UUFPL IV Teams/Review
W1 vs river
Kind of a weird team for this week, the basic idea behind cb azu was that it could punish teams with bad fairy resists, it actually does this better than prim because if you don't load chansey you need some sort of moonblast switch in, which you have a few different options for, but not all of them are good into azu. The biggest problem with running cb azu is it kinda sucks into skarm and amoonguss. This team fishes for no skarm a bit, although glowbro can win if you face spikes, it's just not a great mu on preview, but I didn't think that was particularly unreasonable into udon who i don't think has ever used skarm. safety goggles glowbro is a pretty massive threat into shroom teams though, it might not auto win but this team has enough longevity to play it slowly. goggles might be unnecessary but I really didn't wanna take stun spore on glowbro so i felt it was worth. The other reason i liked azu was that it was a breaker that outspeeds conk, which udon runs a lot. The main reason i lost this game was I didn't play well, i loaded into no fairy resist and loaded glowbro into hatterene, diggersby was kind of annoying for this team but I was disappointed in how i played it, put it down to rust or me not being very good idc.
W2 vs leni
this team was pretty sick, i originally had some different sets but refined it a bit with some help from crushy. psyshock slowking was one change we made, not something i'd normally ever consider but you're running two special breakers on this team essentially so future sight was kind of luxury rather than something needed to force progress, and the mu into sub prim and bounce gyara was a lot harder without psyshock, ended up running into sub prim so it was a good thing i did change it. Played around with a few different kiss sets but ultimately twave was the only one that gave me a playable ho mu and overall felt most solid. Idk if this hydreigon set is really good or not but the idea was that in a lot of mus scarf kinda sucks and with this set you can try to switch it in on knock offs and keep boots on other mons, idk if you really need all this hp but I'm also not sure how much you need more spatk so I ran with it. aside from that everything is fairly normal, pairing chandy with kiss is really cool in breaking down each other's checks but i think this team would struggle with certain chansey structures, i just felt it kind of maximised my chances for this week cos it was really different from my usual stuff (kind of a theme this tour) and would catch a lot of stuff i expected to face. Still probably didn't play all that great this week though, did enough to win but I felt kinda rushed and unfocused.
W3 vs franco
prep was pretty tough for this game, I started prep during w2 tbh cos i played really early and had the free time. Franco had reused teams from the previous uufpl up to this point and he used stall a decent amount so i knew i had to have the tools to beat that, was also slightly concerned about facing prim diggersby as i felt like people were spamming those and tang into me, likely because my amoonguss and tang usage was very low and diggersby and prim generally do well into zarude structures (or grassless which i'd brought twice already this tour.) I knew I wanted to bring one of tang or amoonguss but I genuinely hated everything I was building with them because I didn't feel they matched up that well into franco overall. Then I started looking at thund t into him, more specifically this 6 which i rmt'd and I felt it was a good call, but still being concerned about the trends i'd been facing i tried to consider whether there was a way I could fit tang over zarude, which necessitated a few other changes that ultimately led me to this 6. I don't normally like darkless because of the threat double dance reuni poses as well as polt but i felt that it wasn't reasonable to run a dark type literally every week and i bring them so often that double dance reuni would be a slightly wild bring into me. I did consider some other stuff, fspin drei was one option, also had some amoong + steela + togekiss stuff which seemed promising, but i felt this was the best balance between comfort, accounting for the opponent, and accounting for general stuff i'd been facing a lot. mu was probably the worst I could've gotten from the scout, and gyara easily could've lucked through everything, but ultimately think my play was solid here, and this game really showed the power of sd u turn sciz which isn't normally a set i think is that great but was ultimately needed here to help break through amoong structures which are often kinda soft into it. played the endgame pretty riskily but i didn't wanna sit for another 20 minutes tryna break through amoong hippo if i got turns wrong and let keld in at the wrong times etc, and probably i was always too far ahead to lose at that stage, but yea would not recommend playing like that lol. other interesting turn in this game was t2, going thund to volt switch might seem slightly strange but the idea was that if it was spore it'd always click it there and if it wasn't spore then i shouldn't let nihi take para for basically no reason, keeping rocks up vs tenta wasn't realistic at that stage anyway and there was nothing else i could let take sleep. definitely still had some stuff to improve on after this week but overall i felt i was as close to playing at my highest level as i'd been since sspl/uuwc, I was testing with tmm a lot which really helped get my instincts back so shoutouts him for that. Holy shit tang is bad though, even when i was testing it felt like i had a team with 5 pokemon and a tangrowth but i tried to cope and tell myself it's needed here for prim and grounds but it's barely even good into them, never using it again.
W4 vs lostmemories
this was basically a lily team with steela over reuni, i didn't really plan on it but I liked the idea of adding toad to amoong + steela and then i wanted heal bell and it felt like this structure was kinda forced. bit of a random bring but i was testing it and it felt fine and i figured it'd have a playable mu into everything. Also had a hippo version which was interesting, sand chip was kinda useful and it was arguably more solid, but i was slightly concerned about random suicune (not that toad actually beats suicune but amoong + toad should stall it out fairly well unless i'm bad). toad without tox is kinda weird but i feel like ep is kinda necessary for coba here and you can't drop your other moves so yeah, steela toxing mence isn't exactly unrealistic anyway. overall synergy of this team is pretty cool, the defensive core really applies pressure in the right areas for coba and kiss to thrive. loaded into a pretty weird mu, i think i probably made it closer than it should've been but i wasn't familiar with my opponent at all so it was hard to get a read on what they'd click, felt during the game they didn't have the most solid grasp of what was happening. turn where i sacked drei was weird, i could've stayed because facade needed a pretty high roll to kill me and they technically shouldn't rly risk it but if they went for it and i lost shroom i felt i should be losing long term + ice punch seemed fairly reasonable into me so i was concerned about that, any other switch risked too much while i felt that sacking drei essentially solved all my problems and i could close out the game without too much trouble from there, didn't anticipate lo coba doing 98% to toad, shit nearly gave me a heart attack, was dead to max roll which would've lost me game on spot probably, more patient play with coba could've caused me a real problem but ig you can't click cc into toad without revealing orb anyway so who knows. from there they probably could've put up more of a fight by trying to 1v1 kiss with chansey, it would've lost but depending on how it worked out i could've been low enough that molt became a real threat, once molt went down sub coba was always gonna win though, overall probably not my best showing but i managed to get the win which was the main thing.
W5 vs tmm
I had tested a lot with tmm the past couple weeks of this tour so I was concerned about this week because he's very familiar with my play, and i felt if i got behind it'd be harder than usual to come back because he knows how i click in those situations. with that said my advantage this week was gonna be in builder because while i rate tmm there and he's very creative i felt that he often left long term weaknesses due to not having the most solid resists to things, and to give myself the best chance to win that was the area i had to exploit. I built this team for homefield advantage like 20 minutes before i was meant to play someone, it's basically just solid core + conk, one of the most boring teams ever, but scizor and zydog are the type of mons that will kill you long term if your team isn't the most objectively sound, especially with conk to open holes for them. i changed the scizor to this cos i've been most comfortable with this set recently and made zydog iron tail because i was slightly concerned about togekiss and the last move can be basically whatever, overall felt very confident loading this though. ended up getting a kind of weird mu, big problem for me was getting up rocks was really difficult and i couldn't really deal with port chansey, in a vacuum it's probably not that bad for me but allowing free rocks t1 was awful, staying and flaming into chans was also horrendous though so idk, playing out of position with rocks off here just wasn't really doable. was incredibly fortunate he let coba go down and i also p much needed a first turn wake, but i found a winpath and played towards it and managed to pull it out, was getting kinda frustrated at this point cos i felt like i hadn't really played well in most of my games even though i'd won 4 of them but wins are wins ig.
W6 vs zs
tbh at this point i really just was not that motivated for ss, i was enjoying sv a lot more and i felt like i was getting forced into boring team choices because they were just the correct thing to bring and i really wanted to win this tour. i felt like nihi was objectively the correct bring here and other structures with it just didn't really appeal to me, so i went with this. i brought the same team in snake except i had hex nihi, and zydog over diggersby, + a couple other minor tweaks. I can't really take credit for this team cos i think attribute used basically the same thing before me although it was in my builder for a long while before snake, this structure has been brought a bit by a few different people though, franco even loaded it w7 with prim over suicune, it's just overall pretty solid and when i brought it in snake it got a pretty good mu into mantine stall which is a sign of a good suicune team probably (alas i lost cos i'm bad). i really tried to make other stuff work but i really did hate like 90% of the mons in this tier by now so my options were limited. game was pretty bad, i don't even wanna analyse cos there were multiple nonsense clicks where i just forgot what i was doing, incredibly disappointing. hindsight says i shouldn't have taken twave off nihi and if i really wanted to load knock nihi i should've used a different team cos you need a way to punish coba here.
W7 vs javi
an old classic. rmt'd this a while ago. i think while it's probably not the most objectively sound team and it breaks a lot of rules of this tier that's part of what makes it as threatening as it is, the entire plan is just to get hazards and vortex the opponent to death and it regularly does this. mostly loaded it cos we had to win the week and i wanted to click a bit. think the only interesting turn in battle was t25, objectively i should iron defense here but i was pretty tilted by the gsc game just before this so my thought process was basically that if i clicked it i'd get crit anyway and it's probably still winning if i don't get the roll the next turn anyway, just would've had to work a bit harder. i sack zarude on t36 because i want to prevent nihi from getting a speed boost cos crit hex could kill slowking, the way i played it i was only dead to crit on zarude into crit on slowking, and once i avoided the crit on rude the game ends as soon as i get slowking in vs steela.
probably the last time i play this tier for a while although tbh who really knows. I just feel completely burned out with it at this point and i've started hating like all the interactions the tier has which is probably a sign that i need more time away from it. wanted to post something before i take a step back though so here we are. would like to shoutout
Crushy for helping me prep this tour and
TMM for testing a lot during the middle of it, really helped me shake the rust off, also thanks to umbry for listening to me whine a bit during w7 and telling me the team i loaded would probably win. 5-2 isn't a bad record all things considered but it doesn't feel particularly good, especially given we missed playoffs, that's mons though ig. I would drop a load of metagame hot takes or something to close this out but all of my opinions are unfortunately really boring, so yeah, thanks for reading or whatever.
