Hi, Friends— long time no see.
Ratings are out! Wow! I ended with a final rating of 1701 pts, putting me in 511th place. My record was 31-14. I am not a terribly skilled player, so this exceeded my expectations.
I sympathize with everyone who, earlier in this thread, complained about this format. Yeah, it was pretty similar to the Alola friendly. But I was pretty grateful for that.
When I first heard about the Alola friendly, I committed roughly a month to planning my team, testing on showdown, getting my game ready. But then something happened. Those of us who had not performed a game sync before around January 1st were prohibited from doing so. Just straight-up locked out of the PGL website, unable to sign in. This lasted until sometime around the end of February. Idk if it was just my region or what, but I saw a lot of complaints about it at the time.
I had given up hope of ever using the team I prepared for the Alola friendly… until now!
Imo very standard team. I felt that defensive Gyarados was vastly underrated prior to the Alola friendly. Being a hard stop to most Dragonite, Mimikyu, and especially Garchomp proved to be invaluable.
The team is crazy weak to Cloyster. I was hoping this competition would follow suit with the Alola friendly and that Cloyster wouldn’t show up much, but since it was ranked #6 in usage we can see how wrong I was. I think I lucked out, though, as I faced 8 Cloysters and got past 6 of them. Most lead Cloysters were taken out by leading with Muk and going clear smog as they shell smashed. Better players were obviously keen to that tactic and played around it. If I could revise the team, I would probably at least tinker with giving Celesteela giga drain or energy ball to better deal with cloyster/gastrodon (who this team also struggles with).
I was very fortunate that there was almost no luck involved in my games. No game-deciding crits, no freezes that mattered, no burns off of flare blitz. The games I lost, I deserved to lose. I do regret that I didn’t prepare much specifically for this tournament (and subsequently got trashed by nidoking in two games).
All in all, was fun! Highlights for me included ruining the dreams of a ~1800 player running a stall team. I don’t think there is any finer pleasure in life.