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OU CCAT- 3rd Edition VOTING DISCUSSION SEE #157

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jc104 said:
Gravity I suppose. Quick stall seems to be largely reliant on luck to succeed, so I don't really like it. Gravity is definitely not going to be easy, but with all these people thinking about it I think it can be done.

Also, why have we taken an enormous step backwards as far as voting is concerned? This seems positively designed to be unfair. I mean it's bad enough to have tactical voting just as far as the winner is concerned, but to encourage people to change their vote to the leading candidate in order to increase their say? That's absurd.
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Ok, once again, sorry for the confusion, I have edited the op to possibly make it clearer.

NO, VOTERS DO NOT RECIEVE BONUS POINTS! ONLY SUBMITTERS DO. That means by the end of this project we will have given out bonus points 7 times. (More or less) If we vote quick stall, for example, only user Ginganinja will recieve bonus points, because he initially brought up the idea.
 
Definitely voting for QuickStall. It's an unexplored anti-meta style that sounds like it would include a lot of unconventional sets. Sets like Iron ball Sableye and power split shuckle seem like they'd be interesting to try and a team of pokemon that disrupt and harass rather than straight up wall seems unique and a great place to try them.
 
Just posting to say that while I technically brought it up, I would rather bubbly receive the bonus points (if it won) due to him actually having a proper handle on it. When I brought it up, I was really asking for opinions and such, rather than directly nomination it ;)
 
I also nominate Spike Stacking Offense. while ho isn't the playstyle I like the most, I'm very curios to see how it plays out (who knows we might even be able to use different spin blocker than Gengar, say, Trick Room LOJellicent)
 
To be honest I am very skeptical of quick stall, it just seems like a bad cop out to stall. Id be willing to try it, but if stall is chosen as the play style, I'm definitely voting for a different kind later on.

I support mainly sand stall with Hippowdon, our friend in BL needs more use.
 
I am extremely opposed to any type of offensive team, we're here to make an original and definitive team as a collective group, and making offense would just be a waste of our time as it's all the same in BW2 anyways. I am much more partial to creating a stall team (preferably Sun stall because it requires the most thought). Many claim stall isn't even viable in BW2 due to the prevalence of Tornadus-T, Keldeo, etc.; I would like to disprove that claim.
 
Is there a specific reason why it was decided that we are going to pick a playstyle first? If we decide to build a quick stall, hyper offense, or gravity team they will all fail. Why? Quick stall is not a very defined playstyhle and the masses will have power over the few that know how to use it successfully. People will try to be as original as possible and using a rare playstyle and pokemon will not work well. Quick stall is a less defined method of play and therefore will not succeed unless it is a very standard quick stall team, whatever that is. I have never used it and to me it simply sounds like a hybrid of semi stall and spikestacking. I don't even think quick stall deserves to be coined as its own playstyle because it is more like a different form of other playstyles or a combination.

Hyper offense again will suffer from the same problem. We will not use deoxys-d and will end up with something crappy, like the OU CCAT 2. If that isn't evidence that building hyper offense as a community fails I don't know what is. The most successful hyper offense teams are a slight deviation of the standard anways. There are about 10 pokes that work well as well as a few pokes very similar to that (example: Dragonite->Salamence). There is no way the team will succeed without using that standard skeleton and if we use it creativity is lost. Electrolyte even noted that hyper offense is defined so I don't know why it is listed.

Gravity is not going to work either. I know of one successful gravity user, ginganinja, and having him build the team defeats the whole purpose of having a community project. Gravity is generally not successful and again all gravity teams are very similar. PenguinX elaborated on this in a post. Starting a team around a playstyle like gravity or trick room will almost definitely not work. Adding them as an afterthought and maybe changing a few sets to fit it better is always a better option. My main argument here is that gravity is not user friendly, and most people will not be able to contribute.

So how about we build a team around a specific pokemon?
This can work. However the pokemon will most likely be unusual and unwieldy if chosen. If it can't be used over something very standard with ease you will have to design a team based around it which is very hard to do. Lanturn can replace SpD rotom-w, but trying to fit feraligatr in a team is pretty hard to do. So instead of posting a single set for the community to weave a team around I suggest that we post cores to build teams around. The core would obviously use underrated but effective sets/pokemon. If you are suggesting a pokemon you obviously had experience with it, or you should so providing the community with insight as to a good partner will prove helpful. If you want to use a specific playstyle you can suggest it in a core as well. (For example Conkeldurr and tyranitar leads to sand offense). I know this may not generally be agreed with because it gives a lot of power to one person but I think it should be tried to see if it has any merit.

My Core:
Jynx @ Leftovers
Trait: Dry Skin
EVs: 4 SpD / 252 SpA / 252 Spe
Timid nature (+Spe, -Atk)
- Nasty Plot
- Ice Beam
- Lovely Kiss
- Substitute

Hippowdown @ Leftovers
Ability: Sand Stream
Nature: Relaxed
EVs: 248 HP/ 8 Atk/ 252 SpD
IVs- 25 Def
-Stealth Rock
-Earthquake
-Ice Fang
-Slack Off

So yeah.
 
The obvious problem with starting with a core of pokemon is that it really limits the scope for community discussion and involvement. I honestly don't think that's the way to go.

Also, I really don't agree with your point about quickstall. The fundamental differences between semistall and quickstall are that semistall uses entry hazards to facilitate a sweep, whereas quickstall aims to use its "annoyers" (although I really don't like that term) throughout the game as a cog in the entry hazard machine, if that makes sense; you maintain momentum (especially if you're abusing moves like Encore), which makes it vastly easier to Spin and set hazards when needed, which in turn puts your opponent under more pressure, which in turn makes your annoyers more effective. I don't think calling it an illegitimate playstyle because it's something of a cross between semistall and spikestacking is any more valid than calling balanced teams a hybrid of stall and offense.

That said, if we do get lots of people who otherwise aren't participating in the project jumping in and voting for random stuff they like, that could be a problem as you say. We do have the bonus points system Electrolyte set up, as well as ample opportunity at the end to change the team through discussion rather than voting. As well, most of the people who've posted here so far have been pretty knowledgeable, so hopefully it won't be a massive issue. In the past CCAT's voting has tended to follow the mainstream discussion pretty closely too...
 
I agree with Lavos Spawn in that an offensive team would be a big waste of time. It would be to easy and boring to make a sand, rain, or sun offense team because every one has already tried it. I think some form of stall would be great because people have been claiming stall is impossible even in B/W1. I did vote for Hail Stall but there are also alot of other cool types of stall i wouldnt mind seeing Quick Stall is probally the one i am most curious about since it is pretty much unexplored in OU, Sun Stall also seems interasting.

If we were to go with some sort of offense, something like Hail Offense or Gravity Offense would be preffered imo because they are underused and hard to make.
 
As much as i like creativity, which is definitely one of the goals of this thread, some team styles are pretty crappy for this project.

How are we going to build a Gravity, Sun Stall, or Quick Stall team, when most of the community have never played with such a team? Hell most good players (i mean tour players) have never used one of those teams, as far as i know (maybe i have heard of one SunStall team but this is all). Those teams don't even have a solid definition of what we should use and how we should use it (except from SunStall). Yeah some good players can guide discussion and help the ones that don't know to learn, but i don't think that a project such as this should be lead by 2-3 person who know what are they doing, and the others blindly following. Because if we use such teams, you can be sure that we will either follow the advice of those who know very well (the very few i talked before) or we will fail... You thought a Zoroark team was difficult to make? Well good luck OU players making a team with the single most difficult playstyle to build and use in OU, sun stall, and teams with a theme that is considered gimmick and have never seen any success into the competitive scene (if they have i am sorry, and i would like to see the RMT), Gravity and Quick Stall.

Why not go as we have in the past projects? If the community had problems building a team with one underused poke, what makes you guys think that it will handle better, not a single underused and hard to use poke, but a rare and hard as fuck to use play style? So let's not handicap ourselves, THIS IS A COMMUNITY PROJECT! It's not Ginganinja, Lavos Spawn, Pocket, and Harsha building a team (just some good players i know), it's the whole community, so let's please make this endeavor worthwhile.

If we go with a sand balance team type, like i am proposing, we will have the single most diverse type of team in the metagame. We will have the most options available. Which means that there will be plenty of space to use that one special poke that all CCAT use, and it will be possible for it to pull its weight on the team, provided we chose the right teammates. Yeah cookie-cutter sand balanced teams exist, as do cookie-cutter teams for every kind of viable team style. The fact that they exist, doesn't mean that there is no room for creativity.

Btw i didn't meant that only my choice is viable for this project. All kinds of offense (weatherles offense, Rain offense, Sun offense, Sand offense, Hail offense, bulky offense), all kinds of balance and Sand, Rain, weatherless semi-stall are viable and could give us good results. Note that i believe that only semi-stall would be vaible, because hard stall is very hard to play and to use (not saying it is impossible), so it won't go so well. But semi-stall can have a taste of offense, so it will appeal more to the people, as well as being closest to what they know to build and play.
 
Alexwolf has a good point in that some people want to take the easy way out and build a Sand balance team, however that's not what I'm here for. I don't give a rat's ass if Sun stall is hard to build or use, it's an original style and it's absolutely phenomenal in this metagame. Why in the world are we having a CCAT project if all we're going to get out of it is another mediocre Sand team with TTar/Hippo, Heatran, Stoutland, blah blah blah it's all been done before. I want something original and unorthodox to come out of this, not another generic team that every single person in this thread has seen many times before.

If you're too lazy, or you think others are too lazy, to build a Sun stall team, fine by me, you don't have to participate. I'll gladly lead this project, and anyone who's willing to put a little time and effort into CCAT can follow me.

edit: oh yeah and quickstall simply does not work in bw2 so please stop pretending we're going to do it
 
After looking at the uber stall guide and reading a few RMT's I think that I've found a very concrete definition of quick stall to help people who are less familiar with it. In fact I ran many teams similar to them, I simply didn't know the strategy was called quick stall. I'm going to elaborate on it by comparing it to standard stall.

Standard stall uses defensive pokemon to shrug off even powerful hits and a combination of passive and active healing to stay around for the long haul. It does almost all of its damage through passive damage and uses the defenses of its pokemon to elongate and increase the amount of damage. Cores that cover each other's weaknesses and are very hard to be with a single pokemon (skarmbliss, ferrocent, celetran) in order to force switches and ineffective attacks, building up life orb and hazard damage.

Quick stall is entirely different yet at the same time very similar. It isn't so much a balance of offence and stall as it is a mixture of the two, if that makes sense. The general strategy is mostly the same as full stall, force switches to rack up hazard damage and use their ineffective attacks and status to build up recoil, toxic, sand/hail and leech seed damage.

What makes Quick Stall so different is that it accomplishes this strategy in a much more offensive way. Because these pokemon aren't defensive and can't take a beating they need to force switches by being harder to take down on their own, not in conjunction with another pokemon. Abusing immunities and 4x resistances for switch ins, forcing switches with harassing pokemon like subdisable gengar and tormentran are how quick stall works. It isn't about taking hits, it's about preventing them. Protect toggling, fast taunts, substitute abuse and draining moves are among the most efficient way to do it.

In ubers one of the best quickstallers is Skymin. Skymin is about as sturdy as the fluffy clouds it flies around. But it's the fastest subseeder excluding whimsi and chloropluff. This combined with the fact that its STABs have a 60% chance to flinch and a 80% chance to put the opponent at -2 Spdf means the opponent is constantly losing health and has little opportunity to attack.

So I'm not sure if it's viable in OU, but the fact some people weren't even aware it exists goes to show it might be worth evaluating and trying out.
 
I don't think anyone is lazy Lavos, i think that many of us here are not capable of building such teams, and those teams will be build by 4-5 people that know what they are doing... And what a community project will this be...

Btw i don't get why you assume that a team with Ttar or Hippo in it can't be creative? The team that Pocket created in the first CCAT was quite creative despite using very common pokes, because it had Nidoking in it. I can show you 10 sand teams, that are successful AND creative. So, once again, choosing sand balance doesn't limit our creativity at all, in fact it is one of our best bets of making a GOOD creative OU team for reasons i already stated.
 
Lavos, Wolf, you both make very important points. Wolf I agree that we can't go using gimmicks, very underused strategies and more obscure team centre pieces because it limits community interaction. Only a handful of people would know what they're doing and everyone would simply be following along. and Lavos I agree that we can't keep simply retreading old ground just for the sake of participation. Sun stall is viable, unique, difficult to pull off and let's us explore the meta instead of just being a part of it, however it alienates a lot of the community. Not to mention that a strategy like sun stall is very template heavy, a standard sun team is hard to make work but is ultimately flexible because of the wide range of abusers. A sun stall teams is pretty much ninetales/cress/spinner/duggy/filler/filler. Teambuilding should be a challenge, it shouldn't be a problem to solve with only 1 or 2 possible outcomes/templates.
 
alexwolf said:
I don't think anyone is lazy Lavos, i think that many of us here are not capable of building such teams, and those teams will be build by 4-5 people that know what they are doing... And what a community project will this be...

Btw i don't get why you assume that a team with Ttar or Hippo in it can't be creative? The team that Pocket created in the first CCAT was quite creative despite using very common pokes, because it had Nidoking in it. I can show you 10 sand teams, that are successful AND creative. So, once again, choosing sand balance doesn't limit our creativity at all, in fact it is one of our best bets of making a GOOD creative OU team for reasons i already stated.
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For a balanced Sand team to function in this metagame, it must have the following Pokemon: Tyranitar/Hippowdon, Jellicent/Gastrodon, Celebi/Roserade/Ferrothorn, Heatran/Jirachi, Landorus/Terrakion/Stoutland. That's hardly diverse, and the idea is to make a good team as well as a creative one, so take your pick: we can have good standard balanced sand, or bad creative balanced sand. I choose neither.

As for the "we can't teambuild" argument, I just don't buy that. All teambuilding takes is practice. That's it. When I started playing Pokemon back in March, I was literally the worst teambuilder I have ever seen. Now I'm frankly pretty damn good at it. That transformation occurred in, what, six months? And I wasn't even active all that time. If you work at this game, you get better at it. That's really all it takes. Don't tell me you can't do something, you just lack the experience.

And no StairFall, Sun stall isn't Ninetales/Cress/Duggy/spinner/filler/filler. The only required Pokemon on Sun stall is the Sun setter, Ninetales. Everything else is up to the teambuilder, allowing for a plethora of different styles and teams that still fall under the category of Sun stall. Much better than the generic Ttar/Hippo + a bunch of stuff in top 20 usage stats.
 
Although their may not be alot of people who have had good succes and a lot of experience with stall, there are still a lot of great battlers (including yourself) who would be able to help make a great stall team. If a whole community is trying to make a stall team as opposed to one person the team should still turn out quite succesful and a great community project. I agree with you that Sand Balance has alot of potential to be creative but i personally would prefer a challenge alot harder like stall to eliminate the theory that stall is dead.

Edit: StairFall i should of elaborated on that more and your right semi stall is certainly not dead, what i meant was full stall, especially weatherless, sun stall, and hail stall.
 
Superpowerdude said:
to eliminate the theory that stall is dead.
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I don't think anybody really thought stall was dead, rather just completely outclassed. Bulky offence and semi-stall have been really prevalent in many of my matches, though I may just getting really improbable opponents on the ladder. Weatherless stall seems to have died though.
 
You are arguing that Sand Balance doesn't have room for creative sets and that Sun Stall does? A team that has serious weaknesses to dragons, SR and physical fire attackers by definition? Come on...

And no your skeleton for a sand team is wrong. This is the skeleton for a standard Sand team (with some mons that you have forgotten), but there can be more creative sand teams. I honestly can't believe you are saying that it is more difficult to make a creative Sand balanced team than a Sun stall team (which is not going to be creative if we want it to work anyway)...

But anyway i am done speaking, the people should know by now, if they didn't already, enough to judge in which type of team creativity is more possible.
 
Ok, we've got quite a lot of ideas here! I sifted through the posts and found out who started what idea, and eventually came up with this list. If your name is not on this list, your submission was either too vague or ninja'd by another user.
I've split it into categories for your convenience:

OFFENSE:
Slim Man's sand offense
Thismysteriousguy's offensive gravity
Metroid78's Rain offense
Thereptile's spikestack offense
Katakiri's raind dance offense
Jimbon's hail offense
Husky's hyper offense

STALL
Superpowerdude's hail stall
Tempv1's phazing
Bubbly's Quick Stall
Fuzzy's balanced/semi stall
Lavos Spawn's sun stall

A lot of you were just saying- stall, so I did not add it to the list. Stall is too vague; I only put up clear, concise and exact submissions. Next time, try to specify what kind of stall you wish to nominate, because we can not build a team based off of that one word.

BALANCED / MISC
Alexwolf's sand balanced
Absolete's TR
Clubbingsealcub's dual weather
Drunkdemons trapper
Ganj4lf's Weatherless Balanced

How this will work:
This is a relatively inportant vote, and there are a lot of great ideas, so we'll do a multiple choice vote. Post your top 3 favorite submissions- and rank them by how much you like them. For example,
1. Favorite
2. Second favorite
3. Third favorite

Make sure to write the name and strategy of each idea you are listing. Please do not post more than three votes. All votes past three will be ignored. A tie will be broken by me.

Remember, this is the first chance for one smart poster to get bonus voting points. Let's see who wins this round! You have 48 hours. Get voting!
 
1. Alexwolf - Sand Balanced
2. The Reptile - Spike-Stack Offense sameless self-voting!
3. Bubbly - Quick Stall
 
1. My Sun stall (lol I'm so conceited)
2. Superpowerdude's Hail stall
3. Jimbon's Hail offense
 
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