EUIC 2025 Personal Reflection + Learnings

Team

• This felt like the most powerful team I’ve used since Worlds 2016 - going into the tournament, I believed that my matchup spread was almost entirely positive against the main compositions in the field

  • I believe this was only possible because Koraidon, a Pokemon with huge potential, had basically been overlooked. It’s not that people hadn’t tried it, it’s that nobody had realized that Life Orb + Close Combat was needed in order for it to reach its potential

• Overall, I got somewhat unlucky in terms of the matchups I drew in the tournament

  • I played far more Shadow Rider than I expected to, and a larger proportion of my schedule was Shadow Rider compared to the fields average

  • I also played 0 Kyogre and 0 Zamazenta, two of my stronger matchups

  • I only played 2 Terapagos, my single best matchup

  • That being said I played only 1 Koraidon and 0 Groudon, two matchups I was worried about

• Focus Sash is deceptively one of the highest skill items in the game

  • Focus sash creates a spotlight effect when used on an offensive Pokemon - your opponent, knowing they need to target it twice in order to knock it out, will feel immense pressure to damage your focus sash Pokemon early in the battle. By abusing this, you can dangle the focus sash Pokemon in front of them and use it to create space for your partner

  • Getting to the end game with focus sash flutter mane still intact won me many games on its own - being able to come in when the opponent is low HP with a guaranteed extra life on a fast, offensive Pokemon was crucial

  • It’s probably not completely unrelated that I won the two games in finals where I preserved Flutter Mane’s focus sash, and lost the one where I had it broken with U-turn

• Counterintuitive team choices were the difference maker in my run

  • Tera Normal as a defensive Tera is a really weird choice on a Focus Sash Pokemon, but becoming fully immune to Shadow Rider was crucial in certain matchups

  • Tera Bug Incineroar didn’t come up in the tournament, but that’s largely because I played 0 Zamazenta or Groudon

  • Flare Blitz > Knock Off on Incineroar was super against convention, but I couldn’t have won without it

  • Obviously Life Orb Close Combat Koraidon was the real difference maker

• Protect on Incineroar is really, really good

  • This kind of falls into the previous category but I wanted to make a note here because I also noticed it in Toronto

  • It’s mandatory on this team because of Perish Song, but even in situations unrelated to Perish I still found myself using Protect often on Incineroar. Not sure it would be worth it on a team without Perish, but I suspect I will miss it the next time I drop it.

• Preventing your opponent from freely clicking their spammable moves is huge, even when they still have other threatening things they can do

  • Specifically Tera Normal to stop Astral Barrage, Tera Dark Amoonguss to stop Expanding Force, and Tera Bug Incineroar to (somewhat) stop Precipice Blades forced my opponent to actually think about which move they were going to use and which Pokemon they were going to target

  • A lot of my success this tournament came from making my opponents lives really difficult - when your opponent has a no drawback spread move they can click, they don’t need to think and it makes the game easier for them. With these tera types, I was able to give them additional opportunities to mess up

• Perish Trap was OK here, but probably wasn’t mandatory

  • I don’t regret having it on the team obviously, but I think because I played so many Shadow Rider (and Miraidon, who isn’t the BEST matchup for Perish) it didn’t feel as good in the tournament as I’d have hoped. Still got the job done though.

• Mental Herb is kind of a funny item

  • When you have Mental Herb in OTS, it almost never activates because your opponents just wont taunt you - but I think it was still necessary and the best item here. Just a reminder for the future that how often an item activates isn’t always the best indicator of how much value it’s providing

Play

• Overall I think this is some of the worst I’ve played in a tournament in a long time

• The common thread of my sets is that I would find myself in a super advantaged matchup, win game 1 because of it despite not playing very well, lose game 2 as the opponent played very well, and then lock in game 3 to win

• I played more game 3s this tournament than any other time I can remember

  • At one point somewhat recently I found myself 2-0’ing most of my opponents, and then I got in my head about game 3s because I felt like every time I went to game 3 I lost. This tournament was a really great counterpoint as almost all my sets went to game 3

• I think part of the reason I was having trouble with my play was because I slept so badly the night before the tournament, but I don’t think that was the only reason

  • I was experiencing super bad nerves this tournament

  • I also think BECAUSE my matchup was so good into most of my opponents, it created this weird dynamic where I wanted to play super safe to not lose the advantage, whereas my opponents felt like they had to play super risky because they were starting from behind. This not only encouraged my opponents to go for hard reads, but made it easier for them to get them right because I was playing really safe

  • This is an interesting concept to me, that sometimes when a matchup is super skewed it can actually create an advantage for the person with the worse matchup

• I think that playing mostly best of 1 practice going into the tournament made it harder this time around to adapt to best of 3

  • Interestingly, I didn’t really feel this way in Toronto, where I felt my best of 1 practice translated pretty smoothly. Maybe because the level of competition was higher here?

• This is one of the hardest schedules I’ve had in a long time, so maybe that’s part of the reason I feel worse about my play too - I think I had the highest resistance of any x-2 player

• This tournament more than most of my others recently has served as a reminder that even when you’re in a bad, losing position, you should continue trying to find ways to win

  • There were SEVERAL games I had no business winning that I managed to steal by not giving up despite disastrous early or mid games

  • Even in the games I ended up losing, I think forcing the opponent to continue expending mental resources on a game that they’d probably won anyway is still valuable going into future games in the set - a lot of Pokemon is about making your opponents life as difficult as possible and giving them as many opportunities to mess up as you can

  • I think one skill I’ve been developing is identifying your one way back into a lost game, even when it isn’t a safe move

    • Vs Luca game 1, he had a move that I think would result in a near guaranteed win - but I recognized that if he went for it, I’d lose, so I called that he wouldn’t and it allowed me to turn the game around. That’s the World Champion, so I think this approach can work against other opponents too