Featured Playstyle #5: Trick Room

skylight

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sorry bout the delay!

Introduction
In NU there are a variety of different playstyles you can use, however are all playstyles actually effective in this metagame? This project aims to explore the different playstyles you can use in NU, and discover how to make them most effective. Much like Research Group, you'll be discovering whether this playstyle is really cut out for the tier and what you actually need to succeed at it.

What do we discuss here?
The kind of stuff you can discuss here includes:
  • why this playstyle in particular is or isn't effective in this metagame
  • what Pokemon are most successful at this playstyle (is there a pokemon you haven't considered before such as braviary for example viable in stall? why? how?)
  • teams you've been using that fit into this playstyle category
  • speak about your ladder or general experiences with this playstyle
  • if this playstyle was simply better in a past metagame
  • or post about mons you intend to try out with this playstyle
  • be creative!
What is Trick Room? (23 September - 30 September)
Trick Room is a strategy based around the slowest Pokemon moving first for 5 turns (including the turn it's used). Given that NU has a lot of powerful, but slower Pokemon, how effective is TR really? And what's best at abusing it?

Hall of Fame?
There will be one on NU's hub in the future along with Research Group, same applies as there:
  • Users will attempt to reach as high as possible on the ladder with the Pokemon. Breaking past the 2000 mark on the ladder with your registered alt will earn you a spot on the Hall of Fame: Gold Class. Crossing the 1850 mark will secure you a Silver Class spot while a 1700 rating will earn you a Bronze Class spot. Post a screen-shot of your peak in order to achieve this, and a pastebin of your team. Note: this is for Glicko2. You must also have a deviation of 85.
  • Users will be expected to post their experiences with the Pokemon they use, the teams they used, the problems they encountered while trying to make the said Pokemon work.
  • If a user does not participate in the discussion, he will be passed over.
  • In order to participate in the challenge, simply post here with a brand new alt. Post battle logs, experiences with your team on the ladder, and generally how a Pokemon has worked out for you: past or present.
Also feel free to use anything from Research Group for this particular week if it fits into this playstyle! You can discuss the individual Pokemon's performance there, but here you discuss the team as a whole, and the playstyle, too. Have fun!
 

watashi

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it's bad

the meta is too offensive right now so you're basically screwed once tr runs out. they tend to stack up on psychic/ghost types as well so they're gonna be weak to mandibuzz or skuntank. a lot of walls in the meta can hard-wall a lot of common trick room sweepers such as octillery and marowak.
 

skylight

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i don't think that's true at all. something like golem or rampardos can help with the buzz/skunk issue and both are slow/strong enough to put a hole in the opposing team. sure those two are common but there's other cool things you can use if you think out of the box, like ursa, muk, etc are strong af (even cb granbull!) and when given the extra speed it can really help them dent holes. gurdurr is also nice with tr too, ive found. eggy/mushy are mainly the main setters and there's definitely a lot of opportunities for them to set up trick room out of fear of being slept or set up upon if you design the team to not look like it's based around TR. if you find the right sweepers there's enough opportunities to get through the opposing team.
 
while trick room is nowhere near as good in nu compared to ru (lack of slow monsters with excellent typing in aggron, druddigon and escavalier, as well as the lack of the ultimate setter in slowking which has beautiful synergy with the aforementioned three) i think that saying it's outright bad is a bit of an exaggeration, although not unjustified when talking about entire teams built around it.

i dont like trick room teams that are entirely built solely around the move itself, as they aren't flexible, and have bad matchup against a lot of playstlyes, primarily defensive teams. there are the pokemon such as audino with zero offensive presence that are pretty much required, as healing wish and wish keeps your team healthy. there's the fact that all offensive setters are pretty limited in that they're psychic-type, which leaves them vulnerable to the dark-types that flcl brought up, in particular sucker punch as that just bypasses the inversed speed.

we also have the fact that the non-psychic TR sweepers, while powerful, are very limited by their typing, with few resists to bring them in safely (talking about stuff like marowak, ursaring, rampardos etc) and are often entirely ineffective outside of trick room.

the best way to make this strategy work is to limit it to a little core, similar to the EsKing core in RU, and not build an entire team around it. my pokemon of choice for such a core would be TR musharna + something like gurdurr, as they beat eachothers counters, are bulky, and are perfectly capable of operating outside of trick room. or i'd just use a standalone pokemon like tick room exeggutor, which is possibly more effective than the sunny day set as it's not outsped by the omnipresent scarf jynx/ape, and has more survivability thanks to increased bulk and giga drain (although losing out on solarbeam can be a bummer, you can always go with some hipster TR, leaf storm, sleep powder, explosion set that can potentially cripple three pokemon).

shooting myself in the foot by liking goatboys post but he brings up further excellent points below
 
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tennisace

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if you're purely going for speed control i'm more scared of rain/sun since it both boosts the speed and boosts an attacking type, as opposed to just flipping the speed tiers.

other issues with tr:
-a lot of people run slow Pokemon naturally, and it would really suck if you lost to say, an opposing musharna picking off your rampardos and stalling out your tr
-you cant use priority to set it up
-all of the offensive setters share most of the same weaknesses
-still has to deal with priority from stuff like skuntank and liepard
-cant extend the 5 turns to 8
-mediocre abusers by comparison to other tiers
 
if you're purely going for speed control i'm more scared of rain/sun since it both boosts the speed and boosts an attacking type, as opposed to just flipping the speed tiers.

other issues with tr:
-a lot of people run slow Pokemon naturally, and it would really suck if you lost to say, an opposing musharna picking off your rampardos and stalling out your tr
This is actually the biggest problem I encountered in my experiments with Trick Room- It turns out that Torkoal is actually slower than min speed exeggutor, and does a hell of a lot of damage with Lava Plume. Gurdurr also outslows Ursaring, which sucks pretty badly.

I agree with Cherub Angent that the most effective implementation of Trick Room is to use it as a secondary strategy on one or two pokemon, rather than building a team around it. My most successful experience with the playstyle was with a fairly bulky team which utilized both TR Exeggutor and Gurdurr alongside a number of other, not overwhelmingly fast mons.
 

ScraftyIsTheBest

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I like Trick Room; it's a really cool strategy that can turn around a match if I'm scared of some fast mons or something.

I'd say the best way to put about TR in NU is this; TR is a pretty cool strategy, but dedicating entire teams to the strategy isn't very effective. This is mostly because full TR is very matchup reliant; while it fares rather decently against offense, against defensive teams full TR just won't cut it since they can Wish/Heal bell spam and such, and you can't use hazards because the only TR lead is Banette, aka worst Ghost-type ever (RIP Mesprit). The other bad thing about full TR is that you only have five turns to get a legit sweeping chance with most of the team. Also there's the fact that like offense, full TR gets destroyed by Kanga and to an extent opposing Musharna.

Trick Room can do decently, and the way to go imo is using a standalone TR sweeper such as OTR Musharna, kinda like Cofagrigus and Reuniclus in their respective tiers. Using one Pokemon for TR and trying to legitimately sweep with it; and get a sweep with that Pokemon. Good examples of this are Beheeyem and Musharna imo, since they can hit pretty hard, and Beheeyem can punish the common way of dealing with TR (switching) by having Analytic, giving it some real extra power and making it harder to switch into. In other words, TR is better off used by a Pokemon itself rather than dedicated Trick Room team. A backup slow Pokemon might also be useful to cover the weaknesses of the TR sweeper and also take advantage of it if the TR abuser goes down.
 
Trick Room as a style either works or doesn't. The short number of turns means that your prediction has to be spot on and if your opponent is able to out-predict and/or use protect adequately your turns of reverse-speed are going to be mostly wasted.

One of the major problems is the amount of strong but slow users that find themselves on non-trick room teams such as Musharna, Carracosta and Gurdur. There is also a lot of priority that lowers any effectiveness trick room has such as Aqua Jet , Mach Punch and Sucker Punch.

Most Trick Room setters are Ghosts or Psychic types which can be troublesome as you are stacking weakness for this reason I think Audino has some value as a Trick Room setter despite being barely able to use the field effect herself Audino can take a hit setting up Trick Room and/or pass a wish to one of your slower powerhouses that lack any form of recovery and shrug off the damage thanks to Regenerator.

I agree that Trick Room is best used by a single mon like Musharna or Duosion rather than building a team around it so long as your team is prepared for when these fighters go down and Trick Room is still up.
 
well i've always been told that full tr is inherently flawed (big words right). anyways ebeast showed me a really cool tr core because you shouldn't be using full tr: tr mush | dbond haunter | cb licki. first of all, dbond haunter can get rid of stuff like mandibuzz and skuntank, as well as other things, leaving the path clear for tr mush, which hits really hard. cb licki hits like a fucking truck, return | explosion | power whip | eq is a really cool set, and the core has good synergy i guess.
 

Punchshroom

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Yeah, going full Trick Room is never a good idea, the only good way to really use Trick Room is if the sweeper itself uses it. Lampent, Beheeyem, Exeggutor, Duosion and Musharna are the only viable TR users I can think of; trying to sweep with stuff like Octillery, Rampardos and Marowak alongside them won't really work out too well in the long run since they have to make every hit count, but only have a maximum of 3 turns to do so before they are left as sitting ducks because they are really frail. Gurdurr could work in Trick Room, but it never really needed it anyway due to priority and bulk and would burn TR turns upon boosting anyway.
 
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watashi

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on the topic of standalone tr sweepers, exeggutor is probably the best one using a set like tr / leaf storm / psychic / nature power | sleep powder @ life orb since it can bypass sucker punch from skuntank and hit it hard with nature power and also hits most other things hard with leaf storm and psychic. still can't get past mandibuzz though
 
Confirming that CB Lickilicky + OTR Musharna is a really cool Trick Room core and about he closest thing I can think of to Slowking + Escavalier and Cofagrigus + Snorlax in higher tiers. Lickilicky is really good mostly because of the sheer surprise value of an offensive set. Choice Band Return hits almost everything that doesn't resist it super hard and gets lot of surprise OHKOs, and Lickilicky also has Explosion to do silly stuff like OHKO Musharna, Power Whip to handle Rock-types, and Earthquake to handle Steel-types. ebeast worked on a team with me using this core months ago, and I never really used it until about a week ago when I revamped it to handle some specific threats a bit better. I also agree that dedicated Trick Room is bad for all the reasons everyone else said. It's only really effective against more offensive teams which rarely give you the opportunity to set up Trick Room to begin with, let alone switch out to another sweeper like Rampardos or Marowak.
 

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