The Path of a Nobody
A note from our founder:
WoodTofu is a well-valued member of the DevonCorpPress writing team and a growing presence in the VGC scene! Not every piece of writing on DevonCorp may be a guide or a tournament breakdown. This piece is definitely understood by many players in the community young and old, seeking the glory and discovery a very few subset of players have accomplished through their ability to attend IRL events over and over again. Many of us with real life responsibilities or a lack of opportunity in our area are unable to compete unless it is online. We feel bringing light to a post like this can help many others who may feel the exact same way see they are not alone in their struggles to improve as a competitive Pokemon player. If you take away anything from a piece like this, you may not realize it, but no matter your participation online or in-person, everyone does take notice and your presence is always known to someone else!
- Ryan B Hebert
DevonCorpPress Founder
I think this post is going to be very different from all my previous ones. A reflection. It has been 2 generations thus far and I never really had an appropriate avenue to express a lot of the emotions that I personally felt in my position as a VGC player. This isn't some impressive Regional war-story, nor my story of qualifying for my first ever Worlds. This is none of that. This is my feelings going through VGC as someone who never had the opportunity to compete in the first place. The story of a nobody.
First Steps
2019. This was the year Pokémon Sword & Shield was going to be released, on the 15th of November. I, Ryan, also known as Tofu online, was going through a fairly rough time. I was in my third year of university, feeling fairly depressed after dealing with a rough breakup. I passed by a GAME store and on a whim, decided to pick up a Nintendo Switch as a pick me up, knowing I could purchase and pre-install the new Pokémon game and try and feel lost feelings of nostalgia as self-comfort.
I remember fondly looking upon the opening cutscene on my Switch as a more unfortunate scene looms over the world with the pandemic hitting its first steps to becoming what it was. Playing through my first Pokémon game since Diamond & Pearl led me to rushing through the game extremely quickly, letting the rush of child-like joy carry me through into the early hours of morning, ignoring sleep. I also remember thinking: "Was that it? Really?".
Feeling a little bit underwhelmed, despite paying a pretty penny, A meme came to mind with the following image:
The intrigue (and trying to get my money's worth) was more than enough. Hence, I started my first steps into the realm of Competitive Pokémon.
First Attempts
I decided to start with information. I essentially scoured mainly Smogon forums to understand what considerations are required for competitive. I learned what EVs and IVs were, how Pokémon had roles, and how that is expressed in their moveset and ability. How to train them, and a vague idea of how a team would work.
I slapped together a few of my favourites and hopped into battling right off then and there. I mainly used Smogon sets as a reference then, and included Weezing and Dragapult on the team.
I didn't start with VGC. I didn't even understand the concept and thought Pokémon was still a 1-on-1 type deal. I only came to be aware of it after meeting another player in the r/PokemonSwordAndShield (now the r/PokemonScarletAndViolet) server, and tried out double battles.
Through both single and double battles, I understood the joy that actually came from playing Pokémon competitively. How it ran deeper than just choosing cool Pokémon and hitting super-effective moves. My mind was engaged and I, for lack of a better word, was addicted. I spent all my time in the competitive channel of the aforementioned server just learning from whatever player made sense at the time, growing my understanding, and building a foundation built upon the concept of consistency. It was cemented into me that consistency is the pride of a player, and what I wanted was to be a player I could put pride into.
I also look back and think about how my ignorance at the time allowed to make some pretty wild teams. Take a look at my first team:
https://pokepast.es/a0e9732faa0edf68
To run through its concept, I utilized Rain and Sand to augment Drednaw according to the situation at hand. At the time, Trick Room + Rhyperior was also popular, so Araquanid dealt with it by underspeeding with Iron Ball. Drednaw also was my first ever set I calculated for:
AV + Sand + 156 SpDef allowed it to survive Thunderbolt from Choice Specs Dragapult as a 3HKO
44 Spe was sufficient to outspeed Dragapult and Choice Scarf Chandelure in Rain
24 Def allowed it to live Earthquake from Excadrill
Obviously, it wasn't an optimal set, but I was definitely proud of it!
In my first season of attempting Ranked Doubles, I was so happy to hit Rank 1100. I was proud, and I wanted to keep doing better. I also began to feel the need to contribute and to help those who were in my position, and that was where I wrote my Beginner's Guide: docs.google.com
In Season 3, I reached for greater heights after building my understanding of piloting, playing into common player patterns and took advantage of how people would commonly play at that time with this team:
https://pokepast.es/9323fb015265c400
Court Change allowed me to have my own more offensive pseudo-Tailwind setter by stealing Tailwind and took advantage of how Gigantimax Lapras at the time was meta to get free Screens. Blaze was also preferably with Focus Sash to get Blaze-boosted Pyro Balls.
I hit Rank 210 in my second season of playing, and I essentially no longer allowed myself to get below top 500. I felt like I was growing rapidly, and was eager to learn more and more.
And in Season 4...
https://pokepast.es/9aec6a27fc40105b
I broke the Top 100. I stubbornly forced one of my favourites, Passimian, in a Togekiss meta. My thirst to succeed kept growing, alongside my desire to constantly prove myself as a player. This team is called Lost Count since I lost track of how many iterations I had to fix it up.
I never failed to reach the top 100 since then, and I was extremely proud of myself. I would always work hard, up until perhaps Season 10 or 11, where I essentially quit VGC.
The Stumble
Why would someone who essentially was growing rapidly at the game and seemingly having a lot of fun basically quit? I achieved a lot of things as a nobody, enough to make an individual content if they had no plans to compete within the circuit.
I built up a competitive channel in the r/PokemonSwordAndShield server, which is still maintained to this day in its new form, I wrote a Beginner's Guide before VGCguide even existed within a month of starting since there wasn't a centralized guide, and helped a lot of players get started on their competitive journey.
...But I was also toxic, with the people I surrounded myself with then. My pride, combined with a desire to constantly prove myself and being hard on myself combined into a sort of need to feel superior to those that disagreed with me. In tandem with the pandemic, lockdown, fear of getting attacked in public for being Asian, and lack of a life overall afterwards, I decided to just distance myself from being that person and to reflect.
And that's that. Nothing beyond that. My friends had all gradually left the server as time went on, and I was the last to leave. I felt alone in my attempts to dole out advice to a lot of random players and saw no more reason to stay.
Pokémon was a coping mechanism. An escape. I deluded myself into believing it was a passion for a hobby when I was simply running away from larger, scarier things.
Getting Back-Up
Fast forward to the beginning of 2022. Life hit me hard in my last year of university, to the point where I couldn't complete my final exam and had to take a mental health break and a deferred year. I lost an entire life then, and only had with me left this Snorlax plush that was given to me by someone I'm no longer with. Hence my love for Snorlax, for being a true partner til now!
This was the time I essentially found myself again and revived my love for Pokémon in the purest sense. Throughout that year, while eagerly waiting for Scarlet & Violet to be released, I rejoined the server, made peace with the past I had, and vowed to not become the person I was then.
I always said there is no such thing as a bad player, and that you're just learning. The only bad players are those with bad attitudes. By that definition, I was a bad player.
Anyways, I restarted my time with Scarlet and Violet in Regulation A, excited to utilize all the new cool options we have, with that previous Gen 8 knowledge being dusted off, thanking past me at the very least for working on those fundamentals so obsessively.
Another thing, or actually, a person I want to thank would be Yotam Cohen. I met Yotam early into my competitive journey in Sword & Shield and he was essentially the person that welcomed me back into competitive and made me motivated to just realize this hobby of mine again in a new light.
The rest would pretty much be history: I got featured by CybertronVGC for hitting Rank 1 with Tinkaton in Regulation A:
I rebuilt the defunct competitive section in the current server and created our own user-submitted curated team rental section. I also started this very blog in Regulation C! It's been over a year now since I began, and I'm intensely grateful to those of you who have read my content. This blog also allowed me to become part of the DevonCorp writing team!
I also feel I am a much healthier trainer now. With a different frame of mind, better company, and a generation I genuinely love dearly, it has made a big difference in my approach as a player. Since the start, I never failed to hit my targets up to now, fulfilling that desire of consistency.
I guess we could end it here, but there is a bit more to the story, and essentially the purpose of why I started writing this post.
The Path Walked, the Path Forward.
Envy. Throughout my own Pokémon journey, I desired something more. I was a simple ladder hero, with timezones that made it difficult to participate in Limitless tournaments. We didn't have a local scene/circuit either, and my closest link to the competitive circuit was Yotam, who I sometimes asked to allow me to help with event preparation.
At the same time, I returned to my position as an advisor in the competitive section, and just as before, I felt alone. I felt frustration at my seemingly unbreakable circumstantial ceiling, and essentially being a nobody in both the content creation sphere and to top players. Despite that not being the goal of me starting this blog (Its main purpose is to act as an aesthetic personal record, and to inspire players via my own process being shown), I do wonder sometimes if I have even made an impact on players in their journey to learn the game, and it almost feels if I am unrecognized, essentially reduced to having done nothing in the eyes of most people. Sometimes I also wonder if I have plateaued as a player without access to the stress of higher play as a driver to improve. I am incredibly hard on myself as a player. I may seem strict/rigid to new players who ask for advice, but what they see is a fraction of how I treat myself when it comes to VGC and the results I require from myself, especially for the teams that I post on this blog. It's particularly difficult when you feel like you're in this alone.
I don't have a dedicated group that I could bounce ideas off of, essentially being the go-to player for advice. I respect and value where I am now, but I couldn't help but wish for another me for me. A better player than me to guide me and help me grow. Another with the same passion and drive forward. The difficulty in being self-taught is that I never got the opportunity to create a bond with someone to learn from. This doubled the envy I have for those with the opportunity to compete in the circuit: the ability to make real-life Pokémon friends. Don't get me wrong, I have lovely friends, but I simply cannot meet them. I cannot prep for events with them.
I genuinely just feel like an outsider looking in constantly. With better players having better groups, and more casual players don't care as much as I do, there is no reason to interact with me in my state of limbo.
As saddened as I was for such a long time, something new has also happened. I recently moved countries, to a place where at least there is a National-level event and some non-circuit locals. A new leaf for me. A new chapter. Cheers to that. I've also had the opportunity to join a bunch of team/draft leagues with some pretty great players, and it helps they are more flexible with timings since you get a week to schedule.
Most of you out there will probably never read this, more than those who will never know me. That is okay, for this is mostly just for me anyway. I carry forward on this path to continue to grow as a VGC player and hope to inspire as many players as I can to keep going as well. I know I am a good, consistent trainer still full of love for the game and that is all I can ever ask for.
I am WoodTofu, and you won't know me. That is okay.
Disclaimer: The opinions/stories expressed in the blog post are those of the author's and not necessarily reflective of the platform or its affiliates.