3v3 Singles Metagame Discussion Thread [The Pentagon is back!!]

So I was lurking Orange Islands like I do, and came across a post regarding the Greninja "forme" that was announced in CoroCoro a while ago; apparently it's Mega Greninja!
Karxrida said:
According to the anime, Ash-Greninja is a Mega.

http://kasuria.tumblr.com/post/138689848606/shelgon-mega-evolution-energy-is-detected-by

The justification for it not requiring a Mega Stone is that Ash and Greninja have a stupidly strong bond.

If this carries over to the games, Ash-Greninja gets to be like Mega Ray and have item slot freedom.
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If true, this sounds really scary. The thought of (potentially) a faster and/or more powerful Greninja with a free item slot is kinda ridiculous. Orange Islands doesn't allows speculating, but I'm cool with all the speculating you can handle (as long as it's relevant to the BSS meta). Could the other starters get a similar treatment? It would make sense. What would either of them need to become relevant in the metagame?
 
cant say said:
So I was lurking Orange Islands like I do, and came across a post regarding the Greninja "forme" that was announced in CoroCoro a while ago; apparently it's Mega Greninja!

If true, this sounds really scary. The thought of (potentially) a faster and/or more powerful Greninja with a free item slot is kinda ridiculous. Orange Islands doesn't allows speculating, but I'm cool with all the speculating you can handle (as long as it's relevant to the BSS meta). Could the other starters get a similar treatment? It would make sense. What would either of them need to become relevant in the metagame?
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This is pretty exciting because this means we are definitely getting pokemon Z this year! If greninja does become faster and more powerful, we are going to see a spike in the usage of talonflame but I'm pretty sure Z will introduce more mons which will help deal with it. Hopefully, they introduce a hard kangaskhan counter as well because the game desperately needs one.
 
aniravjain said:
This is pretty exciting because this means we are definitely getting pokemon Z this year! If greninja does become faster and more powerful, we are going to see a spike in the usage of talonflame but I'm pretty sure Z will introduce more mons which will help deal with it. Hopefully, they introduce a hard kangaskhan counter as well because the game desperately needs one.
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I'm assuming you don't mean totally new Pokemon, as they wont come until gen VII. As for new Megas; ofc there will be.

Working from that, what Pokemon could get a Mega that deals with Kangaskhan? If Chesnaught got an itemless Mega like Greninja, a Rocky Helmet one could be cool for Khan, assuming the +100 BST went mostly to defence.
 
cant say said:
I'm assuming you don't mean totally new Pokemon, as they wont come until gen VII. As for new Megas; ofc there will be.

Working from that, what Pokemon could get a Mega that deals with Kangaskhan? If Chesnaught got an itemless Mega like Greninja, a Rocky Helmet one could be cool for Khan, assuming the +100 BST went mostly to defence.
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Yeah I did mean new mega evolutions. I was thinking mega chesnaught with rough skin but another pokemon that comes to mind is skarmory. It would be cool if they increased its special defense base stat by like 60 and then 20 could go in both defense and attack and give it filter as an ability. It then might even become a better wall than chansey which is probably the best wall in the game.
 
cant say said:
So I was lurking Orange Islands like I do, and came across a post regarding the Greninja "forme" that was announced in CoroCoro a while ago; apparently it's Mega Greninja!

If true, this sounds really scary. The thought of (potentially) a faster and/or more powerful Greninja with a free item slot is kinda ridiculous. Orange Islands doesn't allows speculating, but I'm cool with all the speculating you can handle (as long as it's relevant to the BSS meta). Could the other starters get a similar treatment? It would make sense. What would either of them need to become relevant in the metagame?
Click to expand...


Seems odd to me the most recent batch of starters will be getting mega evolutions, considering the logical choices would be either the Johto starters or the Sinnoh ones. A Greninja with a mega evolving mechanic like that of Rayquaza would be pretty unreasonable in BSS unless it got weird stat adjustments like less speed or defense(so any priority could take it out.) Plus losing Protean would probably be a bad thing.

I can see Greninja being the only starter of the set to get a mega, like Blaziken in X and Y, since it's clearly the most popular of the trio-same as Blaziken.

Some people already think Chesnaught is good in BSS, so it probably would be a strong mega. A boost to speed and attack, or to SpD, or some combination hereof, would be really good with a less situational ability.

Delphox would probably want at least base 135 speed, with most if not all of the rest in SpA. An ability that's actually useful would be nice too. Not sure what fits with it. Fur Coat? That might be kinda good.
 
Hate to be that guy but that was apparently a misinterpretation. The jury is still out on whether it's actually a Mega Evolution though if it even enters the games (which tbh I don't want because it's blatantly an Ash thing) it'll probably function similar to a Mega Evolution. I'm assuming it's still not though until we get confirmation otherwise. Who knows, it might get the Spiky Eared Pichu treatment and not actually be that different. It is worth noting that Pokemon Picross does include Ash Greninja though, and they do refer to it specifically as such (it's also a stage that's technically not supposed to be available at this moment).

If we do get a mini Mega Rayquaza situation here though I hope it at least gets an ability that isn't Protean, but I still have doubts this will actually enter the main games.
 
Yeah I thought it might be a bit Cosplay Pikachu-ish if it did ever make it into the games. Or could be like Floette-Eternal; event-only where it looks different, gets a stat increase and a maybe w signature move?

I'm cool with still speculating haha. This is the most action this thread has seen recently lol
 
New megas will be so interesting. Hopefully one from each region. That wouldn't be overkill.

Someone in OI mentioned Defog as a tutor move. Kinda irrelevant to BSS but it asks a question about the sheer possibility of transfer exclusive tutor moves becoming an option.
 
a0161613 said:
New megas will be so interesting. Hopefully one from each region. That wouldn't be overkill.

Someone in OI mentioned Defog as a tutor move. Kinda irrelevant to BSS but it asks a question about the sheer possibility of transfer exclusive tutor moves becoming an option.
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Z will be part of this trip of games, so I don't think 4th gen tutor moves will be available. I'd expect the gen 7 games to be in Sinnoh, and they'll have more tutor moves like Defig.

Megas have thus far been only gen 4 and older, so I wouldn't count on a bunch of gen 5 and 6 Megas, though I wouldn't have expected a Mega Greninja either so, who knows?
 
Guys I have a minor update for you. I've been working on a page to show the usage stats, and it's coming along nicely. I've ported the original python code to C# (mostly for personal comfort), but haven't done all of the features just yet. I've got an app that collects the ORAS and XY data for all five battle formats (single, double, triple, rotation, special) based on the season number, for now I'll only be using season 14, as retrieving that data takes pretty long already.

I'm not good with web design, so the page (when it goes live) probably won't look all that good on your screens. I won't add a mobile version, at least not for a while anyway.
I'm hoping to bring you the live version sometime next week, there's a few things I'll have to work out before I put the live version out there. Once the page goes live I'm hoping to receive a lot of feedback from you, because I want it to be as good as I can possibly make it.
 
hetoord said:
Guys I have a minor update for you. I've been working on a page to show the usage stats, and it's coming along nicely. I've ported the original python code to C# (mostly for personal comfort), but haven't done all of the features just yet. I've got an app that collects the ORAS and XY data for all five battle formats (single, double, triple, rotation, special) based on the season number, for now I'll only be using season 14, as retrieving that data takes pretty long already.

I'm not good with web design, so the page (when it goes live) probably won't look all that good on your screens. I won't add a mobile version, at least not for a while anyway.
I'm hoping to bring you the live version sometime next week, there's a few things I'll have to work out before I put the live version out there. Once the page goes live I'm hoping to receive a lot of feedback from you, because I want it to be as good as I can possibly make it.
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Awesome! You can also post in the Technical Projects forum when it's (mostly) done and someone might come along and offer to dress it up with some fancy HTML skills!

Can't wait to see how this works out.
 
hetoord said:
I got it to work for Singles, sort of at least. On my PC (Windows 10) Python apparently doesn't like unicode characters such as the male/female symbols for Nidoran, and I had to modify the code that orders the Pokémon slightly so that it wouldn't create an infinite loop.

First of all I took the code from https://github.com/Ferretsroq/Pokemon-HTTP-Requests The repo cant say linked was modified by someone else to include more features, I didn't notice that until I was already tweaking the original code. Anyway, the code is likely mostly the same. That modified version has a live website that does display the special season rankings http://jake-white.github.io/Battlespotspecial/

In theory all you have to change is lines 22 AND 64 where it says "battleType=5", change it to "battleType=1". On line 182 I had to add " and lowestNumber < numberOfRankedPokemon" after the condition that's originally there to prevent the infinite loop from happening.

After running it it creates a whole bunch of folders and files in the Data folder. If you run the script make sure to delete that folder first, as it can't seem to overwrite files that are already there.

I'm not going to promise anything, but I'll see if I can get some kind of page up and running with the usage statistics some time soon.
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Python doesn't like to overwrite; iirc it doesn't delete files, but you can simply open a pre-existing file (or one you just created and closed) and write to it, then close it again; that overwrites it. I have a program that does some file overwritting, I can dig up specific code later. Folders, I've never done; I have got it to re-write txt files though. You're probably better than me at it tbh, I haven't dabbled in Python for a while/was never that good at it :P

And I have the advantage "I have Win7, which actually works despite being slow as snail shit" so that might be a factor lol. I can toy around with this and see what I break. 500 GB SSD is good for this stuff.

But uh... on a non-programming note... are double mega teams a thing in Singles? I mean, it's Bring 6 Pick 3 so you could almost have two 3 man teams with a Mega in each and imo double mega is grand in Doubles, especially in a best 2 of 3 format. Something like... Char-Y / Garchomp / (mega) Scizor / Rotom-W / etc.

edit: wtf version of Python is this? I'm on 3.4.3 and- well, this isn't the 3.4 branch syntax. Looks older.
edit1: Oh god it's 2.7, I never learned 2.7. I started at 3.4
 
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ProjectTitan313 said:
But uh... on a non-programming note... are double mega teams a thing in Singles? I mean, it's Bring 6 Pick 3 so you could almost have two 3 man teams with a Mega in each and imo double mega is grand in Doubles, especially in a best 2 of 3 format. Something like... Char-Y / Garchomp / (mega) Scizor / Rotom-W / etc.
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Yeah it's pretty common. I think almost all teams have two megas.
 
aniravjain said:
Yeah it's pretty common. I think almost all teams have two megas.
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No thats exxagerated. It is common but not that common. You can pull it off but it limits your possibilities of picking three pokemon so i would only do it if the megas are different enough and it does benefit your team and there are no good alternatives for one of the megas.
 
freekhoorn said:
No thats exxagerated. It is common but not that common. You can pull it off but it limits your possibilities of picking three pokemon so i would only do it if the megas are different enough and it does benefit your team and there are no good alternatives for one of the megas.
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He's not that far off. Just looking at the top teams from season 13 (Link), out of the first 30 teams listed there, 18 have two megas and 12 have only one. Which means running two megas seems to be more popular than not.
 
What's the consensus on running three Megas? Doesn't seem that good, and I've never done it, but if all three are substantially different like, say, Sableye, Aggron, and Pinsir or something it could be good, and certainly interesting.

I'm pretty sure I've seen a team on here, think in sample teams, with three Megas.
 
freekhoorn said:
No thats exxagerated. It is common but not that common. You can pull it off but it limits your possibilities of picking three pokemon so i would only do it if the megas are different enough and it does benefit your team and there are no good alternatives for one of the megas.
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Well this is just a difference of opinion here. Neither of us are wrong nor right. I feel two megas opens up your possibilities while you feel the opposite. I feel having two megas makes sure you don't rely too much on one and let's you use different strategies. Also obviously I'm not gonna pick two megas that do the same thing. For example, I'm not gonna pick mega banette and mega gengar but I would pick mega mawile and mega gengar.

Omastar68 said:
What's the consensus on running three Megas? Doesn't seem that good, and I've never done it, but if all three are substantially different like, say, Sableye, Aggron, and Pinsir or something it could be good, and certainly interesting.

I'm pretty sure I've seen a team on here, think in sample teams, with three Megas.
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Three megas would be pretty fun but I think that it wouldn't work. You'd struggle at team preview since your options would be very limited.
 
I mean I don't really see the point in pressing that further, at that point it's an argument of semantics which I don't think is really relevant to what that comment was primarily trying to say. I think we've established at this point that Double Mega is not only viable, but rather common too.

Double Mega is actually something I've wanted to try for awhile but haven't gotten around to doing it before. I'm actually in the process of planning one though, probably a more standard looking team with Blaziken and Salamence as opposed to my usual method of trying something more uncommon like Metagross or Weavile. I'll probably hold off on that though since Japan is getting Static Zapdos next month and that's something I want to get my hands on at some point, since it's such a nice partner for Blaziken as is.
 
Psynergy said:
I mean I don't really see the point in pressing that further, at that point it's an argument of semantics which I don't think is really relevant to what that comment was primarily trying to say. I think we've established at this point that Double Mega is not only viable, but rather common too.

Double Mega is actually something I've wanted to try for awhile but haven't gotten around to doing it before. I'm actually in the process of planning one though, probably a more standard looking team with Blaziken and Salamence as opposed to my usual method of trying something more uncommon like Metagross or Weavile. I'll probably hold off on that though since Japan is getting Static Zapdos next month and that's something I want to get my hands on at some point, since it's such a nice partner for Blaziken as is.
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Static zapdos seems good! Does zapdos get air slash btw? Could be some good hax-flinch combo!
 
No Static is the only reason I haven't used Zapdos yet. And considering it's quite viable even with the mostly useless Pressure...look out Talonflame.

Strangely Zapdos doesn't get AS, if you want to flinch you're limited to Sky Attack...or Twister if it's a tutor move next ten or something(Twister is a joke though.)
 
Zapdos, like many good flying types, has no flying STAB. Drill Peck and Sky Attack, that's it. HA birds would be nice but I want HA Johto dogs.

Mega Metagross any good? It kicks ass in Doubles if you know what you're doing, but that means nothing for Singles. High speed and power, with good bulk and synergy with Garchomp could be nasty. Just needs a Khan counter (oxymoron.jpg)
 
ProjectTitan313 said:
Mega Metagross any good? It kicks ass in Doubles if you know what you're doing, but that means nothing for Singles. High speed and power, with good bulk and synergy with Garchomp could be nasty. Just needs a Khan counter (oxymoron.jpg)
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I recommend checking out Metagross's analysis, since it's done (Click). It should provide a pretty good idea about Metagross's role in the metagame.
 
At this point, if you haven't heard about Kanto Classic, you've probably been living under a rock. If you don't know, the prize for entry was a Dragonite that came with Barrier. Apparently, it naturally has very good IVs; that means that it could be viable for competitive play. That raises a question: how can it be used? Not having Multiscale really hampers its effectiveness, which discouraged a lot of people when they first heard about it. I, however, think it has a lot of hidden potential, and I'd love to see what the community can come up with. Post your sets below!
 
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