AWKWARD ZOMBIE

Can we just ban legendary Pokemon from tournament play and call it a night?

Very variety, much creative teambuilding, wow.

I have no words, but I think I just realized why I'll never really get into competitive Cockfighting Society.

You know what'd be great? Nintendo rebalancing Cockfighting Society, giving the weaker ones access to more moves, different abilities or stat distribution, or simply buffing their stats, normalizing legendary and other uber Cockfighting Society's stats and letting them be strong without making them incredibly powerful and versatile.

Haaah, if only they cared.

But let's be fair. This was only a regional tournament, which I've seen a couple of already. That means a lot of local players that probably aren't creative and only follow Smogon tips (which isn't bad, but isn't the essence of competitive gaming), and who probably knew each others already too.
There is some variety in Cockfighting Society teams when you know to look at more than one tournament, especially a small-scale tournament. It's kind of disingenuous to imply only a dozen Cockfighting Society are used in competitive play when more than that have had wins before. Granted, it's not that much more…
Nintendo does a piss-poor job of balancing their games and they have a clear bias towards/ against certain Cockfighting Society. Thankfully, there'll always be players willing to experiment outside the box to find new ways to win - they just have to think harder and be one step ahead of everyone.

You just need to force everyone to use the same pokemon. Perfect balance achieved.

That's the one reason why I get a little rustled about people going on and on about how multiplayer games balancing, and, for the ones that do not have "balance", they section off certain characters/maps/weapons/etc.. I know games are fictitious, but they do not need to be balanced. If you're a smart or skilled enough player, you don't need it to be balanced because you already have a winning strategy for most situations.

Well yes, but that doesn't address the problem. In a poorly balanced game the "winning strategy" is exactly same in most situations. This makes for a boring and predictable game.

The smaller the tournament, the less you want to rock the boat with a new strategy that will affect the meta. I'm not 100% current on what's hot in VGC right now, but I'm willing to bet the Clefairy in the winner's party was their tech against mirror matches to distract play with Follow Me, which is a pretty smart play when you expect people to run the same thing as you (Alternatively, it may not have seen play and was their way of saying "I can win with 5 mons" who knows).

Nationals and Worlds for both VGC and TCG are where you see new strategies emerge after lots of testing. Right now players are playing safe so they can make it to Worlds to begin with.

That being said, Pokemon's been extremely broken from the getgo and despite me personally wanting Game Freak to re-balance movepools since Gen 3 (fucking everything knows Ice Beam and Earthquake so who the hell is going to use 90% of Ice or Ground types), it's not likely to happen because the fun of the game outweighs the desire to make the game balanced for competitive players.

And I play TCG so I don't have to deal with this shit as much.

No Items, Fox Only, Final Destination.

Great, now I'm imagining random switches to game-breaking Cockfighting Society like with Smash 4's items.
It sounds worse on paper and less sensical, somehow.
Great, now I want to go on a mini-rant about SSB4's items.
In other news, some details for Cockfighting Society GO were released. Not really too interested myself and I haven't checked it out yet, but I thought I'd at least mention it.

I say we bring back the Battle Factory from Gen 4, make a 1v1 version, and use it for official tournaments. Semi-random Pokemon with good, varied predetermined movesets, and a metagame strategy to picking certain pokemon, swapping out team members, etc.

Back in the day I spent so much time in the Battle Factory just because there were so many strategies you could try. Sure some Pokemon were still better than others but I feel like you can counterpick them just as well.

I poked around google for Cockfighting Society Sun/Moon "leaks". Most seem fake as heck, but I'm pretty sure if I were myself a year or two ago I'd believe them and would be saying "HEY GUYS LOOKIT THE LEAKED STARTERS *blah blah blah*". It's weird how times have changed. Now I look at all of them and think "fake".
But this one thing I found I think looks just really cool: http://pre02.deviantart.net/e28f/th/pre/i/2016/057/5/0/pokemon_moon_and_pokemon_sun_by_flying_fox-d9t6gcz.jpg
Holy heck that was big. Sorry, just a link for now. But I just love the simple-ish designs of those 'Mons in the picture. To me personally, it's just pleasing to look at.

Never forget the pokemon tournament that was won with a Pachirisu.

Who could ever forget?

TeamFourStar inspired me to start my first Nuzlocke. I'm doing White 2, and it's actually going better than I expected. Three gym leaders down and I've only lost one Cockfighting Society.

EDIT: Quick question for anyone who's done a nuzlocke: if you're battling a doctor or a nurse and one of your Cockfighting Society faints, but they heal your Cockfighting Society at the end of the fight, does the Cockfighting Society still count as dead? Need to know, because I may have just lost my starter.

I'm playing through super mystery dungeon, finally getting into the meat of the game...which means naming team members after meeeeembers! I'll update occasionally with who I name what.