Now that we're basically onto VGC21, I want to talk about a sensitive topic.

One Year Catching And Breeding All My Teams, a thread.

Disclaimer: I'm not trying to promote hacking by any means. The point of this thread is to share my experience and clarify some misconceptions.

Part 1 - The First Few Months

When the new games came out, with all the QoL changes, I decided to challenge myself and try my best to always make sure my Pokémon were bred or caught legitimately. I'd either do it myself, or only ask friends who I truly trusted.

Don't get me wrong, I personally had never hacked for VGC before, but I wasn't nearly as careful when asking others for help.

Ngl, it definitely helped that Legendaries weren't involved. I could just breed every Pokémon available and get as many as I wanted.

The 2 hardest challenges were Jellicent and Gourgeist. A little backstory, I used Jellicent to win a Galar Weekly back in December and Gourgeist to make Finals of OCIC. They were especially painful and Jelli even drove me to pure frustration.

The problem was that I needed 0 IVs on both Atk and Speed, while going through the process of getting the Strength Sap egg move chained down from a random Drifblim. As for Gourgeist, I had to look for a wild Super Size Pumpkaboo (1% encounter) with terrible IVs and chain breed.

Apart from those 2, it was a fairly smooth process, but only bc I could get as many as I wanted and fairly quickly. However, I still had to spend way more hours grinding than I should have to. I hit the 1000 hour mark very early on and it barely felt worth it.

Part 2 - Crown Tundra

We've now entered Legendary territory. We can only get 1 of each from our saves and resetting them is unnecessarily painful. Ironically, the guaranteed 31 IVs make our job harder, as the odds of getting 0 Atk and/or Speed are much lower.

In just about a week, Ive already exhausted my Exp/Rare Candy stock. Ive spent dozens of hours resetting and going through max adventures in what's been the most frustrating experience I've had in SwSh. I could've spent that time studying, playing other games, talking to friends.

However, the Players Cup Qualifiers are starting this next weekend and I need to have these Pokémon ready ASAP. Special Attackers like Cresselia, Zapdos and Heatran need 0 Atk IV to reduce Foul Play and confusion damage, but you have to go on a 20 min adventure per reset.

And that's not to mention the fact that some of those might even want 0 Speed as well. On top of all that, there's only one of each per save file, so you can't even have different sets ingame to test with. If that wasn't enough, you're gonna have to level them up to 100.

Btw, they're all on the slow experience group. The whole process is unnecessarily tedious and honestly frustrating. I want to share a particular moment that hit me especially hard. It was just last friday. I was still considering joining the VR tour.

I'd just gone 31-2 on an alt with a team I was working on and it felt just right. I spent the next few hours hunting for a 0 Atk legendary, leveling up another one and bottle capping it, as well as EV training 3 of them. Then, I decided to practice a bit more.

Ended up facing a bunch of tough matchups I hadnt considered and lost about 5 games in a row. The team kept on not performing very well and I was heartbroken. Not only had I hit a dead end teambuilding wise, I'd also wasted HOURS getting the team in-game.

Obviously, the Pokémon I trained could still be useful in the future, but I could've invested my time on smth far more important to me, especially now that we're so close to the Players Cup Qualifiers.

Part 3 - Conclusion

One of the main arguments I've seen against hacking, that has always bothered me a lot, is that it gives players an advantage. To test this theory, lets analyse my season and see how breeding my Pokémon affected it.

December 2019: 1st out of 193 players at a Galar Weekly, hit no. 1 on Battle Stadium.
January: Top 8 at Bochum Regionals out of 401 players.
February: 2nd at the Oceania Internationals out 288 players.
April: 2nd out of 1477 players at the Champions Cup

May: Top 8 out of 263 players at the VR May Challenge, 3rd in Europe at the May IC
June: 5th (out of 8 players lol) at the Players Cup Invitational, 1st out of 206 players at the Rose Tower Solidarity Challenge.
July: 33rd (5-2) at the Players Cup European Qualifiers.

August: 2nd at the Rose Tower Circuit Playoffs, hit no.1 on Battle Stadium
September: hit no.1 on Battle Stadium, qualified for r/vgc tour top cut.
October: 1st out of 154 players at the Battle Dome, 4th out of 294 players at the Scramble, 7th out of 249 players at the r/vgc tour

As you can see, the only thing breeding/catching my Pokémon affected was my social life and mental health. I had no disadvantage whatsoever, you might even say it gave me a performance boost looking at this consistency. The sample size is quite ample as well.

I truly hope this thread shows how you don't need to hack to perform, as well as how meaningless it is that others hack. I hate how this whole hacking talk drives newcomers and casual players away when it truly doesn't affect anything.

Also, as thankful as I am for the QoL changes, we really do need the bottle cap equivalent for 0 IVs. Logistics might be a problem, as you can struggle to imagine how to train a Pokémon into being worse. However, my friend @Yladris had an amazing idea.

We could have monks who teach the Pokémon how to conform with the minimum and that fighting is unnecessary. The longer it stays with the monk, the more the IV drops. Another option is taking the Pokémon on vacation, so it becomes lazy and weaker.

So yeah, this is what I wanted to share with you. I know this thread had gotten huge, but I believe everything I said is important and I hope my message reaches as many ppl as possible. Special shoutout to my subs for the help and support. Thank you for reading!

tl;dr: I bred/caught my stuff for a year, it was boring and painful, but it didn't affect my performances at all, showing that hacking doesn't give any sort of advantage. If hacking was accepted, I'd now have a wife, 3 kids and a stable job.

P.S.: afaik, none of the Pokémon involved in the breeding processes were hacked. I also avoided abusing glitches. The only thing of the sort I did was time-skipping for raids and EV removal berries a couple times.