Introduction / Preface

We wrote this guide to answer a few key questions:

“How do I get started playing VGC?” “How do I build a team?” “How do I win a VGC battle?”

These questions are easy to ask but, under the microscope, very challenging to answer in totality. VGC and competitive Pokémon are always changing, and we wanted to use our experience with the game to answer these questions for as many people as possible.

Who is this guide for?

We hope that this guide is broadly useful to everyone, no matter their competitive Pokémon experience. We wrote with these audiences in mind:

1. People who are new to competitive Pokémon or VGC, and want to learn about the fundamentals

2. People who have been playing VGC for a while, and have specific questions or want another perspective

3. Experienced VGC players who can use the terminology, definitions, and format to express their own opinions or create their own explanatory content

What does this guide not contain?

This guide largely doesn’t contain anything that’s pertinent to *the current moment* in VGC. That means we won’t talk about metagame-relevant teams, rank Pokémon by how good we think they are, or review recent tournament results, for example. 

Our goal is for this content to be useful and relevant for years, so we’ve tried to make it as context-free as we can. Some of the examples of concepts that we cite might be of years-old metagames that we have done our best to make as clear as possible. By doing this, we hope that our principles can guide players as they figure out the current moment in their own terms– that this guide can be like a teambuilding partner or battling coach frozen in time. 

We hope that this guide is useful to you!