Pikachu Cup

Game Freak recently hosted the Pikachu cup over wifi and what I thought was going to be a bland and restricted tournament turned into something quite interesting.



The Pikachu cup was an electric only doubles cup that would award a special Pikachu to all participants if Pikachu met a certain amount of usage throughout the the whole competition. The whole rules can be found here. http://www.smogon.com/articles/pikachu-cup



Electric isn't my favourite type, and I'm not a huge fan of Pikachu so I didn't actually sign up for the competition. After a few days I started looking up some videos on youtube of games thinking I would just see various Pikachus thunderbolting each other down but boy was I surprised.



Since the matches were so restricted, this forced people to come up with some awesome strategies to win. My favourite of which was a Lanturn using the move "Soak" which transforms the target into a pure water type, causing them to lose the stab on any electric moves while changing their normal resistance to electricity into a weakness.







Every match seemed to showcase some new strategy that I wasn't aware of and before long I was kicking myself for not participating in this crazy competition. All in all I think the Pikachu cup was a great success and I hope there will be more like it in the future!



On a side note, all the new strategies made me think about the current meta. Like many others I was sad to see that the top teams of the recent Worlds competition were almost identical with the Kami trio running rampant. This brings me new hope because if people can come up with interesting winning strategies in such a restricted tournament maybe the meta will be shaken up as well!