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Hi, I’d like to submit a streak of mine in Super Singles that I started last week and is still ongoing. The team is quite simple now, though I have switched some Pokémon around as battles have progressed.
I began with:
Durant @ Choice Scarf
Ability: Truant
Nature: Jolly
EVs: 252 Spe / 252 Def / 4 HP
-Entrainment
-Crunch
-X-Scissor
-Iron Head
Tapu Fini @ Wiki Berry
Ability: Misty Surge
Level: 50
EVs: 228 HP / 60 Def / 20 SpA / 124 SpD / 76 Spe
Calm Nature
IVs: 0 Atk
- Moonblast
- Scald
- Haze
- Taunt
** Yes, I dropped Rock Slide on Landorus for SMACK DOWN! Smack Down picks up the same 1/2HKOs with the added bonus of 100% Accuracy and the ability to put some Mons on the ground (being able to EQ Skarmory, Rotom-Wash/Heat, and Zapdos is wonderful).
When I NEED Rock Slide to hit a target, it always seems to hit the partner and the Mon I needed to hit somehow dodges the Attack and smokes Landorus back.
Landorus's little bit of extra bulk allows it to live Rotom-Wash Hydro Pump 100% of the time at full health. A calc that lets me be comfortable in front of a good amount of Water type attacks**
The Loss (story/excuses):
Despite a very unfortunate CRIT on Landorus, the loss was absolutely avoidable! Since the last update, I hadn't seen too many super offensive leads by the AI but Ezra led with Mega-Alakazam and Expert Belt Porygon-Z... Two mons that can already be problematic on their own.
I let Mega-Latias eat a lot, albeit manageable, of damage Turn-1 so it could set up Tailwind. Then a couple turns of switching that slot to absorb some less effective damage while getting off two Snarls with Incineroar.
Yache Berry Landorus-T is is usually CLUTCH but its EQ missed the KO on Porygon-Z and was subsequently CRIT by an Ice Beam. Landorus should have eaten that Ice Beam with EASE with PZ at -2 but c'est la vie
Later, I STUPIDLY didn't anticipate and let Incineroar go down to Gengar's Destiny Bond. That was basically the game right there. Without Incineroar, Latias and Landorus got smoked by Glaceon in the back.
Moving Forward:
For next time, I intend on dropping Snarl completely on Incineroar. Snarl can be very useful with how well it synergizes with the double Intimidate but U-Turn helps the team in a better way in my opinion. A little more Speed on Tapu Fini (124-156 EVs to hit 121 to 125Spe) would be nice to out-speed some Zapdos, Volcarona, etc
I often think of changing Landorus's item/moves too. A move like Superpower or an item like Groundium-Z would have helped me BIG TIME in this game. Yache Berry spends half the games in the Battle Tree being completely useless BUT... The other half of the time it can literally win games.
Another idea is running Mega-Latios over Mega-Latias?? It would turn a good amount of 3HKOs into 2HKOs or 2HKOs into OHKOs. Unfortunately, the missing bulk makes that same fact true defensively as well.
Threats:
Threats remain the same. OHKO-Walrein is just a menace to any team will it's dice-roll antics. Phys-Def Mega-Venusaur walls my team outside of Latias. My team's biggest weakness are any Dragon Dance Gyarados/Mega-Gyarados forms, Tyranitars with Ice coverage alongside Rock Slide and Crunch, and the handful of Defiant/Competitive Mons.
I know this thread is minimally active these days, but I’d still like to keep it occasionally alive by documenting my best runs of one of my niche hobbies of breaking personal records in the Battle Tree. Last time I posted was actually my first ever post on Smogon, and I used a completely different team for my first run of 120 wins. This time I managed to break 145 wins in Super Doubles with the following team. I doubt the leaderboard will ever be updated again as it looks like it has been defunct for a while now, but if it ever is updated again I’d be happy to see my streak make it up there despite being paltry compared to the topmost scores on the list. Nonetheless, let’s get down to the team report. First, here’s photographic proof of the streak:
My girlfriend’s all-time favorite Pokemon are the Alolan forms of the Vulpix family. We made it a goal early into our relationship to get all of the trainer stamps available in Ultra Sun, and since she still has yet to do that, I figured I’d build a team to both motivate her and honor her favorite Pokemon in the process. There’s only one reason to ever bring A-Ninetales to any battle, especially in Gen 7. I’m sure anyone bothering to read this knows that A-Ninetales is the only Pokemon with both access to Snow Warning and Aurora Veil (as of Gen 7, this distribution was widened to include Abomasnow and Vanilluxe in Gen 8). This means it is the only Pokemon that can set up Aurora Veil in a single turn without outsourcing the Aurora Veil setup to a different Pokemon. Aurora Veil is a nearly unmatched level of team support, as it makes every Pokemon, even incredibly frail ones, able to take game-breaking hits. Even though doubles are incredibly quick matches, some of the computer trainers use annoyingly stall-reliant tactics that can make games a bit of a crapshoot in terms of length. On average though, I’d say games usually end in about five to six turns with this team. Even though there were several times where a Focus Sash probably would have been the ideal item for Ninetales, I personally preferred using Light Clay to make the effort of building a team around A-Ninetales all the more worth it. A-Ninetales has just enough of a movepool to be decent. Freeze-Dry was crucial coverage, as it is the best ice type move it learns in my opinion. I could have run Blizzard, but hail wasn’t guaranteed to be up, and Dazzling Gleam was a perfectly fine spread move. However, anyone who has used A-Ninetales (or heck, even Kantonian Ninetales) knows that it is an incredibly high-maintenance Pokemon. Its typing is pretty crummy, it is super frail, and oddly enough, its speed is a bit problematic. In most scenarios, its blazing speed would be great - and it is great, don’t get me wrong. However, the key problem with its speed is that it is a fast weather setter. In fact, I’m pretty sure it’s the fastest weather setter in Gen 7. For the uninitiated, which I’m certain anyone reading this already knows (but just in case), if two weather setting Pokemon are sent out simultaneously, the slower weather setter prevails because passive abilities that set up field conditions activate based on speed. This is one of the reasons that, when it comes to setting up Sun, Torkoal is much preferred over Kantonian Ninetales. This was one of the main challenges I had, as weather setters are actually really common in the Battle Tree. However, this is where our next member comes in…
A-Ninetales has really poor defensive stats, so I searched through several Intimidate Pokemon. Incineroar was a candidate for obvious reasons, and I did use Incineroar for a while in a previous run, but then I found out Manectric has amazing utility to ensure that Aurora Veil can go up. As I mentioned before, if a slower weather setter (which is basically all of them) is sent out and changes the weather, Aurora Veil can’t go up. However, if I switch out Ninetales on turn one, then Volt Switch with Manectric, I can reset the weather back into Hail and perform a sort of ramshackled Ally Switch, keeping A-Ninetales safe. This also has the added benefit of cycling Intimidate, which is a nice plus. Manectric’s main job for the team was to help get Aurora Veil set up, and then blast the opposing team with Thunderbolt. It really had a simple game plan that doesn’t need much of an explanation outside of that. The only nuance is that there were certainly some scenarios where I probably would have benefitted from a Timid nature instead of Modest, but the extra power was appreciated in so many scenarios that I didn’t really care. Also, I felt I didn’t need HP Ice because Manectric was standing right next to an Ice-Type Pokemon. Let’s just ignore the fact that I’m lazy and don’t breed for the right Hidden power types basically ever. That probably explains why I can’t break into higher streaks though, huh?
Metagrass (Ferrothorn) (M) @ Leftovers
Ability: Iron Barbs
EVs: 252 HP / 148 Def / 108 SpD
Relaxed Nature
IVs: 23 SpA / 18 Spe
- Power Whip
- Gyro Ball
- Leech Seed
- Protect
Honestly, looking at the EV spreads and movesets for these Pokemon makes me realize this is a pretty stock team. I’m still proud of it nonetheless. Do I even need to say anything about Ferrothorn? This thing is a win condition, plain and simple. Ferrothorn is an incredibly good Pokemon in every way. Even having a -Speed nature powers up its Gyro Ball. A-Ninetales and Manectric were the leads for this team, so I needed something incredibly bulky in the back to shore up this glaring flaw. I also wanted a Steel type to cover Kommo-o’s glaring weakness to Fairy types. As such, it was really a no brainer to slap Ferrothorn on the team and call it good. In my run, there were a handful of battles that Ferrothorn genuinely could have beaten on its own due to how good its typing + Leech Seed recovery were. Leftovers were chosen over anything else to ensure it was always recovering and to offset hail damage. Ferrothorn is such a well-known Pokemon that honestly you could skip over this entire paragraph because I’m not adding anything new to the conversation. I will say though - props to whoever came up with that nickname. I can’t take credit for that one, I found it from someone online years ago.
Kommo-o is the team’s star player. Every Pokemon on this team did great, but it won’t surprise you to know that the Pokemon with a 185 base power spread move that provides an omniboost did all of the heavy lifting offensively. When choosing to design a team around A-Ninetales, I needed to find ways to negate hail damage. This narrows it down to three options essentially: 1) a team with multiple ice types, 2) Pokemon with Magic Guard and 3) Pokemon with Overcoat. I could slap Safety Goggles on anything to be fair, but they would be practically useless outside of that effect in the Battle Tree. Magic Guard has a few good choices, but honestly there was no point in debating it when I noticed Kommo-o had Overcoat as an ability. Drain Punch was chosen over Close Combat so as not to lose the boosts accrued from using Clangorous Soulblaze It also ensured that Kommo-o could stick around to take advantage of the omniboost for as long as possible. Flamethrower ensures that I hit the most things super effectively combined with Clanging Scales and Drain Punch. The only Pokemon to resist all three of these types in the tree is Primarina, which is destroyed by Ferrothorn. It was tempting to just throw out Kommo-o, get the boosts, and try to sweep, but I had to play carefully with him on the field. Kommo-o works especially well with Ferrothorn, but if Ferrothorn can’t pick up a KO quickly enough, it would occasionally put too much pressure on Ferrothorn to handle the rest of the battle. Just something for me to think about in a future run I suppose. Overall, Kommo-o was the main offensive member of the team, and I think he performed admirably. I just need to tweak some aspects about the team to better support him if I want to use Kommo-o again for another team.
Threats:
Fire-types are the main issue this time around. A-Ninetales and Manectric offer BoltBeam coverage together, and that alone hits almost the entire Battle Tree for neutral damage except for Magnezone, Togedemaru, and Rotoms Heat and Frost. All of those were covered by Kommo-o super effectively, so coverage was never the issue. The key problem this team faces is a lack of synergistic resistances. Aside from A-Ninetales switching into Dragon moves meant for Kommo-o, which is a scenario that virtually never happened, switching felt somewhat undesirable. This was always the case against Fire-types. Kommo-o is the only Pokemon with a resistance to Fire, and Kommo-o isn’t really on the team to switch in and take hits. He needs to stay in pristine condition, so switching him in to absorb Fire-type attacks is something I avoided doing unless I felt it was completely necessary. It’s not that Fire-types are insurmountable, they can just be a nuisance because if they aren’t taken care of quickly enough they can cause serious problems. One reason I was so shocked this team did so well was because, after a while, I just kind of noticed that there is not even a single form of speed control on this team. No Tailwind, Trick Room, Icy Wind, Electroweb… anything. I was also lacking in Taunt, which meant stopping Trick Room was next to impossible. However, I was generally totally willing to trade Trick Room for a free set usage of Aurora Veil. Nonetheless, Trick Room was awfully annoying at times. Bulky Fairy-types like Aromatisse could be a nuisance as well. Honestly, the team has pretty good type coverage all around and Ferrothorn carried the defensive side. It’s not perfect by any means seeing as it of course lost, but really the team only ever got into dire straits because of shoddy plays on my part or bad positioning from the lead matchup. I felt the team was very competent at handling most Pokemon, the proper Pokemon just needed to be out front at the right time - a statement that’s as obvious as it is true for this team.
Replays:
The Loss: PXRG-WWWW-WWXF-DLQ4
I lost to Scientist Cadel. Fitting to his trainer class, his team almost seemed engineering to perfectly screw over my team. His team consisted of Dusknoir, Drampa, Shiinotic, and Turtonator. Obviously a Trick Room team, I lost due to a mix of poor plays on my part, my team lacking defensive synergy against this specific team, and a hint of bad luck. I set up Aurora Veil on turn 1 while using Thunderbolt on the Dusknoir. Drampa uses Glare to paralyze A-Ninetales and Dusknoir sets up Trick Room. I used Protect to burn a turn of Trick Room with Manectric and have A-Ninetales Dazzling Gleam. Dusknoir wastes his turn with Pain Split into Manectric, but Drampa uses Devastating Drake which chunks Manectric through the Protect. Next turn, I’m able to take down both Drampa and Dusknoir, but the Dusknoir uses Destiny Bond which takes out Manectric with him. Shiinotic and Turtonator were honestly the most perfect Pokemon Cadel could have had on his team at this point, especially with their particular movesets. I sent out Ferrothorn because I figured it would be prudent to get a Leech Seed off whatever he sent in, but I wasn’t able to do that easily. I had Ferrothorn Protect and used Freeze-Dry on Shiinotic. From previous runs (and from the list of Trainers on Serebii) I knew Shiinotic could have a Weakness Policy, and this happened to be that set. Freeze-Dry procs the Weakness Policy, and the Turtonator uses Shell Smash. Trick Room was still active so I was able to get a Leech Seed on the Turtonator, but it didn’t matter. Fire Blast wipes out Ferrothorn, and Moonblast gets a Sp. Attack drop on Ninetales, so I’m looking pretty bad here. Trick Room ends, and Turtonator wipes out Ninetales with a Fire Blast. I tried to block it with Protect, but the paralysis from Drampa finally came back to haunt me and immobilized me. I’m able to get off a Clangorous Soulblaze and knock out Turtonator, but a Moonblast from Shiinotic knocks out Kommo-o and ends the run. Honestly, rewatching that replay, I’m not sure what I could have done differently. I was sitting on the couch watching TV when it happened, so I guess I could have googled Cadel’s potential sets, but really I just made bad calls and got outplayed. It’s a shame, but this team was super successful and I still had a lot of fun using it.
Extra Match #1: 92UW-WWWW-WWXF-DLQ2
Extra Match #2: XTNG-WWWW-WWXF-DLQ3
Here are two other matches I had with this team if you wanted to see how it functioned. One match was just funny because of how often I had to switch out Pokemon just to make it through without taking too many risks. I won’t do any other play-by-plays because this document is already six pages long and frankly I’m sure only like 5 or 6 people on planet Earth will even see this. I’m posting this 2 days before 3DS online shuts down altogether, so there’s a nonzero chance these replays will never be visible to anyone other than myself. Nonetheless, thank you for reading and I hope you’re having a fantastic day.
If you ever play Manectric again, you should consider Eerie Impulse, even with Aurora Veil (but really Aurora Veil is overkill with Manectric and Ninetales-A should be something else, ideally with a move like Calm Mind). Manectric is not Tapu Koko. It's meant to facilitate setup by crippling, it's not good at killing things. You don't need both TBolt and VS on it, choose one.
I would also never run less than 252 Speed (neutral nature) Kommo-o, particularly on a TW-less team. Indeed I would put Focus Sash on Ninetales instead of Light Clay and give it Icy Wind over Freeze-Dry (Manectric smashes most Waters anyway, Water/Ground is handled by Ferrothorn). Also Moonblast over Gleam because Gleam seriously hits for nothing.
I suggest ANTS Ferro (Zoom Lens) for Curseless sets (which makes sense to omit here because of Primarina; Power Whip brings it into Drain Punch range but not reliably -- miss is heart- and neckbreaking).
You definitely could have avoided your loss by just not attacking Dusknoir, especially with a Z-move already spent by your opponent (Z-DBond redirecting is about the scariest thing it can do). It is a do-nothing set. If Shiinotic or Turtonator comes in with Dusknoir next to it, it's gg (in your favor) because one of your backliners kills it and then the other while Dusknoir -1 Shadow Sneaks or whatever. Field control is the foremost principle of Kommo-o teams.
If you ever play Manectric again, you should consider Eerie Impulse, even with Aurora Veil (but really Aurora Veil is overkill with Manectric and Ninetales-A should be something else, ideally with a move like Calm Mind). Manectric is not Tapu Koko. It's meant to facilitate setup by crippling, it's not good at killing things. You don't need both TBolt and VS on it, choose one.
I would also never run less than 252 Speed (neutral nature) Kommo-o, particularly on a TW-less team. Indeed I would put Focus Sash on Ninetales instead of Light Clay and give it Icy Wind over Freeze-Dry (Manectric smashes most Waters anyway, Water/Ground is handled by Ferrothorn). Also Moonblast over Gleam because Gleam seriously hits for nothing.
I suggest ANTS Ferro (Zoom Lens) for Curseless sets (which makes sense to omit here because of Primarina; Power Whip brings it into Drain Punch range but not reliably -- miss is heart- and neckbreaking).
You definitely could have avoided your loss by just not attacking Dusknoir, especially with a Z-move already spent by your opponent (Z-DBond redirecting is about the scariest thing it can do). It is a do-nothing set. If Shiinotic or Turtonator comes in with Dusknoir next to it, it's gg (in your favor) because one of your backliners kills it and then the other while Dusknoir -1 Shadow Sneaks or whatever. Field control is the foremost principle of Kommo-o teams.
I really appreciate all of the constructive criticism here. I won't lie, I did not expect this team to make it anywhere beyond 50 matches, so the fact that it was my PB was a total shock. I totally get why it seems like this team is a mess, because it frankly is.
Zoom Lens Ferro is honestly a great suggestion! I'm not the most creative player (as the sets in my post show) so I love seeing suggestions like this that I would never think of. It's not like Ferro needs Leftovers if it also has Leech Seed, so I really like that suggestion.
You're also right about not attacking Dusknoir. I mentioned in my post that I was watching tv while I lost and was paying more attention to that than the game, so I have nobody to blame but myself for poor play. If I was thinking at all I would've left Dusknoir alone since all the Dusknoir sets in the Battle Tree are a joke lol.
If I ever attempt a run at the Battle Tree again, it'll likely be with an almost entirely new team. A-Ninetales was super high-maintenance and I don't like Hail in general because it barely provides any benefits. Nonetheless, I will gladly take these suggestions to heart because they were all super insightful and I agreed with basically everything you said. Thanks again!
I know this thread is minimally active these days, but I’d still like to keep it occasionally alive by documenting my best runs of one of my niche hobbies of breaking personal records in the Battle Tree. Last time I posted was actually my first ever post on Smogon, and I used a completely different team for my first run of 120 wins. This time I managed to break 145 wins in Super Doubles with the following team. I doubt the leaderboard will ever be updated again as it looks like it has been defunct for a while now, but if it ever is updated again I’d be happy to see my streak make it up there despite being paltry compared to the topmost scores on the list. Nonetheless, let’s get down to the team report. First, here’s photographic proof of the streak:
My girlfriend’s all-time favorite Pokemon are the Alolan forms of the Vulpix family. We made it a goal early into our relationship to get all of the trainer stamps available in Ultra Sun, and since she still has yet to do that, I figured I’d build a team to both motivate her and honor her favorite Pokemon in the process. There’s only one reason to ever bring A-Ninetales to any battle, especially in Gen 7. I’m sure anyone bothering to read this knows that A-Ninetales is the only Pokemon with both access to Snow Warning and Aurora Veil (as of Gen 7, this distribution was widened to include Abomasnow and Vanilluxe in Gen 8). This means it is the only Pokemon that can set up Aurora Veil in a single turn without outsourcing the Aurora Veil setup to a different Pokemon. Aurora Veil is a nearly unmatched level of team support, as it makes every Pokemon, even incredibly frail ones, able to take game-breaking hits. Even though doubles are incredibly quick matches, some of the computer trainers use annoyingly stall-reliant tactics that can make games a bit of a crapshoot in terms of length. On average though, I’d say games usually end in about five to six turns with this team. Even though there were several times where a Focus Sash probably would have been the ideal item for Ninetales, I personally preferred using Light Clay to make the effort of building a team around A-Ninetales all the more worth it. A-Ninetales has just enough of a movepool to be decent. Freeze-Dry was crucial coverage, as it is the best ice type move it learns in my opinion. I could have run Blizzard, but hail wasn’t guaranteed to be up, and Dazzling Gleam was a perfectly fine spread move. However, anyone who has used A-Ninetales (or heck, even Kantonian Ninetales) knows that it is an incredibly high-maintenance Pokemon. Its typing is pretty crummy, it is super frail, and oddly enough, its speed is a bit problematic. In most scenarios, its blazing speed would be great - and it is great, don’t get me wrong. However, the key problem with its speed is that it is a fast weather setter. In fact, I’m pretty sure it’s the fastest weather setter in Gen 7. For the uninitiated, which I’m certain anyone reading this already knows (but just in case), if two weather setting Pokemon are sent out simultaneously, the slower weather setter prevails because passive abilities that set up field conditions activate based on speed. This is one of the reasons that, when it comes to setting up Sun, Torkoal is much preferred over Kantonian Ninetales. This was one of the main challenges I had, as weather setters are actually really common in the Battle Tree. However, this is where our next member comes in…
A-Ninetales has really poor defensive stats, so I searched through several Intimidate Pokemon. Incineroar was a candidate for obvious reasons, and I did use Incineroar for a while in a previous run, but then I found out Manectric has amazing utility to ensure that Aurora Veil can go up. As I mentioned before, if a slower weather setter (which is basically all of them) is sent out and changes the weather, Aurora Veil can’t go up. However, if I switch out Ninetales on turn one, then Volt Switch with Manectric, I can reset the weather back into Hail and perform a sort of ramshackled Ally Switch, keeping A-Ninetales safe. This also has the added benefit of cycling Intimidate, which is a nice plus. Manectric’s main job for the team was to help get Aurora Veil set up, and then blast the opposing team with Thunderbolt. It really had a simple game plan that doesn’t need much of an explanation outside of that. The only nuance is that there were certainly some scenarios where I probably would have benefitted from a Timid nature instead of Modest, but the extra power was appreciated in so many scenarios that I didn’t really care. Also, I felt I didn’t need HP Ice because Manectric was standing right next to an Ice-Type Pokemon. Let’s just ignore the fact that I’m lazy and don’t breed for the right Hidden power types basically ever. That probably explains why I can’t break into higher streaks though, huh?
Metagrass (Ferrothorn) (M) @ Leftovers
Ability: Iron Barbs
EVs: 252 HP / 148 Def / 108 SpD
Relaxed Nature
IVs: 23 SpA / 18 Spe
- Power Whip
- Gyro Ball
- Leech Seed
- Protect
Honestly, looking at the EV spreads and movesets for these Pokemon makes me realize this is a pretty stock team. I’m still proud of it nonetheless. Do I even need to say anything about Ferrothorn? This thing is a win condition, plain and simple. Ferrothorn is an incredibly good Pokemon in every way. Even having a -Speed nature powers up its Gyro Ball. A-Ninetales and Manectric were the leads for this team, so I needed something incredibly bulky in the back to shore up this glaring flaw. I also wanted a Steel type to cover Kommo-o’s glaring weakness to Fairy types. As such, it was really a no brainer to slap Ferrothorn on the team and call it good. In my run, there were a handful of battles that Ferrothorn genuinely could have beaten on its own due to how good its typing + Leech Seed recovery were. Leftovers were chosen over anything else to ensure it was always recovering and to offset hail damage. Ferrothorn is such a well-known Pokemon that honestly you could skip over this entire paragraph because I’m not adding anything new to the conversation. I will say though - props to whoever came up with that nickname. I can’t take credit for that one, I found it from someone online years ago.
Kommo-o is the team’s star player. Every Pokemon on this team did great, but it won’t surprise you to know that the Pokemon with a 185 base power spread move that provides an omniboost did all of the heavy lifting offensively. When choosing to design a team around A-Ninetales, I needed to find ways to negate hail damage. This narrows it down to three options essentially: 1) a team with multiple ice types, 2) Pokemon with Magic Guard and 3) Pokemon with Overcoat. I could slap Safety Goggles on anything to be fair, but they would be practically useless outside of that effect in the Battle Tree. Magic Guard has a few good choices, but honestly there was no point in debating it when I noticed Kommo-o had Overcoat as an ability. Drain Punch was chosen over Close Combat so as not to lose the boosts accrued from using Clangorous Soulblaze It also ensured that Kommo-o could stick around to take advantage of the omniboost for as long as possible. Flamethrower ensures that I hit the most things super effectively combined with Clanging Scales and Drain Punch. The only Pokemon to resist all three of these types in the tree is Primarina, which is destroyed by Ferrothorn. It was tempting to just throw out Kommo-o, get the boosts, and try to sweep, but I had to play carefully with him on the field. Kommo-o works especially well with Ferrothorn, but if Ferrothorn can’t pick up a KO quickly enough, it would occasionally put too much pressure on Ferrothorn to handle the rest of the battle. Just something for me to think about in a future run I suppose. Overall, Kommo-o was the main offensive member of the team, and I think he performed admirably. I just need to tweak some aspects about the team to better support him if I want to use Kommo-o again for another team.
Threats:
Fire-types are the main issue this time around. A-Ninetales and Manectric offer BoltBeam coverage together, and that alone hits almost the entire Battle Tree for neutral damage except for Magnezone, Togedemaru, and Rotoms Heat and Frost. All of those were covered by Kommo-o super effectively, so coverage was never the issue. The key problem this team faces is a lack of synergistic resistances. Aside from A-Ninetales switching into Dragon moves meant for Kommo-o, which is a scenario that virtually never happened, switching felt somewhat undesirable. This was always the case against Fire-types. Kommo-o is the only Pokemon with a resistance to Fire, and Kommo-o isn’t really on the team to switch in and take hits. He needs to stay in pristine condition, so switching him in to absorb Fire-type attacks is something I avoided doing unless I felt it was completely necessary. It’s not that Fire-types are insurmountable, they can just be a nuisance because if they aren’t taken care of quickly enough they can cause serious problems. One reason I was so shocked this team did so well was because, after a while, I just kind of noticed that there is not even a single form of speed control on this team. No Tailwind, Trick Room, Icy Wind, Electroweb… anything. I was also lacking in Taunt, which meant stopping Trick Room was next to impossible. However, I was generally totally willing to trade Trick Room for a free set usage of Aurora Veil. Nonetheless, Trick Room was awfully annoying at times. Bulky Fairy-types like Aromatisse could be a nuisance as well. Honestly, the team has pretty good type coverage all around and Ferrothorn carried the defensive side. It’s not perfect by any means seeing as it of course lost, but really the team only ever got into dire straits because of shoddy plays on my part or bad positioning from the lead matchup. I felt the team was very competent at handling most Pokemon, the proper Pokemon just needed to be out front at the right time - a statement that’s as obvious as it is true for this team.
Replays:
The Loss: PXRG-WWWW-WWXF-DLQ4
I lost to Scientist Cadel. Fitting to his trainer class, his team almost seemed engineering to perfectly screw over my team. His team consisted of Dusknoir, Drampa, Shiinotic, and Turtonator. Obviously a Trick Room team, I lost due to a mix of poor plays on my part, my team lacking defensive synergy against this specific team, and a hint of bad luck. I set up Aurora Veil on turn 1 while using Thunderbolt on the Dusknoir. Drampa uses Glare to paralyze A-Ninetales and Dusknoir sets up Trick Room. I used Protect to burn a turn of Trick Room with Manectric and have A-Ninetales Dazzling Gleam. Dusknoir wastes his turn with Pain Split into Manectric, but Drampa uses Devastating Drake which chunks Manectric through the Protect. Next turn, I’m able to take down both Drampa and Dusknoir, but the Dusknoir uses Destiny Bond which takes out Manectric with him. Shiinotic and Turtonator were honestly the most perfect Pokemon Cadel could have had on his team at this point, especially with their particular movesets. I sent out Ferrothorn because I figured it would be prudent to get a Leech Seed off whatever he sent in, but I wasn’t able to do that easily. I had Ferrothorn Protect and used Freeze-Dry on Shiinotic. From previous runs (and from the list of Trainers on Serebii) I knew Shiinotic could have a Weakness Policy, and this happened to be that set. Freeze-Dry procs the Weakness Policy, and the Turtonator uses Shell Smash. Trick Room was still active so I was able to get a Leech Seed on the Turtonator, but it didn’t matter. Fire Blast wipes out Ferrothorn, and Moonblast gets a Sp. Attack drop on Ninetales, so I’m looking pretty bad here. Trick Room ends, and Turtonator wipes out Ninetales with a Fire Blast. I tried to block it with Protect, but the paralysis from Drampa finally came back to haunt me and immobilized me. I’m able to get off a Clangorous Soulblaze and knock out Turtonator, but a Moonblast from Shiinotic knocks out Kommo-o and ends the run. Honestly, rewatching that replay, I’m not sure what I could have done differently. I was sitting on the couch watching TV when it happened, so I guess I could have googled Cadel’s potential sets, but really I just made bad calls and got outplayed. It’s a shame, but this team was super successful and I still had a lot of fun using it.
Extra Match #1: 92UW-WWWW-WWXF-DLQ2
Extra Match #2: XTNG-WWWW-WWXF-DLQ3
Here are two other matches I had with this team if you wanted to see how it functioned. One match was just funny because of how often I had to switch out Pokemon just to make it through without taking too many risks. I won’t do any other play-by-plays because this document is already six pages long and frankly I’m sure only like 5 or 6 people on planet Earth will even see this. I’m posting this 2 days before 3DS online shuts down altogether, so there’s a nonzero chance these replays will never be visible to anyone other than myself. Nonetheless, thank you for reading and I hope you’re having a fantastic day.
I know this thread is minimally active these days, but I’d still like to keep it occasionally alive by documenting my best runs of one of my niche hobbies of breaking personal records in the Battle Tree. Last time I posted was actually my first ever post on Smogon, and I used a completely different team for my first run of 120 wins. This time I managed to break 145 wins in Super Doubles with the following team. I doubt the leaderboard will ever be updated again as it looks like it has been defunct for a while now, but if it ever is updated again I’d be happy to see my streak make it up there despite being paltry compared to the topmost scores on the list. Nonetheless, let’s get down to the team report. First, here’s photographic proof of the streak:
My girlfriend’s all-time favorite Pokemon are the Alolan forms of the Vulpix family. We made it a goal early into our relationship to get all of the trainer stamps available in Ultra Sun, and since she still has yet to do that, I figured I’d build a team to both motivate her and honor her favorite Pokemon in the process. There’s only one reason to ever bring A-Ninetales to any battle, especially in Gen 7. I’m sure anyone bothering to read this knows that A-Ninetales is the only Pokemon with both access to Snow Warning and Aurora Veil (as of Gen 7, this distribution was widened to include Abomasnow and Vanilluxe in Gen 8). This means it is the only Pokemon that can set up Aurora Veil in a single turn without outsourcing the Aurora Veil setup to a different Pokemon. Aurora Veil is a nearly unmatched level of team support, as it makes every Pokemon, even incredibly frail ones, able to take game-breaking hits. Even though doubles are incredibly quick matches, some of the computer trainers use annoyingly stall-reliant tactics that can make games a bit of a crapshoot in terms of length. On average though, I’d say games usually end in about five to six turns with this team. Even though there were several times where a Focus Sash probably would have been the ideal item for Ninetales, I personally preferred using Light Clay to make the effort of building a team around A-Ninetales all the more worth it. A-Ninetales has just enough of a movepool to be decent. Freeze-Dry was crucial coverage, as it is the best ice type move it learns in my opinion. I could have run Blizzard, but hail wasn’t guaranteed to be up, and Dazzling Gleam was a perfectly fine spread move. However, anyone who has used A-Ninetales (or heck, even Kantonian Ninetales) knows that it is an incredibly high-maintenance Pokemon. Its typing is pretty crummy, it is super frail, and oddly enough, its speed is a bit problematic. In most scenarios, its blazing speed would be great - and it is great, don’t get me wrong. However, the key problem with its speed is that it is a fast weather setter. In fact, I’m pretty sure it’s the fastest weather setter in Gen 7. For the uninitiated, which I’m certain anyone reading this already knows (but just in case), if two weather setting Pokemon are sent out simultaneously, the slower weather setter prevails because passive abilities that set up field conditions activate based on speed. This is one of the reasons that, when it comes to setting up Sun, Torkoal is much preferred over Kantonian Ninetales. This was one of the main challenges I had, as weather setters are actually really common in the Battle Tree. However, this is where our next member comes in…
A-Ninetales has really poor defensive stats, so I searched through several Intimidate Pokemon. Incineroar was a candidate for obvious reasons, and I did use Incineroar for a while in a previous run, but then I found out Manectric has amazing utility to ensure that Aurora Veil can go up. As I mentioned before, if a slower weather setter (which is basically all of them) is sent out and changes the weather, Aurora Veil can’t go up. However, if I switch out Ninetales on turn one, then Volt Switch with Manectric, I can reset the weather back into Hail and perform a sort of ramshackled Ally Switch, keeping A-Ninetales safe. This also has the added benefit of cycling Intimidate, which is a nice plus. Manectric’s main job for the team was to help get Aurora Veil set up, and then blast the opposing team with Thunderbolt. It really had a simple game plan that doesn’t need much of an explanation outside of that. The only nuance is that there were certainly some scenarios where I probably would have benefitted from a Timid nature instead of Modest, but the extra power was appreciated in so many scenarios that I didn’t really care. Also, I felt I didn’t need HP Ice because Manectric was standing right next to an Ice-Type Pokemon. Let’s just ignore the fact that I’m lazy and don’t breed for the right Hidden power types basically ever. That probably explains why I can’t break into higher streaks though, huh?
Metagrass (Ferrothorn) (M) @ Leftovers
Ability: Iron Barbs
EVs: 252 HP / 148 Def / 108 SpD
Relaxed Nature
IVs: 23 SpA / 18 Spe
- Power Whip
- Gyro Ball
- Leech Seed
- Protect
Honestly, looking at the EV spreads and movesets for these Pokemon makes me realize this is a pretty stock team. I’m still proud of it nonetheless. Do I even need to say anything about Ferrothorn? This thing is a win condition, plain and simple. Ferrothorn is an incredibly good Pokemon in every way. Even having a -Speed nature powers up its Gyro Ball. A-Ninetales and Manectric were the leads for this team, so I needed something incredibly bulky in the back to shore up this glaring flaw. I also wanted a Steel type to cover Kommo-o’s glaring weakness to Fairy types. As such, it was really a no brainer to slap Ferrothorn on the team and call it good. In my run, there were a handful of battles that Ferrothorn genuinely could have beaten on its own due to how good its typing + Leech Seed recovery were. Leftovers were chosen over anything else to ensure it was always recovering and to offset hail damage. Ferrothorn is such a well-known Pokemon that honestly you could skip over this entire paragraph because I’m not adding anything new to the conversation. I will say though - props to whoever came up with that nickname. I can’t take credit for that one, I found it from someone online years ago.
Kommo-o is the team’s star player. Every Pokemon on this team did great, but it won’t surprise you to know that the Pokemon with a 185 base power spread move that provides an omniboost did all of the heavy lifting offensively. When choosing to design a team around A-Ninetales, I needed to find ways to negate hail damage. This narrows it down to three options essentially: 1) a team with multiple ice types, 2) Pokemon with Magic Guard and 3) Pokemon with Overcoat. I could slap Safety Goggles on anything to be fair, but they would be practically useless outside of that effect in the Battle Tree. Magic Guard has a few good choices, but honestly there was no point in debating it when I noticed Kommo-o had Overcoat as an ability. Drain Punch was chosen over Close Combat so as not to lose the boosts accrued from using Clangorous Soulblaze It also ensured that Kommo-o could stick around to take advantage of the omniboost for as long as possible. Flamethrower ensures that I hit the most things super effectively combined with Clanging Scales and Drain Punch. The only Pokemon to resist all three of these types in the tree is Primarina, which is destroyed by Ferrothorn. It was tempting to just throw out Kommo-o, get the boosts, and try to sweep, but I had to play carefully with him on the field. Kommo-o works especially well with Ferrothorn, but if Ferrothorn can’t pick up a KO quickly enough, it would occasionally put too much pressure on Ferrothorn to handle the rest of the battle. Just something for me to think about in a future run I suppose. Overall, Kommo-o was the main offensive member of the team, and I think he performed admirably. I just need to tweak some aspects about the team to better support him if I want to use Kommo-o again for another team.
Threats:
Fire-types are the main issue this time around. A-Ninetales and Manectric offer BoltBeam coverage together, and that alone hits almost the entire Battle Tree for neutral damage except for Magnezone, Togedemaru, and Rotoms Heat and Frost. All of those were covered by Kommo-o super effectively, so coverage was never the issue. The key problem this team faces is a lack of synergistic resistances. Aside from A-Ninetales switching into Dragon moves meant for Kommo-o, which is a scenario that virtually never happened, switching felt somewhat undesirable. This was always the case against Fire-types. Kommo-o is the only Pokemon with a resistance to Fire, and Kommo-o isn’t really on the team to switch in and take hits. He needs to stay in pristine condition, so switching him in to absorb Fire-type attacks is something I avoided doing unless I felt it was completely necessary. It’s not that Fire-types are insurmountable, they can just be a nuisance because if they aren’t taken care of quickly enough they can cause serious problems. One reason I was so shocked this team did so well was because, after a while, I just kind of noticed that there is not even a single form of speed control on this team. No Tailwind, Trick Room, Icy Wind, Electroweb… anything. I was also lacking in Taunt, which meant stopping Trick Room was next to impossible. However, I was generally totally willing to trade Trick Room for a free set usage of Aurora Veil. Nonetheless, Trick Room was awfully annoying at times. Bulky Fairy-types like Aromatisse could be a nuisance as well. Honestly, the team has pretty good type coverage all around and Ferrothorn carried the defensive side. It’s not perfect by any means seeing as it of course lost, but really the team only ever got into dire straits because of shoddy plays on my part or bad positioning from the lead matchup. I felt the team was very competent at handling most Pokemon, the proper Pokemon just needed to be out front at the right time - a statement that’s as obvious as it is true for this team.
Replays:
The Loss: PXRG-WWWW-WWXF-DLQ4
I lost to Scientist Cadel. Fitting to his trainer class, his team almost seemed engineering to perfectly screw over my team. His team consisted of Dusknoir, Drampa, Shiinotic, and Turtonator. Obviously a Trick Room team, I lost due to a mix of poor plays on my part, my team lacking defensive synergy against this specific team, and a hint of bad luck. I set up Aurora Veil on turn 1 while using Thunderbolt on the Dusknoir. Drampa uses Glare to paralyze A-Ninetales and Dusknoir sets up Trick Room. I used Protect to burn a turn of Trick Room with Manectric and have A-Ninetales Dazzling Gleam. Dusknoir wastes his turn with Pain Split into Manectric, but Drampa uses Devastating Drake which chunks Manectric through the Protect. Next turn, I’m able to take down both Drampa and Dusknoir, but the Dusknoir uses Destiny Bond which takes out Manectric with him. Shiinotic and Turtonator were honestly the most perfect Pokemon Cadel could have had on his team at this point, especially with their particular movesets. I sent out Ferrothorn because I figured it would be prudent to get a Leech Seed off whatever he sent in, but I wasn’t able to do that easily. I had Ferrothorn Protect and used Freeze-Dry on Shiinotic. From previous runs (and from the list of Trainers on Serebii) I knew Shiinotic could have a Weakness Policy, and this happened to be that set. Freeze-Dry procs the Weakness Policy, and the Turtonator uses Shell Smash. Trick Room was still active so I was able to get a Leech Seed on the Turtonator, but it didn’t matter. Fire Blast wipes out Ferrothorn, and Moonblast gets a Sp. Attack drop on Ninetales, so I’m looking pretty bad here. Trick Room ends, and Turtonator wipes out Ninetales with a Fire Blast. I tried to block it with Protect, but the paralysis from Drampa finally came back to haunt me and immobilized me. I’m able to get off a Clangorous Soulblaze and knock out Turtonator, but a Moonblast from Shiinotic knocks out Kommo-o and ends the run. Honestly, rewatching that replay, I’m not sure what I could have done differently. I was sitting on the couch watching TV when it happened, so I guess I could have googled Cadel’s potential sets, but really I just made bad calls and got outplayed. It’s a shame, but this team was super successful and I still had a lot of fun using it.
Extra Match #1: 92UW-WWWW-WWXF-DLQ2
Extra Match #2: XTNG-WWWW-WWXF-DLQ3
Here are two other matches I had with this team if you wanted to see how it functioned. One match was just funny because of how often I had to switch out Pokemon just to make it through without taking too many risks. I won’t do any other play-by-plays because this document is already six pages long and frankly I’m sure only like 5 or 6 people on planet Earth will even see this. I’m posting this 2 days before 3DS online shuts down altogether, so there’s a nonzero chance these replays will never be visible to anyone other than myself. Nonetheless, thank you for reading and I hope you’re having a fantastic day.
I wouldn't worry about a "stock" team, bud. Play with what you like and are comfortable with... You'll notice, a LOT of teams on the Leader Board a very similar.
My only question is: How do you beat 255Hp/255Def Mega-Venusaur?? I only ask because, for some reason, that freaking Venusaur set always gives me trouble. To the point where I specifically account for it when building a team lol! Maybe boosted Kommo-O 2HKOs it? I'm too lazy to run the calcs
Replying to a recent post has me wondering something so I'll ask the group and see what comes back... Keep the thread active, dig?
What Mons in the Battle Tree give you the most trouble? Are there any enemy sets that you think about and are sure to have specific answers for every time you build a team?
For me, there's a few:
ALL Gyarados sets: With decent coverage on its sets, Gyarados can just easily get out of hand if it can get pull off a Dragon Dance. With proper support or another offensive partner, Gyarados can even punch holes in a well balanced team. Mega-Gyarados does hit harder but the added weaknesses are very much appreciated. Regardless, Gyarados makes Electric coverage a must-have for me.
Mega-Venusaur: 255Hp/255Def with Thick Fat and a moveset of Synthesis, Substitute, Sludge Bomb, Giga Drain ALWAYS gives me trouble. Basically making me ALWAYS have Special Psychic and/or Flying coverage on my teams
Alakazam: Specifically the Choice Specs and Mega sets. Zam is a scary lead with its Speed, coverage, and possible Fake Out immunity. Its Mega form can trace my Intimidate lead to prevent it being OHKOd and is almost always guaranteed to chunk something with damage (I don't ever run Scarf in Super Doubles). The Specs set hits even harder than Mega-Zam which can be disastrous if it doesn't flinch from Fake Out. And, lets be real... Zam is ALWAYS going to hit that Focus Blast when you NEED a miss.
Competitive/Defiant Mons: I've been running the rotating, dual-Intimidate pair of Landorus-Therian and Incineroar on MOST of my BT teams... Needless to say, Competitive Milotic can be a MENACE! Defiant Bi sharp is, usually, easily played around but Defiant Passimian can be damn scary too. If AI leads with a Competitive ot Defiant Mon, they're GUARANTEED a boost from my primary lead Incineroar. Scarf Passimian's Rock Slides can be incredibly annoying with a Defiant boost. Same goes for Braviary under Tailwind... Tho +1 Brave Birds hurt no matter what the Speed Tiers are
I wouldn't worry about a "stock" team, bud. Play with what you like and are comfortable with... You'll notice, a LOT of teams on the Leader Board a very similar.
I think too many beginners worry too much about "originality" in the wrong way. Customizing your sets to maximize team performance with a given four species is important, of course. But e.g. playing Manectric instead of Tapu Koko (not to harp on this, just bringing it up because it's fresh on my mind), but then playing Manectric as if it were Tapu Koko (rather than Zeraora with Intimidate but no FO and consuming a Mega Stone, which is also bad because you can't have AV / Sitrus -- if you look at DOU you'll see lots of Zera running Snarl/Volt Switch), is a mistake. To some extent your choices are always going to be "stock" if they're good, Zapfini is three top-tier mons from the DOU VR running their known best sets, plus a proven defensive core from that mode, 4K is another absurd goodstuff stack, and mons like Talonflame and Togedemaru would be S-tier on a Tree viability ranking (with a single definitive standard set) despite being bad in DOU, too.
Playing established sets/teams, or at least being heavily inspired by them, is a good way to learn what works. Yes, you should absolutely build your own teams once you're past the beginner's stage. But that can take half a year of playing every day or so.
The Tree Doubles leaderboard (top 20 longest streaks, i.e. not the thread leaderboard) actually stands out for its diversity, both on its own merits and compared to other facilities, if you overlook early-2017 Pherolele spam and later 4K. Granted, Kommo-o, Mega Kangaskhan (with a single use of Rabbit Forme) and "Tapu" make up a large share, but the teams around them differ substantially. Moreover, between the four Trick Room teams in top20, the only repeating species are Oranguru and Araquanid. Nothing like e.g. BDSP (or HGSS) tower where TR dominates and it's nearly always with FEAR or Hariyama respectively and Machamp/Snorlax/Octillery (although this might be due to a relative lack of players).
My only question is: How do you beat 255Hp/255Def Mega-Venusaur?? I only ask because, for some reason, that freaking Venusaur set always gives me trouble. To the point where I specifically account for it when building a team lol! Maybe boosted Kommo-O 2HKOs it? I'm too lazy to run the calcs
Many options. You could be running Bulletproof Kommo-o, which takes like 10% from Giga Drain, who cares if you 2HKO it, it just sits there and clicks Synthesis anyway. Mega Kangaskhan 2HKOs it with Seismic Toss. Talonflame (or Mega Salamence) birds on it. Dragonium Z Dragons do well against it. Any Steel-type walls it, and Steel is one of the best types available. Setup mons (particularly with Calm Mind / Quiver Dance) kill it eventually. Putting Fly on Lando-T instead of U-turn might also have helped your specific case.
Zapfini is probably the best team that struggles the most against Mega Venusaur (which is why the thing is such a successful anti-meta pick in DOU). Your team is basically a Zapfini variant (yeah) so it is no wonder you have issues with it. Zapfini handles Venu by preserving Mega Metagross while killing its partners, basically.
What Mons in the Battle Tree give you the most trouble? Are there any enemy sets that you think about and are sure to have specific answers for every time you build a team?
Not really, no. Good teams need to answer "everything" anyway, usually using a strategy that kills a large chunk of the Tree outright, and normally lose to specific circumstances vs. a full set of four (planning for every possible opposing team is unfeasible). What I do as a litmus test is to make sure I can generally beat speed trainers (i.e. have speed control that can at least very likely, if not assuredly go up against every single mon they use, and/or copious priority), which means that unless you're using priority Tailwind you need to answer Jolteon/Crobat/Aerodactyl foremost, Scarf Eruption lead, Band Slaking/Archeops lead, Electric/Psychic/Fairy specialists, Mega Mawile / Mimikyu / Primarina not only for Kommo-o teams (if you can get these three, you can probably defeat all other Fairies too), and any Trick Room lead. Having countermeasures for Blizzard / T-Wave (even if it's just Fake Out) wins you 1000 more. In Subway, the scariest trainers by a good margin are those with legends (which essentially double as speed trainers, but also pack annoying fat shit like Suicune, the Regis and Cresselia), followed by Psychics and Ice Workers.
In EisenTree, you can't possibly plan for everything (unless the plan is FEAR) and have to accept that you lose to matchup with most teams, but here it is very good to plan for the highly likely Eisenherz encounter (four of Lando-T, Incineroar, Tapu Fini, Zapdos, Mega Metagross, Araquanid), by far the no. 1 streak killer you can actually plan for (Incineroar is also the most common mon in the facility, and guaranteed to be Intimidate, and unlike its Tree incarnation -- which is already dangerous enough -- comes with FO and Parting Shot), and the best mon to slap on if your first three can't deal with him well is Waterium Z Rotom-Wash, I think. You will also need to deal with Tailwind and Trick Room going up (can't possibly check all the users all the time, unlike regular Tree where Tailwind is mostly rare outside of Dexio and the full roster of TR users can be checked by two leads, such as the 4K ones which OHKO every single one jointly -- and Neo-4K just Encores most of them, only Aroma Veil Aromatisse remains a problem, Dusknoir/Slowking die to -2 Bolt iirc), so mons like Ferrothorn vastly increase in viability because you can slap them on as a TR check that also does well by virtue of bulk against speed teams.
I think too many beginners worry too much about "originality" in the wrong way. Customizing your sets to maximize team performance with a given four species is important, of course. But e.g. playing Manectric instead of Tapu Koko (not to harp on this, just bringing it up because it's fresh on my mind), but then playing Manectric as if it were Tapu Koko (rather than Zeraora with Intimidate but no FO and consuming a Mega Stone, which is also bad because you can't have AV / Sitrus -- if you look at DOU you'll see lots of Zera running Snarl/Volt Switch), is a mistake. To some extent your choices are always going to be "stock" if they're good, Zapfini is three top-tier mons from the DOU VR running their known best sets, plus a proven defensive core from that mode, 4K is another absurd goodstuff stack, and mons like Talonflame and Togedemaru would be S-tier on a Tree viability ranking (with a single definitive standard set) despite being bad in DOU, too.
Playing established sets/teams, or at least being heavily inspired by them, is a good way to learn what works. Yes, you should absolutely build your own teams once you're past the beginner's stage. But that can take half a year of playing every day or so.
The Tree Doubles leaderboard (top 20 longest streaks, i.e. not the thread leaderboard) actually stands out for its diversity, both on its own merits and compared to other facilities, if you overlook early-2017 Pherolele spam and later 4K. Granted, Kommo-o, Mega Kangaskhan (with a single use of Rabbit Forme) and "Tapu" make up a large share, but the teams around them differ substantially. Moreover, between the four Trick Room teams in top20, the only repeating species are Oranguru and Araquanid. Nothing like e.g. BDSP (or HGSS) tower where TR dominates and it's nearly always with FEAR or Hariyama respectively and Machamp/Snorlax/Octillery (although this might be due to a relative lack of players).
Many options. You could be running Bulletproof Kommo-o, which takes like 10% from Giga Drain, who cares if you 2HKO it, it just sits there and clicks Synthesis anyway. Mega Kangaskhan 2HKOs it with Seismic Toss. Talonflame (or Mega Salamence) birds on it. Dragonium Z Dragons do well against it. Any Steel-type walls it, and Steel is one of the best types available. Setup mons (particularly with Calm Mind / Quiver Dance) kill it eventually. Putting Fly on Lando-T instead of U-turn might also have helped your specific case.
Zapfini is probably the best team that struggles the most against Mega Venusaur (which is why the thing is such a successful anti-meta pick in DOU). Your team is basically a Zapfini variant (yeah) so it is no wonder you have issues with it. Zapfini handles Venu by preserving Mega Metagross while killing its partners, basically.
Not really, no. Good teams need to answer "everything" anyway, usually using a strategy that kills a large chunk of the Tree outright, and normally lose to specific circumstances vs. a full set of four (planning for every possible opposing team is unfeasible). What I do as a litmus test is to make sure I can generally beat speed trainers (i.e. have speed control that can at least very likely, if not assuredly go up against every single mon they use, and/or copious priority), which means that unless you're using priority Tailwind you need to answer Jolteon/Crobat/Aerodactyl foremost, Scarf Eruption lead, Band Slaking/Archeops lead, Electric/Psychic/Fairy specialists, Mega Mawile / Mimikyu / Primarina not only for Kommo-o teams (if you can get these three, you can probably defeat all other Fairies too), and any Trick Room lead. Having countermeasures for Blizzard / T-Wave (even if it's just Fake Out) wins you 1000 more. In Subway, the scariest trainers by a good margin are those with legends (which essentially double as speed trainers, but also pack annoying fat shit like Suicune, the Regis and Cresselia), followed by Psychics and Ice Workers.
In EisenTree, you can't possibly plan for everything (unless the plan is FEAR) and have to accept that you lose to matchup with most teams, but here it is very good to plan for the highly likely Eisenherz encounter (four of Lando-T, Incineroar, Tapu Fini, Zapdos, Mega Metagross, Araquanid), by far the no. 1 streak killer you can actually plan for (Incineroar is also the most common mon in the facility, and guaranteed to be Intimidate, and unlike its Tree incarnation -- which is already dangerous enough -- comes with FO and Parting Shot), and the best mon to slap on if your first three can't deal with him well is Waterium Z Rotom-Wash, I think. You will also need to deal with Tailwind and Trick Room going up (can't possibly check all the users all the time, unlike regular Tree where Tailwind is mostly rare outside of Dexio and the full roster of TR users can be checked by two leads, such as the 4K ones which OHKO every single one jointly -- and Neo-4K just Encores most of them, only Aroma Veil Aromatisse remains a problem, Dusknoir/Slowking die to -2 Bolt iirc), so mons like Ferrothorn vastly increase in viability because you can slap them on as a TR check that also does well by virtue of bulk against speed teams.
The team I'm using is solid but the list of "threats" I put up is basically just stuff that I need to be weary of. Need to assume they're always in the back if they don't lead, play accordingly, and not be too aggressive and end up losing my answers to those sets. They're sets I feel I need specific and immediate answers for where the rest of the AI's sets can be handled by multiple members of my team... Does that make sense? Just engaging the thread seeing which sets people can't stand really.
My team is pretty much a ZapFini team with Mega-Latias instead of Zapdos for some extra bulk plus the Water resistance and Fini runs Taunt and Haze over Calm Mind and Protect. People love CM Fini but I play pretty conservatively so I, generally, value bulk and time/positioning over setup. Calm Mind just doesn't change the calcs enough for me. My offensive EV spreads are for getting the guaranteed 2HKOs with the least amount of damage possible (like if 4EVs does 52% and 252 EVs does 75-85%, I'd rather add bulk). The remaining EVs going to bulk have a bigger impact on my defensive calcs in my opinion. Taunt and Haze wasting turns for the AI and getting me free switches just fits my play-style better.
I also meant that a lot of teams are similar in terms of cores/strategy. A quick run through and you'll notice the type-cores dedicated to specific strategies or the roles certain typings fill vs the AI. I also kind of assumed that "using what you like and are comfortable with" had an understood "within reason" attached to it too haha!
Your team reminds me of a squad (two, actually) that I played in EisenTree (hey people itt, play EisenTree):
Latias @ Latiasite, 252 HP / Spe, Timid, Levitate; Calm Mind / Psychic / Ice Beam / Recover
Incineroar @ Mago Berry, ~ 252 HP / SpD, Careful, Intimidate; Fake Out / Flare Blitz / Knock Off / Parting Shot
Marshadow @ Marshadium Z, 252 Atk / Spe, Jolly, Technician; Spectral Thief / Close Combat / Shadow Sneak / Protect
Ferrothorn @ Leftovers, 252 HP / SpD, Sassy, Iron Barbs; Gyro Ball / Curse / Leech Seed / Protect
Celesteela @ Leftovers, ~ 252 HP / some SpD / some Atk, Sassy, Beast Boost; Heavy Slam / Iron Defense / Leech Seed / Protect
I used Mega Latias / Incineroar / Marshadow / Ferrothorn (95 wins) and Mega Latias / Marshadow / Incineroar / Celesteela (92 wins). The most obvious issue is Heatran, since your main out is Close Combat (but Latias can win 1v1 too). There are, of course, other issues; I remember that I lost without recourse to Rage Powder Volcarona. But all in all, getting 90+ in EisenTree is already a sign that your team has notably good matchups on average (most of my "average" streaks fall at 50-70).
I think you're underrating setup and chip (and by extension, mons working together in Doubles). If you're doing 75% to a mon, that isn't 25% excess damage to 2HKO, but rather it means the partner only needs to deal 25%. Investing offense on one mon (both by EVs and by setup) is what frees you up to invest bulk on others: here Marshadow is the fast glue holding everything together by OHKOing a wide variety of threats on demand; it fulfills the same role as Mega Metagross on Zapfini. The bulk investment on Mega Latias also makes sense because it has "enough" SpA (roughly 240 iirc) after CM -- it is a poster child of the two principles "invest speed" and "invest in your worst stats to make your mon good at everything" (what I call the "Ray Rizzo principle"). Similarly, Ferro and Incineroar mega-invest HP / SpD just to get the most out of Intimidate, which is already sufficient Def investment for most purposes (Ferro also has the purpose of switching into Trick Room and moving first to Curse right away, further eliminating the need for Def because of diminishing returns -- also for Atk since Gyro Ball's huge BP compensates: Curse Ferro essentially has a "+2.5 Atk / +1 Def" move).
I'm a fan of Haze (JetSawk in Subway used it). But I'm also a fan of gen5 Sitrus CM + Ludicolo coverage (i.e. Scald / Ice / HP Grass) Suicune, and it seems that it outperforms "Milotic"-likes (Haze is also antisynergic with Inti)... I'm not entirely sure which Fini I would prefer on your specific team, but I think that, particularly with Tailwind and two Intimidates, CM is actually a great "positioning tool" in its own right because it makes Fini tank that much better (if you can tank everything, you don't need to "reposition"), and it is also a wincon in a way that Haze is not (Haze is more "for the next few turns, I'm not going to lose", kind of like Follow Me or Wide Guard). "Please do damage with your teams."
I think what holds your team back the most might just be that it doesn't have the Mega Meta / Marsh role of a hyper offensive (but sufficiently defensively-typed/statlined to survive one hit most of the time) mon. This is where you might want to consider mixed Electrium Z Tapu Koko (Wild Charge / Volt Switch / Dazzling Gleam / Thunder Wave), which as a bonus is a pretty innovative set to Tree Doubles at this time, too. I went with T-Wave over Electroweb because it enables Incineroar better (-2 Spe is enough to make it outrun base 110 positive-natured if going 91 Spe, which you should) and you can boost SpD, which combined with Intimidate may allow defensive plays where T-Wave is essentially free (shame about 90% acc, but I think T-Wave is already a rare click -- should be fine). Koko would also synergize with a Soak Fini if you want that.
There certainly is a taxonomy of archetypal cores (such as Normal + Ghost, Zap + Fini, Lando + Fini, FO + Koko + Electric resist + Steel (4K is just the natural evolution of KokoKang teams), Salamence + Fini + Grass/Steel, Lele + any Steel answer, and the prevalence of FO / speed control) but overall I think there is, among the top20 teams, an impressive equilibrium both between teams that win on defensive type synergy ("cores") vs. teams that win on other synergies, and of balance vs. offense. You probably weren't there for DANA (some now-lost janky tool I wrote that pretty naively analyzes defensive type synergy) but it was able to predict the fourth mon for a given three of about half the leaderboard teams surprisingly well (such as Rain, S&F (Repto's team), Sharkanine (actually predicting Gliscor way before Josh used it), and Mega Lopunny), and completely failed at others (such as 4K and Zapfini). Here is the pastebin of its results: https://pastebin.com/ByQz1zs5 (I forgot how exactly the "k-value" is computed, but lower means more synergy).
Sets I can't stand... Blissey4 and its ilk. Bliss is really the worst of them and if you can beat it, you can beat all the others (also make sure you can beat "a generic Curser", like Hippowdon). I forgot it in my earlier enumeration, but it's certainly something that demands special respect in the builder too.
Your team reminds me of a squad (two, actually) that I played in EisenTree (hey people itt, play EisenTree):
Latias @ Latiasite, 252 HP / Spe, Timid, Levitate; Calm Mind / Psychic / Ice Beam / Recover
Incineroar @ Mago Berry, ~ 252 HP / SpD, Careful, Intimidate; Fake Out / Flare Blitz / Knock Off / Parting Shot
Marshadow @ Marshadium Z, 252 Atk / Spe, Jolly, Technician; Spectral Thief / Close Combat / Shadow Sneak / Protect
Ferrothorn @ Leftovers, 252 HP / SpD, Sassy, Iron Barbs; Gyro Ball / Curse / Leech Seed / Protect
Celesteela @ Leftovers, ~ 252 HP / some SpD / some Atk, Sassy, Beast Boost; Heavy Slam / Iron Defense / Leech Seed / Protect
I used Mega Latias / Incineroar / Marshadow / Ferrothorn (95 wins) and Mega Latias / Marshadow / Incineroar / Celesteela (92 wins). The most obvious issue is Heatran, since your main out is Close Combat (but Latias can win 1v1 too). There are, of course, other issues; I remember that I lost without recourse to Rage Powder Volcarona. But all in all, getting 90+ in EisenTree is already a sign that your team has notably good matchups on average (most of my "average" streaks fall at 50-70).
I think you're underrating setup and chip (and by extension, mons working together in Doubles). If you're doing 75% to a mon, that isn't 25% excess damage to 2HKO, but rather it means the partner only needs to deal 25%. Investing offense on one mon (both by EVs and by setup) is what frees you up to invest bulk on others: here Marshadow is the fast glue holding everything together by OHKOing a wide variety of threats on demand; it fulfills the same role as Mega Metagross on Zapfini. The bulk investment on Mega Latias also makes sense because it has "enough" SpA (roughly 240 iirc) after CM -- it is a poster child of the two principles "invest speed" and "invest in your worst stats to make your mon good at everything" (what I call the "Ray Rizzo principle"). Similarly, Ferro and Incineroar mega-invest HP / SpD just to get the most out of Intimidate, which is already sufficient Def investment for most purposes (Ferro also has the purpose of switching into Trick Room and moving first to Curse right away, further eliminating the need for Def because of diminishing returns -- also for Atk since Gyro Ball's huge BP compensates: Curse Ferro essentially has a "+2.5 Atk / +1 Def" move).
I'm a fan of Haze (JetSawk in Subway used it). But I'm also a fan of gen5 Sitrus CM + Ludicolo coverage (i.e. Scald / Ice / HP Grass) Suicune, and it seems that it outperforms "Milotic"-likes (Haze is also antisynergic with Inti)... I'm not entirely sure which Fini I would prefer on your specific team, but I think that, particularly with Tailwind and two Intimidates, CM is actually a great "positioning tool" in its own right because it makes Fini tank that much better (if you can tank everything, you don't need to "reposition"), and it is also a wincon in a way that Haze is not (Haze is more "for the next few turns, I'm not going to lose", kind of like Follow Me or Wide Guard). "Please do damage with your teams."
I think what holds your team back the most might just be that it doesn't have the Mega Meta / Marsh role of a hyper offensive (but sufficiently defensively-typed/statlined to survive one hit most of the time) mon. This is where you might want to consider mixed Electrium Z Tapu Koko (Wild Charge / Volt Switch / Dazzling Gleam / Thunder Wave), which as a bonus is a pretty innovative set to Tree Doubles at this time, too. I went with T-Wave over Electroweb because it enables Incineroar better (-2 Spe is enough to make it outrun base 110 positive-natured if going 91 Spe, which you should) and you can boost SpD, which combined with Intimidate may allow defensive plays where T-Wave is essentially free (shame about 90% acc, but I think T-Wave is already a rare click -- should be fine). Koko would also synergize with a Soak Fini if you want that.
There certainly is a taxonomy of archetypal cores (such as Normal + Ghost, Zap + Fini, Lando + Fini, FO + Koko + Electric resist + Steel (4K is just the natural evolution of KokoKang teams), Salamence + Fini + Grass/Steel, Lele + any Steel answer, and the prevalence of FO / speed control) but overall I think there is, among the top20 teams, an impressive equilibrium both between teams that win on defensive type synergy ("cores") vs. teams that win on other synergies, and of balance vs. offense. You probably weren't there for DANA (some now-lost janky tool I wrote that pretty naively analyzes defensive type synergy) but it was able to predict the fourth mon for a given three of about half the leaderboard teams surprisingly well (such as Rain, S&F (Repto's team), Sharkanine (actually predicting Gliscor way before Josh used it), and Mega Lopunny), and completely failed at others (such as 4K and Zapfini). Here is the pastebin of its results: https://pastebin.com/ByQz1zs5 (I forgot how exactly the "k-value" is computed, but lower means more synergy).
Sets I can't stand... Blissey4 and its ilk. Bliss is really the worst of them and if you can beat it, you can beat all the others (also make sure you can beat "a generic Curser", like Hippowdon). I forgot it in my earlier enumeration, but it's certainly something that demands special respect in the builder too.
What is the EisenTree?? You've mentioned it a lot now but I honestly have no clue what it is lol! Is it the Gen-9 Facility? I actually haven't picked up Scarlett and Violet since the week I bought it
It's a mod designed by Eisenherz, you can find it on the Discord server (and if you have cfw, you can play it on your 3DS with a legal instance of USUM -- installing cfw is not hard, imo, and afaik it's not at all illegal either). The aim is basically to make Tree more VGC/DOU-like; sets / rosters are much better (50% berries and Tailwind/Trick Room are everywhere) and updated for gen9 movepools (so e.g. Lando-T can have Sandsear Storm), some useless abilities have been axed (e.g. Pelipper is now always Drizzle), and you can use mons like Diancie, Zeraora and Marshadow (but so can the computer, which also uses Tapus, Ultra Beasts, Aegislash, etc.). Also, people from the Discord server (i.e. from the leaderboard) show up as opponents using their "signature" mons (prepare to get wrecked by Zapfini). It is pretty "hardcore": the top streak is only 325 (with FEAR) and, as mentioned, most teams die in the 50-70 range -- less than 10 have broken 100. The facility is engineered to hamper the strategies that excelled in regular Tree to some extent (I think Zapfini's best streak is ~40-50, and other leaderboard teams -- especially Tailwind/Trick Room ones -- have struggled similarly), but FEAR, LuchaLele, Rain and 4K actually got pretty good results anyway (with modifications... except 4K which Silverstar just plugged in and got 230 lol). What's also cool is that reduced-accuracy moves become a real consideration due to streak length being much lower: I stand by Hydro Cannon Greninja and Draining Kiss / Hydro Pump Tapu Fini. I prefer the mod to regular Tree not least because it takes much less time while nearly every battle is challenging, but also because, well, it's more like VGC. And like there, Incineroar (now with Parting Shot) is probably the best individual Pokémon in a way.
Gen9 has no facility at all. Yeah. It's people like you still fiending oldgens who keep this game alive now, so thank you. If you want, you can ask Eisenherz on Discord to participate in the amusingly-named EisenBerry Academy, which is essentially him playing you in SV PvP "like an AI" with a randomly-rolled team. I haven't played any Pokémon game past gen7 myself.
Gen9 has no facility at all. Yeah. It's people like you still fiending oldgens who keep this game alive now, so thank you. If you want, you can ask Eisenherz on Discord to participate in the amusingly-named EisenBerry Academy, which is essentially him playing you in SV PvP "like an AI" with a randomly-rolled team. I haven't played any Pokémon game past gen7 myself.
I was so disappointed in S/V not having a battle facility that I decided to invent sets for a hypothetical one. It took a few months to finish, but it was enjoyable and taught me a lot about the move pools and potential of many Pokemon.
While I did use plenty of moves like Protect and Helping Hand on the sets, I did imagine that, like the Tree, the sets would be used by the NPCs for both Singles and Doubles, so Protect is not virtually ubiquitous like it would be on sets exclusively used in Doubles. I sincerely hope that Legends ZA throws facility players a bone, but I'm not optimistic.
It's a mod designed by Eisenherz, you can find it on the Discord server (and if you have cfw, you can play it on your 3DS with a legal instance of USUM -- installing cfw is not hard, imo, and afaik it's not at all illegal either). The aim is basically to make Tree more VGC/DOU-like; sets / rosters are much better (50% berries and Tailwind/Trick Room are everywhere) and updated for gen9 movepools (so e.g. Lando-T can have Sandsear Storm), some useless abilities have been axed (e.g. Pelipper is now always Drizzle), and you can use mons like Diancie, Zeraora and Marshadow (but so can the computer, which also uses Tapus, Ultra Beasts, Aegislash, etc.). Also, people from the Discord server (i.e. from the leaderboard) show up as opponents using their "signature" mons (prepare to get wrecked by Zapfini). It is pretty "hardcore": the top streak is only 325 (with FEAR) and, as mentioned, most teams die in the 50-70 range -- less than 10 have broken 100. The facility is engineered to hamper the strategies that excelled in regular Tree to some extent (I think Zapfini's best streak is ~40-50, and other leaderboard teams -- especially Tailwind/Trick Room ones -- have struggled similarly), but FEAR, LuchaLele, Rain and 4K actually got pretty good results anyway (with modifications... except 4K which Silverstar just plugged in and got 230 lol). What's also cool is that reduced-accuracy moves become a real consideration due to streak length being much lower: I stand by Hydro Cannon Greninja and Draining Kiss / Hydro Pump Tapu Fini. I prefer the mod to regular Tree not least because it takes much less time while nearly every battle is challenging, but also because, well, it's more like VGC. And like there, Incineroar (now with Parting Shot) is probably the best individual Pokémon in a way.
Gen9 has no facility at all. Yeah. It's people like you still fiending oldgens who keep this game alive now, so thank you. If you want, you can ask Eisenherz on Discord to participate in the amusingly-named EisenBerry Academy, which is essentially him playing you in SV PvP "like an AI" with a randomly-rolled team. I haven't played any Pokémon game past gen7 myself.
Draining Kiss Fini is something I've always wanted in USUM Super Singles for Calm Mind sets. I'm definitely going to check this out. Will it permanently change my current copy of USUM or is it a separate download?
Separate. It's a patch, you can remove it again at any time. There is also a save file available separately that gives you "100%" game completion -- you should back up your save before installing it. It's mostly not necessary if you use PKHeX, which is allowed for the EisenTree leaderboard -- in fact, policy has recently been changed to allow most legal hacks in oldgens (with an "asterisk" added to the streak), which I appreciate because our competition should really be purely about the battling, not who invests the most dead time into learning / executing RNG manipulation or goddamn Voltorb Flip, or was wise enough to collect / clone mons that can no longer be obtained (Dream World...). In current gens, it makes sense to ban PKHeX to level the playing field, but I believe it has the opposite effect if banned in oldgens, particularly since those who can still play them with "legit" mons probably use external software in the first place. (Side note: I played only with "legit" mons when gen7 was current. I happened to join during the first generation that made 95% of Pokémon creation in-game nearly as fair as PKHeX. But note that I didn't have access to such important mons as e.g. Seismic Toss Kangaskhan while others did; is that really fair in the spirit of competition? Equality of opportunity should not hinge on who buys the most Nintendo product on the aftermarket or who has the most tolerance for grinding, I think (I read about someone else's resetting for Adamant Kang in the Safari Zone and it was absurd). Support the game / devs, obviously.)
It's been a long time but I am back with a new personal best, reporting an ongoing streak of 221 wins in USUM battle tree doubles.
I'm not sure how to provide proof now that the 3DS servers have gone away, but here is a picture of my in-game record, and I saved a few replays on the way. I don't have a capture card to record footage, but if I need to do more to provide proof I can add the extra bits.
This is part of my now years-long quest to achieve the battle tree ribbon with every mega pokemon. I've been tackling this extremely casually, sometimes taking weeks or even months off between attempts. After struggling for the better part of 6 months with Mega Sableye (It's soooo bad) I finally got the ribbon for it and moved on to better pokemon, starting with Mega Gardevoir, which has rewarded me with my longest streak yet.
I really liked the look of Couer7's Illumise/ Xurkitree team (shown here) and wanted to try something similar out myself. Gardevoir seemed like an excellent partner for it, but after taking a loss against a sturdy Magnezone in the early 40s, I decided to make some slight tweaks to the moveset and ended up with the team below. After my last leaderboard team (203 wins with Mega-Alakazam, detailed here) felt super strong but also boring af to play, this was a welcome new PB. This team is engaging, fun, and super powerful.
In additon, the opening pair feel like an absolute dream, like they were meant to play together. It's an iconic duo, leading to me naming this team:
The centrepiece of the team. I wanted to go with Modest 252 SpAtk to maximize the damage output from Hyper Voice, and in Tailwind 76 speed is enough for Gardevoir to outspeed everything in the tree except Aerodactyl-1 (which doesn't appear after battle 40). With some EVs left over I invested the rest into bulk as I felt my first attempt with 252spe felt too fragile. This version will survive bullet punches from Mega Lucario and every Scizor except Mega Scizor, which is good enough for me. Taunt was an excellent control move, especially in conjunction with Illumise's encore, and the pair exerted incredible control over every battle.
This Gardevoir has Trace pre-mega, and while the traced ability has almost never actually been useful, scouting out the opponents has been critical to this streak's length. Knowing an opposing Magnezone doesn't have Sturdy has come up more than once, and so has knowing when a Metagross doesn't have clear body. This team has a great toolbox, and knowing how to play (or not play) certain turns maximizes its effectiveness.
Diva (Illumise) (F) @ Lum Berry
Ability: Prankster
EVs: 244 HP / 124 Def / 140 SpD
Bold Nature
- Struggle Bug
- Fake Tears
- Tailwind
- Encore
Honestly, this pokemon has been the star of the show. This is a slight variation on Couer7's Illumise, as my first run lost when Illumise was last mon standing against a Sturdy Magnezone with 1HP... with no attacking moves. I replaced Protect with Struggle Bug and I've never missed it. Struggle Bug is nice for chip damage, but it also has some decent utility, giving the team a bit more bulk against special attackers, as well as a much-needed option to do something against mono-dark trainers. The original version's Focus Sash felt a little redundant to me as after setting Tailwind it usually didn't matter whether Illumise survived a hit or not, and confusion/sleep/para/freeze would be much more threatening than a KO in that spot, so Lum berry felt like a much safer option. 220 battles later, opposing pokemon will still Thunder wave Illumise, only to get hit by Encore/ Taunt next turn, and having that anti-cheese option is incredibly satisfying. Encore has also been my primary answer to Trick Room, and outside of Tailwind is probably my most used move. Illumise has surpassed all my expectations - this thing rules.
Kommo-o @ Kommonium Z
Ability: Soundproof
EVs: 4 HP / 252 SpA / 252 Spe
Modest Nature
- Clanging Scales
- Flamethrower
- Close Combat
- Protect
This is just a classic Battle Tree set at this point and it partnered up incredibly well with both Gardevoir and Illumise, making it the perfect third pokemon. If Illumise goes down, very little survives the onslaught of Clangorous Soulblaze + Pixilate Hyper Voice. If Gardevoir goes down, Fake Tears pushes Clanging Scales' damage high enough for Kommo-o to OHKO almost the entire tree. I feel this slot could be optimized a little more as it's a little tough to switch in and Soundproof feels sub-optimal as an ability (Bulletproof would allow it to switch in on Shadow Balls/ Sludge Bombs aimed at Gardevoir, and Overcoat would make it sturdier in Sand or Hail), but it's more than holding its own. Close combat is great against Heatran even with the Modest Nature, and I'd use it at -10% damage 100 times out of 100 before I'd ever click Focus Blast. Luckily I'm rarely in that situation, and while CC is a great tool, Clangorous Soulblaze feels like a cheatcode, and it easily closes out games by itself. It's a huge shame this thing was nerfed so badly in later gens, it's awesome.
OOGA BOOGA! (Darmanitan) @ Life Orb
Ability: Sheer Force
EVs: 4 HP / 252 Atk / 252 Spe
Jolly Nature
- Flare Blitz
- Rock Slide
- Encore
- Protect
In the final slot I really wanted a physical fire type because Mega-Mawile and all forms of Metagross completely demolish the rest of the team. I've wanted to try out Darmanitan for a while, and with the Z-move already allocated (locking out my usual Fire options of Arcanine, Entei and Incineroar), this was its time to shine. It has not disappointed. STAB Sheer Force Life Orb Flare Blitz in Tailwind dishes out absolutely absurd damage, even on resisted hits. Fire/Rock coverage is awesome, and Rockslide does some very respectable spread damage, even if the chance to miss is sometimes a bit painful. Having a second Encore pokemon sometimes feels redundant and sometimes feels excellent, but tbh 90% of the time it's either Flare Blitz or Protect with this thing, so having a sometimes excellent third move is more than good enough.
Tailwind made Jolly nature a bit redundant, but usually by the time Darmanitan hits the field Tailwind has expired, so the extra points in speed were useful more often than not.
THREATS
Unlike my last listed team, I feel like this team has a number of credible threats which actually take some very careful maneuvering to handle.
Mega-Mawile
It can OHKO the entire team. Darmanitan is the only pokemon on the team that can handle Mawile reliably, and it is not sturdy enough to switch in on it. When it comes out, the only play is to sac whatever's on the field to get a clean switch into Darmanitan and kill it ASAP. Darmanitan is the best option, but notably both versions of M-Mawile will also die at -2 SpDef to Kommo-o's Flamethrower, so you need to prioritize killing it over setting up Clangorous Soulblaze, which then leaves Kommo-o exposed. It's nuts. This thing forces the whole gameplan to warp around it more than anything else in the tree, and it is the number 1 threat to the team.
Metagross
Some versions are more threatening than others, but it's always a problem. If it's either Mega-metagross or not Clear Body, then Fake Tears makes Hyper Voice do some decent damage to soften it up well for Kommo-o, but realistically Gardevoir is not going to live vs this thing. The key decision vs Metagross is whether to sacrifice Gardevoir for some chip damage or risk taking damage on either darmanitan or kommo-o switching into it. It's never an easy decision.
Mono-Fairy Teams
It seems like a weird threat to identify as Gardevoir should mow down these teams easily, but if the opposing trainer has a Mawile you absolutely cannnot risk losing Gardevoir - Kommo-o is completely useless vs fairies, and Darmanitan will kill itself to recoil chip damage before the other team dies. Underestimate them at your peril. Play strategically, sac Kommo-o, conserve Gardevoir, and eliminate Mawile ASAP.
Magnezone
It resists both Gardevoir's STAB attacks and takes negligible damage even after Fake Tears, but worst of all, if it's Analytic it will also tear ENORMOUS chunks out of Kommo-o or Darmantian switching in. Disable on Gardevoir might have been nice vs this, but tbh Analytic Thunderbolt still does tons of damage, so it's not worth giving up Taunt for. Treat it with caution.
Primarina
It's no serious threat to the front two, but Kommo-o/ Darmanitan literally cannot beat this thing. Fake Tears + Hyper Voice should make short work of it, but getting the opportunity to land those attacks is not easy, especially as its Water attacks still deal tons of damage to Gardevoir. It's not as threatening as everything else on this list, but requires careful play to beat all the same.
Heatran
There's just no pretty way to handle this thing. Gardevoir + Illumise can barely touch it and Darmanitan's Flare Blitz is useless too. Kommo-o is a decent answer but it's not an easy switch in. Pave the way for a clean switch in to Kommo-o and hope that's good enough.
The run continues and I will update here when it inevitably ends, but I am glad this now my highest performing team. It's fun to play, has a ton of control options, a decent amount of hax insurance, and difficult but not insurmountable weaknesses. I feel like every win is earned, and when the inevitable loss comes it'll probably have been preventable somehow.
Only 8 megas remain, including Kangaskhan, Metagross, Salamence, and both forms of Charizard, so I expect this may not be my last leaderboard entry, but if it is - it's a great team to close out on.
I'm glad you found something in Illumise, but cannot agree with your critique of my moveset (maybe we can discuss this again when you hit 1500+). Protect is necessary at least for opposing Fake Out and Focus Sash is indicated at least for Gale Wings Talonflame4, never mind that I've played both Illumise and Level 1 Cottonee to exhaustion and found that getting more actions out of the Tailwind setter instead of treating it as sacrificial is vital to success. (It's different in EisenTree.) I don't know why you consider KOs to Illumise unthreatening, yet status important enough to use Lum instead of a 50% berry; surely if Illu gets para'd/frozen/slept you can just Protect Garde and switch in Kommo-o on the KO'd Illu next turn, with pretty much no difference. Also paralysis barely impedes Illumise, sleep is rare, and you probably don't want to Encore Ice moves.
Bulletproof is best. Consider all the attacks it blocks, and then consider you don't want Mega Alakazam to Trace Soundproof. I don't think the Tree has many relevant sound moves, either (again, it's different in EisenTree where you may want to block Clangorous Soulblaze and Pixilate Hyper Voice). Spend an Ability Capsule. Kommo-o almost never switches in directly, that is part and parcel of Kommo-o teams. Bulk EVs would only compromise its main function and especially its ability to work outside of speed control.
If you struggle this much against Steels despite having Darmanitan (another choice I don't agree with -- why exactly can't it be Incineroar if you've already accepted losing to Primarina if your lead goes down? never mind that 244 HP / 252 SpD AV Incineroar has about a 55% shot to win 1v1 even against the Waterium Z set with Thunder Punch; that said you're possibly also losing to Soundproof Kommo-o if you can't Psychic it), maybe HP Ground on Mega Gardevoir would be worth it more than Taunt, more so because you can already Encore every T1 status move (with Focus Sash you'd be guaranteed to, too) including most Trick Rooms, and Aroma Veil Aromatisse doesn't get solved by Taunt either.
I've considered Mega Gardevoir and Sylveon as partners for Illumise on my team, but Xurkitree blows them out of the water, both defensively (no weaknesses with Air Balloon; immunity to T-Wave) and offensively (Beast Boost; Electric/Fairy coverage; Tail Glow).
Posting this from my phone, so I wouldn't be surprised to find that I botched the reply syntax somehow.
Anyway: Mega Gengar. Hate that guy. Immune to Fake Out, outspeeds almost the entire Pokedex, the fully offensive EVs mean you get nuked by the STAB with a 30% chance to poison you on top of the damage.
Before the 3DS servers shut down, I downloaded battle videos that were part of streak submissions in an attempt to keep some of this leaderboard's history alive. https://github.com/SilverstarStream/battle-video-archive
The files should be accessible to anyone without a GitHub account.
Note that these are the raw battle video files, only usable by the game. The files are not a typical watchable format. Instructions to view them can be found on the main GitHub repo page.
For each streak, I've included a text file with some basic information about the streak. It lists the player's (and partner's) team, each battle video's battle number, and each opponent and their teams.
If anyone with a homebrew 3DS has videos that are missing from the archive, feel free to dump them and send them to me. I'm happy to add them to the archive. Instructions for this are in the GitHub repo.
If anyone wants to archive their missing videos without homebrew, uploading to YouTube and editing the streak submission is an excellent option.
Well, I'm back to record the inevitable loss from the team up above.
Reporting a completed winstreak of 276 wins in USUM Battle Tree Doubles.
I actually took the loss just a few days after my last post but due to some very sudden and unexpected life events I'm only getting around to posting it now. It was a completely unexpected threat which ended the run, a pokemon I don't think I even ran into once before it ended my streak.
Muk-2, specifically Quick Claw Gunk Shot.
I suspected it might be a threat to Gardevoir and switched in Kommo-o to try and take it out. After taking some insignificant chip damage on the switch, Muk survived Clangorous Soulblaze and KO'd Kommo-o with a critical hit gunk shot. Then the QC activated to one shot Gardevoir too. Darmanitan did what it could after that, but it was only a matter of time until it went down too. Absolutely brutal, but tbh I don't think there's anything I could have done in the face of the typical Tree bad RNG. While I'm disappointed I didn't break 300, I can't be too upset. It's by far my longest streak yet, and the team was super fun to play.
Also I should probably respond to Coeur7's post above.
1 - Whoa, who's critiqing your Illumise set? Not me! It's an awesome set. It's just that I tried Illumise with Protect/ Focus Sash, lost early, then felt that struggle bug + Lum Berry worked better for this team. I guess the AI treats an Illumise differently when it's not beside an Air-Balloon Xurkitree. Sometimes what works on one team doesn't on another, that's all there is to it.
2 - Bulletproof is better, thanks.
3 - I didnt use Incineroar because I was bored of using it. It probably would be better than Darmanitan, but I'm bored of it. Incineroar is boring. Darmanitan is cool. That's all there is to it. It's sub-optimal, but-
4 - I'm not aiming for top of the leaderboard, just for a ribbon with every mega. If I hit a leaderboard streak on the way I record it here because I think it's pretty neat to get there with uncommon pokemon choices. M-Audino with Regigigas was fun. M-Beedrill with Sableye was fun. M-Glailie with Noivern was fun. Maybe one day I'll run a single team to 1500+ wins, but for now my goal is to get 2500~ wins (50 x each mega), and I like keeping it fun by changing up the teams. I think I'll revist a few (like Glailie) with the goal of getting it on the leaderboard one day, but for now just the ribbon is good enough for me.
I only have a few megas to go, including Mega-Kangashan/Salamence which will almost certainly get me over that 300 mark. I'll be sure to report back when I do.
Posting an ongoing streak of 1,000 wins in Ultra Moon Super Doubles.
“Repto attempts a serious tree streak in 2024” was not on anyone’s bingo sheet, was it?
My 3DS and UM cart had nonetheless been getting quite a workout lately, between helping to build my randos roster for the Eisenberry Academy (makeshift battle facility for veterans in need) and, with a bit more relevance, the Gen VII Multi Battle tournament to close out 3DS online activity.
User Chrom x Lissa aka Gigginox had been a regular on the facilities discord server during this time, seeking input on a doubles team featuring Mega Audino; the idea being, he wanted to hammer out a streak involving Audino within the rapidly closing window. Between his desire for a TR/Mega Audino team resonating deeply within me (lol), as well as an opponent to Eisenherz and myself during the finals of the aforementioned tournament, we had the opportunity to build a great deal of mutual respect. It is through this respect that I assert there is no arrogance or oneupmanship intended whatsoever in the composition of my team, which unabashedly modifies the team used by Gigginox.
Gigginox’s team, the Decadent Delights, focused on the tried-and-true FEAR VII core, with the extremely versatile Incineroar and burst offense of Clawitzer as mess cleanup for Togedemaru. The Delights stopped just short of unlocking the Starf Berry; I took more interest than usual with his ensuing writeup because it utilized my favorite Pokemon in Kalos, Clawitzer, in a manner very differently than I’d have been inclined. Several of us discussed his team at length following his accolades and, from my memories of dabbling in FEAR during my 624 semi-random dump, I noted several changes I’d have made were I to pilot his exact lineup.
My first and only experience with FEAR VII involved the generic yet goated Aromatisse as its setter. Using Aromatisse grants any TR squad a number of boons, and the extent to which my FEAR team (born from RNG, not that it mattered) took these boons for granted became immediately apparent:
Complete disregard of Taunt users as leads, as well as casting Dazzling Gleam with impunity in the face of Gengar and Froslass.
Base 29 speed, which is undercut by a negligible number of enemies and thus preventing Togedemaru from being attacked twice per turn (usually.)
Base 99 SpA giving Dazzling Gleam substantially more chipping power, and a genuinely threatening Moonblast to Fairy weaks.
Odor Sleuth for the purpose of negating Double Teams or Minimize, which frees up moveslots for her janitors, allowing them to pass on utilities for better damage.
An uncompromised hold item, allowing use of a Berry.
Rather than just bemoan the loss of these advantages by using Audino, I want to address the individal points.
Taunt and Disable blocking ended up going relatively unmissed for nearly the entirety of the run; the former was nearly always directed into Togedemaru or not at all, and Audino had Flamethrower for the likes of Froslass, or as backup damage. Two and only two notable incidents of Taunt denying Trick Room occurred: one from an Ambipom and the other from Electrode. Ambipom must be treated as a Fake Out risk and Electrode lead alongside Ludicolo, another Fake Out risk; these teams were not threatening enough to risk eating two attacks off the bat, thus I took my lumps and killed their users before attempting to set again.
Audino’s 49 speed was by and far the biggest hindrance to this team. For all the relevant targets this undercuts, it leaves so, so many left and it meant lots of hits could’ve been prevented by using someone slower. Scientists and especially Breeders ran so many combinations of enemies that caused Togedemaru to eat two attacks per turn, leading to its death on T3; not only that, if the leads were not especially dangerous, I sometimes (though not often) skipped TR as an opener and attacked with my backline.
Second biggest hindrance was Audino’s pathetic damage output. While Aromatisse’s 99 SpA was not exemplary of power creep by any means, it was enough that its Fairy STAB gave it a decidedly unpassive role in helping Togedemaru clear the field. Meanwhile, Audino’s own Dazzling Gleams had POOR odds of 2HKOing enemies as frail as Flygon. The only Pokemon so frail to fall within two hits were things like Sharpedo, Mienshao or Greninja (provided it did not wipe its darkness with Protean.) Helping Hand-boosted Flamethrower couldn’t even OHKO Ferrothorn or Escavalier, though I seldom had to deal with them and, even under TR, they were generally irrelevant (Ferro3 killed itself the first available opportunity without fail, Ferro4 is weak, and LO Escavalier eats Endeavor, attacks once and dies.)
While Fairy resists had the potential to be even more miserable, there were only a handful requiring Flamethrower to dispatch, surprisingly enough. Not only that, there was the simple tactic of killing the partners first, patiently waiting for Togedemaru to hit 1HP and circumventing the nuisance of needing to roll max damage for that coveted 12 (were it even possible.) Occasionally but rarely a combo such as Heatran x Gengar would require a Plan C, as in “Clawitzer and Incin are gonna murder these fuckers and we’ll see who’s laughing then, huh Christian”
I was surprised to learn that neither Metagross set nor Venusaur required Flamethrower, and the only Fire types better left to my backline (barring 1hp) were Assault Vest Darmanitan, Salazzle and Heatran. Registeel and Toxapex also did not fear the gleam at 12HP.
Even with the loss of spread, I would have taken Moonblast without a second thought, had it been available. That’s how much Audino’s damage sucked.
Odor Sleuth is wonderful for circumventing evasion spam. However, ultimately I’d only wished I’d had it for Zapdos2. Blissey and Regigigas were flinched and/or murdered immediately and never had the chance to use them once. Cresselia was allowed to spam it, then fed to Incineroar. Clawitzer was going to keep Aura Sphere in its moveset no matter what.
My backline was extremely adept at Ghostbusting and, besides which, the speed discrepancy between Togedemaru and any setter makes using Odor Sleuth very awkward and unwieldy. There were no Ghost types so dangerous that they couldn’t be fed to the backline, though Jellicent3 was notorious enough a bastard that I tried not to ignore it. Occasionally, the Ghosts weak to Audino’s moves were killed that way without needing help; in the case of Spiritomb, sometimes Cynthia or Rhyperior couldn’t resist putting a frown on its face with some Earthquakes.
Berries are the most common defensive item featured on top-laddering Tree teams for a reason. Trick Room meta especially mandates your setter be able to do its job no matter the bullshit the AI can inflict with its leads. Thus the mega stone makes Fake Out less of a supplement and more of a crutch, which had opportunities to create major conflicts of interest. The most prominent ones were Confuse Ray and Hail; while I’ll go into more detail on them later, I will say that flinching a known Hail threat was generally simultaneously preventing Blizzard, and Audino freezes were both incredibly rare as well as (IIRC) only one instance of TR denial.
For all that, Mega Audino still satisfied a number of wonderful niches with its compensations (however minor at a glance) giving it a viability that other setters could not enjoy!
Type Change granting extremely relevant immunity and resists, throwing off AI T1 move selection.
Enormous BST increase, allocated almost entirely into bulk, throwing off AI T1 move selection, drastically increasing odds of reset.
Permanent immunity to Trick, bane of most setters after death and status.
Fire coverage, unavailable to Fairies until Swsh.
Potent crippling move and checkmate in Encore.
Audino regularly took Draco Meteors from the twins, and caused Kingdra and Haxorus to waste their Z-moves. Dragonite3 was a prominent threat for Spidey & Friends; now it was a welcome sight (not the least of which because it meant no Extremespeed.)
Gaining the Fighting resist drew attention from Blaziken3, Clawitzer4 and Focus Blast users, buying free turns for Togedemaru should it need to Fake Out. Lacking Fairy typing T1 went a very long way in preventing Iron Heads, Gunk Shots, etc from launching into that slot (with one notable exception.)
Which brings me to the second perk, the figurative elephant in the (Trick) Room, 103/126/126 bulk on a type with a significantly less exploitable weakness than your other setters. This is also the biggest edge it holds over Aromatisse, particularly in context of FEAR. With its natural typing, Aromatisse is seen as fair game by both Metagross34 and Gengar4, as well as the big Gunk Shot users. It also has no magic EV spread that prevents being killed by all of them; this in turn forces you to pretty much EV for the one you can’t stop under any circumstance, Gengar. So, you note that Metagross has to eat your Fake Out, and you just hope that its partner doesn’t throw a wrench into this desperate play.
Otherwise, Audino is just so fat. Even with the AI taking frequent shots at it or being swept up in strong spread moves, it had no difficulty throwing TR back up, were it needed.
Manectric/Reuniclus4 were quite rare, while Alakazam/Rotofan4 were not; Trick was used against me only once throughout the entire run, for that matter, and obviously it was of no concern to Audino. Besides staying safe from that forced switch and keeping its moveset unrestricted, they were very safe bets on move choice (Focus Blast and Dark Pulse.)
Audino’s Flamethrower may not have been strong, but it still made for a good chip on shield turns and killed several grasses on sun teams, with or without Helping Hand. Mystical Fire wasn’t handed out like candy just yet. Also necessary for killing Magnezone4. Occasionally it circumvented Wide Guard.
Last but not least, the juicy cherry on top, Encore. Recommended to Gigginox by Coeur I believe, it requires no justification, only songs of praise. This move was the cement that made Audino the MVP versus teams that otherwise steamrolled FEAR or presented high chances of bullshit.
The biggest by and far is to Mega Kangaskhan; a rare but hopelessly deadly foe, with its two most important moves outprioritizing Togedemaru, and always hitting twice. Encore is the most satisfying Fuck You to Kangaskhan or any Fake Out user, as well as being one of the safest predictions for trainers that definitely carry the set, such as Aether employees. The priority abuse didn’t stop there, as Encore was also used liberally against Shadow Sneak and Ice Shard, for virtually painless swaps to the backline.
Lategame uses of weather or setup moves were also punished severely, being used to reset TR or safely kill Pokemon such as Suicune1. As long as the final turn of Encore did not overlap with TR shutdown, Suicune could be permanently locked into Calm Mind and Incineroar could liesurely dispose of it. This had been done repeatedly during the run.
Klutz is not quite on the level of Ice Beam Araquanid, but an explanation is in order. Audino never, ever has any justifiable reason to spend a turn without evolving. When lead Alakazam3 evolves, Trace will activate prior to Audino’s stone triggering. Naturally, Porygon2’s Trace also will trip. If those Pokemon lead, why not roll the die on giving them a dogshit ability? While losing its Eviolite is already lovely, the AI regularly made resist swaps out of Dazzling Gleam. Alakazams can’t resist the unreliable Focus Blast, which also made them lower priority targets. If their partner is Endgleamed, and they just so happened to decide to resist swap, why not deny them the satisfaction of Regenerator?
This only happened a couple times (both the P2 and Zam) but 200IQ logic doesn’t need to play out every single battle to be 200IQ logic. Mostly it just made me grin like an idiot to see Flare Blitz doing huge damage to P2.
Healer has consistently been terrible to me in randos, on Pokemon other than Audino. However, I can’t deny that it did do its job on a number of occasions, some of them extremely clutch, such as lifting freeze and multiple burns off of 1HP Togedemaru.
Let’s close this off with a few calcs respecting Audino’s bulk!
252+ Atk Choice Band Slaking Giga Impact vs. 244 HP / 172 Def Mega Audino: 177-208 (84.7 - 99.5%) -- guaranteed 2HKO
252 Atk Choice Band Archeops Head Smash vs. 244 HP / 172 Def Mega Audino: 145-172 (69.4 - 82.3%); -- guaranteed 2HKO
252+ SpA Analytic Magnezone Flash Cannon vs. 244 HP / 92+ SpD Mega Audino: 134-162 (64.1 - 77.5%) -- guaranteed 2HKO
252 SpA Pelipper Hydro Vortex (185 BP) vs. 244 HP / 92+ SpD Mega Audino in Rain: 135-159 (64.6 - 76.1%) -- guaranteed 2HKO
252 Atk Choice Band Blaziken High Jump Kick vs. 244 HP / 172 Def Mega Audino on a critical hit: 169-199 (80.9 - 95.2%) -- guaranteed 2HKO
Togedemaru @ Berry Juice, Sturdy
Brave (no EVs)
-Spiky Shield
-Endeavor
-Fake Out
-Helping Hand
I can’t tell from only seeing behind Toge, but I’m pretty sure it rolled its eyes every time Dino failed the 12-chip. Like “how much do I have to carry this girl ugh”
Ahem. Without Toge, Dino Nuggets is no team; just a random collection of goodstuffs.
Very little needs to be said about this well-established TR unit, but the subject of its optimal fourth move has come up now and then. I will die on the hill that Helping Hand is the only choice for a run with longevity. Its priority bracket beats the annoying little chips like Shadow Sneak, and inoffensive status screws Sucker Punch. During my original dabbling in FEAR, HH was used to give Palossand more killing power versus bulky foes, and to make Devastating Drake even more of a nuke (and murder Zapdos2.) While my Clawitzer didn’t need much wallbusting power, Incineroar appreciated the help once in a while, and it brought a smoother end to Cress23. Otherwise, its main use was to let Audino kill Sucker Punchers and other Darks, to have the last laugh on several priority users, and to better manage several Ghosts if switching couldn’t be done cleanly.
Word of the difficulty in stopping Togedemaru must’ve spread amongst the AI (has anyone located their discussion threads/threatlists?) because an absurd amount (like, nearly all) of offensive support moves, with the exception of Thunder Wave, went into it. Taunt, Fake Tears including Jolteon4’s Z-Tears, Baby Doll-Eyes, Will-O-Wisp, Leech Seed, you name it. While those last two have some genuinely smart applications, they were doing this while it had 1HP. I’m just imagining
SYLFia: i run more than two dozen fire types and toge1 is unironically my worst matchup
Kiawe: skill issue
ItsYaBoy: i was telling kukui they need to autolevel to 50 cause of toge1 and he just called me a scrub. dick :shucks:
$Ezra$: lol thats why robyn kept telling you to run chandy, get that 98% :ezra:
SYLFia: yeah 98% :pikuhh: the past eight times i got these leads she had fucking incin in the back
I’ve used Incineroar for hundreds of battles, but this is the first instance of it being involved in a serious streak; it was also abundantly clear why it’s so well-repped on other teams. Incin was so freaking good and handled everything I needed it to. I put a LOT on its plate, much of it dealing with Ghosts, Breeders, Scientists, and nastier Veteran teams that often killed Togedemaru by T3.
Unfortunately I was compelled to run Darkest Lariat over Knock Off or Crunch, because I didn’t have Odor Sleuth and Aura Sphere isn’t suitable for killing Cresselia or Zapdos. I did also use it on a couple of Guzma’s Toxapex, as they were too much of a Bunker risk (and Dino wasn’t killing them at 12HP anyway) and by the time it was isolated, it had Stockpiled.
Low Kick was, of course, always going to be its least clicked move. Several times I pondered if I could get away with dropping it to run Knock Off or something for Primarina. Incin doesn’t get Poison Jab or Thunderpunch (and they’re gross as type coverage without abilities like Sheer Force) and I was running into lastmon Tyranitars and Snorlax often enough. I didn’t want Clawitzer to be my only answer to Tyranitar, especially with Policeman and Hiker teams that could run many cofigurations and potentially be inhospitable to my shrimp.
Fake Out did a lot of killing and was used for much more than getting Trick Room back up. It was just as much a trap for Encore to lock enemies into deadweight and occasionally to let 1HP Toge endeavor outside TR.
Assault Vest did make a number of Focus Blasts less scary (taking OHKOs away from Alakazam34), turned the common Palossand4’s Earth Power into a 3HKO, and would live a crit full powered Water Spout from Jellicent3, to name a few. Though, I almost never even imposed the risk of eating these moves. The only Focus Blast I freely swapped into was Trevenant4, a pathetic 3HKO, and it was next to the joke named Dusknoir.
252+ Atk Incineroar Helping Hand Fake Out vs. +4 252 HP / 0 Def Mudsdale: 12-15 (5.8 - 7.2%) -- guaranteed OHKO
(12, 12, 13, 13, 13, 13, 13, 13, 13, 14, 14, 14, 14, 14, 14, 15) yeah hows that stamina treatin ya bitch
Second time I’ve taken the shrimp to four digits. The pulse targeting mechanic is functionally worthless in doubles, and sidekick Clawitzer has none of the bulk of its leader, Incineroar.
But man, that raw damage. Clawitzer has very clean OHKOs on most things its pulses hit supereffectively, and severe damage to bulky neutral targets; Ice Beam is understandably weaker, but still strong enough to easily dispatch targets that have been chipped by Dazzling Gleam or especially a HH boost.
Between it and Incineroar, there were very few lastmons I viewed with dismay. I preferred bulky waters to be redlined by Togedemaru, though when I needed my shrimp to Dark Pulse a Toxapex, Wishiwashi or Golisopod, it got the job done.
I mentioned Incineroar having to deal with a lot of troublesome Breeder/Scientist/Veteran fights; “Incinitzer” as I occasionally referred to the duo were responsible and highly effective at cleaning up these messy encounters by having excellent damage prospects against most of the roster. While not needed for Double Team users, Aura Sphere was great for sniping Magnezone/Mamoswine3, Glaceon4, and the occasional Glalie evasion boost.
I don’t believe it’s a matter of opinion that Clawitzer has no business running anything except damaging moves. Dark/Fighting/Ice coverage at these strengths puts so many trainers in check that a passive role is simply needlessly wasting its talent. Why do the setter’s job and assist Incineroar, when it can destroy alongside it? Audino already has everything it needs to reset TR and does not require Heal Pulse; and besides, losing Audino “prematurely” means Clawitzer can enter clean, murder a target by itself, allowing Togedemaru to shield or redline whatever is next to it.
Reigna of Terror: my dad watched the replay where i got 3-0’d by clawitzer and asked why i dont run mega blastoise, like he didnt literally qr inject my entire team and hand the cart back to me
Reigna of Terror: i hate my dad so much
Gwenniest: :feelsbadtoed:
$Ezra$: CLAWITZER omg
$Ezra$: i dont respect anything below 130 yet this thing still oneshots almost my entire roster :gengarpout:
The team name came from my constantly referring to Audino as "Dino" in the tree channel on Discord, and my disliking every name I'd thought of that referenced Gigginox's team in some manner. Dino Nuggets has the same juvenile nomenclature as Spidey & Friends. Immature and cringe, but Repto-styled cringe.
Because of my lengthy absence, the first 200 battles or so were pretty slow, as I had forgotten very many sets/spreads and did not trust Audino with most resist KOs. While only a couple battles turned into disasters via consecutive flinch or death (only one of the latter) I still tended to overplan and looked up what Incinitzer could do if they needed to. Ten battles easily took over an hour.
While reacclimating I also absorbed gobs of anecdotal info and trends on AI behavior toward FEAR VII. 280 battles with Aromatisse/Togedemaru/Drampa/Palossand was a decidedly tiny sample size and, besides which, Aromatisse was too different from Audino to be drawing excessively from that memory bank. Naturally, there was an expected minimum degree of sloppiness while I brushed up my piloting; namely, failing to Fake Out things that warranted it and assuming that Toge’s presence would dissuade inoffensive moves (particularly Thunder Wave and Protect.) While it only took one battle to make me wary of these risks, the cumulative experiences were a big assurance that these were not just isolated random batshit AI quirks.
The secondary goal of 500 wins was far smoother and faster than 200; though between troublesome lead pairings, the blue moon random factor throwing off predictions, and my abundance of consistently tricky oppnents like Male Sightseers, I was not fully convinced of longevity. Justin had been playing FEAR alongside me and already ran into trouble (admittedly using different Pokemon, but his team wasn’t just shat out either.) Third goal of 778 breached, and Alice/Chen were joined by Reina/Niara and Calder/Presta for major threats. At least my playing was really consistent, the overwhelming majority of the Tree was back to being memorized, and I refused to play on work nights if I were at all tired. I coasted on those things and avoided running into any bullshit that could break me, and that good fortune carried me to the first major tier of the leaderboard, four digits.
Playstyle
Risk Assessment: General
Facility AI behavior toward lv1 Pokemon has been discussed at length between Smogonites. All of our Trick Room endeavors (no pun intended) combined to agree on one basic truth: their targeting is definitely unlike Maison AI, which was far more prejudiced and careless; also, the slower of two enemies would often deliberately target the lv1’s partner under the assumption that the lv1 would not survive.
Unfortunately while demonstrably true, it was also not at all consistent. It was never safe to assume or plan around Togedemaru or Audino eating any move from either foe, regardless of turn order. I suppose this is a roundabout way of saying that nothing surprised me. They doubled into Spiky Shield as often as they divided their attention.
A necessary evil to play around, but triggering potential berry sets early was very beneficial both for the chance of teamkilling (Hippowdon3 on Earthquake-heavy rosters) as well as a double KO the following turn. A few such as Suicune2 could not be chipped in this manner, but that specific enemy is also the most forgiving Suicune to face. Some such as Conkeldurr3 made for satisfying KOs in spite of the berry. While they were all a reminder that Audino was very weak, Mold Breaker Rampardos4 was the one that regularly caused serious problems.
Which is not to say Archeops and Bastiodon shouldn’t still go fuck themselves.
I eventually broke the habit of firstly prioritizing things that spammed Aqua Jet, and the like. Their danger was illusory unless accompanied by enemies slower than Audino; even then, killing them first was not going to change that predicament. Shard/Jet/Sneak users were extremely vulnerable to Encore, while the most notorious Sucker Punch users either fell to HH+Gleam due to frailty or were Mawile, whose Set3 liked to target Mega Audino instead. Extremespeed users were Incinitzer food. If Togedemaru was destined to hit 1HP, exposing the backline was still an easily achieved goal, and the attack which put it in that state changed little. Thus I gunned hard for enemies that I would have killed first regardless because of their speed or typing, like Conk4 and Prima4. Their priority usage shortened that window.
Quick Claw sets were dangerous for different reasons, be it Rock Slides, paralysis from Lickilicky, or damage from the Fire starters or Drampa. Unless whatever next to them was worse, I tried to kill them as soon as possible. Unfortunately, Steelix/Bronzong almost never exploded T1, instead preferring my grief.
Fake Out was another beast. These overwhelmingly went into Togedemaru regardless of field state, which made them easy to predict, and likewise especially surprising when denying TR. Unfortunately their T1 speed advantage made it impossible to do anything but shield. However, Fake Out with or without TR in effect was just begging for Encore; this trivialized so many threats that I would skip setting in order to Encore certain users. Rosters with guaranteed FO users on them, such as Aethers (Kangaskhan, Sableye, to name some) made this the go-to.
Thunder Wave was the big one, quickly making me relive some of my worst memories from Spidey & Friends and driving Rotoformes way the hell up on the threatlist. Confuse Ray was rarer but still a roll of the die of which I wanted no part. That said, I was less willing to sack Toge to leads like Rampardos x Regigigas just to prevent Confuse Ray. Ampharos was a mandatory FO then destroy since either set spelled trouble. Swagger from Spiritomb was quite rare but unpreventable.
Lead Taunt laughably went into Togedemaru almost 100% of the time, and when facing Genies of Healthy Meta in pairs, they would taunt Toge first, every time. It was funny versus Veteran rosters because they provided some of the least compelling reasons to shield after T1. Trick Room was denied twice over the run, as noted in Audino’s tab; it was inevitable due to the threat of Fake Out.
Will-O-Wisp went into Audino as often as it did Togedemaru and was used by enemies and teams that were destined for Incinitzer, thus they were treated as irrelevant; I cared more about Flame Body. Spore was used only by Amoonguss, as Shiinotic preferred to Moonblast each time.
Trick Room was very seldom reset (well, attempted) by anything slower than Audino, which is most of them, and not coincidentally it was the whopping 72-speed Jellicent that could cause the most irrtation with it. I appreciated the rare Slowking4 or Cress4 attempts, granting them honorable death.
It wound up being far too difficult to predict when high-powered STABs would be directed at vanilla Audino instead of Togedemaru, even if the squishy Dino still survived them without crits (especially the unpowered defaults.) Pelipper4’s Vortex in rain had a chance to OHKO, albeit a very low one. This was one scenario where the AI probably factored in speeds with its attacks, as a disproportionate amount of these T1 Z-moves were launched into Audino, and the most notable among them were slow.
Still, I treated most of them with due respect. Flareon34, both equipped with Firium, was a mandatory Endeavor as a lead; I encountered many Set4s that would Quick Attack afterward. While not Primarina, it was still a fast way to waste Toge. Backline Rotoms buzzed the Twave alarm and were not going to be given any chances either.
The most notorious Laxpowder sets all had something else discouraging me from letting them sit there. Twave on Zone, OHKOs on Walrein, not knowing if Glaceon was set3 with Hail, etc. I took my chances whenever possible unless the partner were considered a higher threat (particularly Landorus next to Articuno on 12s; Articuno wins.) Sets like the aforementioned Zone3 or Twins were nevertheless demoted if it looked like Toge were making an exit, as Incinitzer easily dealt with them.
Double Team or Moody were mostly ignored with the exception of Tornadus, who once used the move, while Blissey and Muk were killed quickly due to their stats, typing, and other moves making them more difficult to remove by Incinitzer. I didn’t give Blisseys the chance to launch Mud Bomb into shield.
Whimsicott and Thundurus threw up Prankster subs once in a blue moon (both greatly preferred attacking) while other enemies, namely Empoleon and Mega Venusaur, also rarely subbed. Endeavor would break these subs if the damage exceeded their HP, but because Encore ignored them, I never took them seriously. I’ve let Empoleon take the pathetic chips from Dazzling Gleam, knowing it’d take three or more to break, as well as having lastmon Venus4 sub itself to death while Toge happily bops away.
Whiffing into Protect was maddening at first before deciding those species that had Protect in one set automatically needed to be set aside while killing its teammates. The AI thankfully almost never attempted double Protects, thus their execution skyrocketed to the top of the queue once they showed the move. I appreciated the times this was done T1. I regularly had pairs like Suicune/Raikou34 and had to gamble. I also took the gambles at 1HP for several of these if I didn’t much like saving them for Incinitzer; Snorlax3 and Tentacruel4 for example.
Protects were both unpredictable and frequent, with enemy spread moves feeling like more a coincidence and less a tactic, with many Protects coming to play without them, while many battles also saw Protect ignored in the face of spreads.
”Kill On Sight” - Priority Targets
My first instinct was to focus on preserving Togedemaru at all costs; ascending to 500 and beyond that, my focus shifted to killing nuisances to Audino, as many status moves and their cousins wasted more effort than letting Toge fall.
By the end of it, the Hit List looked something like this:
Rampardos, Haxorus, Archeops next to Slaking - may kill Audino, FO Slaking or Mold Breaker when lead
Lake Trio 12, Rotoms - Consider killing trio immediately if leads indicate Twave, otherwise Incin food
Mega Kangaskhan - Parental Bond/priority, Shield+Encore immediately, even if lead
Primarina4 - Complete menace, Endeavor when lead
Blissey, Air Balloon Muk - Minimize, FO Muk if lead, kill immediately
Only two things needed to die to expose the backline, and from there I simply focused down whichever (if either) posed the bigger problem for Incinitzer. Teams such as Breeders had more enemies that outsped Incinitzer than not, so I liberally used Spiky Shield to run out the timer if needed. Here were instances where I appreciated set3s of Pokemon like Steelix and the Slowthings, which sat at a Dino-approved 50, or the abundance of partner-damaging spread moves that posed minor threat to Dino but swiftly chipped or killed their allies.
Miscellaneous
Scary Rosters:
Male Sightseers are disregarded by so many conventional teams, but for much of the run I was convinced that they’d eventually by my downfall. This tiny roster is LOADED with grievous Anti-FEAR challenges to overcome.
Mold Breaker Rampardos and Haxorus. Latter can launch DD, unblockable and instant death.
Sitrus Berries on Archeops and Rampardos.
Protect on Rhyperior and the two fossils.
Rhyperior and Regigigas2 outspeed Incinitzer under TR.
Dazzling Gleam must roll max to kill 12HP Darmanitan3, due to Assault Vest.
Earthquake users are happy to use it next to Slaking3, who has a phenomenal track record for targeting Audino with Giga Impact, which will easily KO after the spread.
Any of these by themselves are trivial, but the sheer number of them potentially crammed into four enemies made them so dangerous. Clawitzer easily OHKOs most of the roster but can’t reasonably be expected to carry the whole team, especially when it becomes the next most viable target with Togedemaru down. Conkeldurr4 and the fossils are not dispatched instantly by Incineroar and can easily kill it. My Fake Out is a precious limited resource.
I didn’t fear our little streak killer until having a narrowly avoided disaster. The toddlers have better chances of bringing a routine or awful team than a nasty one, but they have more than enough threats to roll.
Serperior3 with Powder/Sub/Contrary Leaf Storm.
Incineroar & Emboar with their Quick Claws.
Bulky waters as lastmons without Toge around, especially Primarina and Mega Swampert.
Greninja3 with Water Shuriken. Worse than Parental Bond.
All it takes is for Togedemaru to meet an unplanned swift end and even normally nonthreatening mons like Chesnaught or Delphox can create an awkward conflict of interest!
The firefighters have a giant pool of Pokemon to choose from, but if you look at it, there are a lot of nasty pests that give me a stressful workout in damage control. I repeatedly rolled Flareon x Wishiwashi, or had shit like backline Goodra with Togedemaru already dead or about to be (think Carracosta, Lapras.) Priority with slowmons is easily arranged within his roster.
For a while, I thought nothing of these guys over any other trainer before having at least three or four consecutive rough encounters, each time they popped up. Notoriety granted.
Fossils, every Electric worth a damn, lots of Protect, Twave, Rock Slides and other such bullshit. Like the firemen, the workers ran a lot of relatively free lineups but the potential was there.
Mechabob, Gracie and their clones, and Ace Horace. Knowing a trainer was 12 or 34 went a long way in properly ranking specific species and determining a kill order. I especially didn’t like having no idea if the Suicune in front of me could Protect.
Female Breeders were overall a lot worse, even if males had the majority of slower things and might’ve made me regret setting at times. A big part of this was carrying the nasty Rhyperior with its Protect, Mudsdale which holds the record on winning speed ties with Audino, and coincidentally running Carracosta4 or Golisopod4 every time I encountered a fucking Wishiwashi or Camerupt. Their saving grace was often either killing each other or being Incinitzer food, if I could maneuver them into a checkmate position before Toge fell. One Izel battle, during the final stretch to 1,000, was nasty enough to nearly cause me despair.
Favorite Anecdotes:
Mudsdale and Garchomp gave no fucks about teamwork. Chomp3 had the excuse of being locked into its first move, but the Mega knew exactly what it was doing. It wasn't like I encored it, either. Cynthia and Wally, as well as the cops and hikers, regularly murdered their teammates. Maybe they felt bad for Audino and wanted to help?
Aino's Oranguru2 was encountered only twice in any meaningful capacity, and both times it used Psychic Terrain at the first available opportunity, which kills much of Aino's potential to be threatening, and Instructed Togedemaru after it used Endeavor. To attack, it used Future Sight, which wouldn't damage me anytime soon. I joked that it was my own Oranguru from S&F, there as a double agent and sabotaging Aino's battle.
Spiritomb4 repeatedly used Pain Split on Togedemaru and on more than one occasion restored its Sturdy from 1HP.
Wally's Altarias were always hit with FO as leads, or killed upon entry, just to be safe; one particular battle saw Gallade/Garchomp4 leads, with the Mega Stone taken by Gallade. Garchomp opens with Sandstorm, and I bemoan the likelihood that it rolled Sand Veil. Gallade dies and is replaced by none other than Cloud Nine Altaria. I cheerfully told Altaria it earned a free turn! This was the only conceivable scenario where I would gladly allow the Sing coin toss to play out.
Replays:
As of right now, I'm only planning to upload a few replays, as they're annoyingly difficult to record in a manner that doesn't look like trash. However, I will share the list of all replays I've saved and wouldn't mind recording, with a word or two to convey the gist of the replay without spoiling it to the point of being unwatchable. From there, I'll record anything that doesn't make the cut upon request. I have many more replays saved than are listed, but having gone back through them, these make the cut for being especially fun or close to watch.
Battle 146:
Nailbiter, full TR denial
Battle 211:
Nailbiter, outplayed by AI/bad decision, bailed by AI stupidity
Battle 218:
Gigglypuff moments... Fun Fact: Battle 275 features the same four Pokemon as this replay, albeit in a different order, but much of the same shenanigans.
Battle 294:
Nailbiter, cruelly teased with deus ex machina
Battle 366:
"These four look like trouble, yet Repto didn't say 'Nailbiter'" :electhink:
Battle 391:
Leads were more problematic than they appeared
Battle 425:
Gigglypuff IV: Bigtime Breeder Bullshit Bros
Battle 453 contains the HH FO calc into +4 Mudsdale, battle itself looked like Mudsdale thought all horses had Chilling Neigh
Battle 458:
Red Card Chaos, might've spelled trouble otherwise
Battle 483:
TR denial, I'd say "multiple 200IQ plays" but you'd just ask me if Wishiwashi trying to Endeavor Togedemaru counted as one
Battle 490 features Spiritomb attempt three consecutive Pain Splits on Togedemaru, including the one granted by Custap Berry.
Battle 577:
Good thing Protect has only 10pp am I right
Battle 634:
Nailbiter, unlike previous nailbiters I was convinced this was the end of the run before I even knew the lastmon. This is making the video regardless of reader input
Battle 651:
The AI discord was really hyped to see this team on stream, hoping Tasanee would be the one
Battle 752 saw lead Meganium seed Togedemaru as it flinched an Altaria4, then send in nothing with priority or a Quick Claw to stop the sapped little juggernaut.
Battle 761:
Nailbiter, see if you can spot the thing I realised I should've done in hindsight. I was also convinced this was one untimely RNG away from a loss. Definitely being recorded
Battle 800:
TR hilariously denied, "the thing" happens, edge of your seat action
Battle 811:
Looked more nailbiter than it wound up being, but this team could've been even nastier
Battle 829:
Some enemies defied fairly well established expectations and the battle became tricky
Battle 907, Cobalion/Raikou/Regigias/Suicune sees all three run their Protect sets but use it only when I'm not attacking them, and this went leisurely punished.
Battle 938:
Nailbiter, I think a miss probably mattered
Battle 950:
Those leads!
Battle 951:
TR... Denied?
Battle 991 versus Xio with a mean looking Shiinotic/Sylveon/Primarina/Mawile, and putting Audino at -2 from the start made me think this was going to go a lot worse than it did.
Battle 994:
Nailbiter, made a needless misplay with the right intent
Battle 1,000 is uneventful but mandatory, right?
Special Thanks:
-SadisticMystic and Eisenherz for their invaluable lookup tools, which were used constantly until I was comfortable enough to pilot on my own once again.
-JustinTR for playing FEAR alongside me, sharing in grief with annoying POS and indirectly keeping me motivated to play when I had the time.
-Chrom x Lissa or Gigginox as I prefer, for running the team that lead to this adventure.
-Discord chums for following along at times and engaging in all the banter.
Submitting an ongoing streak of 1000 wins in Ultra Moon Super Doubles! Once my BDSP streak was finished, I thought I would be done with facilities for a long while. I was dragged back in shortly after Repto above started his own FEAR streak. I was getting the itch to return to the Tree and so I grabbed my 3DS and booted up Ultra Moon and began preparing. The team went through several iterations before finally getting to this variant. I had been slapping random stuff in the back to see what would work. At first, I wasn't seriously considering anything substantial but I wanted to get something decent. Let's go over the different team versions.
The first two versions of the teams used the exact same lineup but there was a minor change between the two. Version 1 featured Wide Guard on Araquanid but was quickly changed to Lunge to have a secondary Bug STAB. Araquanid doesn't really have the best coverage options and honestly, it's non-Water and Bug attacks are pretty weak. So I went with Liquidation+dual Bug STAB. Xurkitree, on the other hand, was an Iron Ball set both times. It was quite strong and would snowball pretty hard if it was allowed. However, the backline struggled a bit. Mostly with the Grass/Ghosts in the Tree. Trevenant and Gourgeist were tough opponents to take down and while I did manage to get past them on some occasions, they started to prove to be too much. v1 died early on in the 60s, while v2 made it to the 300s before finally puttering out.
The next version saw a shakeup of the backline. Stak and Mega Camel were slapped on without much thought. Stak had shown promise before and I've been wanting to use Mega Camel again. The team handled the Ghosts a little better. However, there was very little defensive synergy in the back. They shared a couple of common weaknesses such as Ground and Water. Primarina4 in particular was such a pain in the ass to handle because it spammed Aqua Jet on Togedemaru. It also had the Waterium Z which made switching into it scary as well. There were a couple of other things that prove to be difficult to handle. Jellicent3 became a huge issue because it liked to turn off Trick Room and then use Water Spout. Whittling it down was hard as well because it carries Recover. This version of the team didn't last very long as it died somewhere in the 100s.
I kept Stak because I still liked it a lot but decided Mega Camel was not the way to go. I quickly replaced it with another Mega I was thinking about, Slowbro. It seemed fine at first, but Mega Bro just couldn't seem to cut it. It shared Dark and Ghost weaknesses with Dusclops, so it was hard to switch it in with Clops if I needed to. Plus, it just didn't seem to be doing enough damage a lot of the time. I was rather disappointed. Stak also had this problem of being pretty weak if it couldn't get a Beast Boost going. Also, having to rely on Rock Slide's accuracy was scary. Wide Lens did help patch that, but I saw two misses on this very short streak. On a 99% accurate move! Insane. This team didn't actually lose, I just forfeited the streak as I just wasn't feeling it after that.
This is only really called the final version because I haven't made any changes to it since running it. I don't think it's perfect, but it's been working out the best compared to the other teams. Let's go over it.
First off, the EVs are taken from Eppie's streak where it can allegedly live every Z move in the Tree. This is true for non-crit Z-moves of course, but we have precautions for those. Anyway, Dusclops is quite simple. It's our Trick Room setter, duh. It ends up being quite bulky thanks to the Eviolite and can do decent chip damage if needed with Night Shade. Paired with Togedemaru, they become a killing machine as Endeavor+Night Shade or Endeavor+Brick Break can KO most of the vast Tree roster. There is some stuff that can live, things like random Sitrus Berry carriers or Toucannon (which I hate). A cool thing about Dusclops is that it can fill the last moveslot with a lot of different options. I had considered Ally Switch there but ultimately went with Foresight. It makes the most sense on a FEAR team and it can help deal with Double Team or Minimize spammers. I did learn on this streak though that Foresight doesn't help with Bright Powder or Lax Incense holders. This was found out when I annoyingly missed Zapdos2 early in the streak after hitting it with a Foresight. Bright Powder, you are my worst enemy.
Dusclops isn't the perfect Trick Room setter though. While the purpose of the lead is to draw attacks on the Level 1 bait, Dusclops still baited quite a lot of attacks. Namely Dark Pulses or Shadow Balls. I had started to click Fake Out on dangerous stuff that carried these moves. Obviously, not everything could be hit by this. Dangerous Ghosts like Chandelure or Gengar made this very difficult. And if they lead with another Fake Out, I had to be careful. Dusclops also attracted a lot of Sucker Punches. The most annoying one being Mega Mawile. That lil dude hurts. There was also random strong attacks that went into Clops constantly. It was theorized in the Facilities Discord that the AI may not see the Eviolite calcs and had more of a chance to hit Dusclops. I'm starting to think this may be the case. Anyway, Dusclops is bulky enough that it's hard to deny it from setting TR. Flinching from random Rock Slides or Dark Pulses is obviously bad though.
One thing I do love about Dusclops though is Frisk. This ability has been fantastic for being able to scout enemy leads and allowing me to plan accordingly. Also being able to expect the random Zoroark has been pretty fantastic as well. With Frisk+Sturdy lead, enemy Trace users also don't get anything too useful which was nice. Being a Ghost also means Dusclops is able to set off Trick Room without being hit by Fake Outs. There is only one Scrappy Fake Out user in the Tree and that's Kangaskhan, which will Mega Evolve when it's first seen. Of course, if the enemy has Mega'd something else than Kang has a chance to hit that Scrappy Fake Out, but this has not happened at all. Dusclops isn't a perfect setter but it is quite reliable thanks to its bulk.
Togedemaru @ Berry Juice
Ability: Sturdy
Level: 1
EVs: 100 SpD
IVs: xx/xx/xx/xx/31/xx
Careful Nature
- Fake Out
- Endeavor
- Helping Hand
- Spiky Shield
Our FEAR bait! Togedemaru is probably the BEST FEAR Pokemon out there. Great typing, Fake Out, AND it's cute? Sign me the hell up! There isn't really anything new I can say about Togedemaru except that it's incredibly reliable with its attack baiting. With the SturdyJuice combo, it can take up to 3 hits which allows it to Endeavor down plenty of targets. First up, the typing. Steel/Electric is fantastic as it means Togedemaru is immune to Sand chip, poison, and paralysis. The AI loves to try and paralyze your Pokemon if it sees you're faster and obviously, a Level 1 Togedemaru under TR will be seen as incredibly fast. As was mentioned in Repto's post above, Helping Hand is probably one of the best filler moves to have on this lil guy. Both Incineroar and Gastro really appreciate it when they need it and it gives Togedemaru something to do if it's ever out and TR is expired.
Sitrus Berry holders sometimes won't die to the Endeavor+Night Shade combo. I found that if they have more than 155HP, they will recover too much HP to die to Night Shade after being Endeavor'd to 12. Also, if the opponent has more than 200HP, then Endeavor+Night Shade will never kill. I think Suicune and Umbreon are the only Sitrus Berry holders that have that much HP though. Because of this, most Sitrus Berry holders are left alone until there's no more opponents. This can backfire sometimes depending on the user, but nothing too detrimental has happened along the way.
One minor thing you may have noticed is the 100 SpD EVs. This is another thing taken from Eppie's team. With Dusclops' spread, and the 100 SpD EVs on Toge, this forces Porygon2 and Porygon-Z to get an Attack boost if they roll Download as their ability. This is just a minor optimization but I think it's well worth it for Clops+Maru. I don't think the Careful Nature or 31 SpD is needed exactly, but I decided to breed for that anyway just to be safe.
Incineroar @ Assault Vest
Ability: Intimidate
Level: 50
EVs: 236 HP / 252 Atk / 20 SpD
IVs: 31/31/31/xx/31/0
Brave Nature
- Fake Out
- Flare Blitz
- Knock Off
- Low Kick
Next up, we have VGC's favourite: Incineroar! I really wanted to avoid using this as both Repto and Chrom x Lissa had used it to great success already. But I gave in after the many failed attempts noted above. This was a great idea obviously, as Incineroar has been pretty fantastic. It's not the strongest Pokemon but its Flare Blitzes still pack a punch. Knock Off has been fantastic as well, being able to remove scary items and also act as an alternative to Flare Blitz if I don't want to take the recoil. Darkest Lariat isn't needed here as I have Foresight for Evasion spammers. Low Kick is probably the least clicked move on the entire team but I felt there really wasn't much else that fit on this team. It has its targets, but that list is very small. One thing I don't really enjoy about Incineroar is the Speed. 58 is pretty slow, but sometimes it just isn't slow enough. There's plenty of things that can "outslow" Incin as well as speed tie with it. Snorlax, Rhyperior, Toxapex, Slowbro and Slowking... just to name a few. Obviously, this isn't a huge issue. Incineroar usually comes in when TR is about to expire or already has expired.
The main thing I love about Incin though, is the backline Fake Out support it offers. If I ever need to have Gastro or Clops finish something off, Fake Out can help achieve that. If I need another Trick Room? Fake Out can help with that also. It's a pretty powerful tool to have and I value it a lot. The Assault Vest was great for tanking enemy Focus Blasts or other random Special attacks that would go Incin's way. Intimidate was very valuable in weakening physical threats as well.
I love this dumb sea slug. Storm Drain has been absolutely wonderful. It completely stops the AI from using its Water attacks as long as Gastro is on the field. Jellicent3 spamming Water Spout? Bring in Gastro. Greninja3 threatening a Water Shuriken? Bring in Gastro. Primarina4 or Golisopod4 spamming Aqua Jet? Bring in Gastro. It's been great at being able to slurp up these attacks and use the SpA boost to its advantage. This isn't perfect though as sometimes, the AI can be unpredictable. Greninja3, in particular, sometimes likes to use Rock Slide or U-turn which is annoying. But whatever. Turning off Jellicent3's Water Spout is also great as that thing can be a menace for the team if left alive.
Aside from Storm Drain shenanigans, Gastro has been amazing at cleaning up stuff when it needs to. It's usually my go-to when Togedemaru or Dusclops die and I have some Trick Room turns left. Earth Power is the most clicked move by far as it does good damage to a lot of the Tree roster. Scald is nice for the things Earth Power can't hit. The burn chance is nice too. Ice Beam is just general coverage but it handles the stuff it can handle. Grasses and Dragons are the main targets. Protect was just a filler I put here but it's been clicked a couple of times. There were some situations where I considered replacing it with something like Sludge Bomb or even Clear Smog. Sludge Bomb for more potential coverage, Clear Smog for removing enemy stat boosts if needed. But I figured neither were really needed so I kept Protect. It's come in handy in certain situations which is good at least. Oh also, pink Gastro is superior to blue Gastro. I will not say anything further.
The team plays pretty similarly to every FEAR team. Spiky Shield (or Fake Out if one the opponents is dangerous), set Trick Room, and go wild. Sometimes, the Tree likes to throw wrenches into your plans and things can go wrong. Like Repto, I have a "Kill On Sight" List as well that usually needs to be followed or bad things can happen.
Regigigas, Gothitelle, Ampharos, etc
Confusion BS mainly. Gigas is especially dangerous on the Male Sightseer rosters as it can lead with stuff like Mold Breaker Haxorus/Rampardos which obviously ignore Togedemaru's Sturdy. Gothitelle4 has a Bright Powder so flinching it isn't always guaranteed but it's pretty rare so missing doesn't come up too often. As for Ampharos, I flinch it regardless if it's the Mega set or not.
Articuno12, Glaceon
Articuno set 1 and 2 are the dangerous Articunos and should be dealt with almost immediately. Set 1 has Hail while Set 2 has Mind Read+Sheer Cold. It should be noted that Set 2 also carries Ice Shard and has a high chance of using that when Toge's out. I still kill it regardless. Glaceon's pretty annoying too as set 3 has Hail like Articuno1. Glaceon4, however, carries a Bright Powder and Detect. If I end up Frisking the Bright Powder, sometimes I just leave it there to remove the partners first. Blizzard spam is still bad though so be cautious.
Mold Breaker stuff
Always pay attention to ability activations!!!! Mold Breaker ignores Sturdy which means they have to die immediately. Mega Gyarados will sometimes use Dragon Dance instead of straight up killing Toge (found this out when I targeted something next to it once) but obviously this isn't guaranteed. Haxorus3 carries a Dragonium Z so it needs to flinched if you see it roll Mold Breaker as Spiky Shield won't block the Devastating Drake. Pinsir4 is a Scarf set that also carries Guillotine. Most of the time, it will use Close Combat or EQ but there is the rare chance it will try to OHKO you and of course, Mold Breaker will ignore Sturdy and murder Togedemaru. Most of the other Mold Breakers aren't too bad if they're next to something that isn't as dangerous. Also, I haven't seen it yet but double Mold Breaker would be terrible and I hope no one ever has to see it.
Mud Bomb/Muddy Water users
Thankfully, there's only a few of these guys past 40. Vaporeon3 and Goodra3 usually warrant an auto kill because of Muddy Water, while Blissey4 and Gastrodon3 carry Mud Bomb. I hate having to risk accuracy drops so I tend to take these guys out when they show up. Depending on what leads next to them, I like to flinch them too with Fake Out. Blissey4 has higher priority to flinch because it also carries Minimize. Before 40, Goodra1, Clawitzer1, and Lickilicky1 also have Muddy Water.
Thunder Wave BS
When Trick Room is up, these guys will try to paralyze anything that can be paralyzed. This mostly includes Rotom appliances, legendary trios, and Latias34. I'm sure there's others but these are the main ones. Oh also, Nuzzle can be annoying too. This is carried by Togedemaru3 and Raichu2 past 40. Before 40, Togedemaru1 also has it.
In addition to "The Hit List", there's also some additional threats that don't usually warrant an auto kill but should be considered if the situation calls for it.
Priority stuff
It should be noted that if the opponent has a priority move and Togedemaru is out, they have an incredibly high chance of clicking it. It's not guaranteed so they're not usually on a need to remove list but should be played around and dealt with when needed. Sucker Punch users, however, don't tend to spam the move as much. Probably because the AI doesn't see it as priority move? Or maybe it takes into account whether you have status moves in your set or not. Who knows. Of the Sucker Punch users, Mega Kangaskhan is one of the most dangerous as Parental Bond allows it to hit twice. Dusclops is also a bit of a Sucker Punch magnet sometimes so they don't always go into Togedemaru.
Ghosts
Yep, just "Ghosts". A lot of the Ghosts that exist in the Tree are annoying because you can't Endeavor them and they tend to target Dusclops a lot. Chandelure34 and Gengar4 are among the most dangerous as they have powerful Shadow Balls. There's a couple of other that are pretty bad. Jellicent3 loves to spam Water Spout and turn off Trick Room when you set it up. Dhelmise4 uses Phantom Force so much. I'd say the same about set 3, but it tends to Brick Break Togedemaru more. Probably because of the Expert Belt. Gourgeist4 is another Phantom Forcer. Mimikyu is a little shit that requires you to hit it once before you can actually damage it. Incineroar usually beats it pretty easily but having to spend a turn breaking the Disguise sucks. Plus, Mimi4 has a Rocky Helmet so Incin takes a lot of recoil if you choose to Flare Blitz.
Another scary Ghost is Alolan Marowak2. Shadow Bone HURTS and can OHKO Dusclops on a crit. Thankfully, it's pretty rare and doesn't show up a lot. But when it does, I tend to worry. A lot. Palossand4 is another annoyance. This one carries a Weakness Policy and has HP/SpD. Night Shade+Scald can't 2HKO. It also outslows Incin which means there's a chance you may have to deal with it outside of TR. Menace. Obviously, Foresight makes Ghosts no longer immune to Normal and Fighting attacks, but it's pretty awkward to use since Togedemaru will go before everything in Trick Room. Using Foresight this way shouldn't be a priority. Depending on the Ghost, sometimes it's best to leave them for last.
Flinch Stuff
This list mostly includes Rock Slides and Dark Pulse a lot of the time. I don't usually flinch non-Dark Pulse users as their usage of these moves is inconsistent if they know something else that can hit Togedemaru. Earthquake, for example, will take priority and a lot of Rock Slide users also carry Earthquake. There are a few Extrasensory stuff in the Tree but I don't usually see them target Dusclops. King's Rock/Razor Claw holders can be annoying too. V2's loss involved Noivern3 flinching Dusclops 3 turns in a row with Dragon Pulse which was awful. But this doesn't happen often, thankfully.
There's also Fake Out to watch out for. All turn 1 Fake Outs from the AI are funneled into Togedemaru thankfully, so most of the time it's an easy Spiky Shield. Just pray the Fake Out lead doesn't have something dangerous to Dusclops next to it. The only Fake Out user that can hit Dusclops is Kangaskhan. But for that to happen, it has to roll Scrappy and be unable to Mega Evolve. Kang1 does exist, but it stops showing up really early so it isn't really a concern.
Protect and its clones
The AI and its Protect usage is incredibly inconsistent. Sometimes, it likes to use it if the partner has a move that can also hurt it. This isn't exactly guaranteed though, especially if Togedemaru's out. Hell, I've seen the AI even KO its own partner because the partner in question didn't click Protect. Still though, Protect users should be dealt with caution as an ill-timed Protect can perfectly waste a turn and sometimes cause issues. Such as losing Togedemaru early or whatever.
Contact Abilities
This list includes Flame Body, Rough Skin, and Effect Spore. Of course, there's still Static and Poison Point but those don't affect Togedemaru so they aren't high priority. Anyway, I try to leave the Flame Body havers last. This can still put Togedemaru as risk of taking a burn from a random Flamethrower or Fire Blast, but sometimes, you can't stop everything. Effect Spore is carried by Breloom, Amoonguss, and Shiinotic. They all also carry Spore. As a result, I tend to flinch them if they lead. Surprisingly, I've only had Effect Spore actually activate once this entire run. As for Rough Skin, Sharpedo and Garchomp can have this. I try to leave these guys last but Sharpedo4 has Dark Pulse which makes it pretty dangerous. Garchomp3 will usually lock EQ but sometimes, it also locks Fire Fang which is.... pretty funny actually. Anyway, only take it out with Toge if you absolutely have to.
Workers Dan and Omar
Pretty scary roster shared by these two. I've had a couple of close calls with them, especially recently.
The Sightseers - Alice, Chen, Ezra, and Christian
Yes, both the male and female Sightseer pairs are hell to fight. Males pack a lot of powerful physical attackers. Conk4 loves to spam Mach Punch and outslows both backliners if it doesn't Fling its Iron Ball. Oh yeah, it likes to do that to Dusclops as well sometimes. It hurts. Haxorus3 can roll Mold Breaker which can destroy Togedemaru behind Protect with Devastating Drake. Backline Rampardos and Archeops are annoying because you don't know if they'll be choiced or just Protect to waste your turn. And finally, Regigigas. Confuse Ray+Thunder Wave BS means this thing should be Public Enemy #1 if you see it. The female Sightseers pack Special Attackers. They're not so bad but they can carry both Chandelure and Gengar. These two can end Dusclops' dreams if they decide to randomly double up. I fear the day they show up as a lead together.
OHKO Stuff
Now thankfully, the AI doesn't always target Dusclops here. But they should still be your Fake Out target if they ever lead. They can be scary and they don't care if they destroy your hopes and dreams. They can eat FEAR for breakfast. Well. Not Togedemaru because Sturdy blocks their attempts at least.... The scariest OHKO users are probably Walrein4 and Glalie3. Walrein because, well, it's Walrein. Its only attacking moves are Fissure and Sheer Cold and it has RestTalk. It's also quite bulky and carries a Lax Incense. Glalie3 on the other hand, has Sheer Cold, Substitute, and Protect. In addition to those, it can also have Inner Focus which means Fake Out won't work on it. The only thing you can do is pray it misses if it clicks Sheer Cold on Dusclops.
Priority Spammers
These guys are just kinda annoying. They're not usually a threat unless they prevent you from taking out a threat. This happens a lot when facing Alice/Chen and they have Conk4 out. That thing LOVES to Mach Punch and can ruin your day if it chooses to hit Togedemaru 3 times with Mach Punch. Most of the sets that carry priority though, can be scouted with Frisk. Except Flareon since both sets 3 and 4 carry a Firium Z and only one has Quick Attack.
Taunt, Status, etc
There is quite a lot of Taunt running around in the Battle Tree. Since our setter is Dusclops and not Aromatisse, we actually have to watch out for those. Usually, a Fake Out is the best answer for these guys if they lead. Frisk can help sniff them out if the Pokemon isn't guaranteed to carry Taunt. Bisharp4, however, is a Taunt user that can't always be Faked Out. If Bisharp doesn't reveal Pressure when it comes in, it's not really worth it to go for the Fake Out as there will be a 50% chance it rolled Inner Focus. This makes it kinda tough to deal with. It's pretty inconsistent in its Taunt choices as well. Tornadus4 and Thundurus4 carry Prankster Taunt but thankfully, Fake Out stops them in their tracks if they lead.
As for Status stuff, this includes things like random Confusion or things that can put you to sleep. I included the Shrooms in the Effect Spore section, but they're also included here since they also carry Spore. Using Fake Out on them can be risky as they can put Togedemaru to sleep with Effect Spore. Plus, Amoonguss3 carries a Rocky Helmet. Most of the Rotom appliances also carry either Wisp or Thunder Wave. I have noticed a lot of random Ice Beams going into Dusclops along the way and they are quite scary. In fact, one of the replays below features Clops getting frozen by a random Blizzard from Suicune. Sometimes, you can't really do much about stuff like that. Be cautious.
Now, let's share some Replays! Since this is the Battle Tree, I actually have some Battle Videos saved and recorded for YouTube upload. I apologize if the quality isn't too good. I also apologize for any background noise heard in the videos. Finally, I normally play with animations off like any sane person playing facilities. However, they are turned on here just for the replays.
Battle 210 vs Guzma - Bisharp4 / Honchkrow4 / Toxicroak4 / Golisopod3
A lovely Taunt targeting Dusclops makes this Guzma fight so much worse. In this battle, I made a switch to Incineroar on turn 2 but that was pretty risky as Bisharp could have had Defiant. Thankfully, it didn't so the switch was unpunished. Still, this was dangerous.
Battle 923 vs Ace Trainer Hashim - Samurott3 / Walrein4 / Vikavolt4 / Pinsir4
An incredibly weird battle that featured a t1 Fake Out miss and a Sheer Cold OHKO on Dusclops. This battle was saved by some of the weirdest AI moments I've ever seen in the Battle Tree. At some point in this battle, Samurott randomly switches out to Vikavolt when it was never hit by anything and it wasn't locked into an unusable move. It also spent the last two turns of this battle refusing to use Waterfall or Aqua Jet on Incineroar even though Gastrodon was dead.
Returning to the Tree took a bit of an adjustment, but I'm glad to be back and hopefully after a brief break, I can continue climbing.
I would like to give a special shoutout to Eisenherz and SilverstarStream for EisenCalc, as well as SadisticMystic for the Battle Tree Filter (and Eisen again for EisenCalc's Lookup tool!). Another shoutout to Repto for making the journey enjoyable with his own FEARventures.
No such worries this time though, I think the other records still provide enough perspective overall that yes this is a team that can seriously contend with this Tower, and that I actually managed to prove this. I will probably keep playing with this team on and off sometimes because I like having fun, but I do not think I can expect myself to shoot any higher than this. If it happens I'll let you know; but overall rn I'm gonna try to find unexpected depths in other teams to explore. Hf all!
Sometimes I do this thing where I hint about any future endeavours but at the same time am so vague and noncommittal about my phrasing that I don't actually set any expectations that I might fail to meet or end up not having any time to pursue. While obviously frivolous and something probably no one except me really found interesting, Archie actually ended up being the first one of said "teams", but my real plan was something much bigger. This attempt is realistically years overdue; I think some people have wanted to see it since the games first released, and to an extent I suppose it always was my "responsibility" to pick up that torch. I also need to apologise in advance, since this is the first time I've actually gone and done it and broken the character limit on one of my streak reports.
In any case, I'm of course talking about the best Maison team that I cooked up all those years ago, team Marathon, and the question of how it would actually hold up in the Tree, with its substantially increased power level and less predictable Trainer rosters. On some level, it was something I never could help but wonder about myself of course, but I've also come across some (already years-old at the time) posts in this very thread asking the same thing. Such interest has always been surprising to me; I am not gonna try to downplay anything about the achievement of that run from eight and a half years ago of course, but at the same time I've been open about how I've never considered myself even close to being one of the great minds of the Maison, so it was easy to feel like other people would consider Marathon's record simply a good run by a team that someone who talks too much for her own good lucked into, and that ultimately it would be in one ear out the other to most people.
Clearly nothing happened at the time though, because like I mentioned elsewhere I really was away from battle "towers" almost entirely between late 2016 and mid 2022. I've been open that towards the end of generation 6 I felt seriously conflicted about the absurd amount of time needed to put in noteworthy achievements, which already led to a level of burnout att; a lot more things made for additional entry barriers to get over, namely the uprooting of the IRC channel I'd been used to, the scarily strong roster with one Pokemon in particular I'd sworn I'd never play a metagame with it allowed (you know I find a Pokemon the most bullshit thing ever conceived if it gets new user mari posting in the OU forum; ironically it was not actually one of my main worries when I finally got here for real), as well as simply the fact that dynamics change a whole lot when you enter a new facility with a number of high records under your belt rather than just trying to clear the in-game achievements and that internalised pressure is the worst thing ever. This was also the time I was busier than ever with my article responsibilities here, and before I knew it this game and community had moved on without me. My Omega Ruby cart and with it my Maison Pokemon dying so I couldn't even dabble with my comfort teams anymore for the time being was the last nail in the coffin, and yea it really took until getting them back via Bank and the nostalgia rushes it allowed me to do until I touched battle facilities again much at all; and when I did get around to trying some non-Maison stuff, I had a lot planned of course, where I actually already used this team to beat Red like a year ago but the "serious" attempt had to wait in line behind some other things.
I'm not gonna bury the lede any further on how this attempt actually went and would rather just get it out of the way now rather than do any sort of rhetorical buildup, both because I'm not really satisfied with it but also because the raw number should not be the primary focus of this post of course. Posting a streak of 638 wins in Super Singles in Ultra Moon.
Let's get into the team again, and rather than letting my old posts do the talking I think it's better if I discussed it from the ground up, to have all the context in one place (skip to the next post for the Tree stuff!!). Before we get to the actual sets, as people may know, this team is Mega Gyarados / Aegislash / Gliscor, and technically it started off as an outgrowth of (then-unnamed) Dance of the Dawn, Greninja / Mega Scizor / Gliscor, my first successful singles team. This got 810 wins on its first big run (as well as 1476 and 1430-something runs after my Marathon streak), but as I was trying to improve on this to reach 1k in my third format after triples and doubles, it kept getting owned by backup Gyarados4 (specially defensive DD + Rest, for those not familiar with Maison sets). I have since solved that matchup, but at the time I thought it was a hard counter, so this team had to go if I wanted a shot at 1k. I did believe I'd optimised a team consisting of these three Pokemon as far as I could (no more tailored or well-rounded moveslot options available, trading specially defensive Gliscor for a fast one would trade the Gyarados matchup for several different ones), so I started off by swapping out Scizor for Aegislash, a Pokemon with a similar role that hopefully would spark some new ideas.
Now this is where I should butt in to say that I don't actually consider this a Gyarados team and by extension think it's fallacious to use this team's track record as evidence that Gyarados is viable for long streaks in general (like people would do with e.g. Dragonite teams). The Aegislash + Gliscor core is what makes this team tick, and Gyarados was simply the perfect Pokemon for making sure their potential wasn't gonna go to waste. It's a bit like how I don't consider Dance of the Dawn a Greninja team either; with the way that one plays, Scizor and Gliscor are the setup mons, and Greninja "supports" them by sniping threats from lead that they can't handle themselves without prior setup. As far as Marathon goes, the main thing that caught my eye of the Greninja / Aegislash / Gliscor trio was the raw defensive potency of the Aegislash + Gliscor combo, where I obviously had plenty of experience with Gliscor's absurdity on the Greninja team, was also familiar enough with what Aegislash is capable of through the leaderboard as well as my own efforts with an earlier, bad team, and spotted some baseline defensive synergy between them as well with Gliscor's Ground immunity and Aegislash's Ice resistance. When wondering why this by all accounts incredible-looking core was actually entirely absent from the leaderboard, their defensive synergy was actually what it looped back to; with Dragonite having been Aegislash's best partner so far, the obvious holes Gliscor would leave there should be obvious, not to even mention how the existence of Pokemon like Froslass and Protean Greninja would all but invalidate Aegislash as a sole response to Ice as well. The specific synergy of Aegislash + Gliscor also left a few question marks, since for how good it looked they still left four types unaccounted for, and on top of Fire / Water / Ghost / Dark being some pretty difficult types to respond to, the possibility of hax made Aegislash hardly the most reliable answer to Ice as well. VaporeonIce still managed to get 500+ with Dragonite / Aegislash / Gliscor, which at the very least gave me high hopes that a third team member with the right defensive synergy would be able to take these guys far. So, let's take a look at type synergy first, and I actually spotted Water / Dark as a perfect complement in terms of covering the types Aegislash / Gliscor would miss out on and finding its weaknesses covered by them in return. Now where had we seen that one before lol, but unfortunately Gyarados4 still existed to make Greninja's life hell, and swapping in Aegislash for Scizor had only made for an even weaker configuration here. Still, it was worth keeping in mind, and then my mind also drifted to the Dragonite / Aegislash defensive synergy, which as we know is mainly characterised by their ability to stall EdgeQuake through their respective resistances/immunities and also weaknesses. The reason why Dragonite could perform this role was of course its Flying typing, and theoretically most Pokemon sharing this would be able to fill this same niche. So, there we had the profile we were looking for for the most synergistic third team member.
- Water / Dark typing;
- Flying typing for a genuine Ground immunity and Rock weakness, bonus points for an Electric weakness as well to give Gliscor easier entry;
- ability to beat Gyarados4.
and anyone reading this two years before this team materialised rightfully would have pointed out that this was an impossibility and was gonna require two Pokemon to cover. That is of course correct, but a certain Generation 6 mechanic gave me the ability to compress both these Pokemon into the same slot, and thus Mega Gyarados was added, who in hindsight is actually kind of the OG Tera sweeper and typing this out makes me cry a lot inside because holy heck the range of options to play with that mechanic would've given us had we not been cheated this gen. Of course thin stat spread and lack of truly strong moves mean that Mega Gyarados brings a lot less to the table than e.g. Dragonite as a self-sufficient sweeper, and I wasn't even close to properly understanding the sheer potential of what I had gotten my hands on, but at the very least I saw it bringing enough specific qualities to the table to give it a serious shot and see if it could put up a respectable number or make for a story that people would enjoy reading.
The resulting team was by all accounts formidable, and in a nutshell the way it operates is that it uses the combination of Intimidate, King's Shield, Aegislash / Gliscor's defensive typings, and Gliscor's PP stalling capabilities to neuter opposing leads enough for Gyarados to set up on, with Aegislash or Gliscor setups (yes a Gliscor with an active Substitute is an auto-checkmate even for most Veterans, as I knew from the Greninja team) as plan B / C / whatever. (Mega) Gyarados's defensive profile, as intended, provides the icing on the cake by enabling turn 1 setup in matchups where employing Aegislash / Gliscor would be a bad idea, from Volcarona to Suicune to several others. These setups can take all shapes and sizes; EdgeQuake stalling against the likes of Carracosta, where Gyarados can set up on a -6 resisted move or simply a status move, is of course the default case, but King's Shield can come into play here as well against foes whose preferred move against Aegislash is not Earthquake but a contact move, where Floatzel4 is the first one that comes to mind. Gliscor on the other hand handles a different spectrum of foes, accomplishing feats like stalling Latios1 entirely out of attacking moves so Gyarados can set up on fruitless Calm Minds. There are many cases where the two of them join forces as well, e.g. with Gliscor stalling Gengar4 out of Shadow Ball and going back to Gyarados on Struggle after switch-stalling Sludge Bomb and Thunderbolt on top of that. Fun fact, I added this strategy to the Greninja team's repertoire when I went back to it after the Marathon runs rather than just one-shotting lead Gengar with Dark Pulse; remember what I said about Greninja "supporting" Scizor/Gliscor by sniping threats they can't handle, not the other way around? Mega Gyarados's typing opens up options even further; e.g. post-Mega all it takes for Jynx4 to turn into a free setup is simply letting Aegislash wait out its Blizzard PP first, after which it can't touch subbed Gyarados at all anymore, and of course Intimidate can also support Aegislash and Gliscor's setup, e.g. trivialising the Golurk4 matchup by stopping it from breaking Gliscor's Substitutes. There certainly were exceptions that warranted an immediate OHKO, in some cases with Mega Evolving as well and/or risk of hax, such as Chandelure4, but overall this team has the toolkit to come out on top with at least some sort of setup versus at least 95% of opposing leads, and leads where it has significant risk of losing momentum are very few and far between. Of course, see here for my full notes from way back when; it's not fully complete, and several of these strategies I optimised further later down the line, but it was still helpful when I didn't remember any strategies properly on this run.
I'm (hopefully) making it sound simple enough here, but the level of depth this team's toolkit has to it is absurd, and it took me quite a while to properly learn to use it while playing. I'm specifically reminded of not even using Intimidate switches a lot at first, until an early attempt lost to Barbaracle4 with an inopportune backup. The way it went was basically that my approach involved using Mega Evolution + Sub to absorb its Stone Edge, going to Gliscor on the baited Cross Chop, and stalling it down, which is all well and good until Swampert4 comes out next, and I don't have enough PP left to stall its moves properly and of course can't actually beat it with Gliscor directly because Rest exists. Intimidate switches on the other hand would actually have kept it under control, and I could actually have preserved base Gyara by having Aegislash absorb the Stone Edge instead, since Gliscor would have tanked a crit Shadow Claw just fine anyway, and bonus points for being able pick up a King's Shield drop along the way this way. Oh well, live and learn, and learn I did. VaporeonIce, with team Growl (real ones knew it before it was named Aegimensey!), and I kind of ended up having the same idea as the same time in terms of the Intimidate shuffler teams, and it was really cool having them side by side on the Maison leaderboard; obviously plenty of people have used his team in here already, and now we can complete the set in gen 7 as well.
I have talked enough about how the team works overall; let's get to the actual sets.
Jormungand (Gyarados) @ Gyaradosite
Ability: Intimidate -> Mold Breaker
Nature: Adamant
IVs: 31/31/31/x/31/31
EVs: 84 HP / 212 Atk / 36 Def / 4 SpD / 172 Spe
- Dragon Dance
- Substitute
- Waterfall
- Crunch
Move-wise, this should probably be the only set. Water / Dark STAB had great coverage in the Maison, without significant gaps where coverage moves would be worth the lack of power and with the ability to handle foes such as Fire-types that Gyarados was supposed to take off Aegiscor's plate, Dragon Dance is the reason to use Gyarados, and Substitute also does Substitute things like always; not only does it block Wisps and other status moves on lead, it also helps setting up on crippled enemies without risking crits. Intimidate is a good part of what makes this team tick in ways that I covered earlier, and the EV spread probably deserves a few words. For the most part, it focuses on offense; when turskain and I were workshopping it, there wasn't really any investment to help handling threats like Greninja at all, and the power in general also makes sense when Gyarados is tasked with quickly removing a lot of threatening Fire-types on lead; one calc in particular that I remember from 2015 is the +0 OHKO on Chandelure4, which can be a major bitch with Infiltrator Wisp. The Speed investment got the jump on Starmie at +1 to negate it as a threat if it showed up as a backup, and the defensive EVs allowed Gyarados to handle Garchomp4 on lead reliably enough by tanking a max roll +1 Earthquake and two rolls of Rough Skin damage as I 2HKO it with +1 Waterfall.
The Tree's expanded roster does add a number of threats and typings that resist Water / Dark coverage, where most are still handled by Aegislash and Gliscor like usual; the biggest ones on the list are probably Whimsicott and Primarina, where the first one for the most part is still handled by Aegiscor but can very much annoy them with status moves and Infiltrator, and the latter we'll uh. get to later. The EV spread is technically outdated in the sense that Garchomp4 was removed from the roster and replaced with a far less threatening Mega set, but we still have a bunch of relevant calcs:
+1 212+ Atk Mega Gyarados Crunch vs. 0 HP / 0 Def Mega Charizard Y: 153-181 (100 - 118.3%) -- guaranteed OHKO
+2 212+ Atk Mega Gyarados Crunch vs. 0 HP / 0 Def Mega Charizard X: 153-181 (100 - 118.3%) -- guaranteed OHKO
+1 252 Atk Tough Claws Mega Charizard X Dragon Rush vs. 84 HP / 32 Def Mega Gyarados: 151-178 (83.4 - 98.3%) -- guaranteed 2HKO
+1 252 Atk Gyarados Earthquake vs. 84 HP / 32 Def Mega Gyarados: 75-89 (41.4 - 49.2%) -- guaranteed 3HKO (I'll explain later but tl;dr Gyarados34 is a major threat and strategy here would give it a free shot at going for the 2HKO)
Hindsight validation of course is the easiest thing ever, but hopefully this at least is enough to confirm that the overall direction of "offensive spread with mild physical defense investment" still has the right idea.
Naegling (Aegislash) @ Leftovers
Ability: Stance Change
Nature: Brave
IVs: 31/31/31/x/31/29
EVs: 252 HP / 252 Atk / 4 SpD
Stats: 71 Spe
- Swords Dance
- King's Shield
- Shadow Sneak
- Iron Head
For the most part, StanceDance Aegislash was always going to be a natural fit here, and we all know how it works, but it does have a few interesting things worth highlighting. The first one is obviously the Speed stat, for which I'll go grab the Maison Speed tiers this was based on first, based off turskain's breakdown for Draegininja II. I'm truncating this to remove the sets that don't appear after battle 40 and italicising the uncommon ones (i.e. other than set 4 + legendaries), sorry if I'm removing any scattered ones from the weather specialists or whatever.
The main one to focus on here was Scrafty, which was one I was worried about when building this team, because Gyarados can't set up on Bulk Up users and it has a lot of PP, so at the very least halving Payback's power would be great for allowing Aegislash to set up on it comfortably enough. Other relevant points included outspeeding Regice4 and its Thunder Wave (as well as other set's Thunderbolt paralysis), leaving 71 and 77 as viable options, and out of the remaining options I felt like underspeeding Tyranitar4 with its Focus Sash was also wise in case anything had happened to leave Gliscor unavailable. I don't really agree that Gliscor's ability to technically stall Scrafty is enough to make this Speed benchmark obsolete ftr; with Protect taken into account, Scrafty actually has more than 32 PP to stall as is, and that's not even getting into scenarios where it comes in second after the well has already been drained a bit. While even in those situations it's entirely possible to still play around it unless Gliscor PP is really low, I really don't think that's a good reason to leave myself without a plan B to it.
So that's that on the Speed front, and Iron Head is the other obvious thing that sticks out. I did use to run Sacred Sword here at first because everyone did, but I don't think I actually had a good reason for it, nor do its specific properties actually benefit this team. "Perfect neutral coverage" is overstated when Aegislash is not this team's main sweeper and Shadow Sneak is the main sweeping tool while Iron Head provides a harder neutral hit than Sacred Sword does, and its ability to negate stat boosts also doesn't really matter when every defensive booster including evasion spammers is stalled down anyways, either through Toxic or through Intimidate switches. At the same time, this team used to have major trouble with a select handful of targets, namely Yanmega4, Togekiss4, Noivern4, and (Taunt) Tornadus4, all of which have one thing in common: they resist Sacred Sword but are wiped off the screen by Iron Head, at which point you certainly start to wonder what Sacred Sword actually does for your team and realise this is one of the most straightforward upgrades you've ever done. I have not really kept my eye out for new targets that Sacred Sword misses out on (though Primarina is a big one), but honestly that's because Iron Head being default is so second nature to me now that the comparison is just not on my mind at all anymore unless I actively try to think about it. Steel's coverage for sweeping is just fine, the more powerful neutral hit is more convenient than ever too (more on that later!), and bulky-enough Flying-types with quirky defensive typings are still relevant enough that idk at all about having Fighting as my main nuke. Even with Yanmega4 barely existing anymore and Togekiss4 having been heavily nerfed.
Specially defensive Gliscor, pioneered by Jumpman for Kangliscune, happily used by me as well on Dance of the Dawn, and just as incredible on here. There is really no reason at all to reconsider the specially defensive focus here; "slow Gliscor is good because it can maintain a Sub more easily", any physically defensive focus would have been major overkill with this team in general, and with the way this team's defensive synergy works and the threats that fall on Gliscor to respond to (Electric move users etc) it naturally ends up responding to special attackers. The main nail in the coffin of a fast spread is that a lot of threats it covers are ones it wouldn't be outspeeding with a fast spread anyway, and I do not really want Latios or Azelf or even Liepard to just run through this team without a second thought!
Movewise, SubToxic was the "only" set when I first played this team and the Bulldoze set didn't exist yet, but I would not want to change it regardless. Maybe it's a matter of perspective, but this set seems to change Gliscor's role into more of a dedicated crippler, and for the sake of keeping this team's toolkit as deep as possible that's not the direction I want to take; I find it really important to preserve Gliscor's ability to actually kill stuff, for which Toxic is of paramount importance. While Toxic's accuracy seems to have been getting more heat lately than it used to, like I mentioned elsewhere, I don't really understand that; Pokemon that actually rely on it here like Gliscor but also Chansey have the defensive profile to usually be able to afford a miss, so its effective accuracy in practice is much closer to the 99% of Wide Lens coverage moves. Now in fairness that is also Maison wisdom to an extent and there actually is a target or two in the Tree where even a single miss is thoroughly inconvenient, but I don't think that takes a whole lot away from everything else (and yes for those I have a plan B as well...). Not like Azelf-3 is gonna care a whole lot about Bulldoze anyways.
I plugged this team into the Tree without any changes at all. I was always gonna do it like this at first for the sake of having a basis and figured I'd do any changes as needed as I came across them, but honestly nothing really happened that would have warranted anything. The only idea that came to mind was taking a single point from Gyarados's Defense and moving it into Speed, to get the jump on Salazzle-3 at +1; I "have to" 2HKO that one regardless because of Sash and it's never a bad thing to come out on top with at least some sort of setup, not to mention that on Trainers that can have both I need to +0 OHKO Salazzle-4 as well to not risk still being outsped anyway by set 3 after a boost. However, the current spread underspeeds Tyranitar-3 by one point, which means that vs Sand Stream variants I can confirm the set via ability activation message order. Given that set 3 is ideally handled by Gyarados (and that underspeeding during a dance party isn't the worst thing ever since it tends to go for double boosts anyway as I KO it) and set 4 is much better suited for Gliscor and Gyarados's matchup here is pretty shaky, this is not exactly an insignificant thing to give up either. For all I know Salazzle could actually be the right enemy to prioritise here fwiw, but overall so far it's felt subjective at best and I've simply chalked it up to "Gyarados's stat spread is so thin that you have to pick and choose between matchups sometimes".
We're done with the history lesson here and ready to get to the real heart of the matter: exactly how did this team survive the generation shift? We all know that the Maison's power level is not as high as it could have been, and the Tree threw that out of the window and made things way harder. In general, there are three main ways in which the Tree is different from the Maison.
- More powerful roster; one criticism of the Maison roster was that it lacked several strong Pokemon, which the Tree made good on. While we're still not seeing the likes of Aegislash (thank Azelf for that btw) and Azumarill, we are dealing with enemies like Jellicent, Amoonguss, Whimsicott, Rotom formes, and the lake pixies now. That is only the tip of the iceberg though, since enemy Mega Evolutions are also a thing now (and they didn't avoid adding Z-Moves I guess), which of course adds a million super-powerful threats to the rotation as is, and with the wallbreaker overload Alola introduced a lot of the new Pokemon are also a threat and a half.
- Set ambiguity; you know what this is, where 90% of non-legendary Trainers in the Maison would exclusively use set 4, the "default" Tree trainer uses both set 3 and set 4. Of course a team like this really wants to know what it's up against exactly to respond properly, so sets that require different counterplay are annoying until they're identified.
- Differences in AI behaviour; for the most part I'm referring to increased switching here, where obvious bad news is obvious for a team with this level of reliance on crippling opposing leads.
Now, for the most part, I should not be saying anything new here to people who actually have dabbled in this place some point in the past eight years of course, but we need a starting point somewhere. I'm not actually sure how to elaborate on the roster in another way than an updated threatlist plus some additional lead notes for some new threats; so, let's do exactly that.
Code:
910 Moltres-1 Modest White Herb Overheat Air Slash Agility Will-O-Wisp Spe/SpA
I'm going through my old Maison lists first and yes this thing still exists and is still a Wisp that I can't dodge, and I can't burn fodder Aegislash either without functionally sacking it outright because lol Overheat; at the very least thanks for White Herb helping identify the set on lead. I don't know if Agility is a buff over Tailwind, for singles at least it feels like it should be because the boost is no longer transient but I'm also not sure if the AI works differently on it? I don't remember its behaviour in the Maison well enough, but I feel like it would use it turn 1 often there a lot while it never did the same here when I saw it, and why would it anyways when it naturally outspeeds, which at least helps with making it more predictable both on turn 1 and turn 2 (since it's never outspeeding on that turn at least). I didn't get a whole lot of bad Moltres-1 run-ins, but I feel like the best option is just Dragon Dancing turn 1; if it uses Air Slash (which seems like it does way more often than would be wise) then okay great just kill it, if it uses Wisp then just DD again to re-secure the OHKO. Either it uses Air Slash and is outsped even harder, or it uses Agility to regain the Speed advantage, but from a damage pov this isn't all that relevant because if it's using Agility it's not using Air Slash of course. Then again I'm not talking from a whole lot of experience here, which I'm quite pleased about of course! Absol4 was the other fast Wisp user I wrote about for the Maison team and I'm very appreciative that they ended up replacing that one with a Dark-type hard countered by Aegislash fsr, but unfortunately it got others to pick up the slack. More on that later...
Code:
758 Skarmory-4 Careful Poisonium Z Spikes Stealth Rock Whirlwind Toxic HP/SpD
Pretty much same story as Maison, a 1v3 countersweep isn't viable here with unknown backups and limited recovery so there's not really anything to do here than just attacking it when it brings out Gyarados or Aegi and hope it dies sooner rather than later. It's made more complicated by Skarmory-3 existing as well every time here rather than just Roller Skaters, but at the very least that one is very hard countered by Aegislash.
The other Defiant user, Bisharp, is easy as hell to KO with Gliscor from behind a Sub—Braviary is in another league. It outspeeds the entire team, cannot be OHKOed by +1 Gyarados, and causes serious trouble if it crits Aegislash. Aegislash 2HKOes it with Iron Head, and it will waste turns on using Tailwind and Giga Impact (which is why set 3 is even probably more threatening lol), but my matchup against this thing is sketchy at best. This is definitely the one threat where Carl's team of Gyarados / Ferrothorn / Gliscor works better than mine heh, can't really bait it into using Superpower with Aegislash.
Both are Substitute fodder when they have Pressure but much less so with Infiltrator. Like in the Maison, Aegislash is the burn fodder here as the most expendable team member, after which Gliscor takes them out instead. Spiritomb-3 slightly complicates this game because obviously you're not going to Gliscor until Aegislash is actually burned and it thoroughly does not mind using Swagger + Psych Up before that, but thankfully +2 Shadow Sneak is hardly tickling Gliscor either.
I'm cutting the Maison throwback short here; the other threats are not exactly invalidated (provided they still exist), and something like Noivern-4 still is very valid as an Infiltrator threat, they're for the most part just not as notable as they used to be anymore with the power creep.
Primarina-4 is a very silly set that almost makes me wonder if a GF dev saw my Maison record and decided this team had to be knocked down a peg. Obvious jokes aside, this matchup is nothing short of comical:
- substantial bulk plus one of the rare defensive typings to actually wall Gyarados's STAB coverage;
- strong STAB moves that Aegislash doesn't take well either, with a Z-Move on top of it that's unpredictable enough timing-wise that I can't reliably bait it into King's Shield either;
- the only sound-based Water STAB move in existence (other than Liquid Voice Hyper Voice which also is Primarina exclusive anyways), and in fact the only non-ate sound-based move in existence that Gliscor is weak to, to shut down any Gliscor funny business (honestly the first two points are fair enough but this is just beyond rude);
- "set variety" to complicate turn 1 plans on top of that, especially without a good way to scout its AI ahead of time before facing it properly (and plausibly losing).
Regardless, the path to victory for both sets involves a KO with +2 Iron Head (seriously take your Sacred Sword elsewhere!), and, to cut stories of AI predictions and scouting and a narrow escape against Prim-3 short, it seems reliable enough at using its Fairy STAB move against Gyarados for both sets. For set 3 in particular, this is, like, fine; use Gliscor to stall Hydro Pump and set up Aegislash, though King's Shield Leftovers recovery is harder to come by here given its propensity to use Baby-Doll Eyes on exactly the wrong turns. Set 4 also gets Gliscor in safely and can drain Blizzard PP (or better yet just click Toxic on a miss to get this thing off my screen asap) as well as, more importantly, bait the Z-Move more reliably with Gliscor's weakness. This gives Aegislash room enough to set up without Z-Move bullshit and freeze risk; I've wondered if going to Aegislash on the final Blizzard instead for lessened chip is the real play here in case it does not actually click the Z button right away against Gliscor, but on top of risking freeze, its lessened reliability in clicking Hydro Vortex against Aegislash probably means I'll just have to try eating those odds with Gliscor.
I'm aware that this is an outplayable strat, but it's reliable /enough/ and I don't have anything better as of right now, and honestly one of my early thoughts while contemplating this team's viability was "massive Primarina-shaped hole, not sure if there's any point at all to giving this an actual shot". All of this context helps me put this matchup in perspective and at the very least means I don't feel the urge to break down and cry when Primarina shows up. In the end this was still the set that I lost to (more on that later etc), and the fact that it had to happen to this one at the very least was a decent way to soften that blow I suppose.
When I saw set 4 on the roster here, the extreme irony with this team's history was obvious; Gliscor is never handling this of course, it also boosts right over Aegislash, and the one move it does not share with my Gyarados is the one that allows it to actually hit mine, while mine is walled pretty hard. So yes this team started off specifically in response to Gyarados4, and it was about to be snapped out of existence by... Gyarados4. My first thought here was honestly that my main out was trying to 3HKO it or whatever while hoping it would keep boosting for the OHKO itself, but bulk and defensive typing make this matchup so lopsided that even then I'd still win only by a single turn, and of course we know that this is not exactly a reliable AI pattern to count on. It took a decently long session of thinking out loud in a close friend's PMs, who thankfully still wants to hang out with me even after that, where I even considered bringing back Sacred Sword (talk about going full ironic circle; too bad the case for Iron Head is even stronger this generation) to figure out the actual answer. The tl;dr is that Crunch is actually affected by King's Shield, and +1 Gyarados has a guaranteed OHKO even on Shield Aegislash. This would enable the following strat, assuming the "they boost for the OHKO" AI pattern:
- go to Aegislash; Gyarados boosts to +0;
- use Iron Head for chip; Gyarados boosts to +1;
- use King's Shield on Crunch; Gyarados back to -1;
- repeat, with additional room for actual setup now.
Now full disclosure, this does not fully work as intended, since Gyarados tends to use Stone Edge on the switch (no complaints there though) and also can and will use Crunch on Aegislash even at -1 or +0, but the most important part, the "safe" King's Shield on the overkill Crunch OHKO, held true; this meant that even in a worst-case scenario, Aegislash was at the very least keeping its Attack boosts in check just fine and also chipped Gyarados substantially to make my own Gyarados's job of finishing it off much easier. Yes this strategy can still lead to a loss with with awkward backups (and almost did at one point vs Accelgor-4 when Aegislash got crit on the turn I was gonna grab an extra SD for a more secure Sneak KO), but it's far better than the turn 1 checkmate I thought it would be, and in practice Aegislash actually would win the majority of the time, so hurrah for that. The final kink to sort out was the presence of Gyarados-3, which my own Gyarados actually does handle easily and should stay in on; thankfully, even switching back and forth to Aegislash is "fine" since it ends with two +0 Gyarados facing off where the AI's always had the Speed advantage anyway, and in practice it often was +0 vs -1 or -2 because the AI is bad at efficient setup. This is also where the earlier calc of avoiding the 2HKO from its +1 Earthquake comes from, in case it does play the early turns perfectly and also boosts for the 2HKO, which is obviously unlikely but hey never know.
Code:
603 Lopunny-3 Jolly Lopunnite Sweet Kiss Fake Out High Jump Kick Ice Punch Atk/Spe
778 Lopunny-4 Jolly Lopunnite High Jump Kick Quick Attack Ice Punch Double Hit Atk/Spe
Full disclosure, I have not actually faced this, but the theoretical threat is obvious enough to warrant highlighting it here and reason to make me feel like "okay if I am gonna have to face this then please either give it to me rfn or just wait until after 1k". I will say it's not as hard counter ish as it appears, since the Intimidate drop helps Gliscor a whole lot, and the same goes for Aegislash, which also can "2HKO" it with King's Shield (shoutouts for having an even HP number lmao). The most annoying part though is that Gyarados actually needs a double DD to outspeed it, and I don't want to predict the AI off pure theory here; specifically I would be very worried about "the AI considers multi-hit moves as having a single hit's Base Power" meaning that set 4 actually uses High Jump Kick on an Aegislash switch, nor do I exactly want to guess set 3 reliably uses Fake Out turn 1. So, that means until further notice the play is just going for the unboosted Waterfall 2HKO, which until confirmation that other options are still viable with AI behaviour does get Lopunny off the field (once again shoutouts Intimidate!) but also leaves me in one of those positions where I kind of have to bank on the backups not being the worst thing ever. +2 OHKO might be viable as well, but set 3 has the possibility of Sweet Kiss to mess with that, and if set 4 does go for Double Hit over HJK, it gets twice as many chances to crit, which does not take out Gyarados but does put it into Quick Attack range. The only counterpoint here is that it's actually better if it's still at full health if things do work out so that I need to bring in Aegislash, since I'd at least get to sneak (haha) in a Swords Dance in between HJK crashes, but I'm rambling. Generally, while Intimidate helps all three of my mons here tremendously, this also turns this one into a "one crit and I may lose" matchup.
Code:
559 Charizard-3 Timid Charizardite Y Heat Wave Solar Beam Air Slash Focus Blast Spe/SpA
734 Charizard-4 Jolly Charizardite X Dragon Rush Flare Blitz Dragon Dance Rock Slide Atk/Spe
The calcs I posted above should have given away that this one was getting a mention here, and it should come as no surprise that, with Red's roster, this was one of the first matchups I tried to theorymon. The overall strategy is non-Mega DD turn 1, Mega Crunch OHKO if it's Charizard-3, Mega DD again if it's set 4 and Mega Crunch OHKO after. For set 3 this is foolproof enough, for set 4 I would be very worried about random Rock Slide flinches (or crits on the first turn, not so much on the turn I MEvo I suppose because if it's using Rock Slide it's not using DD and I get the Speed advantage to finish it off after), but idk if there's anything to really do about it. Thankfully so far it's actually preferred to just go for +2 for the "OHKO" and gets one-shot in the process while I actually don't take damage at all, but yea the potential is there and seems undeniable enough in the long run. And of course it's also the typical early MEvo scenario that you want to avoid and might make bad backups much more difficult to get around. But idk, given the downright mean case of "set ambiguity" we have here I'm just glad to have a path around it at all under normal circumstances, and I really appreciate that Gyarados (barely) has the stat spread and ability (seriously one millionth shoutout to that one, it's so good) to handle them both.
Very major case of Alola's fixation on slow, bulky wallbreakers, and set 3 in particular is a nightmare; too strong to set up on for Gyarados (not always technically true I suppose but it is with hax in the picture, and it certainly is with set 4's existence), Fire Blast to roast Aegislash, and Hyper Voice to make Gliscor stalling a non-starter, as if Quick Claw wasn't enough for that as is. The silver lining is that Fire Blast really is the only thing Aegislash is afraid of here, so getting rid of that one is the logical approach with how atrocious Gyarados / Gliscor's matchups here remain. The way to do it is good old stalling with King's Shield and switches between Aegislash and Gyarados, and given how much I hate letting Gyarados take any damage during these turns let alone risk a burn not once but twice it should be obvious that this is not remotely an optimal strategy; we'll just have to roll with it I guess though. Once this is gone, it's a free +6 Aegislash I suppose at least, plus most of the time (but not always... more on that later, as usual!) also a backup foolishly facetanking a +6 Iron Head given that it can't actually touch Aegislash anymore once Dragon Pulse is gone as well. Set 4 is technically more benign and is at least countered enough by Aegislash (and set up on by Gliscor once Draco Meteor crits are ruled out), but the fact that I'm genuinely happy to eat the paralysis should be a testament to how insane set 3 is.
Code:
144 Turtonator-3 Lonely Normalium Z Head Smash Explosion Overheat Dragon Claw HP/Atk
198 Turtonator-4 Timid Sitrus Berry Shell Smash Fire Blast Dragon Pulse Flash Cannon Spe/SpA Turtonator
I despise this thing, it seems to suck in competitive but between a very tricky typing both defensively and offensively, a very "Alola" stat spread (that notably lets it tank +6 Aegislash's attacks jesus christ i hate it here), and two massively different sets I still don't have a reliable way of handling it from lead. Having to guess between Head Smash and Shell Smash means Mega + DD on turn 1 is the only choice I think, where set 4 just gets KOed at that point, though the Dragon Pulse damage is substantial, the resulting position is extremely suboptimal, and the risk of a second Smash means idk if going for a second boost for a better position for the backups is all that wise either. Set 3 needs a crit to do serious damage here, but its natural bulk and HP investment means that the result is still quite... idk: +1 212+ Atk Mega Gyarados Waterfall vs. 252 HP / 0- Def Turtonator: 109-129 (65.3 - 77.2%) -- guaranteed 2HKO +2 212+ Atk Mega Gyarados Waterfall vs. 252 HP / 0- Def Turtonator: 144-171 (86.2 - 102.4%) -- 12.5% chance to OHKO . For context the +2 calc is actually a guaranteed KO after Head Smash recoil except on an absolutely minimum roll, but with crit risks I'm not quite sure if going for that rather than just a +1 2HKO is all that wise either. I thought I'd hate facing it as a backup as well, but at least with a healthy-enough +6 Aegislash I'm safe than it would seem; there is no real reason not to use King's Shield since the only way to take advantage of it is set 4's Shell Smash which actually turns +6 (and even +4) Sneak from a roll into a guaranteed OHKO, and set 3 is much much much easier to play around if it's actually confirmed.
Code:
312 Ninetales-1 Modest Passho Berry Will-O-Wisp Hex Confuse Ray Flame Burst Spe/SpA
662 Ninetales-3 Timid Wide Lens Fire Blast Dark Pulse Hypnosis Energy Ball Spe/SpA
Hey, there we have more fast status users lol, and they at least found new ways to make Ninetales a threat than just the silly anti-Water overkill of bulk investment plus Passho plus Drought. This is one of those cases where I can't really Do anything other than just DD and hope for the best; thankfully the best is not super hard to hope for, since set 1 Wisp opens up the Gliscor switch, and set 2 Hypnosis is less bad than it appears because Ninetales is actually not strong enough to win here without crits or sp. def drops even on a 3 turn sleep (seriously 252 SpA Ninetales Energy Ball vs. 84 HP / 4 SpD Gyarados: 38-45 (21 - 24.9%) -- guaranteed 5HKO 252 SpA Ninetales Fire Blast vs. 84 HP / 4 SpD Gyarados in Sun: 51-61 (28.2 - 33.7%) -- 0.5% chance to 3HKO is some comedy level shit). Set 1 using Confuse Ray first and actually getting a bunch of self-hit turns and waiting a few turns on using Wisp is the main "real" threat here, but obvious subtext is obvious, and overall outcomes here are not substantially worse than e.g. a Flame Body burn vs lead Volcarona.
I never thought the lake pixies would actually be the most threatening legendary trio in here but hey always a good time to be surprised I suppose, turns out they can be quite brutal when they can and will run literally whatever they want and most Trainers using them also can run any of their sets. I can talk about Uxie and Mesprit a bit more later, but Azelf is the main one I was worried about just losing to at some point. The fact that three of the sets run Electric moves means a turn 1 Gliscor switch is the only choice, where sets 2 and 4 are in all fairness not substantially more difficult to handle than a run-of-the-mill Latios set, but set 3's Nasty Plot is not funny. In terms of natural power I can just barely afford Toxic stalling it, but "Wide Lens Toxic" does not apply here, and I really do only get a single shot. Thankfully a miss does not equal an auto-loss here, but it does limit my options to PP stalling both Psyshock and Energy Ball, waiting for it to switch out, and just hoping the backups aren't too bad to handle with the resulting PP drain while also keeping Gliscor alive so that Azelf doesn't just resume spamming boosted Thunderbolts when it comes back in anyway.
All of that is not even mentioning Azelf-1, which has always used Explosion turn 1, which does ~a little over half to Gliscor after Intimidate. That is all well and good in terms of getting it off the field I suppose, but it does leave me with a naked Gliscor on the field that also is no longer capable of handling friends like Latios, not to mention that a crit if it ever happens one-shots it and turns legendary Electrics from free wins into unfathomable headaches.
Like I alluded to, this threat list is not really comprehensive, and there's some more examples that are obvious threats in theory but I have not run into (Fluffy Bewear-3...) where a purely theorymonned writeup would just be common sense; furthermore, though, this was my very first attempt at Tree singles (Maison experience with this team carrying me hard here! should be very obvious but it's important to spell it out given the circumstances), and 639 battles is not quite where it should be at as a sample size for an in-depth screening of every threat ever. If there's any other ones that I should elaborate on then lmk and I will, odds are that I simply forgot about it but it's just as likely I actually never saw them yet or had to wing my strategy when I came across them and didn't get around to optimising anything yet.
Mawile-34: go to Gliscor, 2HKO from behind a Sub when given the opportunity to do so (i.e. Sucker Punch / SD turns). If set 4 uses up Sucker Punch too quick you can use Aegislash to drop its Attack down further and guarantee an intact Sub on the turn you take it down, for set 3 you'll realistically have to take the L of not having a Substitute active when it goes down but oh well it be like that sometimes and at least you only need a single free turn to take it down period.
Salamence-34: go to Aegislash, Intimidate / KS stall Earthquake on set 4 and set up after. For set 3 use Gyarados and King's Shield to stall Fire Blast PP and bait a lot of Draco Meteor drops before setting up, use Protect loops to dodge as many Fire Blasts on the switch back as possible (getting out of this with a fully fresh Gyarados is not uncommon at all).
Garchomp-34: go to Aegislash, on set 3 just KS / SD until it switches out and you can hammer the switch-in. For set 4, stall its Earthquake PP with your Ground immunities and King's Shield (assuming it always keeps Sandstorm active, you can get out of this with substantial PP conservation and a fully healthy Gyarados if you make the loop Aegi switch -> King's Shield -> Gliscor switch -> Aegi switch -> Gyarados switch -> repeat, this also goes for Steelix-4 and other Sandstorm users); then, once Stone Edge and Dragon Claw are also gone, hammer the switch-in with +6 Iron Head.
Uxie-1234: go to Gliscor; Toxic stall sets 3 and 4, force set 1 into a Rest twice, go back to Gyarados on the first sleep turn, use Sub and Mega Gyarados's typing to safely get a Sub and a few DDs, keeping in mind that (ime, I can imagine it being different if it gets a bunch of boosts early but you can just Mega + Sub the next turn if so) it prefers TWave against Gyarados and you can postpone the switch out by holding off on Mega until after you have a Sub up. Set 2 either do a similar switch back to Gyarados if you're not at risk of a Future Sight hit or just keep Gliscor's Sub active until it U-turns / Mementoes out. Have not faced set 2 in particular sorry.
Toucannon-34: go to Gliscor, Toxic, and you can realistically keep a Sub active here because -1 Beak Blast doesn't break it and you get enough room in later turns if you play around Roost properly. If it comes in as a backup, you have the option of throwing in Gyarados once to get that Intimidate drop after all.
Vikavolt-34: Gliscor food, for set 3 Sub / Protect stall Flash Cannon on the switch, for set 4 use Aegislash to switch-stall Bug Buzz on Mud Shot, Sub on the switch out.
Toxapex-34: Mega Gyarados actually sets up on this, needs +4 for a guaranteed OHKO on set 3 and +5 or +6 for a guaranteed-enough 2HKO on fully boosted set 4, which is easy enough to get taking the wasted turns from Baneful Bunker into account.
Mudsdale-34: Aegislash; use the Garchomp-4 switch pattern to stall Earthquake on set 4, use Gliscor to take down set 3 while maintaining a Sub because Mud Slap makes Aegislash setup pointless.
Oranguru-34: Gliscor; for set 4 Sub / Protect through one Trick Room cycle and Toxic stall it after like Trevenant4 in the Maison, for set 3 switch into Thunder, stall Psychic, 3HKO with Earthquake from behind a Sub.
Golisopod-34: Aegislash food, you even have the Speed advantage so no need to worry about set 4 Sucker Punch.
Palossand-34: go to Gliscor, stall Shadow Ball, switch-stall with Aegislash until everything not named Earth Power is gone, Sub on the switch out.
Komala-34: Aegislash; switch-stall Earthquake on set 3, on set 4 just set up directly.
Mimikyu-34: +1 Mega Waterfall OHKO because Mold Breaker goes through Disguise I love this. Set 4 is Gliscor food on Trainers that don't use both.
Bruxish-34: set up Mega Gyarados, you "need" +2 for Z-Rain Dance set 3 but can easily get more.
Dhelmise-34: Gliscor
Kommo-1234: Aegislash; set up on sets 2-4, use Gliscor to switch-stall Taunt on set 1 and start switching to Gyarados instead once Dragon Tail is gone so that the battle gets reset properly when it switches out.
That is all for the updated roster, with once again the caveat that it's very much not complete, but I need to keep scope in check at least a little bit and don't have the same number of battles worth of experience that I did with the Maison.
Next I need to talk about how set ambiguity affects this team, which is also a little difficult to analyse effectively. The overall worry here is that the uncertainty which set you're facing forces a worst of both worlds situation where the "safest" response to both forces damage of suboptimal positioning while actually knowing the set properly would have trivialised the matchup. I will lead off right away and say that for the vast majority of Pokemon, this team just kind of does not care and that the Pokemon do a fine job covering both slots just fine; examples are hard, but you can just take a look at the Alola lead notes above and honestly even the threatlist to an extent, and you'll notice that almost all the time the turn 1 response is clear enough and the cases where turn 1 is purely a scout are rarer than one would expect. Overall this is mostly by virtue of their defensive profile, and as much as it "makes sense" that Aegislash is a logical turn 1 Mega Kangaskhan response just by virtue of Gyarados's neutrality to its go-to moves and its ability to provide a natural response to the main attack Kangaskhan can hurt Aegislash with, or that Rotom formes are obviously going for their Electric STAB move versus Gyarados (and thankfully are all slow and get outsped by Gliscor!) it goes beyond that, as can also be seen from the Salamence matchup. Even with two massively different sets like that, the team's defensive synergy is so good that a) the initial turn is straightforward enough because the Pokemon's instinctive responses to Gyarados are similar enough, b) they are capable of stalling more type combos than just Rock / Ground. Sometimes the Tree helps us out as well in that area; think Vaporeon-4 losing Signal Beam, which was the only thing holding Mega Gyarados back from setting up safely on both sets at the same time and in the Maison (granted we were facing "any set" here) meant my turn 1 was something insane like going to Aegislash on probable Ice move, going to Gliscor on set 4's Shadow Ball, and for set 3 actually going back to Gyarados and hard switching to Gliscor on Yawn, since taking Muddy Water on the switch would complicate setup. Somehow this was actually reliable, but I'm not complaining that I don't have to do it anymore.
I want to highlight this team's lack of linearity as another helpful factor here as well. Let's take a look at the following old friends.
The Maison strategies here were straightforward enough; for Alakazam, you click Mega Evolution and Substitute and Dragon Dance on the switch, and Starmie was one of the team's major headaches but falls to a straight Mega Crunch which unfortunately is one of the least hax-susceptible strategies here. The Tree throws a wrench into both, though. Alakazam-3 is obviously not forced out in the same way, so the turn 2 here would just have to be an immediate Crunch (or forgoing Substitute entirely and just using Crunch turn 1; basically choosing between getting at least the +1 versus set 4 but also losing 25% versus set 3 or just ending up with a naked 100% Mega Gyarados versus both), it Traces Intimidate on top of that to make the turn 2 position even worse, not to mention that Gyarados is in that weight range where Grass Knot is a viable option so it might be funny and use that one as well. Starmie-3 is similar, with Sash to thwart the turn 1 Crunch route and having Power Gem and Dazzling Gleam for hard hits against regular and Mega Gyarados alike. Thankfully Gyarados was never this team's only option against these, and going to Aegislash instead is a viable option as well here, which handles them... not as cleanly as could have been done had Alakazam-4 been confirmed out of the gate, but it gets the job done. To an extent, it's actually really funny; the next example does not entirely fit into this category, but think Latios1, where the Maison strategy involved PP stalling its attacking moves and setting up Gyarados, which of course is cut off right now with the changed AI behaviour, so we'll have to resort to Toxic stalling instead. Which is... exactly what I used to do in the Maison before I found the Gyarados setup path here. Yes updated rosters and mechanics cutting off the optimised routes sucks, but when the less "advanced" strats are still right where they used to be, we can still make do.
678 Aerodactyl-3 Adamant Aerodactylite Sky Drop Iron Head Fire Fang Thunder Fang HP/Atk
853 Aerodactyl-4 Jolly Choice Band Stone Edge Aerial Ace Earthquake Crunch Atk/Spe
115 Greninja-3 Jolly King's Rock Water Shuriken Rock Slide Grass Knot U-turn Atk/Spe
167 Greninja-4 Modest Wide Lens Hydro Pump Dark Pulse Blizzard Extrasensory Spe/SpA
Of course, there are still exceptions, when the sets are actually genuinely different. The Aerodactyl case is actually funny, and both sets are obviously very nonthreatening in their own right versus this team, but the straightforward Maison strat of an Aegislash switch on Stone Edge actually risks Thunder Fang paralysis here (as well as Fire Fang burn if I choose to set up Aegislash from this point or go to Gliscor), while switching Gliscor into Thunder Fang actually stings if I switch it into Stone Edge instead, where I can actually lose Gliscor entirely on a Stone Edge crit on my Sub turn and trying to set up Aegislash only gets me to +2 before it switches out. What do I do here? My current gut is defaulting to the Aegislash strat and going back to Gyara for a Gliscor setup if I guess wrong and assuming that "surely" I never get both status ailments at the same time, but you tell me lol. Greninja is similar, where the Maison strat involved setting up Mega Gyarados to +3 because set 4 runs through Aegiscor like a hot knife through butter, but here instead we get set 3 using Grass Knot on the Mega turn then (worst case, but it's happened) U-turning out on the Aegislash switch. Fun. I'll stop rambling, but the lake pixies deserve a mention here as well, when Aegislash is actually my turn 1 response against Mesprit because somehow it's the most legit middle ground between Thunder and Flame Orb + Fling (though thankfully that set has defaulted to Facade so far fsr). Once again, I hate it here.
Then, the final point and the one that led fellow Marathon enthusiast tobiuo to declare this team as probably unviable in the Tree, namely the changed AI behaviour. Overall, the AI is very much the same as in the Maison, down to some very specific but appreciated quirks such as still using Pain Split against Substitute and still only using Curse six times, which I tested and posted about in the Maison thread att and is of course very appreciated for Intimidate shuffling. The main thing that has changed is switching, and when I started playing and asked people on Discord exactly how it worked, no one felt they had enough experience in singles to give me a confident answer, so I've had to figure out a lot of the more nuanced things on my own. Apologies if anything here is not fully on the mark, and I'm (intentionally) repeating a bunch of common knowledge here as well, but tmk these are roughly the scenarios where the AI can (but is not guaranteed to) switch out:
- A Pokemon is Choice locked into a move that cannot directly damage the enemy. This one existed in the Maison as well;
- The AI has a Pokemon in reserve with an ability-based immunity to the move its active Pokemon was hit by on the most recent turn; e.g. it can switch in a Levitate user if your last used move was Earthquake (which means you should avoid using Protect on Gliscor the turn after Earthquake if you don't have a Substitute active). This is absolute and is taken entirely at face value; e.g. the switch will still trigger if your Earthquake user was actually KOed last turn, and it will even do so if its currently active Pokemon is a Levitate user as well, which made for some fun times when I got to Toxic an Uxie-3 switch-in after lead Latios-3 waited a turn on switching out, and I actually managed to abuse this to force Latios back in by using Earthquake on the dead turn where (slower) Uxie managed to break my Sub in an ultimately failed attempt to come out on top vs both with my Sub still active. This behaviour overall existed in the Maison as well, idk if the Levitate user shuffling did but I can't say I ever actually tried either.
- Moving to mechanics new to the Tree, the AI has a Pokemon in reserve with a type-based resistance or immunity to the move its active Pokemon was hit by on the most recent turn that also is capable of hitting your current active Pokemon super effectively, assuming it works the same way it does in the BDSP Tower; think the AI switching Magnezone in on Suicune the turn after it uses Ice Beam. This one also is absolute and at face value (think AI partner Wally switching Magnezone into Red's Blastoise's Earthquake as a "resist switch" after Fake Out) and similarly disregards whether your current active Pokemon is actually the one that used the move in question.
- Now here's the big one: rather than only in situations like Latios locked into Thunder vs Gliscor, the AI now switches out period when out of damaging moves, Choice lock or not. This includes the aforementioned Latios switching out of Aegislash or Gliscor when it's out of Draco Meteor (and coming back in to use Psychic later), but also when it's regularly out of attacking moves, like Rampardos-4 having been stalled out of everything by Gyarados + Aegislash or Magnezone-4 switching out of Gliscor when Flash Cannon and Tri Attack are gone.
-- This also seems to only apply to sets that have attacking moves in the first place, and it seems to disregard the usability of status moves entirely. For instance, Weezing-4 with its silly double status stall set still lets me set up six Dragon Dances and a Sub just the same as eight and a half years ago, and lead Tauros-4 and Torterra-4 actually have always switched out of Gyarados on lead due to having only Earthquake as an attacking move, despite Gyarados not having a Sub up to protect against their status moves and Tauros in particular having a faster Toxic.
-- For these switches in particular, they also do not seem to follow the usual pattern of basing their switch-in on which of their Pokemon has the move with the highest effective Base Power versus your current Pokemon; rather, they simply switch to the second Pokemon on their lineup, regardless of whether it's "optimal" by their logic.
With the way this team plays, the final point is of course the one most worth worrying about, since yes it cuts out Gyarados setups on enemies that only have status/setup moves or Earthquake left, which is a prominent line of play for this team in the Maison. Not to mention, if getting there involved a substantial amount of Gliscor stalling, then yes you still have the enemy lead neutered but instead of a free +6 Gyarados your reward is another enemy for Gliscor to take on, with a substantially drained PP well on top of that.
That is the theory; in practice, I want to draw attention again to this team's depth and cases like the aforementioned Latios-1 matchup. Just like that case, the truth is that a lot of Gyarados setups are more advanced strats where a more direct default strat was also available and still is available, and while yes of course taking down Latios-1 with a Subbed Gliscor is a less ideal outcome than a +6 Gyarados, it's still a very serviceable one that rarely has a path to a loss outside of specific combinations of hax and bad backups. Not all Gyarados setups are affected either; the ones where it actually always was plan A for the most part are on damaging moves such as Carracosta's -6 Waterfall and Snorlax's -6 Crunch and of course are just as possible as always, and for ones where I was relying on Earthquake being left alone I can also change the team's strat around a bit. E.g. Nidoking-4 with Maison mechanics would come down to Gliscor stalling away most non-Earthquake PP for a Gyarados setup, but we can just as easily actually preserve the other ones for an Aegislash setup. This in fact also allows us to use the new switch mechanics to our advantage in a way that I've alluded to in some threatlist entries and lead notes, because if we get to set up all the way and it's no skin off our backs to wait out the remaining attacking PP, we get to smash the switch-in with a +6 Iron Head for free (assuming the AI does not wait a turn ofc but oh well can't have them all), and believe me it feels good if we manage to catch a bulky Fire-type or a Focus Sash user. The final instance worth discussing is cases where we indeed don't get to set up at all here, e.g. cases where in the Maison we'd stall down all the way to Struggle; Gengar4 would be my go-to though ofc Gliscor has to KO it directly these days, but some Taunt users are valid examples as well, such as Toxicroak-4 and Sawk-4. In the Maison we'd just be switching back and forth as they constantly tried and failed to hit my Pokemon, and any Taunt we're just switching out of right away of course, until Struggle begins and Gyarados snatches a Sub and a couple boosts. In the Tree, we don't get to this point, and ultimately we get into a loop where they use their remaining attacking PP on the switch to Aegislash and Taunt PP on the switch back to Gyarados; at some point, they will switch out of Aegislash as I go to Gyarados, and because they're faster and switch out first, I even still get off an Intimidate on the switch-in. Is this remotely a game-winning setup, no of course not but one way or another one enemy Pokemon has been taken out of the picture for good, and I used pretty much the exact same "reset the battle versus a lead that does not shut me down" strategies versus Lapras and Mismagius leads in the Maison, so clearly I've always found it a valid strat.
That's enough of that I think, and I haven't even posted any battle videos yet! Once again, we live in a post-3DS Wi-Fi society, so camera recordings will have to, where I'm also including pictures of the VS recorder as confirmation of the numbers (sorry my hideous face probably reflects in the screen during pre-video transitions and I would like to keep that to myself!)
Battle #639: vs. Tamah
The lead here is Primarina, and the switch to Gliscor confirms the dreaded set 4 on top of that. I follow my strat as outlined above, but when Primarina gets a crit to take down Aegislash on the turn I'm supposed to take it down, suddenly the situation is extremely bad. The only out that I'm seeing at this point is sacrifice Gliscor for a Toxic on Primarina to get it into +1 Gyarados's 2HKO range and hopefully get some very bad backups or Waterfall flinches along the way, but Swampert-4 obviously rules that out, and that's the end of that.
Obvious hax here is obvious and I don't want to get into statistical doomer mode too much here, but I do want to highlight the timing of the crit real quick; had it happened on the switch or SD turn instead, I would have been forced to go for a +2 suicide Sneak here or taken my chances with Iron Head + Shadow Sneak, which realistically would have gotten Primarina into Gliscor KO range and allowed me to keep both Gyarados and Gliscor alive. With the backups in question (Blissey as the last mon, confirmed Blissey-4 because Swampert was sent out before it), this actually would have won, with Gliscor being able to PP stall Waterfall and with that Tamah's last way of hitting two functionally status-immune Flying-types, one of which also would have boosted all over what was left of Swampert. I am not saying this to be a sore loser, the loss was fair by "Tower" standards, and my Primarina matchup is shaky enough that I don't get to complain it went wrong at some point; rather, this proves that this team really was only gonna go down with substantial bad luck even against an enemy seemingly designed to hard counter it. I'll always carry "forgot to Mega Evolve against Noivern" with me, but all things considered this was a very honourable loss where there's little if anything at all that I get to hold against myself, and there are worse ways for a run like this to end.
Battle #495: vs. Ezra
I warstoried this one on Discord because it was one of like three pre-500 battles where I actually felt the run was gonna be over. It started off with the Drampa-3 lead that I wrote about earlier, where during the switch-stall the first Fire Blast burns Gyarados but the second misses, and while I obviously would have preferred two hits over the burn it's nothing we get to complain about in the grand scheme of things. I set up with Aegislash until Dragon Pulse PP is gone, planning to blast the switch-in off the screen, but Drampa actually stays in, oh well. Out comes everyone's favourite resident asshole moth, Volcarona, and my "boost once and OHKO" answer Gyarados is burned.
Now the history here is that I lost my 810 streak with the Greninja team because Volcarona came out vs Scizor at the wrong time, and though a sack into a Gliscor stall would have been a pretty safe path to victory, I got completely paranoid about it boosting on Scizor, hard switched Gliscor into a Heat Wave burn, and it all went downhill from there. So at the very least I was not going to assume this time it would boost on a Blade Aegislash. The burned Gyarados still makes matters unfortunate, and I do not actually want to sack Aegislash if it can be remotely helped, but I also realise that Shield Aegislash actually is not in +0 Heat Wave KO range, opening the door to an Iron Head + Shadow Sneak KO after I use King's Shield. I go for exactly that, only for Volcarona to use Overheat, confirming set 3.
Now anything that is not Volcarona-4 is always good news, but at the same time I'll need to change strategies again, since while tanking Heat Wave would have worked, Aegislash actually is still in Overheat KO range even now. I am not remotely going to risk a rogue QD on a Gliscor switch, especially with White Herb allowing two full-power uses of Overheat, but I do realise that a burned Gyarados is still a Gyarados and still has Intimidate, taking the White Herb out of the equation, which is easily the superior play at this point; burning the Herb on this turn would be the full extent of what an Aegislash sack would accomplish here anyways, if Volcarona does use Overheat here I get it to -2 in one fell swoop and majorly reduce its threat level, if it boosts I still mitigate the threat of the two full-power Overheat uses, and of course with the current game state Gyarados is the preferred fodder over Aegislash anyways. I go to Gyarados, Intimidate breaks the Herb, and Volcarona uses... Protect.
Okay, this is not the middle ground I expected and actually keeps it at +0 for now. More pressingly, with a crippled Gyarados being its opposition I don't want it to boost right over it and become too hard to handle for Gliscor after all (did I mention that I actually would have preferred that second Fire Blast hit now to get Gyarados off the field quicker?), so I decide to keep it under pressure as much as I can and boost with Gyarados, since there's no timeline where it's not boosting itself on this turn anyway. Both boost, and next turn I click Waterfall with Gyarados, since this is a range where +1 vs +2 doesn't actually matter at all, and if actually just winning with Gyarados outright is what it takes to stop it from boosting out of control then so be it I suppose. Volcarona boosts again to get the Speed advantage, which is expected, and I don't exactly care either; Gyarados is not in +2 Overheat range, so a third boost, at which point Gyarados just KOes it, is its logical next move.
Except it actually uses Protect, which would not be too bad if not for the extra round of burn damage turning that poor Overheat roll into a pretty assured KO. Volcarona goes for it next turn and gets it, but anticlimactically this still knocks it down to +0 and paves the safe way for Gliscor that Gyarados had been trying to get all along; thankfully Bug Buzz sucks even worse against Gyarados I suppose. Gliscor Toxic stalls Volcarona down, and lastmon Latios is not a major concern with Gliscor's Sub active; Item Clause had removed set 2 from the running, set 3 would have locked into Draco Meteor, and sets 1 (which turns out to be the one I'm facing) and 4 are straightforward enough Toxic targets here. In hindsight I don't think I ever actually was in real danger of losing this battle, but it certainly gave me a mental workout that I felt was worth sharing!
Battle #324: vs. Hashim
I wanted to at least include one video of the more advanced new strats I had to come up with as well; Gyarados-4 was an obvious choice, and while I certainly was not unlucky with its move choices here, this actually is a video of Aegislash setting up on it to +6 and sweeping.
I will say that I get why someone using Bulldoze + Double Team Gliscor would think this team is unviable in the Tree; once again not getting into any "which one is truly better" debates, but if I understand it properly the whole point of that set is to give up Gliscor's potential of actually killing enemies to unlock additional setup situations that don't actually work here anymore, so yes of course at that point the team does get nerfed into the ground here. This less linear version of the team that preserves the more self-sufficient and less pure crippler Gliscor and has not tripled down on Gyarados setup being the only way is affected to a much lesser degree. Yes it does have a few tools removed from its kit, and it absolutely needs to be played in a different way than in generation 6, but overall it remains a team with a solid default line of play with a very deep toolkit that has a million ways past a lot of threatening leads and most of the time does come out on top with some sort of setup. I don't think it's quite as strong as in the Maison, where it felt genuinely unbeatable outside of very specific combinations of problematic leads + hax + problematic backups, and the increased volatility should have already been made clear from other stuff I wrote in this novel. However, the AI switch mechanics are little more than a ripple in the pond, and it's entirely due to power creep in the roster plus select cases of set ambiguity muddying good lines of play. Or was it actually given a decisive nerf by the existence of my old starter, who as it turns out was not calling out to me in a friendly way but actually luring me like a siren to my destruction?
Incredible coincidences aside, I do need to give a final answer to the question of whether it has survived the transition to the Tree; and yes it's still viable and yes it keeps its own identity; Primarina, while consistently beatable enough despite initial expectations, realistically is the main culprit by far holding it back from being ironclad for two generations in a row; and... yes I do think it's capable of reaching four digits again with literally 0 edits compared to its Maison counterpart and I don't like that I wasn't able to give it those. My goal when I started playing was nothing more than to answer the question of whether the team was still viable (read: prove that it actually was), and once it was clear that it was still good I did have "500" in mind as something concrete and significant to show for it so I wouldn't have to just be like "yea it still runs like a charm take my word for it please!" As for 1k, that threshold's magical status is obvious, but since you never know when That One Battle is going to happen for real and a fresh attempt would have taken me at least a month of buckling down pretty hard, I was always gonna be able to live with missing out on it; still, I think my exact words upon losing were "I was serious that 1k was not an outright goal but I did not mean it like this either".
Maybe that's just how it has to be though. When all is said and done, I do think there is a passing grade here, especially since this is the first and only attempt so this was done without any attempts at minmaxing my luck, so in that sense I pulled off what I set out to do; any renewed runs would be full-on attempts at running up the leaderboard, which I'm not sure is in anyone's best interest right now. Obviously I was away for the entirety of the time when this facility was current generation so I really have no context on collective theorymon and other happenings, and maybe I'm just spoiled from the Maison board, but where that one has a highly substantial level of team diversity even in the higher echelons (several shades of Dragon Dance leads, Mega Kangaskhan i.e. non-Lum/Substitute setup, multiple variants of Durant, even lead Greninja and Mega Slowbro all in the 1k+ tier... seriously where do I sign up??), the Tree seems to have had a lot less of that, going off all the repeats of certain proven teams even in the higher ranks. In general I just feel like a full-on drop-in of a successful Maison team is not what this facility needs right now, and that players (I would say "I" but more on that later!) can contribute more by tapping deeper into the possibilities this generation has to offer, even if that realistically won't be bringing any 1k runs. It's entirely possible that I'm armchairing with this though; while Marathon managed to deal just fine with (almost) everything from the gen 7 roster because it's awesome, the power level here really was pretty suffocating overall, and if what really happened was that people just found themselves unable to respond effectively to the ambiguous sets plus Mega Salamence plus Mega Kangaskhan plus Mega Gyarados plus Mega Lopunny plus both Mega Charizards (I feel so validated for saying in gen 6 that giving these to the AI was going to be a terrible idea...), then I don't think I can hold it against the community overall for just sorta giving up at some point, not that I had any really fleshed-out teams pop into my head during my run but the vague ideas I got surely went nowhere fast. At least both Maison Intimidate shuffler teams are on the board now, since Growl/Aegimensey apparently being the only one people felt was worth playing with, let alone so much more, really didn't make sense to me based off their gen 6 track records.
And, well, "in anyone's best interest" includes me as well. The suffocating power level made this run pretty stressful at times (to the point where taking breaks was actually counterproductive for anxiety management; at least when I was actually playing my streak was advancing without the remaining threats I was worried about showing up). I absolutely did have fun with this overall, don't get me wrong, it was great getting these guys out again (if this team had remained unnamed during gen 6 it probably would have been Team Forgotten Sons now), and it was as rewarding as ever to figure out ways around the new threats and even improve a bunch of my gen 6 strats; e.g. while I used to just go for +2 Iron Head on Regice-2 whenever it would reveal itself, I realised that, once Ice Beam is gone, I can use switches and King's Shield to stall Thunderbolt as well while preserving a handful of Icy Wind PP for Gyarados to set up on, which of course would have worked even better would Regice stay in while spamming Rest but was certainly appreciated here. Also I definitely remember being less good at maintaining a Sub against slower enemies (the trick is to either exploit and read slower recovery moves effectively or get up a Sub turn 5 on a favourable roll such as Rotom formes' coverage moves so that you can Protect turn 6 or just try again if they do get the roll; 96,5% odds is "good enough" surely). Hopefully I also achieved my more selfish goal here; like I alluded to in my BDSP Tower posts, for someone who feels her main forte is piloting over building by far, my Maison achievements did leave me with some more deep-seated insecurities about that facility's lower power level making my numbers there less worth on the playing skill front than they would appear at face value, and I didn't have any records in any other facilities to reassure my own messed-up brain on that one. I definitely feel like I got a passing grade in the BDSP Tower, and while this run was cut a little bit shorter than I was going for, I hope there is still enough here to reaffirm that I can hold my own in facilities with a higher power level than gen 6. I'm not fully committing to saying this is all the Tree will be seeing of Marathon (who knows when actual nostalgia will strike again, and no one can tell where an attempt like that would end), but I've been open about not dealing well with the required time commitment anymore, and this is a good time to drive that point home again. I'm really happy that I got to do the things I've done in here and in BDSP, but I *still* have not managed to use any of the pastgen transfers I moved into these games, and god knows it'll actually never happen if I make 1k Marathon my next goal for real.
In a way, I think the BDSP Tower came at a really good time for me; like I mentioned there, drawing out a team's full potential and figuring out matchups is what's most fun about this to me and believe me I got to have my fun there, and with my current perspective on "time", the shorter streaks there are actually a feature not a bug. I don't actually know what my next goal is gonna be, because the only fleshed-out idea I actually have everything lined up for is (by technicality) the Platinum Factory which excuse me for taking my sweet time on that one, plus after this + Archie + BDSP I feel myself getting kinda burned out again. No worries about another six-year hiatus though; I hope my perspective on things is healthier these days, it's been nice to be part of the Discord and get to see the recent FEAR runs firsthand and talk to people like Repto and turskain again after so long, and I hope a mari with a major focus on lots of Fun Teams is here to stay. Who knows, maybe I'll even beat the (self-inflicted?) "sucks at teambuilding" allegations one day.
I've finished recording the battles I cared to; thirteen in total. These are not meant to glamorize the team so much as display some of the challenges/bullshit they dealt with (occasionally due to my own input) or the amusing ways the AI would throw, especially with enemies that would've been highly threatening otherwise.
Animations on, playback at 2x speed, music from USUM not used.
AFAIK nobody will make you watch them, or give two fucks if you don't want to. I sure don't.
