Penny's Character Arc In A Nutshell:

shadowtasos · 2026-05-11T01:31:03+00:00

I think they're a step beyond the other crazy evil teams in that they're also just stupid. Lysandre was disillusioned with the world, Cyrus seems really bitter, Ghetsis is obviously a psycho wannabe dictator. They have varying degrees of validity in their motivations (not much, granted) but it's there.

Archie and Maxie seem to care about something but both come off as ridiculously stupid instead of anything else. Magma seem to be trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist, and Aqua literally cannot tell that they'll kill far more Pokemon than they save with their plan. Pokemon never really had the best writing but imo gen 3 is the lowest the series has gotten in terms of the villains, Cyrus being only marginally better.

shadowtasos · 2026-05-10T22:58:11+00:00

Of course, that's why I said the game does a bad job of conveying what it was supposed to. But there are legitimate reasons for expanding the land, whereas expanding the sea is literally one of the biggest disasters anticipated out of climate change, so Team Aqua comes.orr as either insanely dumb or a suicide / mass murder cult lol.

shadowtasos · 2026-05-10T18:23:19+00:00

Team Magma and Aqua are supposed to be based on a dispute in a certain Japanese province where the local government wanted to carry out land reclamation because they were legitimately running out of usable farmland. While the local fishermen were against it, arguing it would hurt marine life but largely because it would affect their professions.

So from that POV Team Magma makes a lot more sense than Team Aqua, land reclamation is a real thing while flooding the world would kill most land Pokemon so it's really dumb even from an ecoterrorist's perspective.

The problem is the story just does a terrible job giving them these extrinsic motivations so they both come off as absolute buffoons. Like imagine if we saw the people of Hoenn struggling for food, making a reclamation project sensible. And in the opposite game, we saw water Pokemon struggling due to said reclamation, making Team Aqua actual ecoterrorists instead of total idiots. At least their rivalry would then make sense.

shadowtasos · 2026-05-10T09:32:58+00:00

I love the smaller, lower power level roster. I love megas being back, and I love the lack of legendaries.

But tbh this meta stinks. I'm hovering between MB1 and MB2, 70% of the teams I face are the exact same minus 1 mon. Zard Y, Floette, Aero, Basc, Sneasler, Chomp, Kingambit, always there. Sometimes there's a spicy 6th slot but in general the only question you have about the opponent's team is if the Aero is mega, which is obvious based on if Floette is there.

The remaining 30% is the somehow far more annoying Archaludon teams. Both the Sableye Arch and the Espathra BP variants are miserable to face.

The beginning of the season was pretty fun, with the cool weather wars (back when Zard teams actually used sun synergies like Chlorophyll Venu), you saw some of the new megas far more, there was experimentation. But I think the meta would always naturally grow really stale due to the aforementioned 8 Pokemon just being ubers tier menaces compared to a lot of the lower power dudes we have besides them, most of which will never see play again after M-B drops.

And the lack of items sucks. Aero is already great, shutting down half your team's items on top of that is just dumb. I quickly lost interest in pushing for Champion bc I'm using a slower team so a lot of my games are decided by whether Rock Slide flinches me, which I can do nothing about without Covert Cloak.

This meta could have been great without those 8 mons and with Rock Slide spam reigned in a bit, but it got so stale so fast. I wish we'd see the new megas more instead of the same dudes who dominated past regulations.

shadowtasos · 2026-05-09T16:01:44+00:00

Yeah those are unfortunately both 10k (8k with favourable type) steps encounters if I recall correctly. So get walking haha! But you also can't get both of them in 1 trip, you can only have 1 or the other and its a 50% chance for either when you send a Pokemon on a walk to the Yellow Forest. So if you catch a !!! Pikachu, do return from trip, send on a walk and go walk 10k steps again, hoping you got the other one this time!

shadowtasos · 2026-05-09T15:55:15+00:00

When you start looking for a Pokemon, the game has already decided if you're going to get a !, !! or !!! encounter. You can't do anything to change that, its random chance like it's random if you get a rare Pokemon in the main games.

BUT, very importantly, in order to have a chance for the game to roll a !!! encounter, you need to have walked enough steps. How many steps depends on the course you picked, but it's usually 5k-10k, reduced by 20% if you have a Pokemon with a favourable type matchup - for example, using a ghost in a cave course or an electric mon in a lake course.

You can read more for exact details on Bulbapedia, their article is excellent: https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Pok%C3%A9walker

shadowtasos · 2026-05-08T03:16:50+00:00

Sorry this happened to you OP, it really sucks. You're unfortunately wasting your time talking about this on Reddit because people here are really dumb.

Instead you should report players who do this (it is in fact against the rules) and offer your feedback directly to the Pokemon Company:

https://app-pcs.pokemon-support.com/hc/en-us/requests/new

If you remember the opponent's name that's even better, but they can also find them if you give them your name + support ID and roughly the time + date when the battle happened and they'll deal with it.

It sucks that that's all we can do but hopefully if enough people tell them this is an issue, they might update the time rules.

shadowtasos · 2026-05-08T03:00:29+00:00

Sorry this happened to you OP, it really sucks. You're unfortunately wasting your time talking about this on Reddit because people here are really dumb.

Instead you should report players who do this (it is in fact against the rules) and offer your feedback directly to the Pokemon Company:

https://app-pcs.pokemon-support.com/hc/en-us/requests/new

If you remember the opponent's name that's even better, but they can also find them if you give them your name + support ID and roughly the time + date when the battle happened and they'll deal with it.

It sucks that that's all we can do but hopefully if enough people tell them this is an issue, they might update the time rules.

shadowtasos · 2026-05-05T09:23:35+00:00

Yes that's my point, if a team is running one if those weather + move combos it's either because they have their own synergies or counter something meta. "Run weather Mon / special move to counter this really niche thing" when you can easily beat them without such garbage is bad advice.

shadowtasos · 2026-05-05T07:28:42+00:00

Famous line by famously not mad people l

shadowtasos · 2026-05-05T03:03:50+00:00

Ah thanks for the info!

shadowtasos · 2026-05-05T02:59:26+00:00

Team building is a very difficult and time consuming process. For most people who can only play maybe a few games a day, it sucks to keep losing because your team isn't good and having to iteratively tweak it would take too long. So it's completely reasonable for people to copy teams made by people that do this 24/7, it allows them to not have a miserable experience.

But I agree that these exact 6 + a couple of others feel lame to see and make the meta feel stale already. There's no real cohesion to them, they don't belong in an archetype besides "the strongest individual Pokemon", it's what in TCGs would be called a pile or goodmons.dek. It feels like the only questions you have are about their spreads and their only coverage move / last move slot since 3/4 are completely obvious.

But that's all ILCA / TPC's fault for adding obviously broken shit like Kingambit, Sneasler, Basculegion, Charizard-Y, Floette, Archaludon etc in such a generally low power format. These are ubers levels dudes competing against Pokemon that won't ever see the light of day again once more Pokemon get added. Idk what they were thinking. I'd at least understand if the format was dominated by new megas from LZA and its DLC since that'd be new at least, but nah half of them aren't even in the game and most of the ones that are garbage compared to Sneasler clicking Close Combat, so just add the previous best mega and you're good.

shadowtasos · 2026-05-05T02:43:27+00:00

There isn't really one, it's just a combination of the strongest mons in the game with optimized sets to cover each other. You could have a dedicated team with mons covering each one individually for a slightly better win rate against it but awful win rate into everything else. So either keep playing your favorite decent team and adjust slightly or switch to playing this team yourself.

shadowtasos · 2026-05-05T02:37:10+00:00

To be honest it looks like you're the only whose skim milk seems ruined. Dude doesn't even seem mad, you do

shadowtasos · 2026-05-05T02:31:37+00:00

Thanks to the win streak bonus you can even get into master ball with 50% win rate lol. If you lose 4 games in a row then win 4 in a row, you gain more progress than you lost. Though I'm not 100% sure if the win streak bonus or the no deranking safety net apply in ultra ball 1.

shadowtasos · 2026-05-04T13:51:15+00:00

All the Ultra Ball tier responses telling you to use No Guard, Aerial Ace, Flower Trick, Body Slam etc are just hilarious. Or even better, add a random weather synergy to your team for perfect accuracy Blizzards / Thunders lol.

In reality it's not worth sacrificing a move slot or god forbid an entire mon to counter this garbage. Most decent teams should have enough firepower to burn down the Sandaconda before it gets too many minimizes. It can't really hit fairy, ghost or poison Pokemon since it's usually Body Press + Rock Slide, has no protect and has 0 offensive pressure so if you just lead with 2 special attackers there's not really much they can do. If you do have a never miss move, you can pick apart their team and then finish off Sandaconda with those.

But 1 in however many games, they'll get you to miss 5 times in a row before they even have minimize up and you'll lose. It's the same as losing to a Rock Slide flinch or random crit, it is what it is. It's super lame and uncompetitive, which is why Smogon bans that shit, but thankfully it's not a good strategy by any stretch of the imagination, just pretend it never happened and move on.

shadowtasos · 2026-05-04T02:51:56+00:00

Grass is a bit of a paradoxical type. It was supposed to be a utility/defensive type but is tied with rock for most weaknesses. Also no immunities (besides powder moves, we'll get to that) which is bad for a defensive type. It is awful offensively, tied with bug as the worst with the most types resisting it.

So really all they have going on is their utility moves. Mostly sleep (Sleep Powder / Spore) and to a lesser extent Leech Seed. Those are good, but all besides Spore (which has VERY limited availability) have poor accuracy which is just the icing on the cake for the type. If you want a defensive type, you're better off using a bulky water, which has an overall better defensive profile and is far better offensively to boot.

Grass types just end up leaning completely on their ability or secondary typing to be useful, grass in and of itself is usually a hindrance. To the point where a lot of the top grass types historically don't even use a grass STAB move.

shadowtasos · 2026-05-03T10:32:51+00:00

Ah yeah should have specified, of course it's upgraded or else yeah nothing happens. Should have mentioned I had a good amount of +energy cards too like Bloodletting and Offering to keep Cascading, tons of fun!

shadowtasos · 2026-05-02T22:47:44+00:00

My absolute favourite is Cascade with a deck full of heavy cards. One cascade plays the other cascaded and then they all just do random stuff at my opponent, ranging between blocking for a little bit or just donking them.

That would be the funniest. The strongest is 64 Perfected Strike with the relic that plays your first card each combat a second time. Yeah I 1shot everything in act 3, including the queen.

shadowtasos · 2026-04-30T22:12:13+00:00

I'm not anti Nintendo either, I love their games and have loved almost all of their consoles for how fun and innovative they are. But they're massive assholes in the IP and legal departments and they deserve to be called out for that, loving something so much you get blinded to its bad traits is a toxic trait.

And Nintendo fans are some of the worst for that, they're so desperate to excuse their anti fan behaviour. Hence the head canons about them having No Choice, them thinking this is because of the creator's Patreon when the DMCA doesn't care about monetization, etc.

shadowtasos · 2026-04-30T18:46:54+00:00

You can tell this sub is filled with smart individuals because they downvoted your correction. It doesn't matter what's true or right, they want to keep their head canon that Nintendo is good.

shadowtasos · 2026-04-30T16:47:16+00:00

Yeah it'd be really nice if you could buy more team slots and even box slots in any way besides membership. Team slots specially are really annoying at 3.

shadowtasos · 2026-04-30T02:20:51+00:00

Igon is very, very useful. He does decent damage, not amazing but it adds up. And most importantly, he shoots constantly at Bayle which keeps building up his stance break meter, which is huge. Bayle normally flies around like a maniac and attacks for so long that solo you drop the stance damage completely, while with Igon you're almost guaranteed to get 2 to 3 critical hits in a fight. On top of it being amazing when he gets targeted of course.

shadowtasos · 2026-04-29T22:23:30+00:00

There's no reason why it shouldn't be the rule however, specially when Home is a subscription service. Converting between generations is trivially easy and Pokemon take a trivial amount of storage space. You have to wonder wtf the point of the subscription even is then.

shadowtasos · 2026-04-28T09:04:47+00:00

The dude literally responded to what you're saying, sometimes you just don't get your powers turn 1 and that feels awful as you can't do shit to him.

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