Pokémon World Champion and beloved content creator Wolfe Glick has today posted an insightful video about his VGC run at the North America International Championships (NAIC), revealing some unsettling details in the lead-up to the big event.
As a top VGC player with a passion for competing and content creation, Wolfe Glick decided to document his entire NAIC journey from start to finish. Glick would ultimately finish at 19th place, his lowest placement of the season (still impressive, considering he’d also won a huge regional earlier in the year). We caught a glimpse of his run on stream that weekend, but that didn’t show half of what went down behind the scenes.
NAIC, which took place just a month ago, was one of the biggest Pokémon tournaments of the year other than Worlds, and VGC players from around the world had been prepping extensively for their chance to win it all.
Fans who were watching the stream that weekend might recall the peculiar Perish Trap team Glick had brought to NAIC—Gothitelle, Scream Tail, Ting-Lu, Dondozo, Tatsugiri, and Flamigo. He was featured on stream during the seventh round of Swiss, but something weird was going on.
Just one round earlier, another player was on stream with the same exact team. Many assumed the player, Brady Smith, had connections to Glick and they had agreed to run the same team. After all, it’s not uncommon for players to work together on building teams. But as Glick’s video shows, there was more to the story.
According to Glick, the NAIC team he had built with a few friends was leaked and a large portion of the VGC community knew about it days before the event. This meant everyone had time to prep and practice against it, eliminating the surprise factor of an off-meta pick like Flamigo.
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This is also how some players like Brady Smith got ahold of the team after it was leaked. It isn’t against the rules to bring the same team as another competitor—it happens all the time, coincidence or not. Still, Glick made it very clear in his video that Smith wasn’t someone he had built the team with and that it rubbed him the wrong way.
Smith previously published a video last month with his own NAIC experience where he honestly acknowledged the team wasn’t his own. According to Smith, he didn’t realize it was Glick’s team until after the tournament began.
Glick described this part of his NAIC journey as “incredibly unjust” and pointed out how he seems to have a larger target on his back when it comes to team leaks due to his proven success as a top competitor. Everyone sees him as the one to beat, which highlights the downside of having such a huge presence in the community, and believes it adds another obstacle he must overcome if he wants a second World Championship title.
On top of this, he’ll need to get through the brutal first day of the World Championships since he was unable to secure his day two invite this year due to his early elimination. It won’t be easy, but Glick is ready.
“Only one player has ever managed to win the World Championships after starting on day one. Thankfully that player was me. And this year, I’m ready to do it again,” Glick concluded.
We’ll be keeping an eye on Glick along with the best VGC players as they compete at Worlds in Yokohama, Japan from August 11 to 13. With the wild Regulation D ruleset in place, anything is possible.
