then I'm rather sure that plus two t-bolt drop usually drops whatever charizard's on the field So that is an option for those people But I think its primary function Is to just boost its defense with max steels and then to body press after it's done being maxed Yeah, so Magnazone is my favorite series five pokemon. I think is one of the strongest pokemon in series five um, I think that The best set on it is grassy seed with analytic as it's ability cool and so Uh, I'm sure you guys have heard of a player named brago. He's you know, one of the best Pokemon players period, right? He's one of the best NA players constantly And so The day after the format was announced he hopped into his chat and he was like, you know grassy seed magnazone is kind of cool And no one really thought about it until before players come when you know We we started looking at it again. Uh, roger in particular looked at it in context with He was running so can tell you on With icy wind and he had a really good team So so can tell you on plus magnazone. Obviously very cool Um, someone mentioned that magnazone is not very good against sand and I actually strongly disagree I think magnazone is an incredible sand matchup because body press is the most broken move TPC or like game freak is ever added to the game That's true. Oh, that's true I think the thing that makes magnazone so amazing is that It's able to dynamics very safely in early games and it's able to carry that momentum all the way through the game Because steel type is incredible, right? You know, it's one of the best offensive typings in the game Yeah, so especially when carrying a grassy seed or like weakness policy, for example and and with pokemon like incineroar and arcanine and Uh pokemon that are clicking max warm winds, you know, dropping attacks Magnazone is able to stand up to defensive attacks incredibly well Uh, and so it gets to either like steel spike or just, you know, click raw analytic boosted thunderbolts flash cannons body presses And it hits very very hard Um, I think that it's just like, you know, if you're looking for a steel type if you're looking for electric coverage It's a great pokemon to have on your team And if you compare it with a real boom, I think you're gonna get the most value out of it Especially with the analytic ability Yeah combination just between those two is so nice as well, isn't it? Um, how do you feel about its matchup versus poor ganzi? Uh, it's great versus poor ganzi. So, uh, the team that ragov used you can find it on adi's channel. He did an interview with ragov um Actually, I don't think we used magnazone as part of that matchup We we ended up using icy wind and teleon plus, uh Like we maxed the real move and clicked the bug move the the bug max move to lower poor ganzi's special attack but Magnazone is still very good because poor ganzi does not hit it very hard Uh, given that it's, you know, magnazone's resisting the electric move resisting the normal move Magnazone is able to steal spike the clifari and just kill it, right? um And it's also able to use lightning to hit the urshifu if trick room goes up It's able to body press the like potential tyranitar It's just, you know, it has the coverage is just crazy steal electric fighting coverage is crazy um And so I think uh, even if you, you know, I I'd something like the weakness policy said but even if you run that I I think magnazone is definitely a pokemon to look out for and a pokemon to consider using It just has so many good favorable matchups toki kiss also is one of them You know, there's not many pokemon that hit toki kiss very well And I think this happens to be one of them that also happens to hit the t-tart So I think that's very important And you have to be scared if you're a toki kiss and in case you prop a weakness policy on the magnazone too So you always have that in the battle you had to Yeah, definitely definitely want to watch out for this weekend And I think we're probably not going to see anything but more magnazone going forward as well I think when more players kind of realize how good it is as a pokemon Uh, it will probably be flooded and then by that time it'll be Time for us to move into series seven. So probably not have to worry about it anymore. So No, definitely a really good point there I think from all of you and I think just to highlight in the fact that magnazone Such a strong, uh pokemon there and with the grassy seed as well It just you know makes it ridiculously strong the analytic as well as Really underrated ability the study is really good there But I don't think it necessarily needs it all the time and with some, you know, nice coverage for Maybe some more of the threatening ground types that we'll see in the format You're gonna be fine to play around those and really make the most out of magnazone In in the format anyway. So we've got so far Incineroar bravery magnazone Gudra was that the four We're kind of slowly building a team up here. I'm only messing but they're they're kind of some nice picks that we've mentioned tonight You've probably covered all of our hot takes that we had that were good for the end of this video Believe me. I have some hot takes By the way, ally switch on magnazone people have to be aware of this as well. Don't forget Yeah, it does get it. Yeah. Yeah It is one of those. Yeah Yeah, it's good good to point out because I mean you are gonna see that like that randomly Like that's what I was kind of trying to touch on earlier We're like there's gonna be surprises because I mean best of one can pull that off You know all the time. Yeah. Yeah, so you're gonna you're gonna be you're gonna see Things that you wouldn't normally expect to see in like a best of three setting That can perform better because of us being in this format Yeah So ally switch definitely gonna be something it will be seeing a lot of this weekend for sure So be prepared for that Magnazone will be moving on a hot take soon because we don't have that much longer to go my friends because we're getting Pretty close to covering most of the things that we wanted to talk about tonight um, we've covered obviously the sun uh teams sand We've talked we haven't talked about directly, but we've indirectly talked about them in other cores that are very popular that you'll see a lot of And especially this weekend Briefly talked about drakes or covenite Gastrodon stuff the lapras we've covered pz cinderace So I don't know if there's any other kind of archetypes that you guys would like to mention before we move on and kind of wrap up Before we finish this up today because I feel like we've covered quite a lot of things for what players should be expecting going into this weekend and I think it sets up a lot of Especially the newer players up with the knowledge that they'll need And maybe a few hot takes as well to to pokemon to look at going into the tournament, but if there's any cause we've Maybe overlooked a little bit of things that we've kind of neglected a little bit It would be he knows a chance to to mention them Hat and dd is definitely one that I would probably throw up into the mix But um other than that, I can't really think of too many other cores that really would stand out for me So rather than cores, I think um We like I want to touch on some individual pokemon. I think wimmscott is something we haven't really talked about that much I think the whole idea of procking weakens policy on one of your pokemon is not something that we've talked about too much as well and so Wimmscott obviously, you know prankster. It has a huge number of moves that can run charm. It can run fake tears It generally carries tailwind To great support pokemon it also gets helping hand um, and so That's something that I think people should definitely expect with like an offensive point. Wimmscott with lapras Uh, is definitely something you should expect Um, wimmscott derailed on is, you know, it won the first ever 2020 regional, right? Or yeah, and you see it a lot with some of the other faster ones like cinder ace and pz To like I mean just because it's not on all of those teams doesn't mean that you're not going to see it on some of them For sure. Yeah. Yeah, exactly Yeah, that was Dallas wasn't it? No, it was. Yep. Yep. Yeah Yep beat up. Yeah, absolutely. I mean any any kind of self-proc in general We yeah, I mean we haven't talked a ton about that But I mean there's toga kiss is is in this right? So I mean you're gonna have follow me Out the wazoo. So it's not always the easiest thing to nail off I think if you're gonna be working with teams like that where you're gonna self-proc And you don't have a spread move that can do self-procking for you Then you do have to have an answer to the redirection that you're gonna want to be able to deal with first and then Move on to your self-proc plays later in the game. Yeah Yeah, and that makes a lot of sense Yeah, because redirection is going to be everywhere, isn't it? Um, I don't mean trick rim as well On the beat up note, too Like I mean a lot of people go with terracquian, but like I think av cobalion is definitely a beat up threat that I would be worried about too I'm not sure how big the usages on it, but av beat up coba was a lot of fun for me. I got to play for a little while. Um, lee's uh colossal um team with sneezle and av cobalion that was uh That did more work on ladder than I planned on it doing Yeah, there's a good job against pz as well that so there you go. Yeah, I mean exactly so not not just the av cobalion, but the um I'm probably not even saying that right, but the colossal as well I mean both pz resist to the point where it can at least hit it back It can at least survive in front of it. It doesn't make its job any easier Yeah, I think a kutesh actually Used cobalion in the top like in the finals of player cup In the final bracket This team is pretty interesting if we want to take a look at that real quick Yeah, that's being that one out in general though. In general, I don't really expect to see cobalion orver is done I think they're both not very good pokemon outside of like very young is worse though. Yeah Yeah Pulver is in no, I mean we're kind of on the outskirts of things here I feel like at this point So it was just something I felt was worth mentioning while we're talking self proc Yeah, because it's it's definitely one of the bigger self proc users. I think Obviously, I think coal is is the number one self proc user that I would I would expect to see getting proc Yeah, like coal returns are probably Yeah, yeah, yeah because you can you can proc that more reliably with spread moves I I think the individual like it's it's it's cool to perhaps have like coal as an option on a team where you know if you feel like you're not going to encounter follow me on your first turn and You've tacked aqua jet onto something or whatever then that could work as as something nice for you but I think predominantly the biggest ones that you're going to see as far as like self-proc'ing things are is exactly what kuna mentioned Yep. Yeah, I think Look out for just to kind of finish this conversation off is no, no, that's cool, mate A lot of the self-proc, you know happens with like dust cups looking bulldoze on t-tar I think that something that people should watch out for is Proc'ing weakness policy with a faster bulldoze like arcanine or like maybe even just like looking earthquake with exodrome Right. Yeah, you have to rally it on or weakness velocity tyranitar. I think those are both very strong options as well Yeah, they're really nice things and good kind of food for thought for players to think about as well Um, what I was going to say actually just getting on to colossal again um, it's been quite popular recently, but uh, all your thoughts on Scarf d'Oshifu Rapid strike it's a very solid answer for the colossal teams and kind of shuts them down pretty easily You know got to watch out for the aqua jet. Um I mean similar vein of like scarf fish, right? It's a bit better though Yeah, it doesn't worry about it doesn't get affected by intimidate exactly intimidate and goes through protects I think that as long as you've got redirection And you've got star first your food rapid strike. It pretty much shuts down cinderace leads. Uh, sure Um, especially It depends depends if you've got helping hand as well. You can pick up the ko for sure on cinderace Um, but that's as long as you don't expect. Let's say a tailwind support on the side Yeah, yeah, I mean there's there's also I think if I remember correctly if they're running cinderace without like any bulk If you run adamant scarf, um rapid strike I think it puts it in range Like 90 something percent of the time to knock itself out with life orb So that is kind of a play But I mean it is still going to get at least one hit off And that's also depending on the fact that it has like zero bulk invested in it too now I would say probably 90% of aces don't have any bulk, but Probably 95. I mean, yeah, I don't expect many to you you often need it to like be able to ko most of what you need You need pretty much all of them. Yeah. Yeah 100% But I think it's good. It's good because um, you get to outspeed Certain threats you get to outspeed the weevile that we've been seeing no we've out sneeze all and we've out You get to outspeed them both when they usually like being paired up next to colossal Um, obviously has a surprise factor. It is best of one. So surprise factor is a thing But of course rapid strike