Note from the Editor

As the biggest online community for competitive Pokemon, Smogon is constantly growing. In the last two months we have seen a few changes come to fruition, and some of them are really cool. I'll walk you through some of them.

Of the things that have come out on our site in the past few weeks, one of the most notable is the inclusion of Dream World as a new competitive metagame on Smogon. There is currently an entire forum section enabled for Dream World analyses and articles, and its overall goal is to cover this metagame by providing analyses, guides, and focused discussion on every Pokemon in the Dream World tier. It is definitely a great new addition to the site, and I encourage all of you who are interested in the tier to go check it out!

On the competitive side of things, there are quite a few tournaments to talk about. First, after three months of intense battling, the official Smogon Tournament #8 reached the end just a few days ago, with user Snunch as the winner of the first golden trophy for the 5th Generation of Pokemon. Congratulations, Snunch! Everything was decided in two deadly, exciting battles, and you can view the replay for both of them here and here. Continuing with the tournaments aspect of the site, the new season of the Smogon Tour is just around the corner, and on March 23rd, hundreds of players from all over the world will engage in a long-lasting battle to fight over that prestigious trophy. Good luck to everyone who decides to give it a shot! Finally, the second annual Official Smogon VGC Tournament just kicked off, and it looks insanely promising, with hundreds of players fighting 4v4 doubles games. You can find out more about this tournament by following this link.

On the other hand, if front-page news is one way you use to keep yourself up-to-date with the latest announcements, then you probably have noticed that very recently we changed the three main art pieces that add that fine aesthetic touch to the navigation bar on the left. This awesome art comes from one of the most talented artists on Smogon, Chou Toshio. And, if you're curious enough, you can read this thread to find out more about the submission process that took place a little over a year ago for selecting the new artwork. Great job, Chou, and I hope you guys enjoy the new art as much as I do.

The last thing I want to mention before moving on to talking about The Smog, is the second generation of Pokemon Black & White, which as you may or may not know, was announced in a press release issued by Nintendo over a month ago. The new games are coming out in both Europe and North America… this fall! Yes, pretty exciting, huh? Until then, you can participate in our forum discussion and engage with all the other people who are already there sharing their thoughts on the new versions and what to expect from them.

Anyway, enough of site updates—let's talk about The Smog. This issue of The Smog is not as modest in its size as was the previous one—this time we're making the biggest rollout ever by featuring a total of forty articles. It is a milestone on its own, and we are very pleased with the number and the fact that we keep pushing ourselves a little bit more to bring to our readers new things to read about. That said, we are also making public the results for the much anticipated Smog Awards, and I am sure many people are excited about this. Lots of surprises on this front, and I especially loved to see… Well I'm not going to reveal anything here, will I? Go and check this out for yourselves! Aside from that, we continue many of our recurring articles and, as usual, we are bringing new, interesting ones for you to enjoy. Forgotten strategies, rapid spinning among the tiers, suspect results for Rarely Used, CAP report, information about the Translation Projects, and much more. I think this issue is packed with a lot of cool, helpful and interesting articles. We hope you enjoy it!

And as always, it's been really great seeing all of our contributors—writers, proofreaders, artists and coders—putting so much effort into working toward making this a successful issue. I am thrilled with the results of our team's work, and we're going to continue releasing the best online Pokemon magazine.

Happy Reading!

~Setsuna