Former Pok\u00e9mon <\/em>World Champion and VGC extraordinaire, Wolfe \u201cWolfey\u201d Glick took home the crown of 2023 Orlando Regional Champion over the weekend\u2014a VGC tournament that was the biggest in the game\u2019s history with 780 players competing in the event.<\/p>
Wolfe started with an 8-2 run in Swiss followed by an absolutely dominant day-two run, winning the tournament and adding another shiny notch under this highly accomplished player\u2019s belt.<\/p>
These accomplishments for Wolfe Glick include his 2016 Worlds win, two National wins, the Players Cup II win, and now seven whole Regional wins including 2023 Orlando, among the plethora of impressive top cut results, boasting an unprecedented collection of high-level results for this North American VGC pro.<\/p>
This win netted Wolfe $3,000 in prize money along with 200 CP to make his journey to the 2023 Pok\u00e9mon <\/em>World Championships just a little easier.<\/p>
The team Wolfe used to win the tournament is based around an archetype that he is known to be the master of: Perish Trap.<\/p>
Perish Trap is a team archetype that involves the use of Perish Song along with means to trap an enemy on the battlefield and prevent them from switching, the most common one being the Ability Shadow Tag, which was Wolfe’s preferred method of trapping.<\/p>
Once the opposing Pok\u00e9mon are trapped on the field, Perish Song will make sure the opposing Pok\u00e9mon faint at the end of the three-turn timer while the user\u2019s Pok\u00e9mon that heard the song switch out on the final turn\u2014in an ideal world\u2014to avoid being knocked out themselves.<\/p>
While this strategy may come off as cheesy or degenerate on a surface level, Perish Trap is probably the hardest team archetype to pilot and has an incredibly high skill ceiling, which is precisely why no one other than Wolfe has gotten high-level results with such a team since he knows the inner-workings and the basic blueprint of how such a team should function.<\/p>
While in the past, you would have users like Politoed or Mismagius as your Perish Song users with Mega Gengar as your Shadow Tag trapper, times and metagames have changed over the years, leading to Wolfe running Scream Tail and Flutter Mane for that deathly Perish Song, with Gothitelle for the crippling Shadow Tag ability.<\/p>
Perish Trap had actually been picking up steam right before the Orlando Regional on various online grassroots tournaments with teams that did commonly feature Gothitelle and Flutter Mane but not the unique pick in Scream Tail. <\/p>
The lack of a bulky Perish Song user on these pre-Orlando Perish Trap teams made it so that these players could not commit to a hard-Perish Trap playstyle, and built the rest of their team to comfortably play out non-Perish Trap gameplans as well. <\/p>
The decision that Wolfe took of adding a second Perish Song user in the bulky Scream Tail meant that he was committing harder to this controversial archetype that most players would never dare to do.<\/p>
He also had some other interesting picks along with the Perish Trap core to round out his team and give him enough flexibility to not instantly drop to a tough matchup. Let\u2019s take a look at Wolfe\u2019s team sheet and break down what all of his \u2018mons exactly do.<\/p>
