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It'd be a pretty solid check to Egg, but a million weird things already do that. But it also shuts down Alakazam funnily enough. Not to mention Espeon if it doesn't pass. And it'd be a decent second look to Jynx. Not bad! It would lose the Machamp and Hera matchups though, which is a semi-big...

This list is probably sleeping quite a bit on the six selfdestruct/explosion users in the tier: weezing, voltorb, graveler, geodude, pineco, and koffing. They probably end up being quite influential.

You're right. The "main" playstyle is probably better called "Spikes offense" than anything to do with Explosion. One might even call it "Balance" to keep things even more general. It's just that most teams in this mold have at least two Explosions that they use to punctuate the match, but the...

Well, if we’re gonna get meta, the goal is definitely not to make a set of recommendations for newbie teambuilders. It’s more for folks to quibble about what actually counts as a different yet *viable* playstyle and what is ultimately just a substitution of ingredients. I think my thinking...

Hey, so I know we have the sample teams thread and all, which currently sorts things into "Offense", "Spikesless offense", and "Stall". But I'm a curmudgeon who's not totally happy with those three buckets. What buckets would y'all say capture the variety of teams out there? If I were to start...

The most recent official Smogon Tour round to feature GSC (and which explicitly published rules banning HP Legends) seems to have been this from 2007: https://www.smogon.com/forums/threads/season-5-week-9-gsc-2-won-by-fear.19023/ Funnily enough, Fear won it :) Sometimes I forget he was at this...

This post is clearly a bit of some sort but I can't parse what that bit is supposed to be. In any case I don't really care, I just wanna talk about the team in the paste. It's good! A subtle yet aggressive twist on a standard formula, carrying 4 Explosions, most notably with one on Snorlax...

LGTM, QC 1/2. I think if I were to play editor I'd mostly just cut down on the text, as this analysis has a slight tendency to get lost in the weeds: OVERVIEW: Cut the mentions of Quagsire and Tyranitar in the intro imo. You're already comparing to Raikou so you don't need to resort to a...

Hey, a week late here, but the easiest way to go without using Zapdos or Cloy is to use Baton Pass ;) Or some other hyper-offense concept. The "Kururin Team" (as I know it from my Pokemon Online days, based on the username of the player who carried it) had Forretress / Golem / Exeggutor /...

Neat! This might be better suited for the Research Thread at this stage, so that the details can be tested and ironed out. Of particular interest is how likely a desync might be in a link battle: If that risk is extremely high, I could see the appropriate solution being to "patch by omission".

Curse is the setup move with broad distribution. It's not so much that it's the best, rather, it's usually the best available. Pokemon with access to Swords Dance usually suffer from poor movepool or stats. The two Pokemon most capable of making it work are Marowak and Tentacruel, but they both...

Yes, as others have said, it doesn't have coverage to deal with the checks that resist it. Even in a good team matchup, it still needs to spend a turn setting up sun to realize its full potential, and even then its matchups against Zapdos and Snorlax never ascend past "complicated, but favorable".

Celebi was once in GSC OU! I wanna say pre-2004. It was extremely good, albeit in a very outdated metagame. To give you a sense of how outdated, Zapdos was almost always banned from using Hidden Power. (Caveat: from what I understand, rulesets were not nearly as standardized as they are today...

The typical mixed attacking moveset is still best. Nidoking would normally use Thief, as that's currently the most popular alternative to Lovely Kiss, but Counter is also reasonably common. Nidoqueen would likely follow suit. You need a critical hit, but you can do it: +1 Feraligatr Dynamic...

If the benchmark is a guarantee, then you just have to add the min damage rolls. Sand + Leftovers should cancel out in that case. If you're looking for other benchmarks (e.g., without sand, with X layers of spikes, or where X% chance is the benchmark instead of a guarantee), then yeah idk if...

Pikachu belongs in NUBL by my book. But I'm an old who played Mime-Pika NU, and it was banned before NU was a "real" tier. It's not such a big deal though, the Viability Ranking for a metagame is usually a better reference for a Pokemon's viability than whether a Pokemon lands in a proper tier...

lol don't be afraid of having "bad" takes, people crave 'em as long as they're reasoned enough to be interesting. Anyway Zapdos kicks ass, but it's easy to take its presence for granted, so I can see where the "Zapdos isn't actually that good" take comes from. Here's how I see it though...

Thoughts on Thunder on GrowthJolt? It needs 2 boosts with Tbolt vs just 1 with Thunder to threaten a 3hko on Lax, although when it 2HKOs you back, that does seem like an awfully hollow threat. The other thing might be para procs on RoarKou, but it seems most people nowadays (rightfully imo) hate...

Cool team! If you truly want to shoo away spiker leads, HP Fire is always an option. But that’s probably overkill. HP water is worth a look for preventing Golem from spinning on you once Forry has blown up. Plus it might draw in Egg which Marowak wants to see paralyzed. Yep, that’s the...

Odd take: I unironically think the main problem with them is that their raw stats just completely invalidate Nidoking. Naturally, this extends to things like Gengar, Exeggutor, and in Ho-oh's case, Jynx. But in my head it's called the "Nidoking line" - Pokemon which are good enough to hang when...