Guide to Tryharding - by Finchinator
Index
- Get to know your opponent...everything about them
- Make contact...the tryhard way
- Scout the living shit out of them
- Activity post novels mid-week
- Test out teams AT LEAST 100 times
- Fight time!
Get to know your opponent...everything about them
The first part of tryharding is winning the information war. This requires knowing everything about your opponent - the more stuff you have, the more you can use against him in any way possible. I'm not just talking pokemon stuff - you gotta know where they are at every minute and all the details about them. If it's 5pm, you best know where they are and what they're doing. If it's a Tuesday night, you best know where they are and what they're doing. You need to get who they are inside your head before you even think about building for or playing them. I'll use resident Banned Deucer CasedVictory as an example!
I know the following about Cased:
I also have a picture of him:
ty rozes
Conclusion: Before actually preparing for the pokemon aspects, you must know the person you are up against in order to put yourself at an immediate advantage. This is the first step in being a proper tryhard!
Make contact...the tryhard way
When you're a tryhard, you need to show this in every aspect of being in a tournament. In scheduling, you must make sure your opponent knows you're actually spending hours of your lifeless time trying hard to do well at pokemon. You need to tell them your full schedule including when you're preparing and for how long you're preparing and then when you're ready so you set the tone. Also, you need to speak in proper terminology and make your message as long as humanly possible so they give up and let you play when you want and they feel intimidated. Every character counts, really, which is why I'm throwing on this unnecessary sentence to the end of this paragraph as I, too, an, in fact, a tryhard. I'll use my message to Meeps last year when we were fighting during week 2 of SPL as an example!
As you can see, it outlines everything and clearly gives me an advantage before the match even starts. Combine this with the fact that you already know EVERYTHING about your opponent thanks to step one and you're already on an easy path to mental, psychological, and actual victory against your opponent!
Conclusion: Make contact in detail stating everything you possibly can and you've completed the second step of the tryhard process!
Scout the living shit out of them
This step is the most straightforward, the most varying depending on person/opponent, and the most important, so pay attention! Being a tryhard means that you have to put forward all of your free time and effort into making sure you know every last pokemon, trend, team archetype, and set your opponent has used over the years - this can be tedious and time consuming, but you must get it done as part of your tryhard duties. What you do with this information, however, is what truly matters. First off, organizing the information in a fashion that makes it ascetically pleasing and helpful for you to plan is key. Here are a few examples:
Once you have this down, the real challenge starts. You need to stretch out all the information you have to make it look as long and tedious to make as possible in order to make it look like you spent hours and hours doing it and
make it look like you are literally insane. This will strike fear into the opposition - they won't want to play a tryhard prodigy.
Finally, the easy part comes - building an actual team that matches up well and doesn't have many weaknesses. This step isn't really important because you've already done all of the tryhard stuff beforehand, so there's no way you're losing, haha
I'll use my tryhardery and prep against Marth as a prime example for this!
First off, I
compiled all of this information. As you can see, that is fucking massive:
If I told you I had 850 words and 7 pages written on you, I'm sure you'd be psychologically fucked. So then comes the unimportant part, of course, in actually building the team. As you can see, I just used a completely random,
bog standard sand team. However, thanks to following all of the tryhard steps, I
won the match handily!
Conclusion: Make sure to put emphasis on the information finding and organizing and not the actual building of a team and you'll be far on your way to completing the third step in the effective tryhard process!
Activity post novels mid-week
Now that you have done your scouting and eventually built a team, you need to do something while your opponent is johning you or missing the scheduled time that you had for early in the week because you did your tryhard things asap because you have no life. This is where you put your writing skills to the test and craft a lengthy, bitchy activity post that will make your opponent wish he didn't have to face you before the game even started, giving you an even larger psychological advantage!
I'll cut right to an example on this one because it literally says it all -
here.
Conclusion: Make sure to post activity whenever possible in order to get that extra advantage and assert your tryhard dominance over your opponent and you'll be completing the fourth step in the tryhard process!
Test out teams AT LEAST 100 times
This step is straightforward - if you want to be an all-star caliber player, you need to put in the tests. With all of the tryhard elements above put together, you should be winning a vast majority of your tests and go into your game with confidence that you will emerge victorious as the superior
tryhard player!
- here's a normal day in the life of a tryhard for ya
Conclusion: Make sure to test out your team until you physically cannot stand the sight of your pokemon's sprites on your screen anymore and then you will be ready to battle and you will have completed the fifth and before last step of the tryhard process!
Fight time!
This is the culmination of all of your tryhardery. Take all of your hard work and prep in conjunction with the distinct psychological advantage you have acquired and use it all to absolutely destroy your opponent.
