This post is something like a year in the making, and that is entirely intended to be a factual statement, before I picked it back up (a couple of weeks ago at this point) the last draft of this post was quite literally the ides of March (yes, even before the moth streaks). It’s been so, so much harder to just do this writeup than to grind out another few hundred, another few thousand battles, and if not for the impending online services shutdown, I would probably have pushed this out another few weeks or months or year(s).
But since it’s come to this, I’m here to announce completed streaks of an
ongoing streak of 3807 wins in Super Singles in X (with an ORAS tradeback move though) with minor variants of a minor variant &c. of Team Marathon (Mega Gyarados / Aegislash / Gliscor), the last in a series of streaks that I’ve been putting off writing up since last February, completed at 136, 1071, 1967, and 908 wins. Some of them used to be uploaded but I think are long gone by now and I don’t have enough slots to reup them all so a quick rundown:
Loss at #137:
VQ2W-WWWW-WW67-59EG vs SpA Ace Jai Togekiss3: This one is from last January, basically my first “real” steak picking up mons again this time. There’s a couple of things I could’ve played better (I have long since learned to go to Gliscor first against really Togekiss in general but especially ones that could be this on in particular), and then I should’ve switched out after the flinch, but it’s still a silly level of bullshit from a multi-set trainer with a dumb set getting a King’s Rock Shadow Ball flinch.
Loss at #1072:
2MFG-WWWW-WW67-59EB vs Punk Guy Puck Gyarados3/Arcanine2/Krookodile4: Way back last Februrary, this one pretty much comes down to missing that it’s the Intimidate trainer, playing as if it’s Gyarados4, get instantly punished as Gyarados3 crit one-shots with Stone Edge (oops) and everything goes downhill from there. Despite this, it takes some extra weird blunders with KS because I think I need +4 Aegislash IH + SS for the kill (but actually Aegislash would be in Blade form so +2 would’ve been fine…), and get clean oneshot because I let it boost too much. Gliscor cannot salvage a battle out of a set-up Gyarados3 and I don’t even get to see the backups, which is really sad because Gliscor would’ve 1v2ed them. In principle, the Tree thing where the trainer is rendered all the time could’ve saved this run…
(“If I’d just clicked the Mega Button, or if I hadn’t gone for the extraneous boost on Aegislash, I would’ve won anyway” is just the authentic Team Marathon experience anyway I guess lmao)
Loss at #1968: vs 1/2 Veteran Hera Suicune2/Articuno1/Cobalion2: This one starts with some sketchy play into a turn 1 freeze, but really just goes downhill when I forget to stall out Shadow Ball entirely and Gyarados does not appreciate getting nailed on the switch and not being able to complete its setup, ends up without a sub as Cobalion2 comes in and I don’t correctly switch out. Gliscor has to finish it off and Pressure Articuno1 comes in, and at this point we probably would’ve been fine if I were still running Toxic Gliscor. Alas, this is last August,
after the Masquerain Starf steak, so I’ve converted to a DT set, which just barely does not have enough PP and gets stalled out. Obviously winnable matchup, I just threw horrendously. This is
not actually the scenario that made be decide that it’s not worth it to full stall Suicune12 (which is easy with an Aegislash sac on set 1 but really annoying against set 2 because Mirror Coat usage is pretty random), but that would also have surely prevented this loss.
Loss at #909: vs Sand Worker Rasmus Gliscor2/Tyranitar3/Dugtrio3. I see SD out of lead Hyper Cutter Gliscor, and I mistakenly assume that we’re looking at Gliscor1, which is annoying but can barely touch Aegislash, and miss the possibility that it’s set 2. It BPs out into an unknown Tyranitar set as I don’t immediately Iron Head; at this point, sets 2 and 3 at +1 are I think threatening a genuine (still pretty small) loss chance even with no further misplays. This doesn’t happen, because I promptly switch to Gliscor, which in hindsight
is a misplay and definitely threatens a (somewhat more likely) loss with no further misplays. This still doesn’t happen, because I just let it DD on a Protect turn and that’s pretty much game.
This one’s a rare matchup where I’m actually not sure there was any sequence I could’ve played that wouldn’t have had a nontrivial loss chance without knowing the backups, though I
think immediate Head on seeing SD is correct, which would’ve nailed Tyranitar on the switch and put it at least in range to be finished off by SS, which also beats a second boost out of Gliscor and I don’t see anything in the sand pool that it would lose to, but this is hardly obvious even in hindsight.
Battle videos for the current streak further down, since I want to talk about some stuff first.
How did we get here?
Well,
Team Marathon hardly needs me to introduce it, mari’s written reams on it as is, ft. elaborate and very helpful lead guide, which I think makes it pretty much the the best-documented team in the thread in that it’s the only one with a lead guide that really goes into enough detail to get a feel for how someone manages to play a team to 2k and beyond. It’s very appreciated, and very
importantly a jumping-off point for feeling out the situations where it makes sense to PP stall, which btw is “most of the time” but this is not remotely intuitive without experience piloting other long-streak comps like Aegimensey or, like, Kangliscune on a
really bad day, and ime this team prefers to full stall significantly more often than either of those.
One of the fascinating things to me about this team composition is how … affordable? it is—not literally, of course (I have no idea what that would even mean), but at a glance we’re working with hilariously off-the-shelf parts: one Adamant 5v Magikarp of the sort you could plausibly have picked up off Wonder Trade back in the day, a 4v + 28-29 Spe Honedge (and the speed is just for one particular edge case), and an HA Gligar which seems like it could well be any generic standard facility Gliscor set (everyone has one of those, right?), which sounds a little fancy but Immunity Gligar is, like, maybe the easiest HA to find in X/Y, since it’s a semi-common swarm encounter that you can Poison Gas to weed out (… okay, that sounds bad). No once-per-playthrough mons, no egg moves or anything, not even tutors, just level-ups, relearns, and TMs. You’d be forgiven for imagining that it could be a single-cartridge team in X/Y, because with the exception of one tiiiiiny detail, it almost would be except that for some ungodly reason Gyarados doesn’t actually learn Crunch before ORAS, and that’s definitely a mistake I made waaaay back in what must have been, like, 2016-2017 when I first built the team and had to ask a (… ex-)friend to take my freshly bred Gyarados and a Heart Scale to the move reminder in OR. Still, that’s a far shorter ask than procuring a 5v Bold Suicune!
Honestly, with the team sitting at the top of the board for a good half decade, it’s a
little surprising that we’ve never actually seen much in the way of a copycat streak (until now lol)—there’s a pre-ORAS predecessor Mega Gyara/Ferro/Gliscor, there’s a vaguely similar Mega Gyara/Aegislash/Garchomp built without Sub TM access, but apparently nobody took this team out for a spin to see any particular level of success. And I get that it’s a
hard team to play, and to be sure it’s not a team I can wholeheartedly recommend for, say, polishing off a 50 or 200 streak and calling it a day, but my best streak from 2017 still made it to 434, and I was definitely holding it wrong then. Probably still am, but back then I hadn’t clued in to the whole “you’d rather stall down to a full setup than try to 1v3 with Gliscor” thing, whereas now I’d hope at least some of my choices can be chalked up to, eh, call it legitimate playstyle differences. It’s a surprisingly solid, resilient team with a lot of backup plans even when you’re playing like a dumbass (source: just look at my battle videos lmao).
The actual goshdarn team
So I call this a minor variants of a minor variant &c. of Team Marathon, because this is the result of a series of individually quite minor changes, and at a high level I think the team still very much maintains its identity and core game plan. Gyarados and Aegislash have only really seen fairly minor spread tweaks; Gliscor … has gone through a lot.
Gyarados (M) @ Gyaradosite
Ability: Intimidate -> Mold Breaker
EVs: 100 HP / 196 Atk / 36 Def / 6 SpD / 172 Spe
Adamant Nature
IVs: 8 SpA
- Waterfall
- Dragon Dance
- Crunch
- Substitute
There is a
very marginal improvement to the spread: 2 points moved from attack into hp. So the original writeup claims that 212 EVs are “just enough” to Mega OHKO Chandelure4, but it turns out that’s not quite right: 196 EVs read the
exact same damage ranges as 212. In fact, our min damage in that matchup remains the same (168 hp) all the way up to 252 Atk. In fact, when we do the mass calcs, it turns out the 196 Atk EV spread differs from the 212 Atk EV spread in surprisingly few matchups, few of them relevant and basically none of which push a roll over a guaranteed HKO threshold.
If you are a huge nerd, you might already recognize that 196 EVs hits a nature boost threshold for base stat numbers ending in 5, and expect a priori that of course it’s going to be twice as impactful as the previous and next points in attack. This is true, but it’s not what’s going on. If you are a Huge Nerd (looking at you, Magpie), you might recognize that 196+ Atk Mega Gyarados hits exactly 220 attack.
… yeah, it’s a rounding thing. Being a multiple of both 10 and 11 means this stat number tends to bump Atk*BP over exact integer multiples of uninvested Def with base stat divisible by 5 and nature-boosted uninvested with base stat divisible by 10. Chandelure4, being a Bold base 90, has exactly 121 defense.
The bulk investment, eh, isn’t actually that relevant. It’s a benchmark-based defense number, but it turns out we don’t actually need to care that much about the Garchomp matchup (see Gliscor). The extra hp
is a marginal improvement since we’re running a Sub set, since it means we can takes 2 more damage unsubbed and make the same number of subs, but that’s a pretty minor effect on Gyarados in particular (though it is relevant when we have to facetank a few Struggles to set up). I’ve contemplated moving an extra 4 points from Def into HP, but Gyarados has a janky base Def ending in 9 that makes sticking 4 points in Def profoundly pointless; 45 hp subs already exactly survive the extremely relevant +2 base 90 neutral nature 3-way-split 90 BP resisted STAB benchmark (read: Entei2 Flamethrower exactly), and shifting more HP doesn’t seem to make my subs survive crit Struggles any better.
Cutting bulk down to 68/252/12/0/4/172 to run max attack is a conceivable option for this blessed calc:
+3 252+ Atk Mold Breaker Gyarados-Mega Waterfall vs. 0 HP / 0 Def Greninja: 147-173 (100 - 117.6%) – guaranteed OHKO
but it doesn’t really seem to solve any other problems and I’m not actually sure how affordable the bulk loss is… worth trying in a throwaway run, though, maybe.
The gender is relevant mostly because Rivalry Pyroar4 is a bit more likely to be more threatening when you’re female, partly because Serperior1 matters way more than Blissey1 (still not much), and then because we want Gliscor’s gender to differ from both Gyarados and Aegislash because Milotic2 is
actually threatening and that’s not possible if Gyarados and Aegislash have different genders. It’s really not that big a deal, but I did actually select the specific combination deliberately this time.
Side note, if you
really need to make this a single-cartridge team, I think the version with Bite > Crunch is
probably still a 4-digit team, there are a couple of matchups that would be a bit jankier, Haxorus4 gets a little sketchier (but it’s generics only and two +1 Bites should still have decent odds), Drought Ninetales4 needs +3 (might be harder to carry a sub), getting to +6 becomes somewhat more relevant, and you’d lose the fast path on the Hex/Psychic pool, but it still nails Starmie and on the whole there’s not
that much stuff you’d DD once and Crunch. I guess some Def boosters (read: Umbreon4) become sillier when you absolutely need to fish for a 1/16 crit because you don’t have the 1/5 drop chance to back you up? That’s definitely not a recommendation, but I can see it working.
Aegislash (M) @ Leftovers
EVs: 252 HP / 252 Atk / 6 SpD
Adamant Nature
IVs: 19 SpA / 28 Spe
- Shadow Sneak
- King’s Shield
- Iron Head
- Swords Dance
Not much to say here. I’ve swapped in a more “standard” 79 speed Adamant, which incidentally is exactly the same speed IV as 71 speed Brave, so that’s nifty and saved a lot of pain breeding. The “relevant” matchups between 71 and 79 speed are Scrafty4, Obamasnow4, Tyranitar4, and then a bunch of stuff (in particular the base 55 normals, Blissey, Bouffalant, and Ursaring) that it makes more sense to outspeed and use your non-priority move on anyway. Obama’s Protect alternation is hilariously predictable even when you don’t outslow it since it barely does damage to Aegi even with Blizzard, Tyranitar4 is not only utterly humiliated by Gliscor but it is preferred to stall it into a full Gyarados setup, and Scrafty, it turns out, has the janky Payback AI that makes it Protect or set up way less often than you’d expect and Payback its way down to -6 into KS against fast Aegi.
I think Iron Head as the non-priority move is … underappreciated. Actually, let me rephrase that, because Head still kind of sucks actually, what I should really be saying is that I think Sword’s ｐｅｒｆｅｃｔ ｃｏｖｅｒａｇｅ alongside Sneak is grossly overvalued and gets it used even when it doesn’t actually do anything special. Yeah, sure, the matchup spread matters for this team in particular, but even in general you’re approximately never choosing Sword over Sneak because it does hilarious overkill SE damage to stuff that resists Sneak anyway, you’re picking your actually pretty rarely resisted priority move (except, I guess, into the generic Beauty pool) when it’s good enough to land a kill, and then you’re picking your non-priority move over your priority move so you’re either moving after something faster than you and thereby avoiding a hit in Blade form, or just outright doing more damage to something slower than you and killing it that way. The baseline difference is pretty minimal even if your team doesn’t specifically hate a few things that Head hits harder, and the Maison just … doesn’t have Sword targets, like what are you going to use it on, Ferrothorn? Defiant Bisharp4? Bulky waters that happen to be slower than you but also aren’t slowthings or Quagsire, i.e. pretty much Gastrodon exactly because Lanturn4 is fundamentally unthreatening and set 3 demands Sneak anyway in the Roller Skater pool? People should try it more on other comps, it’s good value.
Funny spread notes: unlike with Gyarados, cutting attack down to 220 is probably not worth missing out on guaranteed KOs against Moxie Gyarados4 and Entei3, and anyway there’s nothing I really want to invest two points into: it’s not really desirable to outrun Empoleon4, Lapras4, or Swampert4 on this team, and bumping defense/spdef by 1 point doesn’t actually change move any relevant benchmarks except like, while it’s actually slightly relevant that we cause an Atk Download because +1 PZ4 has a cursed set of Shadow Ball crit Aegislash + Tri Attack crit Gliscor calcs.
One of the funniest things about running three 220-222 attack 80 BP moves and one attack 40 BP moves is that the damage calcs are all the same. This is one argument for sticking with 222 attack Gyarados…
Gliscor (F) @ Toxic Orb
Ability: Poison Heal
EVs: 166 HP / 252 SpD / 92 Spe
Careful Nature
- Double Team
- Protect
- Bulldoze
- Substitute
Everyone has their own favorite Gliscor sets, and this is … not my favorite spread (that’s 228/4/4/0/252/20), but a particular carefully tuned set of compromises which has had to go through a bunch of iterations:
In the distant past I ran the original 212/4/36/0/252/4 Toxic/EQ set, but the oldest Gliscor I have (presumably from 2016—it’s dated 2012/5/16, but that’s obviously wrong and other mons that should’ve been traded roughly contemporarily are dated May–July 2016) is already (presumably re-EVed to) 228/5/20/0/252/5. (My Gyarados from that era, incidentally, is 100/204/30/0/4/172, which is a funny kind of mangled spread that I’m not sure isn’t a mistake.)
Fast-forward to 2020 and, the story I like to tell goes, I’m rebuilding the team after replaying Y in Japanese but was (still am tbh) bad at reading all-kana text and teach じならし instead of じしん and locked in the PP Ups before the difference came to light. Of course this should’ve been an easy problem to fix in gen 6 with reuseable TMs, but first of all I suspect I straight up just hadn’t done the Strength puzzle and didn’t even realize that I had a different ground-colored TM with a vaguely similar-looking name, and second of all, as we can see from the fact that I’m still running it, I actually do genuinely think Bulldoze is a better move than EQ in this slot—there are very few situations where it’s even particularly relevant than Gliscor is doing 40% less damage (I think the main ones in the lead position are Aurorus4 and Probopass4, both of which I handle dramatically differently now anyway), but there are a few leads that become full combo when speed dropped to allow Gyarados to Sub, and fundamentally I just have to trust that individual lead matchups are like an order of magnitude more common than backup matchups where specifically Gliscor is out.
Anyway, back in the land of living memory (last January), I was playing with Toxic/Bulldoze 230/4/20/0/252/4 (very smooth spread to EV train btw) until I realized that bumping up to 118 speed would let me outspeed max speed base 108s at -1, which is a surprisingly large weird speed tier that includes Infernape134 and the
Unova gerbils musketeers swordsgerbils and swapped to 230/4/4/0/252/20 (second easiest re-EV of my life tbh), which I was running until last summer when I flirted with more exotic Gliscor sets on the moth runs. At that point I’d been off “serious” streaking for a few months (as in, I’d last
streamed up to 2995 in April before life stuff came up that kept me away from it for weeks and then months, by which point I was kind of terrified of continuing, started playing on a different file and then kind of just forgot I still had the almost-3k-streak on hold?? eventually thinking I’d already lost it but wasn’t clear on the details until I dug it up and it turns out that no, it was just still sitting there all along) and started
yet another new file in X, this time with a fresh mind, newfound appreciation of Double Team, and fear of Tyrantrum4 leading me to seriously consider bumping up the speed as a backup plan for a turn 3 crit.
What the spread actually
does is that164 HP EVs puts us at 171 hp, which is 3 more than a multiple of 8, and the remainder is just enough to run max spdef. Like with Gyarados, I opt for Sub number +3 rather than +1 to maximize the amount of single-hit damage we can take and still Sub. For singles Gliscor, the ability to subtect/PH hp loop is also a
relevant consideration (yes, I still think heal% optimization is wrongheaded though) in that leaking hp over a subtect cycle likewise cuts into the amount of damage we can safely take and still stall some amount of PP, and because that number is overwhelmingly going to be more than 4, I’m comfortable with staying just under 4 mod 8. So long story short, this spread tries to maximize effective special bulk we can bring to bear alongside a speed stat in the 123-127 range.
Incidentally, I kind of wish I could afford to cut hp another PH tier down to 163 and bump speed up to 134 (i.e. 100/4/4/0/252/150) since all four things in the 129 tier, Tornadus23 at 131, and Togekiss4 at 132 would be kind of nice to outspeed. Ultimately, though, there are always these nifty pickups that could justify cutting a
little more bulk, but in practice it concretely does matter that we’re not leaking much hp switching into e.g. Vaporeon4 Shadow Balls “on average”, and the marginal benefit to going up to 134 seems is way more, ah, marginal than picking up Ludicolo4 and Tyranitar23, the former of which btw was the
main reason I thought it made sense to cut bulk for this speed benchmark, up until I discovered last month that it can in fact go for the turn 1 Hydro miss into Gyarados because Grass Knot AI is a sick joke. 127 also picks up Sceptile2 as a Bulldoze target to stall down to full combo, which is considerably rarer but without outspeeding at -1 technically carried a small chance to SD twice and ript hrough the whole team with limited counterplay from that point; that set is like 0.3% (1/3600 inferred) to appear as a lead post-40 but I’ve met it twice this streak, so I’m not exactly regretting the decision to run the full 127 speed instead of a little more Def. I’ve never really found Gliscor’s Def inadequate, though granted I really don’t play Gliscor on non-Intimidate teams very often these days…
Anyway, Bulldoze is actually fantastic because, as I was saying, lead machups are fundamentally way more common than specific backups showing up on Gliscor, because in order for a backup to come in on Gliscor we need the lead to leave (usually by dying) while Gliscor is on the field, and contrary to what 2017 me seemed to think, we do not actually prefer for Gliscor to be on the field as the lead dies, we in fact strongly prefer to get a Gyarados setup because even a modestly set-up Gyarados at +2 or +3 with a sub is a near-unassailable position that only a small range of backups can actually out, not all of which will even be brought in second, and the list of things that out +6 sub Gyarados is basically Static/Effect Spore + para proc, multiple Lax Incense/Bright Powder procs, forced Mega + Accelgor4, and egregious misplay. The upshot of this is that, essentally, making a single sketchy lead matchup “safe” is worth 5-10x as many sketchy Gliscor secondmon matchups, and is substantially compensated for by reducing the number of Gliscor setups we get in the first place.
(Concretely: Bulldoze lets us safely stall down stuff like Garchomp4, Lilligant4, Sceptile4, Slaking4, Tauros4, Typhlosion4, Cobalion1, Virizion1, and non-Clear Body Klinklang4. Before the hp cut, Ludicolo4 and Tentacruel4 too. The extra PP is also nifty to solo stall Crobat4 so that we get a full Gyarados setup no matter whether it has Infiltrator or not. Garchomp4 in particular is a huge pickup.)
Double Team is … an adequate skip turn button. I mean, I’ve talked about this, and calling it a skip turn button is only like half facetious, it really does get clicked a lot just to waste the least critical PP against a non-floater like Blastoise4 or Poliwrath4, against which we now have full combo because the problem with the Toxic set was literally just that Focus Punch had too much PP to stall out with other attacking moves on the set. This alone is extremely valuable.
Evasion boosts also sometimes blank an incoming attack. This is not exactly reliable on a turn-to-turn basis, but there’s a reasonable expectation that we can get e.g. Heatran1 to miss at least 7 times over the course of 40 attacks, with the chance of a miss rising further each time it does as we get a free turn to DT again. This lets us stall it down to Earth Power and represents something like >98% chance of full combo out of Heatran1 (without needing to sac Aegi). Even funnier, misses mean the attacker doesn’t take recoil damage, which isn’t always good (fuck Talonflame4 btw) but gives us good chances to stall down Life Orb users Probopass4, Bouffalant4, Cobalion4, Victreebel4, and the like.
You’d think we’d miss Toxic a bit more but surprisingly … not really? It turns out that the vast majority of situations where you’d want to use Toxic are really just mistakes that could’ve been stalled down to a proper setup instead of leaving a heavily depleted Gliscor on the field, since as we know there’s no prize for killing the lead in 6 turns but there
is a pretty good reward for stalling it down to EQ as its last move. Even when there’s nothing good to stall down to fully set up on, though, Gliscor with 56 non-attacking PP can afford to stall quite a lot of things down
to Struggle, and it turns out that in itself is a decent consolation prize, since the +2 or +3 Gyarados we finagle out of that, at least 15/16 of the time behind a sub, 1v1s almost everything and thereby eliminates otherwise potentially problematic backups.
(To wit: the record indicates that the most popular way to handle Luxray4 on a Gliscor team is to switch Gliscor in, stall out Ice Fang, then Toxic and carry a sub, spending 16 subtect PP and 6 Toxic/EQ PP in the process. With this team composition, Luxray4 can be stalled out of attacking PP
without using any moves by switching between Gliscor and Aegislash, ideally getting Aegislash frozen in the process to avoid paralysis while switching into Thunder Wave to stall out the last few Thunder Fang PP, but having Gliscor fully stall out elec PP at the end or just getting Aegi paralyzed is an acceptable sacrifice. At thais point, Gyarados can switch in from Gliscor on a turn where Light Screen is down, guaranteeing safe entry, and immediately Sub and set up freely. Interestingly, this maneuver is even easier with Suicune, which can Rest off paralysis and can just afford to facetank a crit Thunder Fang if it wants.)
The combination of DT and Bulldoze also has the synergy that, when making use of evasion, it’s really nice to move first against the opponent so that you can know when you need to re-Sub instead of wasting a bunch fo Sub PP on turns where it doesn’t break. This buys you free turns on which you can do something else, often DTing further to buy more free turns, but in some situations (e.g. backup Starmie4, lastmon Jynx4) it even makes sense to spend spend the extra turn to straight up attack and do damage to and eventually even kill things. At this point, a great fan of Chansey sweeping might wish to pipe up that he always knew evasion sets were good at slow-sweeping, but I submit for the record that he would be wrong, that (and I’ve said this before) uninvested mono-Bulldoze Gliscor is abysmal at actually killing things, should not be burning through hilarious amount of PP trying to do so, and
is not the setup we want on the field when a backup comes out, because Claydol or Feraligatr or God’s gift to this world Talonflame can show up and then you will have small PP and a bad time. Dropping Toxic is a real trade-off that does actually reduce Gliscor’s sweeping capability to make it better at PP stalling things so that its teammates can set up, and on a team where we already had two solid setupmons and “Gliscor with a sub” was always the easiest setup to get into trouble with anyway that’s a sacrifice we are well-equipped to take, but
you need to be able to convert that PP-stall into a setup. You
need to be able to convert that PP-stall into a setup. This is honestly even more true here than where I said it before, because we don’t have a pink blob involved so Gliscor actually has a pretty hard time switching out from arbitrary backups, so it can easily end up committed in a position where it has to stay in for 15+ PP before it wants to switch out if it gets the wrong backup in its face. You need to be able to convert that PP-stall into a setup. It’s like, the main point of the team.
Grumbling about goodstuffs
On that note, I’ve seen it said that this is a generation where “goodstuff” teams came into their own and were “more than a joke”, and I
get that in common parlance what that’s intended to mean in context is “not a Durant team (and probably not trickscarf either),” but frankly I think that’s a fundamental mischaracterization of what’s going on here.
And yes, this
is a facility where a singles team whose organizing principle rounds off to “three individually strong pieces that consistently generate enough advantage to scrape out a win” sees a moderate level of success, and the goodstuff mons available do have enough of an edge over the opposition that yes, you honeslty can pretty much pick any 2-3 and have decent odds at a Starf streak if piloted competently. (I should know…) And superficially, this team even fits that mold, in that leaning hard on Aegislash and Toxic-stall Gliscor and basically writing on the possibility of setting up Gyarados in all but the most straightforward situations is solidly Good Enough for mid 3 digits (
I should know), and we’ve seen similar results replicate a good few times here and even in Tree. That’s not an
unimportant part of the team’s success story.
It’s not
enough, though. 4 digits kind of demands more. No, this is a team whose plan A is to abuse the AI’s tendency not to switch out to fully set up a sweeper that semi-reliably beats Everything. In its preferred position, it functions kind of like an elaborate sort of crippler team, except that the crippled state of choice is “has a bunch of PP that can’t touch a floater behind a sub”, which can take quite a while to inflict, has a lot of variations, isn’t even always possible. And we have backup plans for that, lots of backup plans that try to lead to perhaps doing the setup anyway but eating a little of damage in a safer setting, or setting up something else and hoping to get back on track to plan A later. Trying to get back to plan A is an important piece of the puzzle too.
All in all, reviewing my last batch, I estimate we’re walking out of the lead with a full Gyarados setup a bit shy of half the time, various other Gyarados setups a bit over 20%, +6 Aegislash a bit short of 20%, Gliscor with a sub under 10%, and assorted sketchy positions (no sub, other Aegi positions; no Starmie4 in this batch but that’d definitely count) probably under 5%. So when I was saying backups coming out on Gliscor specifically was an order of magnitude less common, well, no, that wasn’t a figure of speech, or even as a particularly great exaggeration, it’s pretty much a factual statement.
(Is that higher than you’d expect? Lower? I imagine if you’ve played Aegimensey, especially in Tree, that this Gyarados setup rate weirds you out because even with a recovery move Salamence isn’t managing to get itself set up nearly that often, at least in my experience. And to be totally fair, Gyarados on this team wouldn’t set up nearly this often in Tree either—in fact, I suspect this team barely functions at all in Tree due to the switching out when out of useful attacking PP mechanic, because I suspect the secret sauce here is in Gyarados’s and Gliscor’s shared immunity to
the single most common move in the Maison, which happens to have a convenient 10 PP, just enough to pivot Gliscor into via Aegislash and stall until the second use to signal for Gyarados to switch in on the third and set up over the next 7 turns. Part of it, I guess, is also that stalling something dry to steal a minor Gyarados setup winds up being a more appealing option than it is for Salamence, because without a recovery move, Gyarados “gets to” run its actually pretty decent dual STAB coverage, which is still pretty much always breaking through at least one backup and doesn’t really get forced out by a threatening resist. Or it could be that I’ve always just been holding it wrong. I like to imagine that this is the Gliscor advantage at work, though.)
Matchup blabber
Honestly, I really just want to paste my whole lead guide and notes in here, but that would be hilariously unworkable since (a) it’s full of holes for less common leads, which okay isn’t necessarily a problem in its own right, but also (b) there’s a bunch of stuff I wrote down that I don’t really endorse anymore but also just haven’t rewritten, and most importantly (c) it’s currently scattered over two documents of 127k and 189k that overlap substantially in content but I haven’t gotten around to reunifying but also either one of those would be well over the 64k post size limit here lmao. Granted, part of it is because I just write too much sometimes, a few amusingly egregious cases that are also maybe interesting (i.e. not the same):
- Aggron4: This one is rarely dangerous, but requires careful PP counting and some improv because its move choices are a little random. Because it does so little damage, it usually (but not 100%) goes for either Taunt or Metal Burst against an untaunted target; however, notably, it randomly Shadow Claw or EQ against Aegislash, so it’s not safe to switch Gyarados back in from taunted Aegislash. Moreover, only Gliscor really wants to take Shadow Claw to the face (for 34% on a crit—fine to Protect off unless you get catastrophically unlucky several times in a row); while Aegislash takes non-crit Shadows Claws “fine” in moderation, the crit is a 2hko. The upshot here is that you don’t really want to Gliscor to take a Taunt, because then you don’t have any “good” switchins (obviously you just risk the crit on Aegislash anyway, since it’s still recoverable). However, because it’s actually really likely to go for Metal Burst, you can often get Aegislash in on Metal Burst and go to Gyarados, which is still risking a Shadow Claw, and also really doesn’t want to take a Shadow Claw crit, but is sufficiently unlikely to switch in on Shadow Claw at all when the other three moves are all “higher-priority” that it’s more or less worth risking it, especially since Intimidate will make it easier to heal off crit damage in the face of non-crits; having Aegislash KS and going back to Gliscor instead if it does get Taunted is also a solid option, though going back to Gliscor without seeing Taunt first risks Aegislash facing a Shadow Claw crit on the switch back. Eventually it’ll run out of Metal Burst first, at which point depending on its Atk drops and EQ PP, you can make a judgement call on which setup is most appropriate (usually Gyarados setup, but this is potentially risky on its hp if there isn’t enough EQ PP left; Aegislash is almost always safe to set up on Struggle, but is a worse setup while also requiring a full PP stall which can risk getting it hit with more Shadow Claws; Gliscor can Sub + Bulldoze 2-3hko as soon as Metal Burst is gone, but risks not having a setup at all if Aggron crits a Shadow Claw, or having a turn of Taunt left on high rolls).
- Ambipom4: Go to Gliscor to absorb Fling, go to Aegislash on expected Taunt, swap with Gliscor to stall out Payback (KS to absorb the incoming Taunt if it uses Payback on the switch from Gliscor, to realign so that Gliscor takes most Payback hits, as it heals more and isn’t weak to it); once it starts using Return on the switch from Gliscor, swap Aegislash with Gyarados down to -6 (up to 9 times is fine), then swap with Gliscor until it’s out of Taunt and goes for Fling on the switch, then Sub/Protect stall the remaining ~10 Return PP (prefer not to Bulldoze). If you’ve been counting Return PP carefully, you can go to Gyarados on its third Fling once it’s out of Return; if you’re a bit lazier, feel free to just have a sub take one Struggle, which can’t break the sub even on a crit.
- Samurott4: Go to Aegislash on probably Grass Knot(!) or Protect, KS until you actually block a Hydro Pump, then try to get in a +0 Iron Head (probably into Protect, but you might get unlucky) to set up a +6 SS kill later, repeat until it’s out of Hydro Pump; since you’re slower and Hydro Pump is the only attack it can really hurt you with, this is safer than trying to trade Protects and guarantees you only take Hydro Pump at most twice, which can only kill you if it goes for b2b Hydro Pumps twice, hits and crits on both non-KS turns, and gets high rolls unless it went for 4 Hydro Pumps in a row. Once it’s out of Hydro Pump, trade Protects to set up Aegislash; if you get 10% frozen off a stray Ice Beam, just spam KS until you defrost since it’ll probably do negative damage going for Protect every other turn. If Aegislash dies, just go to Gliscor, stall out any remaining Ice Beam, probably stall it out and set up +2 Gyarados if it’s still at full hp, otherwise just get a couple of DTs times and Bulldoze it to death (GK doesn’t break a sub).
- Vaporeon4: Go to Aegislash on Ice Beam, switch/Protect/KS-stall Ice Beam and as much Shadow Ball as possible (under ideal circumstances, you might switch ~7 times, absorbing ~20 PP on switches and Aegislash; in practice, Gliscor might get crit and Aegislash might get frozen), then once that’s no longer possible (Gliscor under 93 hp can no longer safely switch into a max roll crit Shadow Ball, Protect, and Sub; Aegislash cannot switch into more than two Surfs or one Shadow Ball; Gliscor cannot safely switch in from Aegislash once Shadow Ball is empty because it risks dying to Surf), then Sub/Protect stall whatever is left of Ice Beam (if any) and and continue until it’s out of Shadow Ball—you will need to pay attention and count after it runs out of Surf, because it’s not super consistent about what moves it picks after the “strongest” one, although it does disproportionately prefer Surf. Once Gliscor is out of PP, it’ll probably have used more Surfs than Signal Beam, so you can bring Aegislash in to sit around on Signal Beam until you feel comfortable with how much PP it has left for you to switch Gyarados in—Vaporeon4 is a 5-Struggle set. Ideally you only use ~3 Protects during the stall, but that’s honestly pretty unrealistic—not because you’d take too much damage, although potentially you do, but because it requires Aegislash to take 7 Ice Beams without getting frozen. It’s kind of annoying if Aegislash gets frozen too early, but a frozen Aegislash can still take a lot of Ice Beams, so it mainly just means you only stall half as many Shadow Balls, which is uh, not fantastic because this is a 50 PP stall, but even KS-less switching between Gliscor and Aegislash is knocking at least 10 PP (probably a little more) and Aegislash can stall 3-4 Surfs at the cost of its life even if it’s frozen. If it’s really not looking like you’re going to make it, Toxic stall as soon as you have a free sub, so basically after stalling out Ice Beam if Aegislash got frozen too early.
- Weavile4: Go to Aegislash; improvise a switch-stall on Ice Punch + Taunt + Night Slash (which probably gets Aegislash frozen, but also probably gets a fully set-up Gyarados); kind of unusually, you want to Protect on the Ice Punches but probably prefer not to KS, because it often goes for Taunt on Aegislash before attempting Night Slash, but will always Night Slash against already-Taunted Aegislash, and it’s preferable for Gliscor to switch in on Taunt over Night Slash—Aegislash can pretty much afford to take 15 Ice Punches to the face, even if 2-4 of the crit, it’ll just be frozen and useless after, which is fine, whereas Gliscor actually takes damage from Night Slash and will die to two crits and a hit. If you’re feeling slightly cheeky, you can probably even afford to switch Gyarados back in on 1-3 Taunts—it can afford to take one mispredicted Night Slash crit (Accelgor is in the same pool for generics, but hey, Accelgor4 vs frozen Aegislash is a free defrost and full setup for Aegislash, it’ll be fiiiine—as long as you don’t mega, any Accelgor will probably won’t show up second unless the other backup is profoundly unthreatening anyway, in which case you can be pretty sure that switching out to Aegislash won’t hurt), actually baits Ice Punch very consistently, and -3 Weavile is nice enough to average negative damage on non-crits vs both Gliscor and Aegislash, which doesn’t really solve the problem with getting stacked out by three crits but at least lets you stay close to full hp over non-crit switch-ins.
- Zapdos2: From Gliscor: Sub/Bulldoze/Protect-stall Heat Wave (non-crit Heat Wave hit is only 3/16 to break Sub and does 67 hp max on crit, also Zapdos often goes for DT instead, so prefer to spend Bulldoze pp over re-sub with fresh subs). If Pressure, switch-stall Charge Beam with Aegislash, set up Gyarados (don’t undercount—you have plenty of leeway with DT PP in this case) and go for the kill. then switch-stall Charge Beam with Gyarados, set up Gyarados (don’t miscount, you have plenty of leeway with DT pp). If Static, instead switch-stall with Gyarados to Intimidate down to -5 (-6 doesn’t change the ranges) or to 2 DT PP if you’re counting, then just keep clicking DD until it starts to Struggle and Sub on its last Struggle from 1 hp, which can’t break your sub on a crit.
(It’s not all like this! A lot of entries just look like “Go to Gliscor?” “Go to Aegislash?” with no further elaboration because I expect myself to look at the set and make an obvious judgment, but then there are the ones that look exactly the same but are like that because it’s actually not obvious what the right turn 1 switch is but I made the assessment once and wrote it down. It’s just kind of hard to wade through the short ones to distinguish the ones where it’s just a normal thing and the ones where something interesting is happening, where if there’s a huge block of text there’s almost certainly something going on.)
A few major threats and things I hate seeing: 3/4 Moltres sets are pretty bad, and even set 2 (the “good” one) threatens a burn while pivoting back through Gyarados to stall Fire Blast (though I’m a bit happier with it being a +3 sub Gyarados setup). Talonflame is awful no matter what you do with the Flame Body but also threatening +1 Gale Wings Brave Birb if you try to set up on it. Arcanine and Rapidash have annoying hard-to-avoid burn chances. Nothing good comes out of Skarmory4, which isn’t really threatening by itself per se but I’m really just waiting for the accursed day when it rolls along with something that actaully demands a switch-stall that isn’t possible because I’d take too much damage from hazards. Starmie4 is never good news. Togekiss just does too much damage no matter what, can just delete Aegi with a crit or burn, leaks a bunch of hp to switch-stall. Noivern in the same boat, with the extra complication of requiring a Mega to bring Gliscor in without risking a burn. Tornadus1 clicking Hurricane on Gyarados just sucks. One of these days Andrei’s 0.019% Cryogonal3 is going to commit murder.
Some things I hate less now: Absol4 and Infiltrator Spiritomb4 can actually be stalled into a Gyarados setup, although the former is still an inconsistent pain in the ass for the first few turns, which is cool. Vanilluxe4 can be stalled down to a full Gyarados setup, it just requires risking switching it into a few potential Ice Beams that are
usually Taunt, but it’s fine because it can almost just facetank them and defrost when it runs out of attacking PP. Probopass is Usually™ full combo now. Some more fun examples below.
Battle video recaps
#2420 NP2G-WWWW-WW68-YHVS vs 1/2 Veteran Dorian Heatran1/Terrakion1/Cresselia2: A case for DT. Contrasts with a battle I uploaded last January where I tried to PP stall Heatran1 with toxdoze Gliscor, which is not a good idea. With DT, though, you’re likely enough to get at least a couple of free turns that you’ll be able to spam out enough DT at it to avoid running out of subtect PP before getting to EP. Notice that we let it Struggle itself to death instead of touching it, because it could be (and in this case is) Flame Body.
#2725 67HG-WWWW-WW68-YHVU vs 3/4 Veteran Alfie Heatran3/Entei4/Raikou4: Stalling a different Heatran, this is the sun one. This one isn’t Flame Body, but there’s no real way to know that.
#2799 EZZW-WWWW-WW68-YHVV vs 1/2 Veteran Hera Thundurus2/Tornadus/Landorus2: funny Nita cosplayer, there’s nothing really going on here except that I do a sloppy job substalling the hurrrrnadus.
#3120 SSZW-WWWW-WW68-YYW2 vs generic Beauty Lucetta Absol4/Snorlax4/Bisharp4: Really smooth example of stalling Absol4 out of WoW so we can actually get a decent Gyarados setup on it.
#3459 CVTG-WWWW-WW68-YYW4 vs SpA Ace Jai Zoroark2/Magnezone1/Exeggutor2: By far the narrowest escape I’ve had on the streak—lead “Exeggutor” goes for GK as I switch to Aegislash; satisified that it appears to set 1, I SD as it NPs, which really should’ve blown its cover but I don’t notice and assume it was actual ggu2 going for LS. I think at this point the play is to go straight Head into it, but I SD again (egregious misplay), it NPs again, and I think at this point I do notice and click Head but get one-shot. This is a hilariously bad position and I need Gliscor to come in, Bulldoze it to outspeed, subtect a while until it steals a sub once it’s out of Flamethrower, DT once, then grind it down off the free turns. This brings out the real Exeggutor, which is set 2, the Curse setup set, which has too much PP for me to
safely stall out, but I manage to get it down to 5 Egg Bombs when Gliscor goes down, one of them misses, the others break all of Gyara’s subs but the remaining Curse and Synthesis PP is enough to let Gyarados set up fully off of it, though I end up having to Mega for Crunch to outpace Synthesis healing and not end up facing +6 Struggle into 3 hp.
#3703 LU7W-WWWW-WW68-YYW7 vs “A” Tourist Chelsey Marowak4/Skarmory4/Dewgong4: I would just like to say that wak4 has always been hilariously easy to stall down to a Gyarados setup, and is kind of a good example of it being a bad idea to get
too caught up in the urge to switch-stall rock/ground coverage, because stalling down to EQ is one to the best positions this team can maneuver into.
#3805 66FG-WWWW-WW68-YYW9 vs generic Beauty Lucetta Tauros4/Braviary4/Blissey4: The case for Bulldoze, ft. dozing the bull.
#3807 V7LW-WWWW-WW68-YYWA vs generic Worker Axel: Mostly just a progress indicator, but also an example of one of the funnier things running DT lets us do. “Normally”, Probopass is a pretty annoying lead, since it does too much damage to both Gyarados (with TB) and Aegislash (with EP) to let them set up, and consistently breaks Gliscor’s sub with its STABs, and can’t be stalled because it kills itself with Life Orb. With DT, though, we only need it to miss 5/15 attacks not blocked by Protect, so >99% of the time we can actually get it down to just TB and EP, at which point for … reasons, it’ll consistently spam out TB over EQ (this is a recurring theme with elec/ground coverage…), then we can just go to Gyarados and set up. Even it hits too many times early on to stall fully, the ability to make it miss also let Gliscor plausibly carry a sub while killng it.
(… yes, I really did choose (jumbo) shrimp fried rice jokes for the nicknames this time. Look, I’ve bred this set of pokemon like at least five times, I’m out of good ideas…)
A few comments
… that you can imagine to be answers to some mundane questions that nobody actually asked:
- The median time per battle is about 5m20s. I don’t have usable data to compute a proper mean, but the mean on intervals between my battle videos filtered to under 1h is about 6m15s. This is, like, pretty darn slow but probably not as slow as people think this genre of team plays.
- I have at least 11629 Maison Super Singles battle videos starting from 2023-01-08, when I started systematically saving almost every battle except on outright misclicks and dumping them every time I hit the cap. Not all, but something like 95%, are with minor variants of this team.
- My misplay rate is ridiculously high, I miscount PP something like a quarter of the time if I’m doing it mentally, the #1 biggest thing imo that improved my play on this streak is that I wrote myself a one-hand-operable PP counter over Christmas lmao
- Yes, I’m still playing this streak, though this time of year I’m probably going to get busier again until summer. Hopefully this time it’ll be harder for me to just forget I have this streak ongoing…
- No, I don’t really recommend you play this team if you just want the ribbon or something. It’s very slow, and it probably takes few hundred or thousand rounds to really get a feel for it anyway. It’s a good experience if you really want to to get a feel for handling this genre of team, though.
- No, I don’t really recommend singles unless you’re
an inveterate control freak comfortable with unlearning all your preconceptions about how pokemon plays; facility singles, even if you’re only going for a small streak, is a really degenerate format, in many ways more akin to so-called hardcore nuzlocke than to competitive singles (which is also a pretty degenerate format tbf, but differently so). If you must play singles in this generation for a quick steak, just pick a Kangaskhan team with coherent backups, I promise you it’ll be less painful than whatever else you were thinking of.
- You can go slower. You can always go slower. There are still as-yet undiscovered ways to go even slower.
Some useless notes
And now for something completely different, an ultrashort summary 1-40 sets by trainer class. Better here than lost in chat where anyone who’s finding it is already in deep enough not to need it…
- Battles 1-10: Everyone uses set 1s. Chefs are Fire/Water/Grass, Fairy Tale Girls are Normal/Psychic/Fairy, Hikers are Ground/Rock/Steel (not Fighting!), Lasses are Normal/Fairy, Punks are Poison/Fire/Dark as usual, and Youngsters are Normal/Bug specialists.
- Battles 11-20: Returning Butlers/Maids, Chefs, Fairy Tale Girls, and Punks use set 1s; added Artists, Roller Skaters, and Workers use set 2s. Rising Stars Jamie and Tilde specifically use set 1s; the others (Carol, Giacomo, Gillaume, Lena) use set 2s. Beauties are Normal/Dark/Fairy and Workers are Ground/Rock/Steel specialists as usual; Roller Skaters are set 2 Flying/Electric specialists but can also carry Empoleon2.
- Battles 21-30: Returning Artists, Rising Stars, Roller Skaters, and Workers use set 2s; added Chef (Dylan), Furisode Girls, Gardeners, Mesdames/Messieurs, Breeders, and Tourists use set 3s. Beauty Apollo/Bunnie specifically and Chef Dylan/Berger are set 3 Water/Ice specialists; the other two Beauties (Lucy and Lucinda) are returning set 2 Normal/Dark/Fairy specialists. Furisodes are set 3 Eevee specialists, and Gardeners are Ground/Bug/Grass specialists.
- Battles 31-40: Returning Beauty Apollo/Bunnie, Chef Dylan/Berger, Furisode Girls, Gardeners, Mesdames/Messieurs, Breeders, and Tourists use set 3s; added Battle Girls/Black Belts, Hex Maniacs/Psychics, Owners, and Scientist are the familiar set 4 users.
