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Welcome to the SS OU Player Interviews! The aim of the project is to feature conversations with some of the biggest names in the tier to try to learn more about them.
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FlamingVictini
Favourite Pokemon: Victini
Most used Pokemon (outside of Clefable): Dragapult
Most known for: Winning OST!, Managing the Scooters
hey fv, how are you?
doing well man, finished school the same weekend as OST so i'm just enjoying these few weeks of break before i get back to things. hbu?
i'm going great, thanks for asking!
how has the quarantine been for you?
bit weird honestly, i mean definitely the whole situation sucks for everyone. personally, not being at college with my friends really sucks. but, on a day-to-day basis, i've been doing ok with quarantine and just trudging along
yeah it's definitely been hard on us all, but im glad to see you're still doing well man
so you're known for winning the latest ost and being a long time tour player, but i don't think a lot of us know much about you, mind telling us a bit about yourself and a bit about what you've been doing during the quarantine?
so i'm in my second year of college, studying math and computer science. I'm definitely a bit of a nerd! I find artificial intelligence really interesting and am hoping to pursue research in the field. Gaming-wise, i've always been a core pokemon fan. I started getting interested in competitive mons from watching youtube in middle school, mostly joey and also blunder. I didn't play too much on showdown then, i'd say my roots are actually in pokebattler around 2013-2014, where I would ladder a lot and basically learned how to play. I also met a lot of my amazing friends on smogon there, like philip7086, stone_cold, and ABR. In 2014 smogon started OLT, and that's where I made the transition to smogon and have been playing tournaments since.
during quarantine i've mostly just been busy with school, which I just wrapped up last week. I've also been playing lots of games online with my dorm-mates. I'm a huge fan of board games, and we've been going hard on Catan. I've also never really played any first person shooters (before quarantine, at least), but now i'm addicted to krunker.io even though my mac can't handle it
oh wow ok that sounds really cool, wish i could've tried that myself but idt i'd have any idea how to work anything like that lmao
but damn you've been around for a lot longer than I've thought lol
what do you think has kept you around for this long?
definitely the community. around my senior year of high school I started taking a big step back from mons, playing the tournament circuit year-round and taking it seriously can be quite draining. But I've made so many awesome friends here, I find it really hard to just quit the game completely like that. In recent years i've definitely gone several months at a time without thinking about mons, though. I'm usually most active around the times for SPL and WCoP as I love the team tours the most.
yeah it's definitely hard to stop when there's so many fun people around
now speaking of tours, you've obviously just won OST
could you tell me a bit more about your run?
yeah absolutely
so the way i've been approaching pretty much every tour the past few years, and especially large, long ones like OST, is to just play out the first few rounds with 0 investment in the tour whatsoever. Especially since i play way less than I used to, I find it far easier time-wise and mentally to just take a few teams I know well and spam them early on. I believe it takes a combination of good luck (which includes the absence of bad luck!) and skill to win any of these big individual tours. I have the same approach for something like Smogon Classic, where imo playing 5 cups is just way too much without such a laid-back approach. This is mostly why I tend to be a bit secretive with my teams / replays, as I want to avoid getting counter teamed. think around when I was matched with Sacri in top 32 was when I started to take things more seriously. Though this also meant that because i was now more invested in the tour, it had a greater mental affect/stress on me.
i've been playing these tours for long enough that once i'm in the moment, i'll be completely fine, but buildups to game-time can be nerve wracking. Towards the later rounds, i'd completely lose my appetite a few hrs before game, for example
anyway, because of school i'd usually schedule for the weekend, and prepare the night before. As I alluded in my finals win post, this was basically just me and TPP playing until the wee hours as I made a new team and tweaked it and learned how to play it. I think at this point we were both still in but TPP got knocked out just before top 16, but with this process I usually was not able to produce more than one good, solid team that I was happy and comfortable with. So, I actually repeated teams in all of my series from top 32 till semifinals when they went to 3 games
when I started learning SS during SPL it was mostly during the home metagame, and the teams I had made were either dugtrio balances or hyper offense, so for top 16 and 32 I used dugtrio quite frequently, and the one new team I had made for that round. After dugtrio was banned I needed to completely revamp what I was using, so I edited that hyper offense build and started bringing that along with my one new team
I think probably vs BDLC is where I branched out the most in my style, with the chandelure xatu dugtrio team which I quite liked, and had a strong mu vs things I were noticing people liked to bring vs me.
i think that and perhaps primarina vs insult is where I had my strongest team matachups. But usually I didn't focus too much on mu personally. Part of my process was becoming intimately familiar with playing the teams I was using. This is why I'd feel so much more confident about re-bringing teams in a series, since I felt like I could always outplay out of a tougher mu, and I had immense trust in each of the teams I was using
reaching finals sort of crept up on me, as I just kept following this process (honestly, much of my routine throughout this tour became a bit of a superstition for me) and eventually I had won enough to get to finals lol
then there was one night where some ideas hit me and I built two of the teams I used, and I perfected those and made my last team the day before, as per usual. from there it was just playing my best and hoping for the best
while I love teambuilding, I feel like i'm quite lazy in my prep, and especially in the past few years tournaments tend to burn me out. I had always wanted to win an individual like most do, but after years of reaching playoffs and losing motivation at the most important moments, I sometimes felt like maybe I just didn't have the work ethic to take one to the finish, so this tour was a really welcome surprise for me, and I guess I got a bit lucky that things just worked out and I was able to play well enough
sorry for the wall of text haha
nah don't fret about it this is perfect
but damn this is honestly a pretty amazing way to look at tours
like im pretty sure im lumped in with the majority of the site and absolutely overthink the earlier rounds so it's definitely really great to see another strong perspective
now i guess i've got to ask
what do you think about the current meta?
i like it tbh
idk it just sort of clicks for me
i think the level of centralization rn is healthy
i'm a bit of an aggro player and I feel like there are plenty of tools for me to take on most of the meta, while still having a lot of good supportive pieces to round my teams out
hmm yeah i def agree with this
but what would you say are some of your favourites to use and what to you absolutely hate seeing people use
if that makes any sense
yeah absolutely
i was just gonna say, along that note i absolutely love cm clef
and personally don't use teleclef much
i brought one in g1 of finals and that was the game i lost
thats p much the only time i've touched teleclef
i think this is mostly just a style thing honestly, like I said i'm a bit aggro, and I found I had a really hard time using, or trying to build teams that use mons like teleclef or hippowdon or toxapex or w/e
i like things that are wincons in themselves, or enable the other other wincons on my team. and teleclef definitely does that more than most defensive mons, but i just find it exerts very little direct pressure and had a hard time loving it
i think ppl are under-prepped for cm clef
and cm prim is another mon in a similar vein that is getting some traction now but is underrated
i love things that just rip apart standard defensive cores without falling over to common glue mons
yeah it's kinda wild to think that people aren't using as many wincons anymore
especially after the home meta
but what do you think of the general balanced based meta? I know you said the centralisation was healthy but i think a lot of people have started to notice that people are just playing too safe and relying too heavily on wish clef, what do you think about that?
i actually considered mncmt to be the toughest person i could face in finals, because I thought he was the most aggressive player who also didn't lean too heavily on wishclef, and I felt his understanding of the meta was really good
well i definitely can say it was great watching two really offensive players going at it in the finals
but on that note, do you think you could share a team that you've loved using throughout the run and just give a word or two explaining it for the masses?
yeah so this is what i used in g2
(click for import)
this wasn't the team I was most excited by at first, it was initially based around jirachi though in the end I felt like i thought mew and togekiss were better threats. But I still really like the set I came up with, and I think the overall synergy on the team in terms of wincons is fantastic
bu corvi and cm clef are my 'defensive' wincons
and salazzle helps me keep pressure on teleclef, adds some speed, and allows to me enable these two and even zeraora by spreading toxic on things like toxapex, rotom-h, and hippo. it itself is a win-con too with nasty plot
jirachi often draws out and weakens things like rotom-h or aegislash, and also helps me get rid of ferrothorn early to compensate for my lack of hazard removal for spikes
the sitrus berry and bulk is for living shadow claw + sneak from jolly sd aegi all the time, and most of the time from ada
and rocky helmet with kommo allows me to get crucial chip on things like CB aegi and dracovish, with the fast draco meteor to hit things like ada CB vish, and cover things like rotom-h + dragapult in one slot (status + volt switch shenanigans can be annoying)
its definitely a very offensive team and doesn't have perfect defensive coverage vs things like ghosts, but I think because there are so many wincons that support each other, pretty much any game is winnable if played well. and I think the rocky helmet kommo tech is really good and deserves to see more widespread use
ooo this is a really cool team, thanks for sharing this
hmm i guess is there anything else you'd like to say for the people reading this?
not really
i think that p much covers it
well thanks for the time man
thanks for interviewing me!
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Feel free to ask FV any questions! If anyone has any recommendations, feel free to PM me on discord @ curiosity#2758.
Feel free to ask FV any questions! If anyone has any recommendations, feel free to PM me on discord @ curiosity#2758.
