Alright anxiety about going off to college and other irl stuff has made me a slight insomniac lately, so I need to write to destress. This likely won't be a series I keep up, but I hope it works. In this blog, I'm going to go over one issue I see with VGC, and ideas for fixing them, while trying to fall asleep and listening to The Eagles.

Lack of Written Reports

This is perhaps the most unspoken issue with VGC, and the one that I see as the biggest problem. Yeah, you can say it's Verlisify dragging the reputation of players like Ray and Wolfe through the mud, but there's no excuse for why there have been so few reports the last 2 seasons.

Think about this. The 2012 season had more written team reports than 2016 and 2017-- combined!! Now, part of the issue is the biggest name players do have YouTube channels they share their teams to on occasion. But those teams don't give a great scope of the entire team-building spectrum.

I often find myself going back to Nugget Bridge and scouring VGC12-15 team reports, partially for ideas for BSD teams, but also for other interesting ideas. Since matches from pre-2013 are hard to come by, written reports are all that I really have to learn about these older games. But from these reports I've seen some cool teams that would never be piloted on YouTube. I seriously doubt that Markus Stadter would try Choice Specs Cresselia(2012 US Nationals Champion-Aaron Z), or Screech Crobat + Houndoom(Top 8 Ft Wayne 2013- Sam H/Dr. Fidget). Why? Because they're "best-of-one gimmicks," but also it's not the common train of thought-- and with no resource for these ideas, it's not something that would cross everyone's mind.

Ok Raden, why should we care about a lack of written resources?

Well, examine the purpose of YouTube vs something like Nugget Bridge.

YouTube is great at showing how a team works, teaching skills, and, for my purposes, getting an entire team as a starting point.

Nugget Bridge accomplishes the same purpose of getting many teams as a starting point, but what's brilliant about the reports archive is digging around for a specific Pokemon and finding a spread that works for what you need to do, saving you time and energy. Just the other day I was trying to find a bulky Saftey Goggles Heat-Rotom spread. Lone behold, I was able to find one and I've been using Cybertron's Heat-Rotom spread from 2014. Or when I was in need of a check to Suicune and rain teams, I stumbled across the idea for a super bulky Mega Venusaur that accomplished what I needed it to, courtesy of RedStriker's 2015 10th Place Oregon team.

Getting ideas like these from what's worked for others is how VGC grows. It's my firm belief that the lack of written team reports is the number one reason why this format isn't as diverse as it could be.

I mean hell, BUTTERFREE made top cut at San Jose this year. This is an extreme case, but it's worth pointing out cuz who wouldn't get excited to see BUTTERFREE KICK SOME BUTT!!

Ok Raden, why not have everyone make a blog and they post their teams to that? Would that make you happy?

Not really. What made Nugget Bridge the beast of a resource was the fact that I could scour 30 pages of teams at once, sometimes with multiple variants in one blog. There are easily over 1000 Pokemon and sets just lying around in reports on Nugget Bridge, waiting to be used.

At this point, I should probably address the elephant, er rhino, in the room-- Trainer Tower.

If I'm being honest, Trainer Tower currently is a joke. I can count on my hands the number of reports Trainer Tower has, and they're not even that good compared to what Nugget Bridge did.

It also might just be me, but Trainer Tower feels more elitist compared to Nugget Bridge. Part of the glory of Nugget Bridge was you didn't need to even win a regional to have a report posted. From what I can gather just by looking at it, all you needed was a well written and detailed blog about a team that did well at an official event, or something like Nugget Bridge Major. Trainer Tower pushes out mostly teams that have had continuous, high ranking success, usually only ones that have Top Cut events.

The thing is, using "did this team Top Cut?" as a benchmark is a flawed concept. There are dozens of reasons why a team didn't top cut, from poor composition to 4 consecutive Draco Meteor misses(Latios!!!). The point of a report isn't always to showcase "The Best of The Best of The Best, sir!"(comment if you get that). The point is to provide resource material for others to get ideas.

Here's one of my favourite stories to illustrate this concept. In 2014, Nikolai Zielenski won the Senior World championships with an unusual Pokemon-- Gengar. Now Gengar in 2014 may not sound unusual-- it was one of the best checks to Kangaskhan. But Nikolai ran Focus Sash, Timid, Trick Room Gengar. This was able to catch many opponents off guard, and help win him the title.

But it wasn't Trick Room Gengar's first showing at high level play. Ray Rizzo had previously piloted TR Gengar to help him in 2010?(correct me if I'm wrong)

To sum up-- write more team reports. Share more ideas. Let me sleep.