Gustav

A4: Challenge Sabrina Quick Claw on Poliwrath; Focus Band on Flareon only--not Gardevoir. Lead with Poliwrath and Hydro Pump. Follow with Gardevoir/Moonblast. Finish with Flareon/Fire Blast.

Agatha leads with Chandelure, who's a level higher than your Gyarados, but you know the deal. One attack from Chandelure and one from Gyarados are not equal--though Chandelure does survive your first attack and make your Oran Berry necessary for you to flip the script moves-wise. Next up, Agatha will send out Aegislash in the Shield form, which isn't something I think I've seen yet! Attempting to get the best of both worlds, she will give it some Wise Glasses to work with. One Iron Head knocks out Gyarados, and you respond with Venusaur. You do your Venusaur thing--I wish I knew about that sooner--and Aegislash is brought down after a series of moves. Gengar comes out, and its attack is a bit better than that--Venusaur attempts to attack and heal, but Gengar gets past it after a few rounds of combat. You bring out your Sword form to see what it can do...

You earn $876 at work and buy yourself a Quick Claw. You immediately decide to put it to good use... Charizard gets the first move, by virtue of your Quick Claw, against Will's Exeggutor. You know the usual Fire-and-Grass-type deal; the first round is over in two moves despite some pretty substantial Psychic damage from Exeggutor. Jynx comes out next and gets off a Blizzard right away, evening the score at one knockout each. Weavile is your next pick with Dark Pulse...which knocks out Jynx in two more moves. At the moment, you're cruising! The same thing happens, more or less, with Gardevoir--an immediate redemption after you receive a knockout. Here, though, you look directly into the camera...

You earn $763.

For your first action, you attempt to catch Lugia as specified on Discord. You throw a Great Ball at Lugia. That business settled, for better or for worse, you battle the wild Pokemon. That out of the way, you head over to the gym to challenge Lt. Surge... You start off with Razor Leaf against Surge's Jolteon, who will respond with Pin Missile. This goes back and forth for three whole rounds before Jolteon finally comes through, scoring the first knockout for Lt. Surge and sending you to Pupitar. Pupitar will get you your first knockout! Lt. Surge reaches in the bag and throws out Magneton (and an Oran Berry). Magneton will use Flash Cannon...

You earn $976.

Bruno gets the first move, and it's with a Shell Bell-equipped Steelix. It's fairly effective, but Gyarados comes back with Hydro Pump, and that's even more so. Steelix gets another Stone Edge off, and you manage to pick up your first knockout on the next move. Following that up with Poliwrath, Bruno takes out Gyarados and returns the favor. You bring in Venusaur and alternate attacking and healing...and it's super, super effective! Venusaur gets out of the battle in five moves with zero net damage. That said, it's no match for Machamp. Two rounds of Close Combat, and Venusaur is out and you bring in Aegislash. And Retaliate 2 is no joke! YOU'VE DEFEATED BRUNO! Gyarados and Venusaur gain 3 levels, and Aegislash gains 4 levels.

In this case we would ping @BarzalGoat to make the pick(s) for the DQ team I believe.

"Morty...*belch*...it's time to battle Morty..." you say as you send out Fraxure. You use Crunch, and Gourgeist, holding an Oran Berry, counters with Shadow Ball. Another Crunch, and Gourgeist stays up--thanks to the berry! Fraxure has to take another attack as a result. Fraxure survives and deals another Crunch. You've scored the first knockout of the match! Koga brings in Gengar, who will knock out Fraxure with one hit. We've got ourselves a game so far. Looks like Steelix doesn't know Crunch, and neither does Onix--so I'll default Steelix's move to Dig here as it's the most effective. Gengar takes a powerful hit and responds with Destiny Bond, which does nothing other than heal it a bit... ...but it also comes with a very powerful condition! If Gengar is knocked out on the next move, then so is Steelix! Unaware of this, you give Steelix the command to use Dig once again. You get a knockout, but you also get knocked out, and you and Koga are down to your last. Vikavolt uses Thunder Bolt, bringing Chandelure down to below half HP. Chandelure responds with Overheat...

Well, you know what they say about insanity... Do the exact same thing again, because if Weezing doesn't roll high on the item I think I win:

Buy one more Focus Band. A2: Challenge Koga Quick Claw on Gardevoir; Focus Band on Poliwrath and Flareon. Lead with Gardevoir/Psychic. Poliwrath/Hydro Pump comes second. Flareon/Fire Blast third.

Though not more valuable

"Pryce? More like..." you say as you struggle to come up with a way to finish the sentence. No matter; it's time to finish Pryce. Pryce gets the first move with Jynx, and it will be Blizzard. You come back with Dark Pulse--twice--and Jynx faints for your first knockout. Pryce sends out Glaceon, who uses Blizzard. Will it finally work out? ...which will use its most powerful move... Pryce brings in Lapras, who's holding a pair of Wise Glasses, and hits you hard. Charizard is out, and you're down to Magnezone, who you give an Oran Berry to and hope for the best. Will the healing power of the berry be enough to counter the extra attack given by the glasses?

No

Set 1: Squirtle lv 25 Magikarp lv 23 Magikarp lv 27 Set 2: Horsea lv 26 Lugia lv 27 Poliwag lv 25 Set 3: Grubbin lv 25 Squirtle lv 24 Grubbin lv 28

Art Vandelay

Buy a Quick Claw. A1: Challenge Erika Focus Band on Poliwrath; Oran Berry on Flareon. Lead with Gardevoir and Psychic. Follow with Poliwrath and Dynamic Punch. Finish with Flareon/Fire Blast.

If you can't tell, I'm particularly drawn to players I remember back in the days when I joined the league in S65. At that time, @ShawnGlade was GM of Davos and still on his first player, the creatively-named...Shawn Glade. As a side note, I can say that as a former GM in both leagues (yes, I said both; fight me), it's rare to see players with the same name as their agents' usernames stick around and be productive, so some congratulations is in order here for exceeding expectations before we even get into the article. I mostly remember Glade playing for Davos, which is somewhat curious considering the fact that he never finished a season with the team (I did a double take upon realizing that Davos doesn't make a single appearance on his player page for that reason). When I first learned about the player, at least, he played for Davos, and the sig Shawn used at the time was a Davos one (which I made a meme out of at one point). Anyway, we're going off on a bit of a tangent here. I also remember Glade as one of the league's good, established defenders who, in the eyes of a pure noob, was someone whose build I should pay attention to and try to emulate. In recent seasons, he's popped up in a couple places around the site, and his agent firmly believes that he should be inducted into the VHL Hall of Fame. A note about my own bias: when I popped open Glade's player page for the first time, I more or less concluded that I didn't think he was HoF-worthy. That said, though, I wouldn't mind trying to make the case because I want to give him the benefit of the doubt (and I at least think he deserves Hall of Not Bad status). To analyze Glade's career, we'll compare it to the following players: -Joseph McWolf: a HoF player. A first-gen in S63, McWolf put together a full 8-season career in which he won two Labattes and a Valiq. -Maxim Kovalchuk: a HoF player. Starting in S62, Kovalchuk switched to forward after five seasons but managed to impress on defense in that time, winning a Labatte, a Valiq, and two Wyldes. Here, we'll just consider his stats on defense. -Ryan Kastelic: NOT a HoF player despite being the current all-time leader in TPE. He would win a Cup in S63 with Riga, but never put up any individual awards. Like Kovalchuk, Kastelic also switched positions, but has enough of a body of work present for it to be comparable. Where to start, where to start...I suppose we'll start with points, because this league has a weird obsession with offense above all else regardless of position. From the standpoint of points, we see everyone above Glade. You'll notice, though, that McWolf had a longer career (which is a bonus, but also tends to skew the numbers if we speck purely in terms of totals). Ultra-nerds will also notice that Kovalchuk is the only one of these players to play in S62, an abnormally high-scoring season for the time, and that this likely contributes to his point total starting as high above the others as it does. What should we do to compensate? Here, I'm going to introduce the concept of what I'm going to call the "Glade Window", or a view of each player's career in as similar of a chunk of time to Shawn Glade's full 6-season career. What this means is the following: -McWolf's stats will be evaluated from S64-69 (his 2nd-7th post-draft seasons, analogous to Glade's) -Kastelic's from S63-67 (his 5 seasons on defense, no change from the above) -Kovalchuk's from S63-66 (we'll start from his 2nd season to exclude S62 as an outlier) And what this gets us is the following: We'll see this doesn't change much at the moment about Glade's numbers. We do see that Kovalchuk's early career success can't just be attributed to S62--as he's still on pace above the others--and that Glade's point total still falls short of McWolf's. Well, all right then. We've established that Glade doesn't quite stack up to the others in this article in terms of points. We are talking about defense, though, so let's find out what happens when we look at our main defensive stats. I don't care for hits as a metric to evaluate many players, because in many cases, it's just a question of play style and whether the builder chooses to dump points into Checking. In this case, we see McWolf running away with it on both charts, and Kastelic trailing far behind--but if memory serves right, that's just because one upgraded CK and the other didn't. What I will note is that Glade does project to a respectable hit total, around 1,200 for an 8-season career if I'm eyeballing it correctly, but that isn't mind-blowing enough to make a huge difference. Let's move on. *this graph is wrong for McWolf's first season--I don't know why--but it gets his eventual career total right. SB is a stat that I love for defensemen, especially those on good teams, and we can see that Glade isn't that far off from the pace set by McWolf and company. He's still under it, though, and when we look at career totals, he's quite a bit under it. So far, there's nothing to suggest that Glade belongs in the Hall of Fame, or that his career ended up being any better than any of the others we've looked at. But we've only looked at three numbers, so let's look at more, shall we? Doesn't this just throw a wrench into our plans to exclude Glade from the conversation? Here we have our first stat where Glade does stack up to the rest--though he comes in third among the group in totals, he's second when we adjust for a view of others over Glade's career. That is to say, when Glade was playing, he was a better goal-scorer than McWolf and Kastelic. A couple notes about this, though: -The claim that Glade "paved the way for two-way defensemen" or that it "just wasn't a thing at the time" is false--if anyone did that (not that I know enough about league history to know if anyone did in the first place), it was Kovalchuk doing it better a season earlier. -This also makes Assists vs. Time a potentially very interesting graph--if Glade comes in last in points and 2nd-3rd in goals, there's probably a big drop-off between Glade and others in assists that doesn't favor Glade too strongly. I didn't care enough to plot this, but it follows that one relationship would lead to another. So...not a Hall-of-Famer? Hold off just a second more. I remembered this article from a long, long time ago in which @Victor dropped a bit of information that one might find potentially useful--at the conclusion of his career, Glade held the all-time record for goals by a defenseman in the playoffs. Playoff stats are worth looking into, after all. I've done what's called normalizing for these numbers--hit totals are obviously higher than goal totals, so what I've done is a simple division of all the numbers in a given category by the highest number in that category. For each, the leader in that category will be shown at 1 here, while the others are represented as proportions of that total (for example, the leader putting up 100 hits will be shown as 1, while someone who put up 50 will be at 0.5). Glade leads the group in every single category. Impressive, right? Well, sure, but we've just spent an entire article comparing these other players to Glade in the amount of time they and Glade had to play with. What if Glade just simply had more time? That was the case here, for sure--Glade the GM was criticized for trading his own player to contenders back in the day on more than one occasion. Without comment on whether this was the right move (and I wasn't involved enough to know the semantics one way or another at the time anyway), this led to Glade the player, well, playing for very good teams with a lot of playoff time. It got him, on average, a championship every other season, and he played 72 playoff games compared to, for example, 34 for Kovalchuk or 37 for McWolf. What if we look at the above stats on a per-game basis? In a given playoff matchup, Glade was still the best goal-scorer, but he was far from the best defensive player and he still manages to fall short of Kovalchuk in points. It's true that the same logic I used with McWolf above applies to Glade to some extent--total numbers do mean something--but when we look at his overall performance within those total numbers, we get a perfect 72 games that looks like this: 72 GP | 25 G | 49 A | 74 P | +14 | 155 HIT | 115 SB Which is still a very good body of work for a defenseman in the mid-60s, for sure--it just isn't good enough to make up for the (relative) shortcomings of the rest of his career. Overall, I think it's safe to conclude that Shawn Glade is not a Hall of Fame player--though it isn't for lack of trying. I hope you enjoy this series, because I'd like to write more at some point! Always nice to have people encourage me to take a look at their old player, as was the case here. Others mentioned: @McWolf @Enorama @Banackock 1,602 words | 3 weeks

@Big Newff is skipped for the second time and DQ'd. @Jason kranz is back on the clock. Please make two picks to make up for the miss on Eightnine earlier.

Gallade is the first one out, so you use Steelix first. Steelix's first attack isn't very effective, but it's a tank--surviving a 147-damage hit from Gallade and Close Combat. You continue to use Iron Tail, and the random aspect of the fight ends up working in your favor as Gallade switches its attack. Now you have to deal with Jynx, who takes out Steelix in one hit. You respond with Charmeleon... ...who gives a powerful attack, but it's not enough for a knockout. Jynx responds with Covet, which doesn't do much, and you're on to the final fight of the tower against Wartortle. You might think that Wartortle would be super effective against Charmeleon, and it is to some extent...but you stay in it and manage to give it a Slash before being knocked out. It's down to your Honedge... ...who uses Fury Cutter, and it's not very effective. Wartortle counters, and you stay in the fight as well. You use Fury Cutter again, and it works a little bit better...

Action 4: Work. Buy an evo stone for Poliwhirl and use it! Action 5: Challenge Lt. Surge Focus Band on Poliwrath. Lead with Gardevoir, who will use Moonblast on Jolteon/Psychic on Magneton/Moonblast on Raichu. Follow with Poliwrath, who will use Hydro Pump on Jolteon/Dynamic Punch on Magneton/Hydro Pump on Raichu. Close off with Flareon if and when necessary and Fire Blast everything.

Actions 1 and 2 - Work x2. Buy EXP share. Action 3 - Challenge Brock. EXP share on Poliwag. This should pull off the evolution. Lead with Poliwag and Water Gun. Follow with Gardevoir and Psychic. Finish with Flareon/Fire Blast on everything. I think I've got a Poliwhirl and a gym badge at the end of this (unless I missed something).

Somehow I missed this; thank you.

D - Hammar Voss D - Erlantz Jokinen @Big Newff