How to Get Started Playing Pokémon VGC - 6 Steps to Mastering Competitive Battling
Pokémon is the most successful media property on the planet, with millions of players buying every game that the franchise releases. However, that success has not translated to competitive dominance, as the Video Game Championship (VGC) side of the main Pokémon games is still segmented from the casual fanbase.
Pokémon VGC is still extremely popular, seeing hundreds and sometimes thousands of players attend major tournaments around the globe to compete. But compared to the regular game, there are plenty of barriers to entry for casual players who might want to give VGC a try.
While you're waiting for Pokemon Champions to release, now is the perfect time to get familiar with the basics of the most popular form of competitive battling. If you have ever wanted to get into the Pokémon VGC scene, or at least try to understand some competitive elements of the game, here are a few key tips you can use to get started.
How to Improve in Competitive Pokémon Battling
Find Your Team and Work on Teambuilding
Teambuilding is likely the single most important element keeping players from truly getting into Pokémon VGC. It is hard to learn because you need to go deep into every single decision you make and won’t always be able to use Pokémon you like from a normal playthrough.
Not every Pokémon is made equal. Each creature has unique stat totals, abilities, movepools, and more that make some Pokémon more viable in competitive play than others that might end up being completely unusable. And just because a Pokémon looks bad on the surface, doesn’t mean it won’t have a chance to shine on the right team.
When building a competitive Pokémon team, you will want to focus on core pairings that synergizes with each oher. This can be based on things like how their Abilities work together, covering each others weaknesses when switching out, or scenarios where one Pokémon does something leading to the other Pokémon doing another action that benefits your position.
For example, pairing a Pokémon that sets up the Rain like Kyogre with a Pokémon that benefits from the Water-type boost or Fire-type resistance the weather provides is a classic option.
You can build your entire team around two or three Pokémon cores that work well together in your strategy. And, once you have your core working, you can flex some additional options that play differently to throw off your opponent. Think running a Trick Room team but having a core of Pokémon that also work well outside of speed control matchups in case you need to pivot.
Learn What Abilities and Items Do
You also need to remember that Abilities and Items are key to every Pokémon’s success in a battle. Whether you need an extra punch on offense or want to avoid status conditions, there is no way you can ignore giving your team the right tools.
You can build entire teams around Pokémon with good abilities, or shut down strategies because a Pokémon’s item disrupts what your opponent was trying to do.
Incineroar has become a competitive force and is meme’d for it partially because it has a versatile typing, good moves, is flexible in what items are good on it, and its Intimidate Ability is one of the best in the game at helping controle game pace since it automatically lowers both your opponent’s Pokémon’s stats.
Regardless of the team, at the end of the day you are building it. You choose what mechanics to put in a core, what Pokémon you want to try and make work, or the meta strategy you want to counter. Teambuilding is as much an expression of the player as it is the backbone to your gameplan.
Learn When To Act - Terastallizing, Mega Evolution, and other Battle Gimmicks
With every new Pokémon game comes different “battle gimmicks” that Game Freak develops and places at the core of the series’ battle system. Mega Evolution, Z-Moves, Dynamax, Terastallization, and other smaller ones that stick around between games like Abilities that set weather or terrain.
These mechanics can make or break matchups if you aren’t prepared, both when using your own or countering your opponent.
In Scarlet and Violet, any Pokémon can Terastallize into a different typing, giving it new weaknesses, resistances, immunities, and an offensive boost for moves of that type. For example, if you Terastalize a Swampert to be a Flying-type, it loses its 4x weakness to Grass moves and becomes weak to Electric-type moves, completely changing how you have to approach taking it down—unless you just hit it really hard.
Being able to Tera and boost your offensive moves or throw off your opponent’s counters by taking less damage can swing the battle’s momentum to your favor or buy you extra turns to try and find an out to a sticky situation. It also adds new layers to what you have to prepare for in each match, how you predict different scenarios, and makes positioning in a battle even more important.
Something like Mega Evolution is a bit more limited, seeing as only a select few Pokémon can Mega Evolve. However, those Pokémon then become much more powerful and turn into win conditions on their own, making it harder to build a team that can counter every potential Mega you might face.
Understand Your Gameplan
Once you have your team built, you need to go into every match understanding your gameplan and win conditions. These will vary based on your opponent and the team you are facing, but overall, you should have a handful of ideas for how your team can win heading into every battle.
You want to enter every matchup knowing your team’s strong and weak points, while also analyzing your opponent’s team to see where you might need to switch your approach around. If you have a Pokémon they don’t have a clear answer to, use that to your advantage when planning out your first game.
If you bring a Trick Room team, your goal is to set the pace and throw off your opponent’s best offensive options by giving you team initiative. But what happens when your Trick Room runs out or they are also playing a similar strategy? This is where you need to be flexible while still understanding your key early and late game win conditions.
You need to study things like the most common moves and items, what Pokémon counters each of your own Pokémon, and how you can break through a counter with proper positioning if you get into a touch spot. This is not knowledge you will have right away when starting, no matter how many competitive tournaments or team breakdowns you have watched.
Practice and Learn By Losing
You can’t just watch analysis or other people playing the game if you want to improve at Pokémon VGC. Eventually, you need to queue into a battle yourself and practice—and the best experience is losing.
Every time you lose a battle, it is a chance to evaluate the circumstances that led you there. Did one of your Pokémon not survive a hit it needed to? Did you make the wrong switch, leading to losing a Pokémon? Is there a clear lack of synergy with one of your cores that is easily exploitable? These are questions you can only answer once you start building hands-on experience.
The more you play, the more comfortable you will get with the ever-changing Pokémon VGC meta and the decisions you need to make in certain situations. Things like properly planning out a switch, when to preserve low HP team members, and analyzing your opponent’s strategy just from their team preview are all skills you can improve on.
Just make sure you aren’t running into ranked battles with no plan. Bring your team and be ready to take notes, save your replays so you can review footage later, and try different approaches so you can see how things might play out if you end up in a similar situation at an actual event.
Losing while preparing is the best way to actually be prepared when you really need it.
Use Community Resources
If reading this VGC overview has still left you overwhelmed, don’t worry! The competitive Pokémon community is a very open space and there are plenty of players and content creators who have made it their mission to make newcomers feel welcome.
If you are struggling with teambuidling or don’t have time to grind out a competitive team for yourself in Scarlet and Violet while learning, Pokémon Showdown is a free, unofficial, battle simulator that has an incredibly deep and visually easy to follow teambuilding tool that you can use and practice with. Other tools like the Pokémon Team Planner, My Pokémon Team, and the classic Marriland's Pokémon Team Builder are also available.
Resources like the VGCPastes Repository also hold data for top teams used in competitive Pokémon events that you can browse and use to plan out a team you might want to use. And, should you just want to give a team a try, plenty of those teams have Rental Codes you can input in Scarlet and Violet to use them online as practice.
The single best competitive resource in the game however is a website called VGCguide. This is a platform developed by VGC players like Wolfe “Wolfey” Glick, Aaron “Cybertron” Zheng, Aaron “Unreality” Traylor, and others as a hub for learning about the format.
VGCguides features dozens of expertly written introductions and explainers for topics like teambuilding, gameplanning, the competitive VGC circuit, and even guides to in-game team training. There are even guides to help players coming into VGC from other parts of the Pokémon community like Shiny hunting and Single Battles.
If you are a visual learner, competitive Pokémon is fairly popular on YouTube too. You might not find guides that go as in-depth as VGCguides, but there are hundreds of creators out there posting VGC content that might be able to help answer your questions. And don’t forget to check out communities like r/Stunfisk or Smogon that have sections centered around VGC discussions.
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