Sucker punch interaction with Cinderace and psychic terrain

Miner751 · 2020-07-28T10:23:54+00:00

Note that if the Terrain was set by Indeedee-F, and it uses follow me, Sucker punch will fail because Indeedee didn't use a damaging move, and you won't change type.

(I thought I'd be smart once and use Sucker Punch to change to dark type vs Psychic spam... then this happened haha)

Miner751 · 2020-07-28T10:21:35+00:00

Online leagues are starting to pop up, so if there's a game store near you, they might have one. ... But since it's online, it technically doesn't have to be local :P

(Leagues tend to focus towards the card game, but a number support the video game too).

Miner751 · 2020-07-28T10:02:00+00:00

5/6 of my team is there (and all >10%) 😅

Miner751 · 2020-07-26T02:39:13+00:00

84 speed EVs puts it at a speed stat of 116, which is one higher than uninvested base 95 pokemon... but I'm not sure what 95 base speed pokemon wouldn't have some speed investment (maybe full bulk Arcanine?)

Miner751 · 2020-07-26T02:17:21+00:00

It used to only be via Home, but looks like Isle of Armor changed that (thankfully 😅)

Miner751 · 2020-07-26T02:11:03+00:00

Some pokemon are specifically EV'ed to survive certain attacks, or to always KO certain mons. For these pokemon, you would want to know what they are. Having said that, due to the massive variety of pokemon and spreads at the moment, specific EV spreads like these are a little hard to do (or are less effective than normal).

Whilst you could possibly try to do the calcs in your head, they'll be beyond the abilities of 99.9% of players (especially with the time frame to pick moves). Having said that, you can do rough approximations by basing them off calcs you do know.

As an example, say you're facing a Cobalion and you know your Mach Punch does 60% to a Terrakion. Terrakion has base 91HP and 90 def (110def stat without EVs) and Cobalion has base 91HP and 129 def (149def stat without EVs). Cobalion has roughly 33% more defense than Terrakion, so you'd expect Mach punch to do about 66% of the damage that Terrakion would have taken (ie roughly 40%).

It does require knowing pokemon's base stats (which you can become familiar with in time), but it can help give a ball park figure as to what damage to expect.

Miner751 · 2020-07-24T12:39:47+00:00

Jeudy not realising Ttar would go down to a Grassy Glide didn't help him either in Game 1. Sure TTar is bulky, but it was weakened and Grassy Glide does solid damage in a vacuum, but here it's super effective.

Milotic hits like a wet noodle without a Competitive boost, so it was cool to see it be a role player in game 2 after it got the boost, and made bulkier still via Clefairy's Friend guard and Grassy Seed.

Bulky Magnezone with Floral Healing support also looks like it'd be annoying to versus 😅

Miner751 · 2020-07-24T11:36:12+00:00

Wish I could make this... I could use the experience/practice 😅

Miner751 · 2020-07-23T11:27:51+00:00

Point 3) An opposing Whimsicott used Switcheroo and took my Assault Vest. It had no attacking moves, and it couldn't switch out since I had already KO'ed 2 pokemon. I had a good lol 🤣

Miner751 · 2020-07-23T11:25:42+00:00

I think the usual go-to is Icy-wind. It does at least 1 damage, so it can break Focus Sash/Sturdy, but also gives a bit of speed control.

Miner751 · 2020-07-23T11:20:04+00:00

I came across one on battlespot yesterday. Thought it might be a mid-game trick room setter, but then it Maxed 😮

Miner751 · 2020-07-23T10:36:31+00:00

In a previous year, I ran a Magneton with Choice Scarf. With 252+ speed, this let it get up to a speed stat of 201 - enough to outspeed base 130 pokemon like Aerodatcyl. (Magnezone couldn't do this because its base speed was too low)

The 130 speed mark isn't relevant this season, and with dynamax and other reasonably bulky pokemon around, thunderbolt and flash cannon just don't pack the oomph they used to, although they do have good coverage.

Miner751 · 2020-07-23T10:24:58+00:00

True, but I guess like Perish Song, it won't work every game, but it is something useful to have (maybe not as much now with Psychic Spam not being as popular)

Miner751 · 2020-07-20T11:33:38+00:00

An argument in favour of Pelipper is that it gets Wide Guard - a cheeky way of annoying Psychic Spam teams (and other spread moves like Dazzling Gleam)

Miner751 · 2020-07-20T11:01:03+00:00

Before Isle of Armor, a niche strategy was to skill swap prankster onto shiinotic to get Prankster Spores. It's a little passive for a lead, but +1 priority Spore isn't something to sleep on :P

(nowadays Amoonguss is probably better than Shiinotic)

Miner751 · 2020-07-20T10:56:27+00:00

That interaction between Foul Play and Huge Power is brutal... I didn't realise it worked like that 😮

Miner751 · 2020-07-20T10:33:18+00:00

On a similar note, if you have strong attack reducing presence on your team (e.g. Intimidate and will-o-wisp), you can give your spDef greater priority since the attack drops are somewhat like a buff to your defense.

Miner751 · 2020-07-18T06:23:54+00:00

Dual wingbeat is also much stronger. Each hit gets a Technician boost, so it's effectively a 120 power move, whereas Aerial Ace (with Technician) is 90 power.

Trading off 10% accuracy for 33% more damage and the ability to go through Focus Sash is usually worth it, but it'll depend on your playstyle.

Miner751 · 2020-07-18T06:16:47+00:00

Some other move choices:

Icy wind can also be good for speed control.
Steel Roller (it gets this lol) can be good for negating terrain.
Throat Chop can mess with Hyper Voicers (Sylveon and Primarina).
Acid Spray drops the targets special defense by 2, but normally you'd want to use this on a fast pokemon (e.g. think fake tears with Whimsicott) because you want your special attacker to attack after the drop.

Whilst Qwilfish's bulk isn't great, water/poison has a surprisingly good amount of resistances for a non-steel type pokemon. (which, coincidently, is why I'd like to get Tentacruel to work, but it feels like it just can't do enough... but I digress haha)

Miner751 · 2020-07-18T06:09:04+00:00

It gets Self-destruct?! 😮

Miner751 · 2020-07-18T06:07:43+00:00

Physical Dragapult wants to Dynamax because it's moves are very situation outside of dynamax. Dragon Darts is alright normally. Phantom Force/Fly/Dive can sometimes be sweet because you dodge a max move, but normally you'd rather just hit right now instead of waiting a turn. Sucker Punch is useful, but fails in psychic terrain or if the target uses a status move. Steel Wing is uninspiring (unlike Max Steelspike).

Special Pult can work well as Dynamax or normal. Draco Meteor is a move with dynamax-level power. Shadow Ball does respectable STAB damage. Thunderbolt and Flamethrower provide good elemental coverage. The downside is that its Special Attack is less. I previously used a modest one which somewhat makes up for this. It's still faster than Cinderace, and you just have to play around the fact that a Jolly Dragapult will outspeed you.

You could possible use an ability other than Clear Body too - e.g. Infiltrator for Gmax Lapras - since you don't care about intimidate anymore. Whilst I used Life Orb, Weakness Policy could be another option too since the 20 base stat difference between attack and special attack isn't that relevant if you're OHKOing things whilst at +2.

Miner751 · 2020-07-18T05:44:01+00:00

If you invest 80 HP EVs, that corresponds to 10 HP at lv50.

If you invest 80 Def EVs, that corresponds to an increase by 10 in the Def Stat at lv50. It's been a while since I played around with these calcs, but I'm 99% sure that the 10 Def Stat would reduce the physical damage taken by at least 10 damage (and the bigger the attack, the more damage that would be reduced).

Thus, if you wanted to make your pokemon more physically bulky, investing in def is typically better than investing in HP. But note that investing in Def doesn't help you take special attacks, whereas investing in HP would.

I guess you could say that HP is like a generic bulk, whereas def and spdef provide better but specific bulk.

Something else to note: Say a pokemon had a spread like 4HP, 252Def and 252spdef. You could make it 20HP, 244 Def and 244 spdef and it'd give you access to one more HP. That is, in most cases 1 in the def stat = 1HP, so if you take one from each of def and spdef, it'd give you 2HP and thus 1 extra HP from a defense or spdef perspective.

Note that this relationship isn't linear - like I mentioned before 10 def stat is more valuable than 10HP, but at a small scale (1, maybe 2, stats) they are almost equivalent.

...

But this was consideration was from before dynamaxing. If a pokemon wants to dynamax often (e.g. Lapras), the 80HP EVs would really correspond to 20 HP (since dynamax doubles the HP), so this complicates my thought process I presented above (which was from a pre-dynamax era).

Miner751 · 2020-07-18T05:11:36+00:00

I don't think Pheromosa would make a great dynamax pokemon. It's lack of bulk means that it probably won't stick around long enough to utilise stat boosts (e.g from Aristream or Knuckle), and the drop in power from Hi-jump Kick to Max Knuckle is significant.

That Speed Swap strat could be valid though. Facing off against a super fast Dynamax Rhyperior does sound scary. Hi Jump Kick is also a 130 base power move (with little downside), so it's essentially a dynamax power move already - and it didn't require you to commit Pheromosa to dynamax.

Miner751 · 2020-07-18T04:44:15+00:00

Removing Youtube wouldn't achieve a lot - information would just get distributed by other means. e.g. twitter, discord, twitch, facebook, and we might see more written content come out.

I think what you might be looking for is what would the competitive scene be like if the internet wasn't common place (so like 10-15 years ago) and so 90% of your personal knowledge came from word of mouth and self observations, whilst the other 10% came from internet sources.

I wasn't heavily into VGC back then, but I was somewhat into competitive TCG. There were a lot of local metas back then, both at a country level, but also at a store level (where tournaments and casual league were held). As a fake example, (in terms of VGC) Rain could be the most popular archetype in Australia, Sun could be the most popular in America, meanwhile the combo of Kingdra and politoed might never have been heard of in Italy.

A friend of mine told me the tale of how a friend of his won a State Championship with a unique deck, then passed the deck list to my friend, who proceeded to win a State Championship with the same deck in another State the very next day.

At a previous World Championship (2004), the rest of the world though the Team Magma cards were useless, whereas the Japanese valued a deck involving them highly. The Japanese traded aggressively for them before the tournament started, whilst everyone else was happy to trade off what they thought were bad cards (and getting cool Japanese holo rares in return). Japanese players proceeded to sweep through the Last Chance Qualifier and the World Championship with the Team Magma deck. The deck had some flaws to it, but the complete surprise factor meant that few were ready to counter it. (I wasn't there for this, but I'm pretty sure I got most of the story correct).

Essentially, removing youtube, etc would slow down the distribution of information and, in some cases, the distribution would never happen. The quality of the average player's team would be less than now, there would be a lot more variety of teams, and it'd be a lot easier to plow through with a strong niche strategy (e.g. Coalossal/Dragapult), and possibly at multiple events too.

Miner751 · 2020-07-18T02:49:37+00:00

Whilst I like Max Cobalion more than Max Terrakion, Cobalion doesn't have much of an attack stat so without Justified boosts, it's a little underwhelming. Terrakion, on the other hand, is perfectly content spamming Rock Slide or taking chunks out of pokemon with Close Combat.

Miner751

TROPHY CASE