A massive Spanish Pokemon tournament that starts out with a Stardew Valley-style Nuzlocke was won by an exploding "trash-bird"

Pokemon has an enormous and thriving competitive scene, but even though many fans might think of the official Video Game Competition (VGC) as the pinnacle of high-level Pokemon gaming, the Pokemon Twitch Cup is arguably much more interesting. 

If you were unfamiliar, the Pokemon Twitch Cup has been running since 2021 in Spain, with its third and most recent iteration taking place in December 2023. YouTuber pChal (Pokemon Challenges) has thrown its existence back into the spotlight, talking through what makes the tournament so unique.

The Pokemon Twitch Cup is actually split into two halves, the first being a Nuzlocke challenge which essentially serves to determine which Pokemon each competitor is able to use on their team in the tournament half of the cup. For those unfamiliar, Nuzlockes generally see players capture only the first Pokemon they find on each route and release any Pokemon that faint in battle, meaning that they have a more limited (and often constantly depleting) supply of friends to throw into battle. In the Twitch Cup, competitors are only allowed to use their surviving Pokemon which managed to make it through the Nuzlocke to go up against their real human foes.

To make things even more interesting, in the case of the 2023 Twitch Cup, competitors were faced with playing through a fan-made Pokemon game that's heavily visually inspired by Stardew Valley, even if you don't need to plant any crops to win. The concept is genuinely really cool, with the plot seeing players invited by an in-game social media company, Delta, to live in a town populated only by streamers. However, players soon find themselves tasked with fighting streamers who are being manipulated by Delta in order to save them, and at one point, even have to take on "Mark Zuckergerg" in a champion battle, who definitely doesn't look like any social media boss in particular. 

Since Pokemon caught in this Nuzlocke boasted random moves and abilities, it meant that the tournament could see