Hi. I'm Zee Costagliola, and I've been playing VGC for over a decade, since I was 11 years old. I have top cut a regional ever year since 2018, have day 2'd numerous tournaments in the past 12 months, and am a multi-time World Championships qualifier. I'm going to be writing multiple of these long winded forum posts with advice on a specific topic for people on this website interested in getting into VGC for themselves.
The topic of this thread will be improvement.
Players getting into VGC, especially around the Smogon community, come from all backgrounds and skill levels: SPL starters, DOU ladder heroes, or just people looking for a competitive hub. My hope is that this rant will be useful for everyone. Let's get into it.
It's day 1 of deciding you want to start playing VGC (while there is both a gameplay component and a circuit component, this article will focus strictly on gameplay). My biggest piece of advice to you, more than anything else, is to take a successful team and hit up the ladder on PS or in Scarlet/Violet or join a Limitless tournament that works for your schedule.
You can find successful teams from a lot of different places. Limitless, the tournament platform that I just linked, displays the Open Team Sheet for all entrants, like this:
You can even copy it and paste it right into the Showdown teambuilder and all you have to do is add EVs and Natures. The other website I'm going to recommend to you is top cut explorer. This is a wonderful automated resource that compiles the top teams and their open team sheets from major events. You can quickly sort by the Pokemon or other details you're looking for too if you have a preference. If I wanted to search for all the Regidrago teams that made day 2 of the most recent regional, I would see this:
However, these are just open teamsheets, which means they're missing stats. If you're just getting into the game you probably don't know the optimal EVs to run and that's okay. There are a lot of resources that compile common EV spreads for you to try, such as Brady Smith's VGC Corner page, the Smogon PokeDex, or just the Showdown usage stats themselves.
This isn't to say that you should steal teams forever, but that starting out that way will do you way more good than harm and the opposite is rarely true. Once you understand more about the game, you can easily start working on your own builds, and I would encourage that. It's way better to show up to an event with an original squad than something your opponent has seen on the ladder 500 times, but you have to be competent to build such a squad and have it be effective.
Okay so you've found a team you want to try and you know where you can go find games. What's the next step?
Playing those games. It may sound obvious, but a lot success in VGC is a direct measure of input and output. As someone once told me, "VGC tournaments are like exams and you guys aren't studying hard enough". Once you ladder a lot or play a lot of limitless tournaments, you can quickly gain a feel for how certain Pokemon interact, when opponents are likely to tera their Pokemon and which Pokemon they'll opt to tera, and how your team can be used to challenge the other teams in the metagame. If you're coming from other Smogon formats, you might be a little surprised at how much emphasis I'm placing on team v team interactions, but these are way more important in VGC since there are a lot of constraints to be put on a team you're running for at least 9 rounds against opponents you know nothing about. This is why I would recommend playing on Showdown the most: you can save your replays and study them vs common cores/teams to develop consistent plans that you can start using in tournaments. In fact, this is how I do the majority of my prep.
This definitely isn't going to be as linear as this article has made it sound so far. You are going to take teams, realize you dislike them, have win streaks, loss streaks, and overall your process is going to oscillate between It's So Over and We're So Back more times than an Incineroar clicks Parting Shot in an average bo3. But I promise you that if you follow this process as a beginner, you are going to accelerate your development far more than trying to build teams for a meta you know nothing about, not using online tools/data, and expecting to squeeze water from stone.
What are some other things you can do to fast-track improvement?
-Practice in a group. If you have a group of friends wanting to pick up the game, make a discord server and make it a habit for everyone to share replays, talk teams, and discuss the metagame together. It'll be way more fun for you and having people to bounce ideas off of will go a long way and assisting development. If you don't have people to do this with when you're starting out, I suggest making friends in the discord servers for Limitless tournaments or getting involved in your local community if you have one. Also, if you have access to someone who's better than you at the game, reach out to them! Odds are they'll be happy to answer your questions and it'll benefit you a lot too.
-Watch tournaments. The Pokemon Company International will stream major events in Europe and North America and you should be watching them. See how the games are being played out, draw your own conclusions about the metagame, and try to be a step ahead when it's your turn.
-Keep playing! VGC evolves at a rapid pace and for as long as you're interested in the game it's important to be tapped in. Make sure if a new team is popping up, especially because of a recent deep tournament run, you make note of it and start planning for it. This includes attending locals if you have them, and you can find those on the Event Locator.
Really that's all there is to it. All of this that I've talked about in this article is my entire prep process for tournaments, and if it works for me I know it can work for you too.
This thread will be left open for questions/comments/addendums, I hope you found it helpful if you read it!
The topic of this thread will be improvement.
Players getting into VGC, especially around the Smogon community, come from all backgrounds and skill levels: SPL starters, DOU ladder heroes, or just people looking for a competitive hub. My hope is that this rant will be useful for everyone. Let's get into it.
It's day 1 of deciding you want to start playing VGC (while there is both a gameplay component and a circuit component, this article will focus strictly on gameplay). My biggest piece of advice to you, more than anything else, is to take a successful team and hit up the ladder on PS or in Scarlet/Violet or join a Limitless tournament that works for your schedule.
You can find successful teams from a lot of different places. Limitless, the tournament platform that I just linked, displays the Open Team Sheet for all entrants, like this:
You can even copy it and paste it right into the Showdown teambuilder and all you have to do is add EVs and Natures. The other website I'm going to recommend to you is top cut explorer. This is a wonderful automated resource that compiles the top teams and their open team sheets from major events. You can quickly sort by the Pokemon or other details you're looking for too if you have a preference. If I wanted to search for all the Regidrago teams that made day 2 of the most recent regional, I would see this:
However, these are just open teamsheets, which means they're missing stats. If you're just getting into the game you probably don't know the optimal EVs to run and that's okay. There are a lot of resources that compile common EV spreads for you to try, such as Brady Smith's VGC Corner page, the Smogon PokeDex, or just the Showdown usage stats themselves.
This isn't to say that you should steal teams forever, but that starting out that way will do you way more good than harm and the opposite is rarely true. Once you understand more about the game, you can easily start working on your own builds, and I would encourage that. It's way better to show up to an event with an original squad than something your opponent has seen on the ladder 500 times, but you have to be competent to build such a squad and have it be effective.
Okay so you've found a team you want to try and you know where you can go find games. What's the next step?
Playing those games. It may sound obvious, but a lot success in VGC is a direct measure of input and output. As someone once told me, "VGC tournaments are like exams and you guys aren't studying hard enough". Once you ladder a lot or play a lot of limitless tournaments, you can quickly gain a feel for how certain Pokemon interact, when opponents are likely to tera their Pokemon and which Pokemon they'll opt to tera, and how your team can be used to challenge the other teams in the metagame. If you're coming from other Smogon formats, you might be a little surprised at how much emphasis I'm placing on team v team interactions, but these are way more important in VGC since there are a lot of constraints to be put on a team you're running for at least 9 rounds against opponents you know nothing about. This is why I would recommend playing on Showdown the most: you can save your replays and study them vs common cores/teams to develop consistent plans that you can start using in tournaments. In fact, this is how I do the majority of my prep.
This definitely isn't going to be as linear as this article has made it sound so far. You are going to take teams, realize you dislike them, have win streaks, loss streaks, and overall your process is going to oscillate between It's So Over and We're So Back more times than an Incineroar clicks Parting Shot in an average bo3. But I promise you that if you follow this process as a beginner, you are going to accelerate your development far more than trying to build teams for a meta you know nothing about, not using online tools/data, and expecting to squeeze water from stone.
What are some other things you can do to fast-track improvement?
-Practice in a group. If you have a group of friends wanting to pick up the game, make a discord server and make it a habit for everyone to share replays, talk teams, and discuss the metagame together. It'll be way more fun for you and having people to bounce ideas off of will go a long way and assisting development. If you don't have people to do this with when you're starting out, I suggest making friends in the discord servers for Limitless tournaments or getting involved in your local community if you have one. Also, if you have access to someone who's better than you at the game, reach out to them! Odds are they'll be happy to answer your questions and it'll benefit you a lot too.
-Watch tournaments. The Pokemon Company International will stream major events in Europe and North America and you should be watching them. See how the games are being played out, draw your own conclusions about the metagame, and try to be a step ahead when it's your turn.
-Keep playing! VGC evolves at a rapid pace and for as long as you're interested in the game it's important to be tapped in. Make sure if a new team is popping up, especially because of a recent deep tournament run, you make note of it and start planning for it. This includes attending locals if you have them, and you can find those on the Event Locator.
Really that's all there is to it. All of this that I've talked about in this article is my entire prep process for tournaments, and if it works for me I know it can work for you too.
This thread will be left open for questions/comments/addendums, I hope you found it helpful if you read it!
