How you can use Total Pathing for yourself
First the bad news:
I’m pretty sure it’s impossible to completely flowchart a game of Pokémon. For any given board state there’s over 100 different combinations of moves, switches, tera, and targeting options for you to choose from. The number of options only grows exponentially with each turn.
Now the good news:
You don’t have to.
When flowcharting a matchup, there’s no need to consider every single possibility. While the total number of options you and your opponent have is in the hundreds, if not thousands, in most situations there’s only a handful of plays that make sense in the context of the game. These are the ones you need to consider in your flowchart.
That being said, let’s get into how flowcharting for VGC can work. We’ll discuss when flowcharting is useful (and when it isn’t), what tools you can use to create flowcharts, a couple of ground rules and best practices, as well as an example of what a game-plan in a flowchart can look like!
When should I use a flowchart?
Despite the number of viable plays being way smaller than the number of possible plays, a flowchart can still get very complicated very quickly. Because of this, flowcharting gets far easier when:
- You have a matchup advantage
- The opposing team’s play-style is relatively linear
Please, for your own sanity, do not try to flowchart a balance mirror where both you and your opponent have Incineroar, Urshifu, Rillaboom, Raging Bolt, Ogerpon, and Flutter Mane on your team. The fact that pretty much any combination of these Pokémon can be expected in the lead means that there are already 15 branching paths before the first Fake Out has been thrown.
In return, think Hard Trick Room: Depending on the exact team structure, their leads are limited to combinations of Pokémon that can execute either a Follow Me + Trick Room or Protect + Trick Room play. Because of this, most of the time they will lead something along the lines of Indeedee and Hatterene. That we can work with.
Another factor you should consider before deciding to create a flowchart is how likely you are to face the given matchup. Just because you lost to a team built around a 1% usage Pokémon on the Bo1 Showdown ladder doesn’t mean that you have to build a complex flowchart around it if you are unlikely to come across it at a Regional.
What tools can I use to create a flowchart?
Even though I am usually an advocate for pencil and paper (seriously, if you ever face me at a Regional check out how much I have written in my notebook), I’m afraid it’s not feasible for a flowchart. You would likely end up having to tape multiple pages together before you got to Turn 3. Luckily, there is a simpler option.
There are many different applications for creating flowcharts, and pretty much any of them can be used for VGC. These will let you create large flowcharts with many different shapes and colors, but I would recommend you use a software that supports Business Process Model and Notation, or BPMN for short. BPMN is a standard for the graphical notation of business processes and supported by many applications. I recommend you use the Open-BPMN extension for Visual Studio Code. A short guide on how to install these programs and create a flowchart with them is provided at the end of the article.
What guidelines should I follow while flowcharting?
We’ve already touched on the first rule briefly at the beginning:
Don’t map out every single possibility!
There’s no need to map out all 15 possible leads and every single possible combination of moves. Stick to the most likely plays that make sense for your opponent. Keep in mind that you also don’t need to chart unlosable (or unwinnable) endgames. A branch should end when you reach either a winning or losing position.
Only ever flowchart one play for any given situation!
The point of a flowchart is to create a rigid gameplan that is purely reactive and works no matter your opponent’s plays. A flowchart is no place for predictions, no “if you think they will x, then y”. For a given board state, there is one possible move you are going to make. Your opponent’s plays are the different branches. This also means that the four Pokémon you are going to bring, and the two in the lead, are already set when you see a flowcharted matchup in team preview. The moves you make on turn 1 are then dependent on what your opponent led, and your turn 2 play is dependent on your opponent’s turn 1 move choice. There’s no need to predict when you have a flowchart!
Standardize your notation!
There are four main building blocks to a flowchart. Depending on what software you use, your notation might look a little different. Here’s what they look like when implemented with BPMN:
Your Leads and Endgames: Events
A flowchart always starts with your leads and ends with an endgame that can be either winnable or unwinnable, although the goal is to have zero unwinnable endgames.
In BPMN you can use a start event (thin ring/green ring) and an end event (thick ring/red ring) for your leads and endgames respectively.
Opponent’s Leads and Plays: Gates
After your leads, the next element of a flowchart is your opponent’s leads, which are also in a way a play that they make. Your flowchart can account for multiple plays that your opponent makes, which you can implement as a series of gates spawning parallel branches.
Since your opponent must choose one play, you can use an exclusive gateway (diamond with an X) to stand in for their choice of moves in BPMN.
Your Plays: Tasks
After you have seen your and your opponent’s moves play out, it’s time to make a play. This can be mapped as a task. As previously stated, it’s important that after each of your opponent’s plays (gate) you only have one play that you are going to make (task).
Your plays can be represented in BPMN by tasks (rectangle with rounded borders).
Field Conditions: Annotations
Since a flowchart can grow very complex quickly, it’s important to keep track of the board state and field conditions, such as Weather, Terrain, and Speed Control Turns.
Field conditions can be noted in an annotation (one-sided square bracket) in BPMN.
Let’s Flowchart a Matchup!
The one flowchart that i never leave for a tournament without is Hard Trick Room, so let’s take a look at the plan that i had against it with my EUIC team!
We’ll be working with a pretty standard Hard Trick Room composition, featuring Life Orb Hatterene, Indeedee-F, Choice Band Urshifu-Dark, as well as Choice Specs Torkoal. It’s important to keep in mind, that small variation on the team can already invalidate the flowchart. If the Indeedee for example has Healing Wish or is carrying the Psychic Seed, the gameplan needs to be adjusted!
Our six will be the Iron Crown Psyspam team that i brought to the 2026 European International Championships. We have some very good tools against HTR on this team, such as Tera Water on Iron Crown, which together with Rain Dance on Tornadus greatly reduces Torkoal’s damage, as well as Trick Room and Tera Fairy on Indeedee to keep speed-control and resist Urshifu’s Wicked Blow.
In total there’s 15 possible lead combinations that the opponent could bring in this situation. In practice, I have only ever seen them bring three:
- Indeedee/Hatterene
- Indeedee/Urshifu
- Farigiraf/Urshifu
Since the first is the most common by far, we are going to focus on it. The second is also mapped, to show you how a flowchart into multiple leads can look, but it has been grossly simplified.
We start by deciding our brings for the battle:
Despite our opponent having three resistances and one immunity to Psychic, Iron Crown is still our win-condition for this battle. It can KO Iron Hands and Torkoal in a single hit, and can take care of both Indeedee and Hatterene with two hits of Helping Hand Expanding Force.
Indeedee is almost always brought when Iron Crown is. Reversing Trick Room is annoying for a Hatterene/Indeedee lead, while Tera Fairy Follow Me is necessary to deal with Urshifu-Dark.
Once the opposing Torkoal hits the field, it’s crucial to establish Weather Control with Tornadus. Iron Crown can take Eruption in Rain quite well.
Should we not be able to reverse Trick Room, Ogerpon is our only other Protect. A second Follow Me is also great support for Iron Crown.
Now that we have decided on our brings, we can start setting up our branches. As mentioned before, we’re going to primarily focus on the Indeedee/Hatterene lead, but the flowchart also includes a rough outline of the Indeedee/Urshifu path. We can note our brings as a start event, create exclusive gates for our opponents leads, and write down our moves for each of the leads in tasks. Then we create lines to connect the different elements and label them with yes/no. We can also note down any active field conditions, in this case the Psychic Terrain, in an annotation.
Against a Hatterene/Indeedee lead, our turn 1 play is always Helping Hand/Expanding Force. This should get both opposing Pokémon down below 50% HP, putting them in range of another. However, we don’t want to thoughtlessly go for another Helping Hand/Expanding Force in this position. Our next play depends on the choices that our opponent made in turn 1. They have two options: They can go for Follow Me/Trick Room, to guarantee speed control, or Follow Me/Expanding Force, if they think that I will set up Trick Room for them.
If they didn’t set up Trick Room, we can easily go for another Helping Hand/Expanding Force and take two KOs. If they did get speed control, we have to be more careful. We don’t want to give them a free switch into Torkoal with the speed in their favour. To prevent this, we can go for Trick Room/Expanding Force. The attack won’t knock out either Pokémon, but we can make the same move two turns in a row. That way we are guaranteed to reverse the Trick Room, because even if they also use Trick Room on turn 2, we will knock out both of their Pokémon on turn 3 and undo the twisted dimensions.
At the end of this sequence, we are guaranteed to force in their back Pokémon with the speed order in our favour. This is a winning position, which we can mark with an end event.
And that’s the entire flowchart! Obviously you could expand it ad infinitum, but for me this is enough to go into a Regional with the confidence, that I won’t lose a set to Hard Trick Room. If you want to try to expand this flowchart as a little exercise, you can download it here and edit it with Visual Studio Code. Here’s the full overview of the flowchart:
Installing Visual Studio Code and Open-BPMN
Visual Studio Code can be downloaded from their official website. Choose your computers operating system, download the file, and follow the instructions to install it.
Within Visual Studio Code, you can click on the “Extensions” field in the left sidebar and look for “Open-BPMN”. In case you can’t find it, click here.
To use the Open-BPMN extension in Visual Studio Code, you need to have Java 17 (or a higher version) installed. You can download the correct version for your device from the official Microsoft website.
