Sorry for the delay, folks, but thanks for being patient. As I said, I wanted to revive this with some SPL battles, so here we go.
This week's feature was in my opinion one of the best SPL UU battles we've had thus far - week 2's match between kokoloko and Hikari. Hikari brought a strong team featuring the always terrifying Heracross as a wallbreaker and Taunt Mega-Aerodactyl to punish more passive teams and discourage setup, while kokoloko brought a bulky offense featuring CB Snorlax and a triple-Intimidate core of Krookodile, Salamence and the recently-dropped Gyarados. There was a lot of back and forth in the match, and Hikari seemed to have control toward the end, but some excellent playing by koko kept him in the game and brought home a W.
[replay]smogtours-uu-114503[/replay]
I asked kokoloko for some of his thoughts during the game...
1a. You've played Hikari many, many times over the years. How did your previous experience help you?
knowing hikari likes weird sets made me want to use a team that was hard to take advantage of with random shit, and a good way to do that is to incorporate your defense into your offense. triple intimidate + cb lax seemed like a good way to do this, since mence / krook / gyara leave little breathing room for random offense to take over but still pack a punch offensively. cb lax was an idea that sam had before i even started building and it just so happened to fit in with the triple intimidate theme i went for. scarf whims is something pretty random i thought of because dd mence was a huge threat and i know he likes to use mence a lot, and it actually fit pretty nicely with the team because it gave me the option of tricking a stall-mon (something i would not have been surprised if he decided to bring) and gave me trick + memento to make setting up dragon dances very easy. lastly i knew i wanted a spinner so i could spam intimidate freely and since i had not picked a mega yet, blastoise seemed like a good choice, given how reliable it is.
1b. Did you do anything special to prepare for this match?
nothing outside of the ordinary. i study all my opponents for spl pretty thoroughly and try to build a team that will match up well vs them. this was a bit hard to do because hikari is easily the least predictable uu player this season, but the team i decided to bring would have matched up well vs anything. luckily, it ended up being a good matchup for me since he decided to bring infernape as his rocker and cb heracross as his breaker.
2. What were your thoughts during team preview? Was there anything on Hikari's team that had you particularly worried?
the first thing that stood out to me was “cool no lax switchins” because even though he had two resists, neither one of them actually beats cb lax. i also had facade so if he decided to burn it, i would have been in even better position. in fact, the turn i switched it into rotom i was almost sure he was going to wisp, but he made the better play and went for storm, which unlucky for him, missed—although i doubt it affected the outcome of the game in the end. the biggest threat from his side was obviously his aerodactyl, which i legitimately had no real answer to aside from intimidating it and getting rocks up. the fact that it had taunt made it even more of a threat since i couldn’t set up on it with my intimidators.
3. What was your general gameplay going into this match? How did it evolve as the game progressed?
i was sure lax could put in work, given that it comes in for basically free against florges, rotom, and empoleon. i figured that’d be my main way of killing stuff, and depending on what he sac’d to it, either mence or gyara could break through. i also kinda figured he might be forced into a position where he’d have to sac florges to gyara in order to avoid being swept, which changed when he stayed in to take whim’s switcheroo with rotom, and then went back to being the case when he was forced to sac the rotom. i was a bit scared of that being subpetaya emp, because hikari is insane and would bring a dpp set against me, and it would have wrecked me since i was subbounce gyara. i was also a bit worried that infernape might be 4 attacks with hp ice, which is the real reason behind my turn 1 switch. i figured he’d either hp ice thinking i wouldn't expect it, stealth rock being a lead set, and in either case blastoise was a good move, OR he’d go to florges and allow snorlax to come in and start plowing shit.
another cool set of plays were turns 10-13, which probably just look like me trying to intimidate aero, when in reality it was a fantastic triple switch with little-to-no drawbacks. gyara into aero on the revenge meant rotom was coming out 100% since he had scarf now, so i predict that and go to krook (risk free since aero can’t touch krook at all at -2) trying to bait the non-volt switch (wisp / storm were both fine) as i go to lax in order to start wailing on shit. that was easily my favorite set of plays in the game—moreso than the late-game intimidate spam, as funny as that was.
turn 18 is another worthy of note because some people think that was a 50-50 that i just “got lucky and won” when in fact going to whims was 100% safe because memento meant he, at worst, would be in the exact same position vs gyara (assuming he CMd twice as i switched in and memento’d). gyara then comes out and does what it did, regardless of what hikari did. a lot of people think gyara was poised to sweep once it came in on florg, but that simply isnt the case. it cannot beat florges AND set up to +2 in order to beat aero as well, so the best play was to just DD once and 2HKO the florges. i subbed once in case he got ballsy and went straight to aero, which would have been disastrous, but he decided to play it safe.
4. In particular, following turns 25 or so you did an excellent job cycling through your Intimidate 'mons to ensure a tight win. Can you give some of your thoughts on how the end-game played out?
yeah that end-game was interesting. tbh all i needed was for him to kill something with heracross, so i got tunnel vision. there was one turn in particular where i think attacking would have been better than switching, but at that point my brain went into auto-pilot. i knew i could kill both mons with a +1 outrage and i knew i could set up on heracross 100% of the time so i thought “ok just force aero out every time and try to sac something that isn’t mence vs hera, then set up and win”. i could have set up on aero as well but alas, he had taunt.
5. Anything else to add?
yeah i’d like to give a special shoutout to king uu, who didnt get bought and has a negative-all time record in spl, and christo, who would be 0-3 if it wasn’t for a massive choke on bugzi’s part—both of whom said i shouldn’t have been bought right after the auction. r0ady too for predicting against me every week bar vs xmarth. also to teal6 who will be getting the donking of his life, ending his undefeated streak, at wednesday 11:15ish PM EST (although i actually like teal :]). be there or be somewhere else!
What did everyone think about this match? How did you think kokoloko and Hikari played? Do you have any questions for kokoloko? Any thoughts on other matches to feature?