It should be no surprise to anyone who is familiar writing that I am a fan of the Pokemon franchise. I've been personally playing the game since the North American releases back in the fall of 1998, and have bought every main series entry in the franchise and even went so far as to write three articles covering the first three generations of the series several years ago. Something I've always wanted to do, but have never been able to, is to get into the field of competitive Pokemon battling, now while this seems as simple as leveling a team of six Pokemon and running off to face an opponent, either online or in person, but when you get down to it, there's an entire world of depth available to those who are willing to look for it, and today, that's what we're here to talk about.



   For the benefit of those without a background in the franchise, allow me to give you a brief rundown of how exactly Pokemon stats work and how one would go about preparing a Pokemon for competitive battling. Whenever you encounter a Pokemon in the wild, or when you receive an egg from the Daycare couple, the Pokemon has six random values, called Individual Values, one for each statistic (Attack, Defense, Special Attack, Special Defense, Speed, and HP). Each of the these values can range between zero and thirty-one and will effect how high the Pokemon's stats can get, for example, a Pikachu at level 100 with a speed value of 0 can hit 185, while a Pikachu with a speed value of 31 will cap out at 216, meaning these values can make a huge difference when battling, since a large different in stats such as attack, defense, and HP can make the difference between being knocked out in one hit or two. Prior to the sixth generation Pokemon titles, it was pretty much a crap shoot on how your stats turned out when breeding, at best your had a 25% chance of passing down a specific IV based on using certain hold items, and it led to a lot of uncertainty when breeding and caused breeding to be a huge time sink for those who did attempt it, this also led to a lot of players choosing an alternate route for obtaining their Pokemon, but that's something for a different day.
   Now, with the introduction of Pokemon X and Y, new items were introduces that would guarantee that three IVs from each parent Pokemon, making it much faster to breed. To give you a good example of what this means, for the entire fifth generation, which included Pokemon Black, White, Black 2, and White 2, I was never able to breed a competitive Pokemon, which in the competitive community means a Pokemon with five or their six IVs at 31. In the sixth generation, I was able to breed a five IV Mawile in less than an hour, though admittedly there are other tricks to help along your breeding in X and Y, but again, that's something for another day. Going a little further down the rabbit hole, we have one more hidden value to talk about, there are Effort Values.
   Effort Values, as indicated above, are another hidden value withing the game. Whenever you finish a battle against a  Pokemon, you will receive up to three points of EVs in addition to your normal experience for the battle. For every four EVs you earn, you can raise the stat those EVs are associated with by one point. You can earn up to 252 points (it was 255 in gens three through five) in each stat, this will raise that stat by 63 points, keep in mind though that each Pokemon can't earn more than 510 total EVs. To use the example of our friend Pikachu from earlier, that level 100 Pikachu with 31 speed IVs has 216 speed, now if we wanted to max out that Pikachu's speed we could give it 252 EVs in speed which would raise its speed to 279, which is a significant bump from that original 216 we were dealing with. The great thing about EVs, at least in my opinion, is this is where you can really individualize your Pokemon, since you can divide up your EVs however you want, as long as your don't exceed that 510 max.
   Now, onto our final topic for this article, Pokemon natures. Natures were introduced in Ruby and Sapphire, there are twenty-five in total, five of them are neutral and the other twenty will raise one of your five statistics (HP has not associated natures) by ten percent, while decreasing another by 10%. While this may sound like a deterrent, if you can decrease a stat that your Pokemon isn't going to be using anyway, then you can further boost important stats. Using our little friend Pikachu again, a Pikachu with a speed boosting nature, while lowering an unimportant stat like attack, we can get our Pikachu up to 306. Which is more than capable of outspeeding quite a few Pokemon even in the higher ranked competitive tiers. While speed isn't the only key to winning a match, our Pikachu is coming along nicely and we'll have to come back to it another day.
   Well, sorry that got a little long winded, and really we didn't even cover every possible topic when it comes to raising a competitive Pokemon, honestly we haven't even cover all the aspects of breeding. This is really just the basics of tuning your Pokemon's stats. I hope you've all enjoyed this little look into the world of raising a competitive Pokemon, I was hoping to cover this entire topic in a single article, but I just didn't realize how much there was to go over until I started typing it out. So, we'll continue this discussion on another day. Until then, if you have any questions or comments, feel free to ask below and I will try to answer everyone's questions as best I can. So, thank you all for reading my newest article and I hope you will all join me again next time, as we take a look into several more aspects of preparing a competitive Pokemon, as we take this journey towards building a competitive team together.

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