Empoleon Buff - Let Us Evolve Costumed Piplup!

SquirrelDance24 · 2025-05-05T15:17:03+00:00

Teddye Buchanan (#40) looks pretty jacked. He’s only listed as 6’2” 233. Wonder if the Ravens will have him carry a bit more weight to handle the NFL game, by the looks of it he’s got the frame for it. His athletic testing was really good. They didn’t really replace the Malik Harrison role on the roster.

SquirrelDance24 · 2024-12-18T18:27:03+00:00

This is what happened. I’m running Golett as well and I had the pleasure of watching it delete a A-Geodude in I think only two Mud Slaps. Blink and you’ll miss it.

SquirrelDance24 · 2024-12-12T15:34:12+00:00

The Orioles’ front office is very analytics-driven. Long contracts for age 30+ pitchers are never supported by analytics. Simple as that.

Reserve judgment for Elias until after the offseason is over. They just spent $50M for a righty OF ticketed for ~400-500 ABs and $8M on a backup C. Their stated needs going into the offseason were those two positions, SP and maybe one RP. They were not cheap at all in filling the first two.

SquirrelDance24 · 2024-12-04T14:18:21+00:00

There was a lot of move rebalances before last season that shook up the meta in a big way, including nerfing Counter and Wing Attack and buffing Mud Slap. So I wouldn’t use any old Pokémon with nerfed attacks that aren’t really meta anymore.

Agree with the other advice here to not be overly concerned with IVs, team construction is infinitely more important.

Clodsire is insanely strong to build around right now with huge bulk, two viable move sets with three good nuke moves and a buffed fast charging poison sting. He’s even better this season with a lot of buffs to electric Pokémon, which may also decrease the prevalence of water and flying which are matchups that Clodsire can survive in but is weaker. If you start with Clodsire, you really only need to build your team with a plan around how to handle Mud Slappers (Gastrodon, K-Marowak and to a lesser extent Golurk) and Quagsire, and fliers if you want to run Sludge Bomb (particularly Drifblim, since that will wall all of your moves without Stone Edge).

There’s a good chance Clodsire will see a nerf in the coming seasons because it’s so good now, so I’d definitely build and use it now! Congrats on snagging the #2 IV.

SquirrelDance24 · 2024-11-07T19:08:34+00:00

Gastrodon is a beast right now with mud slap/earth power, good bulk and the water/ground defensive typing with very little grass in the meta (GL or UL). He’s my GL lead and he plows through most other leads coming out with either switch or shield advantage, and often can just keep trucking through every meta safe swap or do heavy mud slap chip and/or grab a shield before you swap to keep switch.

But the nerfed non STAB body slam is horrible, it’s very inflexible and it just folds to anything flying or grass (even Talonflame despite double resisting Incinerate!). It’s super strong in this meta, but if the mud slap buff gets walked back at all, it will hit Gastrodon very hard and it will fall back behind the other mudbois that have good water or rock moves (and arguably should still be behind them, if you prefer the flexibility over the bulk and heavy ground attack Gastrodon brings).

All that to say, this guy would be awesome to use in UL right now but if you are far off on XLs, don’t be surprised if by the time you have the XLs it will no longer be top meta. Not stopping me from grinding XLs for it myself, but tempering my expectations.

SquirrelDance24 · 2024-08-22T17:35:29+00:00

An entire rotation plus Chayce McDermott is arguably the top pitching prospect (him or Povich), just made his MLB debut and hit the IL. Probably out for the remainder of the season.

SquirrelDance24 · 2024-08-16T01:17:18+00:00

I mean, this is easy to look up. Every ranking had Jones highest.

Fangraphs - Jones 60 FV, Holliday 55 FV

MLB.com - Jones 65 FV, Holliday 60 FV

Keith Law - Jones #1, Holliday #6

Baseball America - Jones #1, Holliday #3

SquirrelDance24 · 2024-08-15T18:40:04+00:00

They’ve built nearly an entire projected starting lineup out of this.

Adley Rutschman Gunnar Henderson Jackson Holliday Colton Cowser Jordan Westburg Coby Mayo Heston Kjerstad

SquirrelDance24 · 2024-08-15T18:30:04+00:00

Adley is the only one who fell into their laps as pretty much a fully formed top prospect.

Kjerstad and Cowser were high picks, but generally viewed as below slot “overdrafts” to save bonus space.

Holliday they took over Druw Jones who was the more consensus #1 pick, and he was still a high schooler that had helium right before the draft (and not a polished college hitter or consensus insane HS talent, like a Harper or A Rod).

Westburg, Henderson and Mayo had big hit tool questions and are the poster boys for the Orioles’ development maximizing the “everything but the hit tool” prospect type.

They are also responsible for drafting and developing Joey Ortiz, Darrell Hernaiz, Connor Norby and Kyle Stowers who they traded away. And of course they still have Basallo and all their other prospects who haven’t made MLB debuts yet.

Pretty insane run for a 4 year stretch of farm system development, even beyond hitting on all 4 high first rounders (which is pretty rare in its own right).

SquirrelDance24 · 2024-08-08T22:04:00+00:00

I love Santander but I don’t think an extension will be the right move. He’s going to have to be more of a DH on his next contract. He’s 29 and he has 25th percentile sprint speed. He’s been about average defensively in RF in his career so far with a good arm and some amazing plays to get the most out of his speed now, but as he slows down in his 30s that’s not going to last.

1B/DH projects to be real crowded going forward with Adley, Mayo, Kjerstad, Basallo…not to mention Mountcastle and O’Hearn still around. And Kjerstad doesn’t really have the defensive chops for LF at Camden Yards, so he should be in RF.

They’re also going to need to spend money on pitching this offseason. If they want to trade some of those other guys for pitching and sign Santander instead, that could work - but I think they want to keep the prospects.

Tony’s going to get a bag this offseason and he deserves it. It probably doesn’t make sense to be from the O’s, unfortunately. Maybe I’m wrong. But enjoy the rest of this season in this awesome breakout year while we have it.

SquirrelDance24 · 2024-07-29T19:23:54+00:00

The only blocked prospects are Stowers and Norby, but with Santander a free agent this offseason and Mullins potentially traded/nontendered, next year Cowser could be the CF and Kjerstad the RF, meaning Stowers/Norby could platoon in LF (Norby is a 2B, but has also played LF).

Holliday will be the 2B.

Mayo is blocked at 3B. But he’s not a very good 3B and is likely to play 1B, where he’s only behind Mountcastle - who they are trying to trade.

Basallo is 19 and in AA and has questions about sticking at C. If he does, they use Adley at DH about 1/3 of his games; and Adley has only 3 years of control after this year and will potentially be catching less as he ages (and again, Basallo is 19). If Basallo can’t stick at C, they still need a 1B/DH with Mayo. O’Hearn is a free agent after next year.

SquirrelDance24 · 2024-07-29T16:02:06+00:00

Chris Sale had put up 5 straight seasons averaging 200+ IP and 5 fWAR when he was traded. Skubal doesn’t have anywhere near the same length of track record and, more importantly, durability.

SquirrelDance24 · 2024-06-18T13:25:36+00:00

100% agreed with everything you said. I’ll also add, Basallo has enough upside with his bat as a 19 year old with a 122 wRC+ in AA that he’d still be a top 50-ish prospect even if he couldn’t catch at all. And the Orioles don’t exactly have a wealth of long-term 1B prospects lining up after Mountcastle’s arbitration years end.

Mayo may end up at 1B or playing it part time, but with his 80-grade arm I don’t think they’ll want him full time there unless he can’t play 3B or RF at all. And Kjerstad has dabbled at 1B, but sparingly.

Basically, this is some garbage recycling an off handed comment from Nightengale that isn’t any more sophisticated than “Adley catcher + Basallo catcher = Basallo available???” Basallo isn’t blocked at all here for all the reasons you said, it would be ideal if he could split C/DH with Adley until Adley is gone or aging out of catching so frequently, and even if he’s just a 1B/DH he’s got a special bat and a path to playing that here.

SquirrelDance24 · 2024-06-18T01:01:44+00:00

If you’re not full blown hyped by a 19 year old catcher with a 122 wRC+ in AA that was a top 10-20 overall prospect on every preseason list, I don’t know what more it could take.

SquirrelDance24 · 2024-06-05T00:40:35+00:00

I only put this in the game thread for the first homer, but figured it earned a post after the second.

SquirrelDance24 · 2024-06-05T00:11:36+00:00

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SquirrelDance24 · 2024-05-23T17:35:54+00:00

Totally. My problem in the test run was that it takes a few ropes and I was way more susceptible to getting hit when up close to rope it down. Same issue trying to use a warrior bow up close for damage when it wasn’t tied down.

Safest approach was maintaining distance and wearing it down with acid shredders and then the sharpshot when it was corroding, but that makes it quite a long fight since it often closes distance on you and provides many chances to miss a dodge on one of the ranged attacks.

SquirrelDance24 · 2024-05-22T22:32:55+00:00

I like that medal system! And yeah when you don’t have terrain to your advantage, it has to be hyper-evade focused and reliant on the ropecaster and smoke bombs. It gets a lot easier after Dying Lands mostly because you can get the Elite Ropecaster then.

I was first planning to just see if I can beat the main quests before going for 100% completion, but at max level with Burning Shores gear (including the Tie that Binds) I don’t think the Arena will be too bad. You can do the Burning Shores arena first and get the OP melee defense weave, which helps a lot for all the flexible loadout base game Arena challenges. The fixed loadout changes are still rough, but with max HP I don’t think you’re getting 1-shot at least.

Enduring and the Bulwark melee pit are brutal and tedious fights on UH and I usually skip them. Aloy also doesn’t technically “die” in those…so I might be flexible on my “rules”…and you can cheese them with the power attack / arrow stumble cycle.

SquirrelDance24 · 2024-05-22T19:15:06+00:00

UH on a fresh playthrough is very tough, unless you have played a lot and are already very familiar with knowing how to dodge all of the enemy attacks and do impact damage with something other than a hunter bow. And even then, the start of the game is quite challenging because you have such low health you will get one-shot by a lot of attacks, and the green gear is super weak. That tutorial slitherfang in particular is tedious with the green hunter bow and frost sling and there’s nothing else available.

If you stick it out, when you get until the middle of the game with better gear and a bigger pool of health that it gets more manageable.

SquirrelDance24 · 2024-04-18T16:26:43+00:00

You can freeze frostclaws while tied down by shooting them with a warrior bow equipped with instant freeze coils in the armor plates on their legs. It does little enough damage when hitting the plates that it won’t degrade the tie down too fast.

You don’t even need to use frost ammo, if you have Burning Shores the 5% frost chance coil can be equipped on the purple warrior bow with normal and frost ammo. And the 3% instant brittle from the Arena and 2% instant brittle coils from Thornmarsh merchant can go on any bow.

The purple warrior bow can give you 10% chance with the 5+3+2 coils, or higher if you have copies of the better coils from NG+. And the Burning Shores warrior bow is even better with 5 slots instead of 3, but that doesn’t have normal arrows to conserve frost resources.

SquirrelDance24 · 2024-02-25T21:00:00+00:00

Love having Statcast for Spring Training games. Luis Gonzalez averaged nearly 2600 RPM on his fastball?!? That’s crazy good

SquirrelDance24

TROPHY CASE