I chatted- and Mystery Gifted- in line with some people, a few years older than me but with a fraction of an Azurian's know-how. One 18 year old was gushing over her L100 Ho-Oh with Sacred Fire, SafeGuard, Fire Blast and Swift. I was later to find out that no-one was packing anything even remotely resembling high-level strategy in their teams- I didn't see one person using Miltank, Marowak or Machamp, no Death Stars, Hellgars, not even Parashuffling or even Parafusion. People were just packing high-end killers lke the Super Legendaries, Birds, Kingdra and Tyranitar. Because of my fanatical hatred of Gameshark, I personally challenged this kid who was bragging about his Celebi and took great pleasure in dismantling the L100 shiny pink Celebi, L74 Beedrill and some L40-20 water types. Kingdra was able to take out Celebi and I used Jolteon to sweep away his little Poliwhirl. I looked over another kid's team, but declined his offer of battle after seeing that his Tyranitar packed Mega Horn and his Lugia had Horn Drill and Drill Peck- "Yeah, I traded Lugia back to my Blue game and taught it the Drill Peck TM". If that isn't sig material I don't know what is. It really pained me hearing some people's opinions- no-one understood why you'd put Toxic, Mean Look and Confuse Ray on Umbreon, preferring to put some "good Dark attacks like Thief and Faint Attack" on. People had never even heard of the Death Starmie, and someone tried to teach me the Cloning Trick (Don't they know who I am?). People were also gasping in wonder about the fact I talked to KC-Chan every night on mIRC. After a bit of initial confusion on the part of the staff, I picked up a Celebi (and a second- I think the "one per person" rule present at Six Flags is also in effect here) but blagged a second for Weezinbell. It's the same as Six Flags too, with random DVs (My Celebi had HP:26, A:15, D:15, SpA:16, SpD:16, Spd:15 - anyone care to find out the DVs of that for me?)

I queued up for the tournament qualification- and that's where I got my big shock. There's a very important fact everyone needs to know. You should all leave your GS carts at home- you'll have no use for them here, unless you want to make trades or have casual battles. Yer Miltanks, Machamps, Starmies and Smeargles can't compete, because everything in this tournament is self-contained. To qualify, you have to win a battle against the CPU. Sound easy? Not when you're playing to Challenge Cup Master Ball rules, and on Hard level to boot. You'll have to make the best of what you're given against a team that usually has all the advantages against you. You can retry as many times as you want (you'll have to get back to the end of the queue, mind you) until they have 64 people competing. I failed three times against Stadium 2's jammy AI, which destroyed the Starmie which would have walked all over its team with a critical Ancientpower from Rhydon, destroyed my Electrode with 2 crit-hit Thunders from its own Electrode and finished off the leftovers with a divebombing Crobat.

Anyway, it was no great loss to me, as I'm used to crushing defeats by now. The winners get a very big goodie bag, consisting of a small shirt, a page of stickers and vouchers and a big fluffy Pikachu which you can stick pins into. Finally, they get a copy of Silver with twenty Celebis on it. This is the special part. Trade away all 20 Celebis, return the cart to Nintendo and they'll send you a free copy of Crystal. That's right, 100% free. They even supply the envelope. But there's a trick- you can't just send the cart back with 20 Dunsparces, oh no. Instead, you get a list of specific pokemon, and unless the cart comes back with exactly the right pokemon on it, you lose out. The pokemon in question shouldn't be too hard to get hold of- they include Azumarril, Xatu, Charizard, Blastoise and Venusaur, and I'm sure you'll all figure out your own way of getting it done. Don't know if they'll be able to find out if you've sharked them all, but it's not fair play really. Nothing to say you can't keep all 20 for yourself and give them your own 20 from the list though. All 64 qualifiers get their own goody bag, so that's 320 free copies of Crystal they're giving away in all. Hmm....

The tournament's done in classic elimination format, nothing special really. You're not even allowed to use your own team here, but instead pick from the L100 rentals on offer for each battle. After someone won a very crowd-pleasing victory using Wobuffet in the second rounds, it showed up on a lot of people's teams. Other popular choices included Misdreavus for its Thunder attack, Skarmory for all-round strength and Heracross for Megahorn, which may have been to counter Misdreavus and Wobuffet. Then again, seeing as people were smacking each other around with Thief and Rock Smash when they could be using Psybeam and Shadow Ball, I may be overestimating them. In the semifinals, you weren't even allowed to attach items to the rentals (despite the fact that all you had to work with was Berry and the 5 status-healing Berries- Bitter, Burnt etc). Nevertheless, the crowd was really in a frenzy at times- the limited scope of pokemon and moves made it a great challenge, sort of like competing in Sealed Deck for MtG- with lots of applause, cheering, chanting, shouted advice from certain members (and boy, did they need it- as illustated by people trying to use Fury Attack on Misdreavus and Thunder on Quagsire). The TV cameras certainly got a lot of very good footage, although I expect they'll cut everything they filmed with me out. Maybe I shouldn't have screamed so loud. I even met up with someone from Pokemasters (Sage of Darkness) who certainly knew his stuff, and by the end of the day people were watching the Semifinals with rapt attention, hanging on the competitor's moves- who, faced with a lack of pokemon strategy were making up for it with psychological warfare. For example, two people were fighting a drawn-out battle with Skarmory against Ursaring- Skarmory could have torn great chunks of HP away with Fly, but was forced to chip away with Steel Wing because Ursaring would use the charge-up move to execute a Rest, followed by using some very strong Snores. You'd go downhill very quickly if you gave in to stress, which was easy to do with the huge crowd following your actions. My stay was, however, cut short, so I couldn't find out the overall winner. I don't know what it looked like, but I'm reliably informed they won a big Trophy at the end.

So, if you english types want a blast on Stadium 2 (all the rumors are true- Nightmare looks superb and Jumpluff/Furret are uber kawaii), and want a considerable challenge, kind of like a massive Challenge Cup, then you could do a lot worse that head to the local Celebi tour. Despite rumors, there's no sight of Dave McComb and his minions to ruin the mood, just a bunch of like-minded fanatics that you might even be able to teach a thing or two.

Cool story.

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Originally posted by Jolt135:
Just use Word instead.

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Originally posted by Hoppip:
Skarmory could have torn great chunks of HP away with Fly, but was forced to chip away with Steel Wing

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Which do exactly the same amount of damage against Normal-types. Or am I just missing something here?

It's also come to my attention that despite positive remarks in the forum, the main attitude in the Azure Heights chat after I posted this War Story was "WTF, this is retarded". If this is the thanks I get for informing and assisiting you, you can expect neither of them from me ever again.

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Originally posted by Hoppip:
Yes, like I said, he was forced to use Steel Wing because the Ursaring would Rest otherwise.

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Myself, two friends of mine, Dragonite21, Jikkyou Yoshi and DH from Pokémon Daily all failed to beat the Challenge Vup on Master Ball with Hard CPU to qualify.

The tournament final for Brent Cross came down to two under-tens, one of whom was Dragonite21's little bro. The battle was between Skarmory, Quagsire and I think Jolteon (D21's brother) and Abra, Kadabra and Alakazam (the other kid).

It came down to an intense one-on-one (as intense as a rentals battle can be, anyhow) with Quagsire and Kadabra. Quagsire's Dig won Dragonite21's little brother the overall tourney. So, no Azurians won, but I suppose he counts as a mini-Azurian.

I never even got an official Celebi, and couldn't frankly give a rat's ass.