Hey guys, sorry for the sporadic updates. I guess this thread is probably officially a sometimes thing for me at this point. No new 'mons for talbain and clint quite yet, though I did a bit of work on them.
Was watching some replays yesterday and today, so I got the itch to build an SB team.
I’ve been resisting making this team for a while, for reasons that will make sense in a bit. As I’ve previously mentioned, the OU format this generation is unbalanced to say the least (whereas UU is, like, a perfectly balanced game). I wrote previously about the type homogeneity. Some bans have happened since then, but it hasn’t really effected the character of the meta from what I’ve seen. One thing I didn’t get into was team composition.
A video by super-good-player blunder kind of isolated the major conflict in OU right now, which is this: balanced teams are basically totally ineffective vs. hyper-aggressive teams and stall teams, and stall teams are basically unstoppable. There are Reasons for this, which maybe I’ll get into more in another post if y’all are interested, but basically it comes down to the fact that preparing for stall makes you weak to non-stall, whereas there’s really no risk to just running stall.
For those who don’t know: “stall” is running really bulky pokemon who aren’t usually great attackers and just wearing down your opponent gradually. Pokemon is generally a pretty fast game with average game length running around 20-25 moves. However, stall often runs 40+ moves. In addition, it really doesn’t take as much skill to succeed at stall, since your bulkiness offers a cushion for mistakes. The skill in pokemon is in knowing all the major checks and counters, sizing up your opponent’s team, determining your win conditions, and predicting your opponent’s moves. If your experienced enough, prediction is a lot less of a guess than–say–poker, and it ends up more akin to any physical sport, where high level play is basically in split-second readings of you opponent’s shoulders and hips. Once a certain level of athleticism is reached, many sports come down to speed and accuracy of prediction, and pokemon is similar–somewhere between the pondering of a board game and the twitch readings of soccer or baseball.
But yeah: you can get away with much less skill by playing stall. And I’ve heard top players say that if you’re actually good and play stall, you basically can’t lose.
So, since stall teams usually result in drawn out battles in which the opponent has to constantly struggle and anticipate while the stall player barely breaks a sweat, stall is HATED on the ladder. For some people, the attitude is, “Dude, the ladder is for fun. Save the safety plays for tournaments.” For others it’s just, “WHY DON’T YOU WANT ME TO HAVE FUN; YOU ARE WORSE THAN HITLER.”
So yeah: I made a stall team.
Really, when it comes down to it, I was really into stat boost moves when I made you guys, and–while most of our aggressive 'mon are now totally out-classed in OU–our powerful walls are now downright evil.
So, anyway, I laddered us up a bit from zero. I didn’t really get up to the good players yet, but so far this is by far our most effective Sun/Moon team. 'Course, playing it makes me feel a little slimy, so I’m gonna try to put together some other teams that won’t get us booed out of the stadium.
Battles in the next post.