I'll start.
I'd like to talk about Rayquaza
, a Pokemon that I think has been severely overlooked and not properly considered, but who I think has a ton of potential, which I'll go through below.
I think theres 3 main characteristics that define Ray
for me; total weather canceling, being a bulky swords dance user, and having access to excellent coverage and type. Lets go through each one-by-one
Total weather canceling is a much bigger deal than it looks like on first glance. In a weather war, the constant pivoting is a huge factor. In my experience a lot of the game is just pivoting your setter in and out, which burns a lot of turns. It also leaves your partner switching in vulnerable to pretty predictable attacks, as your not exactly likely to keep a Groudon
in front of a Rain boosted Kyogre
. Late games are also kinda annoying if two of your mons are dead, or when you only have one option to pivot into. Ray
completely bypasses these issues, allowing it to completely neutralize both the dons, especially so thanks to its typing completely walling both, and to an extent Koraidon
too with resisting CC. In most single restricteds online tournaments Groudon
or Kyogre
have either outright won the event or had the highest usage out of the restricteds, so this is a pretty big deal. Its also nice in blocking both weathers, so you dont have to deal with say a Rain team mirror if you were instead say running
to deal with Sun. Finally blocking weathers is huge in one last way, enabling teamates. I'll give one example here, Urshifu-R
. With Choice Scarf its able to outspeed many natural threats to Ray
such as Flutter
or Calyrex-S
, and Urshifu-R
appreciates the weather blocking ability immensely. I've seen Sunny Day Tornadus being used on a lot of teams as their Urshifu-R
counter, and most pure Sun teams have literally no ways outside of a stray Bolt
to handle the fast Water-type coverage. I'll talk more about partners later tho
The second thing is having SD and a great stat spread. I've seen a lot of people say its just worse Dragonite
, which is just not really true imo, they both play very differently and I think Ray
has the edge here. Dragonite
is kinda locked into Choice Band and being paired with Chien-Pao
to have any sort of bite, and even then its pretty easily handled by say a Steel- or Ghost-type. After a single Swords Dance, Ray
is matching a Banded Tera boosted Extreme Speed from Dragonite
, and its higher attack stat means its almost matching the same damage as if SoR active. With its very respectable bulk and support from teamates, Ray
can set up a Swords Dance really easily, and Extreme Speed allows it to dodge a huge problem with many set up sweepers, in lacking Speed to properly utilize the boost. Another thing I've seen is that Inner Focus makes Dragonite
superior, which I also disagree with. While Inner Focus is great, it doesen't actually apply to Ray
as much. Thanks to not needing a Choice Band, it can run Camulet (Or another useful item) to gain the Intim immunity and more, as well as being able to Protect to dodge Fake Out. The flexibility is really nice, and not being Choice Locked is way more useful that you would think. Which (Kinda) leads me to my next point, in its coverage and typing.
I cannot really stress how useful having an actually good Flying-type move is. Flying is such a good stab option, it hits most relevant types for neutral as well as handling another big problem for set up sweepers, in Amoonguss
. The Rock-type resistant is kinda irrelevant as theres not many good ones out there (I love you Glim
but your like the only good Rock ;-;) , and while not hitting Electric- or Steel-type Pokemon is kinda annoying, it comes up a lot less than you might think, and you also have access Earthquake to hit all of the Flying-type resistances. Flying/Dragon is also a really solid defensive typing, resisting the Dons is super useful, and is a great switch in to a lot of mons.
I've been having great success with it so far on a variant of the classic Gouging Fire
team, and honestly speaking Gouging
deserves a whole post on its own but thats for later. Im not even running Howl with it, the damage output is already there from Ray
and Urshifu-R
, instead opting for a Snarl/Breaking Swipe combo. Being a fast de-buffer that bypasses redirection is really nice, and also slows down so many prevalent threats (Stuff like Caly-S
just get so bodied by a single Snarl, losing out on all that momentum early is crazy bad for it). I've already talked about Urshifu-R
already but yeah its just generally really solid. I was also told to talk about Caly-I
, I dont really know what to say I have answers for that on my team too, the existence of a single bad match-up doesen't auto mean the mon is bad lmao, you got 3 other Pokemon to bring for a reason!
Anyways thats my rant on Rayquaza
, this was way longer than it had any right to be but whatever. TLDR; Mon is good, Swords Dance + Extreme Speed is broken and blocking weather is really valuable, I even got a figure of it cuz its neat.
The fall off of Choice Specs Terapagos
- The lack of boosts and usually Rillaboom also limits what you can do vs Miraidon + Iron Hands + Urshifu, it just dances around you with its own Tailwind Light Screen support and you can't do anything against Brian Hands. Sub CM of course can reliably run Rillaboom and boost up to patch the hole, Miraidon can't Volt Switch spam you for so much anymore.
- Imo the single saving grace for Terapagos in this match up is Tera Ghost Will-O-Wisp Incineroar, Specs isn't that bad into ZamaC with Chi-Yu Flutter support but your lines are a lot more linear and this folds to the new uptake of Ting-Lu Zamazenta. 
