The Flying Cup of GBL

Since the development of the PvP feature in Pokémon Go, the community (through Silph Road and Silph Arena) has taken to develop it into something that would provide an outlet for structured competition. With the Go Battle League today, a similar thing can be said to be occurring internally within Pokémon Go. I've already detailed two of its developments, the Premier Cup and Halloween (Cup), and now I'd like to detail a third one. As the title of this post suggests, it's called the Flying Cup.

Like the other two above, it has its own restrictions, and they're dead simple. The primary restriction is that only Pokémon with the Flying type as one of their types are allowed. The secondary restriction is that the Great League limit of CP 1500 applies. Other than that, it's up to each individual Trainer to make what they will based on these two restrictions, in order to try to go against other Trainers who do exactly the same thing. But as with similar developments, there are more beneath the surface.

While there are lots of potential contenders, the meta boils down to certain combinations of the Flying type with other types: Rock (Aerodactyl), Steel (Skarmory), Water (Mantine), Electric (Zapdos, Emolga), Ice (Articuno), and Dragon (Altaria). Since the Flying type is centrally involved, the Rock, Electric, and Ice types play against each other, and the other types on the list act as support against the first three types. As with any meta, a Trainer may elect not to use these, but best practices will demand them.

The Flying Cup is available as part of Go Battle Night... which happened to occur yesterday after having been postponed two months ago. Because of its special nature, it became the preferred battle mode for many, including me. I'll spare the event details for later, but what's important is that I got to test out how things worked out with the Flying Cup. As expected, many Trainers like me used different selections from the "big six" above, including myself. The above interactions played out as expected, but what seemed to be more important was suppressing or activating these interactions as necessary, which I may or may not have done. The result was that I won and lost a fairly even number of battles. In the limited time I battled with the mode, I found it sometimes thrilling and other times disappointing. Should the Flying Cup return at some point, and I very much hope so, it may be time to try new things.

This cup is extraordinarily simple in restrictions, but as I've found out - and perhaps others too - it can become extraordinarily complex. However it's regarded in complexity, it should also be regarded as something that provides structure to GBL as well, something that the GBL is really moving into in light of how the community creates a structure for PvP competitions and battling in general. With the Flying Cup, it could be said that everyone's hopes took flight into the sky for GBL and beyond.

One year ago: Performance Critique: Project "Untitled" J-Karaoke

Two years ago: Let's Rule the World, Together

Three years ago: Triplets and Pairs