Approved by UU Moderation / Amazing Art by Moutemoute
Hello and welcome to.. "Player Interview"! This project will allow you to discover or re-discover some well known players of the UU community. Those people may be known thanks to their high-skilled level, their achievements on the strategic scene, or thanks to their dedication to the tier or within the community. Let me first say that I am honored to be following in the footsteps of an esteemed and accomplished list of interviewers: Moutemoute, Feliburn, Kink, and Cynde (also Pokemonisfun and Aqua Jet). Thank you are very much for your work!
Hello again! I am temporarily taking the reins from Aqua Jet as they step away for a little while. I would like to apologize for dropping this project; life got the better of me and I had to step away from Pokemon. I am part of the reason why this project has gone through 3 versions and interviews have been held by 5 separate people. That being said, I am back and the show must go on! With UUPL in full swing it's the best time for this project to be active because it truly is fun to interview UU's best and brightest battlers, contributors, and personalities.
Hello Lyss! How are you?
Hey! I'm oki, a bit sick but it's getting better, how about you?
I'm pretty good, thanks for asking! Just pretty tired.
So, tell me and the community a bit about yourself via a brief introduction. Name, age, favorite color, how true you think Meru actually is, whatever you would like to say!
My name is Reina, i'm 21yo, i live in italy iceland and i study languages, with a focus on japanese for now. My favorite colour would be lilac probably, which is ironically my discord name too, although i chose that name for a different reason. So True Meru for sure, but ever since his nitro expired and he can't spam that ok sis emoji he defo got nerfed a bit.
Iceland is a gorgeous country but I've heard its expensive to visit which is unfortunate. I've been to Japan. Absolutely love the culture and food! So true Meru indeed.
How long have you been a member of this community and what brought you to Smogon and Showdown?
I've first started playing competitive mons in 2013. I found out about it with random youtube videos and i really wanted to try it out, but i was way too lazy to start making my mons in-game so i was looking for an alternative. When i was randomly browsing the store on my phone i found out the PO app and started playing there. I didn't speak english at the time so i just hang around italian communities and forums. I wasn't really interested in tournaments, i was mostly looking for people to casually play with and was laddering from time to time. In 2014 I logged on Showdown for the first time and made my smogon account to try out the xy ou smogon tours since some friends were talking about them, i had some fun but i still enjoyed being a casual more. From late 2014 to 2016 i joined tours at random pmuch, i remember playing some opens during oras (uu and ru i'm sure about) and some classic cups (i used to enjoy dpp and bw ou a lot), but i was still not rly active on smogon and in the community.
I tried out the SM UU alpha in late 2016, i was rly liking it and decided that i wanted to play that during SM. In early 2017 i started playing uu tours and got to know people like Killintime and Ark, although talking with them was still not easy for me cause my english wasn't great. I played pmuch every UU tour from may 2017 to july 2018 (with the 2018 UUPL being my first one), but decided to take a break from mons after uu open cause i felt burned out.
Came back in June 2020 after talking with some friends (looking at you Juno) and was active ever since!
Thats an awesome story!
Currently you are starting in UUPL as one of the stronger SWSH starters, but you also carried our UUFPL last team last year and are proficient in ORAS. Can you talk a little about about your tournament experience and success?
Well, I don't think i've had much success so far. I've yet to debut in an official tournament and only had success in smaller tournaments like UUWC, UUFPL, RUSD and similar. I don't really have an individual (or finals of one at least) to show off either, I've hit playoffs of a couple of indivs before and had a nice run in UU open a couple of years ago but outside of those I think I still need to get a big accomplishment I can be proud of, in a teamtour or an indiv.
If there is something that i gathered from all of these tours I played into is definitely some experience though, and I think it's very important. I've always had (and still have) anxiety going to and through games, and I think i'm getting more comfy and finally being able to perform when it matters. For example in RUSD I had to play the tiebreak during finals and it was my first time experiencing that, and although i got smashed by a good friend, I definitely took it as a lesson and i'm sure that i'll do better the next time i'll be in that exact situation. Something else I learned a lot about is how to prep in the right way, considering I have a past of sabotaging myself with some choices in the builder, I think that was an important step, although I still need to learn to be self-sufficient since I don't really find myself comfy loading my own stuff in tours lmao.
So yeah, for now I can't really say I've had much success but I feel like I'm making a lot of progress in the right direction, so I'll keep trying my best to get something I can be proud of and hopefully to play in SCL later this year, since it's an experience I'd love to have.
Going far in individual tours is hard even for really skilled players. You definitely have the stuff to do so!
What's the story behind the names Lyss and Mionda?
I get questions about my nicknames a lot since i go by many different ones and outside of close friends people don't really know my name. The answer is that i like to change nickname every now and then, never really like to stick with the same ones for too long although i've been doing it recently on all platforms.
The stories behind them aren't anything exceptional. In 2017 I used to play some MMORPG games and needed multiple names for multiple characters. At the time i had just played Danganronpa and one of my favourite characters from series is Ibuki Mioda, and when i was brainstorming for name ideas it came back to my mind and I went like "hey, what if i added a n to it?" and that's how Mionda was born, eventually i started associating it with sea waves since that's what "onda" means in Italian, and the nickname on PS being blue was just perfect for it. Later on I got close with umbry which used "Tuononda" as PS name at the time, and people associated our names since they sounded really similar and thought it was some kind of matching while it was just a casuality. Her name meant Thunder Wave in Italian and a lot of people knew about it/learned about it, so I got asked often if it was some other Italian move, but the answer is no.
As for Lyss that's a bit more complicated. I love writing and it's an hobby I practice from time to time although I don't think i'm any good at it. I usually just try to come up with fantasy stories and make characters from 0. In a story I was trying to write in 2019 there was a girl named Lyssereth and it was probably the most interesting design i had came up with at the time (and she still is probably), eventually I changed her lore and development a lot and her name also changed and went from Lyssereth to Lyss to Lyssa, but I loved her character and the name I gave to her. Although I'm not all too similar to her, I decided to make it my smogon nickname at the time because I really liked that name and felt that mood a lot, and since part of me gave up ever publishing something (or at least for the near future) I didn't feel like i was ruining her name or anything, especially since I was using an older version of it. I kinda wish i made it Lyssa but recently it probably would've made a lot more confusion due to reasons lmao, so I don't mind it.
The only other one i frequently use in the mons community is Lilac, which is one of my favourite japanese songs, and even tho sometimes i've been feeling like changing it, someone screamed at me to stop the last time i did it so i just kept Lilac LMAO. Last thing i'm gonna add is that part of me got tired of Mionda being my ps alt, but between being too shy to ask for the Lyss name and people liking Mionda a lot, I kinda sticked to it.
That's cool. I like all of them. Purple is my favorite color, I don't really have a favorite shade though.
Why do you have it out against Zydog? What did it do to you?
WELL I've been meaning to write down something in a proper way about Zydog for a while now so I suppose this is the perfect occasion.
I just believe that the mon is broken to put it simple. It affects teambuilding in an extreme way, Amoonguss would be a top tier mon in this meta and an amazing tool for Aegislash, but sometimes it's simply unusable because of that mon alone. Zydog has extremely limited counterplay, with the only reliable answer being Tapu bulu, since both mandibuzz and tangrowth just die to Outrage with minimal chip, which is not hard to achieve consdering the nature of those mons (The first wanting to slowturn on a bunch of threats to bring in a breaker, and the second being a sponge; Synthesis tang does an ok job at handling zydog but non-av tang would be worse than av in 95% of the scenarios if that mon alone got kicked, and synthesis is not the move you'd want to first slot in there). Offensively checking it is not a thing in most situations, since it's base speed being 115 makes it one of the fastest mons in the metagame and it pairs really well with Mandibuzz, Slowking, Chansey and other mons that grab momentum very easily. Zydog alone makes teambuilding a nightmare for me, the options to cover it are very limited and when you don't go for one of them, you often find yourself running items that you would love to avoid such as Shuca for Cobalion or Button for Amoonguss, that while are still relevant for a couple of other things (Shuca for Mamoswine and button is usually ok to pivot to stuff early on), make it a lot more awkward in other situations.
It has also been insane in games to me. While it doesn't always have the strongest showing in UUPL for example, both because it's sometimes not played well and some others it faces a combination of things that limit it very hard, I've seen games coming down to @ how many outrage turns and it's just ridicolous. This meta having 2 (some would even argue 1) good fairy types means that during the midgame you can safely click outrage and get a ton of progress off it, just to get bailed by a 2 turns end when they switch out in favor of their steel type. Seeing games come down to that is just sad to me.
I would write more and more but the tl;dr would be that i think it affects teambuilding in a crazy way and since the mon is so good at punishing unprepped teams you can't afford to ignore it, but using the little tools that consistently beat it just leaves you open to other stuff. It makes the tier a lot more revolved around match up and i think we would be 100% be doing well without it, while also not losing anything too important for the balance of the tier.
I'm slowly moving towards ban. However, I think it's still really stupid Aegislash stayed in the tier.
Let's move outside Pokemon. What are your TV, movie, and music interests? Do you have a favorite song, movie, or TV show?
I don't really watch TV series nor movies much, I used to watch some anime years ago but i stopped in the last 2-3 years. I have a netflix account and sometimes binge watch stuff although i usually do it with friends rather than alone, since i prefer doing something else otherwise. A couple of months ago i watched "The queen's gambit" and liked it a lot so I'd say that's my favorite TV series, unsure about film though.
As for music, I listen to a ton of stuff of different genres in a couple of different languages. I like japanese music a lot and used to listen to a bunch of korean music too, even tho i haven't been doing it much lately. Lately i've been listening to BMTH, Bülow, Sub Urban, Charli XCX and Halsey the most I think. If i had to pick a top 5 overall for me, I'd say Cö shu Nie, BMTH, Heize, Aimer and Minami would be my favourite artists/groups overall, with Asphyxia by Cö shu Nie (jrock) being my favorite song and That's The Spirit by BMTH (alternative metal for the most part) being my favorite album.
Good choices.
Could you perhaps share a team of your own design that you are especially proud of? Your choice of team week 1 of UUPL was interesting if you'd like to speak about that.
Well, as i said earlier i'm not self sufficient which means I don't build for my own tour games, and I don't really build a lot in general. I don't dislike doing it, but I just can't unless I feel inspired in doing so and usually have big holes in the things i build which makes me end up scratching them away. The week 1 team wasn't made by me and both me and the person that built ended up agreeing that the team wasn't really great, it just had the ability of covering everything the meta had at the time if the sequences were played the right way which was good enough. Since I don't really wanna share teams made by others even though the base ideas might've been mines, I'll share one of the teams I used against Meru in UU Masters 2 months ago, which i thought was interesting at the time and i actually made it for once.
(I changed the spread of tang to the default smogdex one for tour reasons)
So yeah, this was a team i built around banded Aegislash, which at the time wasn't a common thing, it was a dead, months old, trend that i thought would be cool to revive since it looked exceptional against meru and his high Celesteela usage. Aegi could literally just cc it into Nihilego's +1 Thunder range which was perfect, and i was using Head Smash during that game as a fun choice for Mandibuzz, so i could easily get rid of it for my Azelf to pop off. Head Smash was definitely a memey choice i made, Shadow Claw is better in 90% scenarios but clicking CB Head Smash is so much fun and I wanted to show it off (if possible) for the fun of the TD chat. I ended up showing it! .. just g3 when i used another CB aegi team and it did more damage than good things, but i kinda expected it the moment i took the head smash gambit. Rest of the theory is pretty simple, Azelf pressures Slowking which belt eball/turns to get it in range for nihi/molt, swampert and tang were the defensive backbone of the team and checked most stuff that could be threatening, Mamo was a huge threat so i ended up making swampert pdef for it and to have an out to dd mence, which would've been really hard to deal with otherwise. Amoonguss is super annoying for this team to deal with but it trended off at the time, same with zydog.
Overall, this team was really fun to use back in that meta, wouldn't expect it to do much nowdays with a way different meta where i don't think mons like Azelf are that great, but it did it's job and won me that one game i used it into+revived cb aegi for everyone!
That was an intense game! Cool team.
Would you like to shout out anyone or give some final remarks?
Not gonna mention everyone 1 by 1 because those would be a lot of tags, but big thanks to umbry in particular as well as everyone in ff22, idols, darms, tmbj, roseraiders, the uu community and all the people i talk with in general for the fun times and memories i've made so far. I've had ups and downs in the last couple of years but my time here has been overall enjoyable and it's thanks to y'all. Also big thanks to you Drew for having me, it was fun!
Awesome interview! Thank you very much for joining me!
