Heya! I actually competed in VGC 2011 (even attended Worlds) and this video brought me back! Prepping for Regionals/Nationals/Worlds on top of keeping my high school grades up was exhausting. Dozens of hours RNG manipulating legendaries, regular breeding (I didn't figure out Gen V breeding RNG at that time), and grinding BP for held items. And it had to be crammed into three months because BW came out in March and Regionals were in May-June. I distinctly remember getting 2 hours of sleep the night before Regionals because my friends and I were last-minute grinding our teams. Or the 3 hours of sleep before Nationals because I accidentally left my Life Orb with my friend who didn't have Wi-Fi. All of this led to teams with non-perfect IVs, no PP ups, etc. and hoping team-design and play could overcome a few lower points. It was exhausting. I share your opinion on hacking culture. The exhaustion and the wasted time on grinding (time that could have been spent practicing) 100% makes me understand why people hack. Because we shouldn't spend dozens of hours just to *begin* to play. However, hacking is still an unfair advantage: if you hack, while your opponent adhered to all the options and limitations the games provide, you now have the advantage of having more time to practice. You've violated the rules you agreed to when you signed up for a tournament, while your opponent didn't. But ultimately, the "enemy" isn't hackers for trying to avoid wasting their life on zero-skill tedium. It's single-player RPG systems being applied to a multiplayer game. Game Freak has made so many advances in saving players time (Gen. 8 felt relatively so quick to train), and I hope Gen. 9 eliminates the last of the barriers. Because it still takes hours to train a team.

Competitive pokemon without hacking your team in is like a fighting game that takes potentially a week or longer just to get to the character select screen.

I actually assumed most competitive teams WERE hacked in. It just makes so much more sense. After breeding a couple full teams I don't blame anyone for using hacks, because now me and my friend just use Showdown. I had over 400h in X/Y JUST breeding.

What’s even worse about grinding a team is that you won’t fully know how it performs UNTIL YOU HAVE IT. Sure you can theorymon, but there is still the whole process of playtesting and making a team that works well. I really have no idea how people had the time for all of this back in 2011/earlier.

I think messing up on timber actually would be closer to the true breeding experience. I use to miss up little stuff like that all the time having to do more work

pokemon should just make their own showdown and separate competitive play entirely from their main series story games

Also, while team building is easier than ever, I still wouldn't call it easy. So many competitive items are locked behind BP or some other currency that you need to grind for. Why can't I just buy Ability Capsules or Patches with regular gold? Why can't I buy Weakness Policies from an in-game insurance agency or Air Balloons from a clown on the street? Why isn't there an industrial supply store selling Safety Goggles, Heavy-Duty Boots, Protective Pads, and Rocky Helmet? A pharmacy selling Throat Sprays?

Love that plot twist, getting us thinking "Oh wow, almost 30 hours... thats rough" only to throw us with the "lol jk, my DS is overclocked".

I entered the 2011 VGC as a kid since the regional was in my town. I EV trained but the concept of IV's seemed too daunting and time exhaustive. I didn't even consider legendaries for my team at all since I didn't want to start a new save (and as it turned out, Thundurus DOMINATED 2011) I lost on something like Round 3 and spoke with the guy who won my bracket and I asked about IV's and he told me that his team was RNG manipulated and it was practically necessary to have a shot at winning. It's cool that the systems exist to make the game more complex, but even in the newer games there's still such a barrier to entry to competetive for newer players.

Plus you have to take into consideration how hard it would be for a new player to not only understand but to research how to do all of this. Without hacking and pokemon's crazy popularity I don't think competitive battling would be what it is today with the barrier to entre being as high as it is.

Old school Competitive player here. I started in DPP. I remember it taking me over 400h for my first team (it is possible I might have gone too hard on having Shiny Weavile...), because I didn't know of RNG manip or anything like that, I did it legit because 2006-ish wasn't the easiest time to get info as a lonely kid (and thank god for knowing about Ditto, couldn't even begin to imagine without that...). Since then, it's been genning in new mons, because I feel like that Emerald cartridge is enough of a reason to NEVER do anything close to similar. :D (also, that 400+h team got swept at my first local to a F.E.A.R rattata)

Even with all the ways we have now in gen 8, it's still easier if you are interested in competitive Pokemon to just do it on Pokemon Showdown. That's why I don't blame hackers at all.

While gamefreak has made things *easier* they haven’t made things perfect. Oh you got Calyrex? Nice! Now you can only use it in one form! Wanna use ice rider? Cool grind for a 0IV one if you’re doing a trick room team! Want shadow rider? Cool easy enough catch any old thing and give it a bottle cap. Oh but the meta changed?? And now the other one is more optimal? Damn guess you’re playing through the whole game again to get another calyrex!

PKHex itself serves as a way better hackcheck than the actual games. Especially during the 3ds era. I mostly use it for Trade Evolution skipping.

"...back then, it became the cultural norm in the community to just hack in your teams." Ok, so I'm not crazy. I started playing competitive in Gen 5. I mostly played on Pokemon Online and later Showdown, but I had a couple of IRL and online friends who I would do in-game battles with. And most of us owned Action Replays and just hacked our teams in. In fact, only one person in our group did not own an Action Replay, but we would just lend him ours or hack is Pokemon for him. Point is, it was absolutely the norm back then. If you weren't hacking, you were out of your mind. At least, that was my experience in my pocket community. But then somewhere in Gens 6-7 there was a cultural shift. Suddenly hackers were "ruining the game". And guess what? Now nobody from my original group plays competitive anymore. It's just not worth the dozens of hours to get a team ready. I gave Gen 8 competitive a shot, and I had a lot of fun with it! .....When I was actually battling. Problem was, I would spend the vast majority of my time riding in circles in front of the Day Care. Because despite all the baby steps GameFreak has taken to make competitive mons easier to get, it still takes dozens of hours. I finally quit when I finished putting my team together *just in time for the "season" to change.* Suddenly the rules were all different, half my team was banned, and I would have to start over from scratch in a new meta. I was devastated. And that was it for me. The barrier to entry is just too much. This is a game design problem, not a community/hacking problem.

This is why I don't get why it's a problem to gen teams. Nobody in competitive tournaments wins because they spent hours and hours getting their 31 IV perfect 'mons, they win because they know how to build good teams and play well. The end result would still be the same, it would just be a lot, lot more accessible.

I miss having the time and patience to actually do all of this. Adults with full time jobs that *aren’t* making content can’t put all this time in, and it makes you truly realize why 10 year olds are constantly called on to save the world.

Even nowadays with all the improvements, there are still big barriers to entry in obtaining competitive Pokemon, such as: - Why aren't we allowed to see the exact IVs, EVs, and base stats of our Pokemon? It's not like seeing that stuff would ruin the experience, casual players still probably know what they are and you could very easily lock that stuff to the postgame - Why isn't there a way to see what Egg Group(s) a Pokemon is in-game, or what Egg Moves it can learn? Sw/Sh sorta addressed this by getting rid of a ton of Egg Moves and making a lot of them TMs, but I dunno. I really like the concept of Egg Moves - Why does it take so long to hatch Eggs, even with Flame Body? And why can't you mass release your Pokemon? Changing these would also be beneficial for all the Shiny breeders out there. Maybe make it like the Recycling Bin on your computer, where a released Pokemon just sorta sits there for 60 days, and you can either take it back or delete it for good - Why isn't there a way to at the very least drop an IV to 0? Trick Room has been a thing since the infancy of VGC - Why is it so difficult to change a Pokemon's EVs and IVs? They got Natures down perfectly with the Mints, and Hyper Training is almost good, save for some of the odd restrictions like needing to be Lvl 100, but why can't we have an easy way to change EVs? I think they should make EVs so that acquiring them is the same as before, but once you have them, you can invest as many and whatever arangement you want. A best of both worlds if you like EV training, and this wouldn't nullify Power Items & Pokerus - Why are PP Ups still a pain to get? If you have an exact team in mind, getting them isn't that bad in Gen 8 IIRC, but wanting to experiment with moves or Pokemon makes them such a huge barrier. At least for Singles; PP isn't nearly as important in VGC

i personally would love them to add something that is opposite of hyper training. An item that reduces an IV to 0. if they are going this far to make competitive more available and easy to get into, this one change would drastically improve things for players. Many pokemon would need this, especially as meta changes, for stats like Attack and Speed.

A while ago I saw someone have a rant on why competitive Pokémon is giant clusterfuck and why it should be separated into its own thing from the mainline games, I'm starting to see his point...

This is why I've never cared about "legitimacy." As long as the team is legal (could naturally happen in a game with enough time/planning) then I'm good. I remember having a small "business" back in the original Ruby and Sapphire where I did IV breeding and EV training in exchange for shinies lol. All I can say today is... Thank Arceus for mints and hyper training 😂

Having watched the full video now, it cannot be overstated how excellent and thorough this is. I really hope this gets the attention it deserves, because it's so much more than just an in depth exploration of why hacking became the norm in competitive play. It's a celebration of the ingenuity of the Pokemon community, a revelation about what's possible in the games now with all our modern tools/research, and a demonstration of how deep the rabbit hole can actually go. Bravo friend. Bravo.

"Unreasonably time consuming" is an understatement regarding breeding perfect pokemon in Gen IV/V, it's virtually impossible.

I remember when this channel was a lot smaller when I was using the cute charm glitch guide on my Platinum copy. Awesome to see this channel is getting the attention it deserves, love these videos :D

I want to be clear I don’t know or care how Ray got his Pokémon! He could’ve rngd, used pksav or did it full legit, I just used the world champs team as an example that this is tough to do! Hey everyone, let me know in the comment what Meta you'd like to see me cover! Gen 3 Smogon, Gen 4 Smogon, Gen 4 VGC, Gen 5 2013 VGC, Gen 5 Smogon, Gen 6 Smogon, Gen 6 VGC, Gen 7 Smogon, and Gen 7 VGC!

Usually I would just pull up a long video like this and just leave it running in the background but this one had me hooked on it. Keep the content going!

Really cool video, definitely expands a lot on how laborious it used to be to make a competitive team. Of course, this is all with the context of already knowing what you want your team to be in the first place. Now I'm imagining that you want to test out a variety of pokemon for your prospective team, each with different possible stat spreads and sets. Sure, you can use things like showdown to do the testing without losing your mind painfully grinding all these perfect mons to test, but the testing itself would still take a considerable amount of time, then doing the research to see how you would actually get all the pokemon with correct moves and such or even if you could for the specific pokemon you chose. If something didn't work out because of incompatible egg moves then it's back to the drawing board.

And for all us casuals who don't even know where to start with RNG manipulation we might as well give up before Starting.

As a comparison, doing this in gen 8 would be cool, just to see how accessible it is nowadays. In particular without any RNG manipulation since you hardly need to breed anymore with bottle caps and mints

This video is honestly such a good insight into what it was like to make teams and just how much time it took for ONE team. Props to those who never hacked and even bigger props to you Blisy for the fantastic videos as usual!

This was a great video. I think doing a video like this for gen 6 or gen 8 VGC could be fun to compare the time differences between more modern generations and gen 5. I started breeding competitve pokemon in gen 6 and even with all the new mechanics, it still takes me about 24 hours on the long end to breed my perfect pokemon without any RNG manipulation (not including hidden power).

I remember this being the reason I couldn't get into trying to make a competitive team. If you don't RNG manip, your effectively fucked. This took a lot of time with the RNG manips.

In middle school I decided to hop into competitive breeding in Gen 6. My first mon that I did that with was Garchomp, I went for a 5 IV with the Sp.Atk being the not flawless stat, and a jolly nature. I was in middle school at the time and it took me 2 weeks just to get the Gible. Leveling it to 100, EV training it, and teaching it the moves I wanted on it was easy as hell and took me 2 days (including my school time so it was probably more like 6 hours of me actually playing). Now I'm proud of that Garchomp, and it is a staple on my team to this day, but once I gained the ability to use PkHex I never looked back. I always found more fun in the competition and theory crafting anyway. As long as it was legal, hack away. Makes theory crafting and playtesting team comps a lot easier and faster so you can see which strat you'd rather use. Making the mons the hard way I find is only good for bragging rights. Which if you like that, go ahead. My friend did a couple mons like that though they were strictly ones he had a heart out for.

You seriously deserve a sub just for commiting to do this for real...I've been into competitive pokemon and breeding since gen 4 and I always did it legally...it's a complete pain in the ass. You may have taken close to 50 hours, but what wasn't taken into account was all the time Ray took to theorycraft that team, you should only commit to build a team like that when you are 100% sure of the team, you have to consider so many factors in a forever changing meta that I'm not even bothering to list em all out. This brought me back so many memories, thank you, I really enjoyed it man.

As a somewhat outsider when it comes to comp Pokemon. I think it should be fine to edit your team as long as they're legal. Winning comp isn't just about the Pokemon stats, it's how you use them. Read your opponents and pick your options based on that. Someone with a lot of experience will win against an amateur 9 out of 10 times even if they're using the exact same team.

I've always thought that hacking in mons was a perfectly reasonable thing to do, since the winner is determined by the one who wins the battles, not who breeds the perfect pokemon. Even if breeding was added as a qualifier, I don't think it would change anything as people would just grind out the perfect mons anyway. All breeding does is take time away from getting better at battling, which is fine casually but makes no sense for this competition. Imagine if you had to create your own deck of cards to play poker or ball to play soccer. If the argument is that it takes away from the spirit of pokemon, as in you raising your team yourself to compete, then they should just outright ban hacked mons or include breeding in the competition. I just don't think it would add all that much, rather, I think it'll take away from it. Great video though, I've always wondered how long it would take to make one team and you did it so thoroughly.

As a casual, this right here is why I didn’t try anything competitive Pokemon until gen 8. This was absolute madness to watch, I can’t imagine doing it. An interesting challenge would be hand building a team with some of the weirder IV spreads for hidden power that some smogon Pokémon have. I don’t know any specific examples, but it does seem like a good starting point.

They should just make 2 separate modes in the start menu, one is story and the other is a Showdown style where you can choose to use your story team cause you do grow attached to them, or just build one from the ground up.

Even if it's way easier now to make a competitive team, I still think they should make a new Pokémon Stadium game that's just straight up Showdown. It's fun to just go with a random team online or to make up your perfect team without all the hassle of breeding and grinding just to try a new idea you got. Discourage cheaters by just giving them all the tools from the start, or unlock Pokémon and items frequently while playing. I think that's why I liked the Battle Factory back in HGSS so much.

I was 10 years old back during VGC 2011, and MAN the grind was absolutely atrocious for it. I was gonna try doing everything legitimately, but then there was a lot less in terms of resources, I didn't have as much understanding as I do now because of my age, so I just used an Action Replay for everything, including a single shiny in Hydreigon since it's my favorite Pokemon. I still advocate using things like PKHex though, as the IV system is dumb to begin with and shouldn't exist, and to a lesser extent natures not being a choice without an item that you have to grind for. Especially for content creators, as they were needing a ton of different mons to test and do wifi battles. Super cool to get insight on how long it would take to build a team with RNG manipulation though, great vid!

imagine if game freak makes a good anti cheat and doesn't make getting a competitive team better

For gen 9 they should honestly make a competitive battle team builder showdown style that you can only use online on ladder or in tournaments or something

I made one team this way on black 2 back then, and I know it took me close to 400 hrs, for non shiny, no rng was available at the time as far as I was aware. I had what I felt like at the time was "good" luck. It's definitively much easier now but I understand why people hack, even with all the changes it's still not ideal. It could still be much, much better.

This was such a daunting task to undertake, but such an enjoyable watch. You did a spectacular job with the explanations and recording all of the visuals during all of this. Your perseverance and love for the game truly is admirable to witness and to watch. Happy to see this video got a great deal of attention. Thanks for always educating everyone on all of the RNG stuff as well. Although you’ve been a smaller channel (no fault of your own), your impact and the value you bring to this community is immense and very appreciated. From one pkmn fan to the next, Keep it up Blisy!

The level of determination for a video. Mad respect

I'd be interested to see another one of these done in gen 8 just to show how much easier and faster it can be done now

11:30, “I can trade with myself instead of my ‘friends’.” I felt that.

Wow, this was a really great video. And the twist at the end really made me remember how impossible this really is. Great job

I always thought the Magmar was completely impossible even with RNG. I'd love to see a video on the 2013 team at some point

This video was incredibly thorough. Like I kind of did not expect it to go this much into detail. With all the weird hurdles like gen 4 mons with special moves, that 1 chople berry etc. Lol Shoutouts to you for keeping it 100! Furthermore, your conclusion is spot on and I feel pretty much the exact same. The reason I got into vgc in gen 6 was because breeding became really accessible, although maybe at times tedious. I actually really like breeding in generations 6 and onwards. Probably the most significant reason I did not get into vgc in gen 5 was because I did not want to hack my Pokemon and was too incompetent to make rng work lol Mind you, i do not really care how other people feel about getting their Pokemon. This concerns solely me. Although I do have to agree with you that its unfortunate that hacking is still so widespread since in swsh you can just literally play through the game to get the Pokemon you want. Like, you dont want to play the game you bought? Oh well :x PS: I really regret not getting into gen 5 vgc because I love gen 5 sprites and looking back, I really really really like the vgc 12/13 metagames. #NoBattleGimmicks #PlainOldPokemon ;__;

Thanks for sharing this! I recently discovered your channel and started Emerald RNG, and is incredibly easy with a dead battery. I wish I figured out about that 15 years earlier... Now to the video: I'd like to point out that many, MANY people hacked back then and I could only feel pity for those who put a lot of effort just to get 2-3IV breed and some useful legendaries just to lose at the first or second rounds of any torunament by some hacker... however, I don't blame hackers either, because it wasn't their fault, it's the disrespect (and stupidity) from the biggest gaming/media franchise in history puts their fans into: mindless, boring and tedious grinding, even to this day, like reaching lvl 100 just to bottlecap (which are still somewhat rare) or still doing hunderds of battles for BP just to get a Nature Mint or something else, compared to any other competitive scene in other games where assets are easily and readily available after some point, you just need to "git gud" to success. Like, we're treated as dumb, that we haven't figured out the mechanics of the games since Gen 3... my (very low) hopes from GF in the future is that every item is at shops only and the Battle (facility, tower, frontier, whatever) is made to test you as a trainer: knowledge and strategy thinking (something like Pokemon Showdown implemented into the main series), but I suspect this would be tied to a paywall/DLC because how greedy and toxic this company has gotten.

very interesting video! it really shows how spoiled we are in newer gens with how customizable you can be with a pokemon. you can stumble upon a wild shiny unexpectedly and there are way more shortcuts today to make it competitively battle and put it to use right away

Great video, absolutely crazy how long it would take back in those days. I’d love to see an attempt at gen 3 with this.

This is great content outside your helpful RNG guides! A very cool way to apply the knowledge you know in a hypothetical way.

Fantastic video, I'm genuinely impressed by the thoroughness of this project. The barrier to entry that Pokemon's competitive grind has built cannot be understated and even in the most recent generations there are so many mechanics and forced time sinks a player has to go through to just get into their first comp online battles. Really hope videos like this open people's eyes to the irritations of "legit" grinding for a team and why people would rather just crack open the ol' pkhex.

Getting mad at people for hacking is like getting mad at a tennis player for not building their own racquet. Team building involves 0 skill and 0 fun. It's just a waste of time that Game Freak insists on.

As someone getting into VGC over smogon where a Pokemon is as easy to get right as typing in IVs, I would love to see a video like this but in Gen 8 (or the soon to be Gen 9). I still feel as though training, breeding and getting IVs is extremely difficult in today’s games mainly due to the lack of informative and concise resources, and I would love to see a full team being built and explained. Great content, keep it up!

The only question I have is would it have been more optimal to combine the HP and leveling a bit since Audino also give 2 HP EVs?

Really quality video! I'm for sure going to rewatch this again sometime.

Additional thing to consider: this was what it took for his final team. To get there took countless battles and trialing other mons to decide on said final team.

Damn that reveal at the end of the time! Man what a real grind you did. Part of me was thinking it seemed kind of like a fun challenge to make a truly competitive team, but now I'm having second thoughts if I'm not even going to play competitively with it

I got into gen 5 recently and have experienced a small slice of this trying to get a decent team together to beat the PWT. thanks for this vid!! this is like everything I'm experiencing times 100 LOL

Also thank god there’s an unofficial battle simulator online so that you can practice using that and also make tweaks and test strategies before building your team in game. hopefully it doesn’t get DMCA’d

I got this video in recommended to me even though I don't watch pokémon content that often. I watched all the way through it and enjoyed every second of it. The explanations were very good and the process were even more complex than I expected. I then subscribed without hesitation and when I saw the view count I became very surprised. This video deserves so much more attention than it already has gotten, keep it up man and thanks for the immaculate entertainment. 💜

Found your channel the other week, I like the interesting conversation of using hacked mons for competitive play to show that they cannot be easily obtained and I enjoyed the level of explanation detail and research length that went into these, you earned a sub from me :)

Literally anybody who says hacking Pokémon is bad is lying to try themselves. Literally could be battling and trying new teams instead of doing tedious work. Which btw, work smarter not harder

Making teams is such a struggle. I knew nothing about rng manip so I just bred thousands of eggs. In vgc 17 I went to a regional without using any tapus because I didn't have any good ones and didn't want to replay through the game and reset for who knows how long. The team was surprisingly good, but not being able to build around legendaries is a huge disadvantage. I also arrived at tournaments while still EV training my team and didn't always manage to finish and had to use an old team. Rip my Vileplume team :( Also losing trakc of your evs halfway through is fun.

The only thing I could think of that could improve making competitive ready teams from gen 8's system is a way to reset ivs to 0, that's now the only last difficult step in the way of competitive teambuilding. Unless the dreaded hidden power returns for anything other than unown in gen 9.

I’d love to see more gen 5 vgc content but something I’ve gotten so interested in since finding your channel is gen 3 competitive builds.

Dang!! Massive respects for getting it done for real, can't have been easy, especially considering how much time it takes!! Thoroughly enjoyed it :3

Yep, though I will say there are a lot of competitive players who are strictly against hacking. I was when I played (qualification: I made worlds in 19), but post-retirement any time I play I have a friend hack and send me a team. It still saves time now, especially if you don't care about the game casually. Like I think a huge part of what you missed is the time to beat the game, which is relevant if you already caught a legendary and you need a different nature or hp or speed iv for a different team. Then you have to play through the game again. I remember doing this no less than 8 times in ORAS. Honestly should have submitted some of my Speedrun times XD. But after beating them and playing competitively, playing the story is sooooo anti-fun, like it really makes you hate the game really fast.

This was a really cool video. Very interesting to see just how much competitive training has evolved in Pokémon, and how much of a pain it used to be.

Yeah I will never look down on a hacker for making teams quickly cause Game Freak makes team building so inaccesible and extremely time consuming. And this was you doing a lot of manipulations too to make this team. I imagine it would take at least three times as long to do this process without any of those in Gen 5. I'm grateful to Game Freak for making steps toward making this less tedious through the newer generations and honestly I enjoy it making teams a lot more in Sword and Shield than ever but I would like them to make it a tiny bit easier for someone who has limited free time.

I absolutely LOVE the idea. Great video and I can't wait for more! small edit: some feedback I have is that I would cut down on the hyper fast timelapses a bit. I personally found them a bit rough on my eyes from time to time but that might also just be me. Apart from that I love the editing on the video and this absolutely deserves a loooot of attention

Awesome video man! The detail and explanations were fantastic! Keep up the good work!

And all of this time was spent getting a specific team from the start. Need to switch out some pokemon or even change some EV's/IV's after play testing your team? Well, back to the grind with you!

nice vid, really puts things into perspective. I wish things were more accessible back then but oh well, too late at this point. I really wish dream world could've gotten preserved in some capacity as well since I never got the chance to experience it but that's just how things are I guess.

amazing vid! i'd like to see you building world champions teams across the generations

Great video, my man! I personally shiny hunt all of my VGC members - and have done so since 2013, so this was incredibly interesting to watch!

This is hella good content. I myself got into competitive gen 7 shiny breeding . took me nearly a month of breeding to assemble a shoddy shiny trick room team. always wondered how the pros did it, if they hired some other guy to do it or jsut simply did em themselves. This was a perfect video imo

I could see a video on SwSh on this topic blowing up. I could see you getting Wolfey to react to it and your channel would probably blow up. You deserve more notoriety for your knowledge and dedication in these videos.

Honestly I don't mind hacking in Pokemon. I view Pokemon as a strategy game. If someone is better than me due to their understanding of the game and skill I don't mind if they didn't do a mindless grind beforehand. Grinding for a good team stops many players from joining the competitive Pokemon scene due to that boring repetitive process you have to go through and if hacking is the way for those players to join the community I don't mind it.

Great video I would love to see more like this just to see the comparison between Gen 5, 6, 7, and 8

Very cool and insightful video. I appreciate all of the tracking you did on everything for some very thorough reporting and conclusions. I remembering breeding and ish for singles battling in Gen 5 & 6 and it was absolutely MISERABLE, and that was when I was ~15-18 and had very few responsibilities. Super respectable opinions all around too.

I think after several years the game devs finally understood how difficult it is to build a competitive team from scratch. Scarlet Violet introduced a lot if not the most of quality of life improvements just to begin playing.

I have no bad feeling towards Genning as an adult with a full time job. The line I draw is keeping Pokémon legal and not scamming kids. It helps that I’ve completed so many legit shiny hunts when I was younger. But for me RNG and Gen are the same; third party tools to get a specific Pokémon. I will say RNG Man definitely requires more skill and practice but is still a third party tool. Have fun guys, have an awesome day and make safe choices!

@ 16:10 - 16:20 My goodness... I seriously tracked my EV gains on paper. Every single time, I'd save, grind a stats to 252 (or desirable number) and then save to lick it in place. Never even once did it dawn on me to use PP as a measuring source. The hours spent when I thought I had missed a count. This makes me so proud for your efforts and so sad for my time invested all those years ago. 😭😂

This was an entertaining video the whole way through. Not many creators make videos where I watch the whole video like I did this one. Keep up the good work!

Also in addition to this, you have to still practice with the team. And what if you decide that you want to make changes? Congrats you get to train up more mons.

cheating your teams in should be the standard and encouraged, nothing about breeding good pokemon takes skill just time, vgc is there to find out who the best player is, not who the best breeder is.

I started doing VGC in 2013 and I feel like Black2/White2 did make the grind a little bit easier compared to the first games, but it still took a very long time. I wasn't too knowledgeable about breeding for IVs at the time and I only had a limited access to HAs so I mainly focused on egg moves, nature, EVs, and/or items. I had to write down the EV gains on paper since there wasn't a way to see how the EV spreads were going. It still took a very long time and my team wasn't the best but it was fun and rewarding when it was finished.

Hey man, I just got sent down an insane nostalgia trip watching this video. Some years ago, I don't even remember how long ago it was, I stumbled upon your video explaining how to rng manip for a cute charm glitch save file on hgss. I thought this was the coolest thing so I gave it a try. And after a few attempts, I had my own legitimate cute charm save file. My friend and I thought it was the coolest thing and I still have that file to this day. Thank you for being a part of my childhood :)

They should have the "team building" part of showdown in their games starting gen 9. It's too convenient. But Keep the current methods for Those who wish to run around in circles hatching eggs, and we are all happy

As someone who had played in gen3 competitions, getting a team was just such a huge hazzle, needing up to 3 games for pokemon, not knowing exact IV counts, not misscounting on your EV tally checklist and not overleveling for those competitions that wanted lvl 50 only, or much worse getting pokemon to lvl 100 without any good EXP grinds, yuck.

This is a big reason why I decided to get into pokemon breeding. I first started as just making extras of the starters for my friends during gen 3. Then I later heard about competitive pokémon and how difficult it was for people to get them, so I wanted to start making them so that it'd be a bit more accessible. I came back in gen 8, having to rebuild my entire collection, and started ball breeding. I'd love to make good pokemon more accessible.

Holy shit I can only say that I respect the sheer amount of work you went through just to make this video

Id love to see you build a gen 7 smogon ubers team. I tried that once but gave up on making them all shiny because i couldnt get gen 7 rng to work :/

The only explanation I can think of when people defend this monotonous process is that they've gone though this process so many times they developed something akin to Stockholm syndrome.

Im replaying gen 5 rn and wanna do cool postgame stuff so this video is a great resource, and also a thorough dive into competitive pokemon, thank you :)

Fantastic video! Awesome small poke channel, hope your subs keep climbing cause u just earned one! I would definitely have hacked the hell out of this game if I played comp then