Gen 2 [Gen 2 OU] curseTTar w/o electrics or cloy

[Lojh()]

Snorlax, Cloyster, and Zapdos are the best pokemon in the game, in that order. This is almost an undeniable fact, and the direction the Viability rankings are trending since my outlandish vote in 2020 with cloy over both electrics. However, this philosophy starts to clamp my style of building, as almost every team I build has all three of these pokemon. Even now, my favorite team has BOTH electrics, snorlax, and cloy. However, for this one, I wanted to relax these preconceptions, to hopefully make something decent without these teambuilding constraints. With that said, this team attempts to strangle the spikes game, and win with curseTTar or explosions lategame.


fucking tree (Exeggutor) @ Leftovers
IVs: 6 HP / 28 Atk / 24 Def
- Hidden Power [Fire]
- Psychic
- Giga Drain
- Explosion

The first pokemon on this team is one that has fallen from an A tier threat in this gen, but still one of my personal favorites. This pokemon is the perfect glue for the team too, covering the glaring golem/rhydon weakness without it, functioning as a lure for skarmory, steelix, zapdos, snorlax, or tyranitar, depending on which of the attacks you choose not to reveal at any given time. 4attks egg is a very agressive and prediction reliant pokemon, which is perfectly in line with my playstyle. Realistically, if a normal (non adrenaline junkie) person wanted to run this team, use a status move over hidden power fire.

misty (Starmie) @ Leftovers
- Light Screen
- Psychic
- Recover
- Rapid Spin

Ever since the advent of golem, people are starting to forget about the gen's old premier spinner. Starmie is here to spin and cover the things zapdos does, but better. Light screen synergizes with the other electric weak pokemon on the team, and can lead to very interesting interactions with CurseTTar, Exeggutor, or Snorlax. Psychic covers machamp/heracross (sometimes) and hits spinblockers hard too. The team is very hera weak as I am not running zapdos, but heracross is falling out of the meta as of late anyways. Spikes is important as without the offensive powerhouses that is zapdos, offense needs a way to play agressively, and spikes is perfect for that. Light screen also makes Starmie essentially unpursuitable.

GENGHIS (Gengar) @ Leftovers
- Mean Look
- Explosion
- Thunderbolt
- Ice Punch

I fucking love this set as of late. It's very ttar weak, so necessary offensive plays will need to be made to not get pursuit trapped, or just simply blow up TTar. This set can catch so many pokemon off guard for a confirmed explosion, most of the time snorlax. If you are not an adrenaline junkie, switch this set to dpunch or hypnosis, and if you run hypnosis, put egg on sleep powder. If not, happy snorlax trapping.

T_T (Tyranitar) @ Leftovers
- Rock Slide
- Curse
- Rest
- Roar

When I was a middle schooler, playing pokemon showdown on my chromebook in math class, in 2018, this was the set that carried me to 1500 elo for the first time. I was a bit of an idiot back then, I played tyranitar, zapdos, raikou, snorlax, foretress, skarmory, not because it was a good team (which it is), but because the pokemon looked cool. But this set is the centerpiece of the team, and a current favorite idea. With the correct supporting pieces (exeggutor, spikes), curseTTar can absolutely run through offensive teams in the lategame. Also functions as another snorlax check on the team. Roar has interesting priority in this generation, so funnily enough, you can spam roar against other not cursed skarmory and you'll always get it because the SLOWER roar is the one that doesn't fail in this gen.

Laxative (Snorlax) @ Leftovers
- Double-Edge
- Earthquake
- Sleep Talk
- Rest

Classic talklax, kind of necessary without any other real nidoking counters, and being the blanket electric check. Synergizes really well with TTar with earthquake hitting everything TTar cannot, and forcing switches for easy doubles galore. Putting zapdos to sleep with double edge damage is sweet. Just a standard defensive snorlax functioning as a glue here, nothing much to see here.

$pikes (Forretress) @ Leftovers
IVs: 6 HP / 28 Atk / 24 Def
- Spikes
- Rapid Spin
- Explosion
- Hidden Power [Fire]

The spiker. Another important piece to the team, as spike control is virtually necessary on this team to break through some stall structures. Funnily enough, foretress's explosion as a bait is severely underrated. Hidden power fire is on this guy because without it, the matchup against hpghost foretress is essentially unwinnable. Once foretress is revealed to be hidden power fire, people will switch in very explodable pokemon like starmie and golem in on it, and foretress's explosion can negate some of these pokemon, greatly helping tyranitar in the late game.


I hope you like my team! Feel free to suggest anything, criticism is always welcome. Happy building!

 

[Siatam]

Cloyster is a fairly simple Pokemon to replace by using Forretress. Zapdos however, has a more unique and difficult to replicate role. While I think there is merit to electric-less offense teams, they need to have a very specific goal in mind. Zapdos, and to a lesser extent Raikou, are phenomenal all-rounders. They are good is almost every situation. If you want to drop both from your team for any reason other than novelty you need to pick one strategy and drill down on it.

Your team aims to strangle the spikes game and win with Curse Tyranitar or Explosions. Putting aside the Ttar strategy, there's no better strategies to use Zapdos/Raikou on that Spikes focused or Explosion based offenses. Durable attackers with wide coverage are excellent when paired with Spikes and aside for Snorlax there are hardly any mons that are more valuable than the electrics in a 1v1 or 2v2 situation when you have expending your Explosions.

The most prominent examples of electric-less offense teams I can think of focus heavily on Explosion and use a set-up Sleep Talker user in the back. Most commonly Vaporeon. These teams play every aggressive games and rarely give their opponent time to set up or heal with Rest. A typical team composition may look like Snorlax/Cloyster/Gengar/Exeggutor/Golem/Vaporeon.

I don't think your team quite has a unique enough strategy to warrant being electric-less, but I don't want to radically reshape into one that does. So I'll give what recommendations I can while keeping your team composition intact.


I am a proponent of the school of thought that your lead in GSC doesn't matter that much as long as it is one of: Snorlax, Electric, Spiker, or Sleep user. Exeggutor qualifies as a sleep user, whether or it actually has sleep, the possibility still needs to be respected from the lead slot. However, I don't think four attacks Eggy is well suited for the lead. 4A Eggy likes to surprise opponents with its unexpected coverage moves and put them in a rough spot. If you use this set from the lead it is more often that it will trade damage with some Sleep Talker and then be forced to explode at low HP without ever utilizing its full moveset. Four attacks Eggy is a good set, but I recommend you don't lead with it.


Starmie does not cover the things Zapdos does and do it better, not even close. While your set qualifies as a check to fighting types, it severely lacks as check to ground types (particularly Steelix) and does not nearly have the same offensive presence as Zapdos needed to force switches. I think this team needs checks to ground types as well as more offensive punch. To this end I recommend the standard NightMie set of Surf/Substitute/Nightmare/Recover. This set notably drops Rapid Spin, but I don't think the team should try to play the Spikes game when it's missing some of the best Spikes abusers. Instead of trying to defensively support the team with Light Screen, NightMie can instead offensively support the team by forcing RestTalk mons into uncomfortable Rest loops which give the rest of your team easier entry.


Much like Bind Steelix, I view Mean Look + Explosion Gengar as a crutch. Instead of trapping the opponent you want to explode on, why not just explode on them? Of course I understand that trappings moves are not as committal as clicking a raw Explosion, but once you reveal them the surprise factor is lost. Your opponent can essentially treat you clicking Explosion and you clicking Mean Look as the same thing. Bringing Mean Look essentially gives your 1 free Explosion test run where you don't lose your mon. I think there are much more valuable uses of your moveslot.
On this team I recommend Psychic on Gengar. This greatly improves your matchup against Machamp, Heracross, and other Gengar especially when combined with the Starmie changes proposed above. It also won't make your Gengar's matchup into Tyranitar any worse than it already is.


No changes. This Tyranitar set can be a powerful win condition if you can remove its checks. Notably water types, ground types, and Charm/Growl users. But to comment on your analysis, I find this Ttar set much better against stall teams than offense.


Nothing to add or change. Your team needs some defensive backbone and Snorlax fulfills that role.


As mentioned above in Starmie's section I don't think this team should be focusing on the Spikes game. Dropping Rapid Spin for Toxic gives Forretress a lot more utility.


While I don't personally like this team structure, I appreciate the creative teambuilding. Its good to keep in mind that sometimes all you need is an unexpected build to deceive your opponent in order to win. I hope you found these comments insightful or at least entertaining.
New paste: https://pokepast.es/ff387ea02e8fb6da

PS: This team gets washed by Marowak, but that is basically a given when you build an offense without Cloyster or a ground immunity. Exeggutor and Starmie are not reliable checks to Wak.

 

[Lojh()]

Thanks for the new comments, unlike my other posts on RMT, (such as the machamp 2elecs team which is currently my favorite one as of late), this one was decidedly less serious, and more of an exploration into building without certain threats that my brain defaults to. I am not very experienced in building electricless, and playtesting im starting to appreciate the synergy zapdos and raikou have with spikes. I have a long ways to go building more off-meta ideas, as when I played the game competitively I stuck to very simple and well explored structures and just focused on fundamentals. If you were allowed to fundamentally alter the team (add zapdos), how would you go about doing it? I myself completely rebuilt it after realizing I wanted a zapdos spikes control team more than i wanted a electricless novelty team, and I plan on posting that RMT next week, as i find the whole process interesting and the team I landed on very weird.

Tldr: if you were to fix the team by altering core themes behind the team but preserving most of the structure, how would you do it?

 

[Siatam]

Thanks for the new comments, unlike my other posts on RMT, (such as the machamp 2elecs team which is currently my favorite one as of late), this one was decidedly less serious, and more of an exploration into building without certain threats that my brain defaults to. I am not very experienced in building electricless, and playtesting im starting to appreciate the synergy zapdos and raikou have with spikes. I have a long ways to go building more off-meta ideas, as when I played the game competitively I stuck to very simple and well explored structures and just focused on fundamentals. If you were allowed to fundamentally alter the team (add zapdos), how would you go about doing it? I myself completely rebuilt it after realizing I wanted a zapdos spikes control team more than i wanted a electricless novelty team, and I plan on posting that RMT next week, as i find the whole process interesting and the team I landed on very weird.

Tldr: if you were to fix the team by altering core themes behind the team but preserving most of the structure, how would you do it?

Honestly just drop Starmie and add the standard Thunder/HP Ice/Rest/Sleep Talk Zapdos set. The ideas of Spikes, Explosion, and Curse Tyranitar are solid, but they're just so much better when you can use them alongside Zapdos.

If you want to keep the Spikes control aspect of the team you can instead drop Exeggutor for Zapdos. However, for more Spikes centric offense teams I prefer to bring Golem instead of Rapid Spin Starmie. Personal preference.

 

[Jorgen]

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 / Gengar / Snorlax / Vaporeon and aimed to basically just click Explosion and hope Vap was set up well for a sweep thereafter.

Going stall also works. The most well-remembered iteration of VIL stall (Raikou / Skarmory / Miltank / Starmie / Snorlax / Marowak) doesn't use either of those guys. A little outdated and not my cup of tea, but functional. The more newfangled concept from Zokuru (Raikou / Tenta / Forry / Ttar / Snorlax / Skarm) also does without #2 and #3.

Basically, to break free of the top-tier shackles, you have to deviate quite a bit from the dominant playstyle where those top tiers thrive. I think that's this team's greatest fault - the concept is to still try and build one of those fashionable Spikes & Explosion offenses with bend-but-don't-break defenses, but without two of the Pokemon acting as that playstyle's lynchpins.

Now if only somebody could invent a playstyle where Snorlax isn't mandatory... BP comes pretty close...