Smogon Snake Draft 2019: LC Discussion

A lot of the prep for some of these weeks is in a binder that I don't have anymore so my memory is shaky on why I made some decisions some weeks (everything probably had a reason though).
week 1 vs Osh: https://pokepast.es/0df880be477083ba
I really wanted to web very early in this tournament, and before it started I planned to web the very first person that had even a slight weakness to it. I had not used it a single time in all of LCPL and it doesn't really appear in my scouter, so webbing so early both catches the person I web by surprise and adds a web team to my scout, which is really important in this current meta because webs are so oppressive at that team building stage and you can be much more creative in the team builder when you aren't afraid of someone webbing you. I knew that Osh had encountered Levi+Luthier webs at this point so I created a new team to have the added advantage of him not knowing the sets.

In the actual game he bought 20 spe scarf diglett which I didn't really expect, so the game accordingly came down to a speed tie that he won. He choked pretty hard in the endgame by giving my abra a chance to sub but at that point I wanted to be able to keep abra at full HP in case his staryu was defensive so that it could bullshit through a hit from full. If I had subbed there predicting the choke I would have won, but I don't think it was a choke on my part as I didn't know the sets.

week 2 vs BurntZebra: https://pokepast.es/dc7e2be256e2d78a
I think that this is my favorite team that I built this tournament, though in retrospect it has a resttalk bray weakness that I would remedy if I could build it again. I wanted to mix it up this week so I bought a bunch of substandard sets that I think work pretty well together: the dual waters + timburr force out each others checks and then kill themselves against their checks so that Z diglett can some in. Tirtouga is pretty weak as a vullaby check so I instead decided to check it by pressure by having setup mons stop it from wanting to kill things. 11 spe foongus rounds out the team, synergizing well with the sweepers that tend to force out foongus and knock it out and making sure that I don't lose outright to timburr.

Zebra ended up bringing ferroseed+Timburr+resttalk mudbray and getting a very desirable matchup, but I think my techs made it not nearly as bad as it looked from preview. Ferrospritz at least could be broken through, as you saw in the actual game. I was put in a very bad spot by a double min roll mid game on his vull with the knock to brave bird, allowing him to kill my best check to his mudbray on the wakeup turn. I was bailed out by sleep talk turns in my favor in the endgame and a successful bluffing of 3 attacks foongus.

week 3 v trash https://pokepast.es/230c9309d05c659d
Trash had taken a long hiatus from LC and from that I speculated that he was unfamiliar with some of the recent metagame innovations that threw standard for a loop: explosion ferroseed + diglett and eviolite abra. From this speculation I made a pretty cool shellder team, a Pokemon that I had noticed people were under preparing for repeatedly mostly from Onix eclipsing pawniard completely as the best vull check thanks to the rise of Z vulla. The actual game was a matchup slightly in my favor where by the endgame thanks to a lucky double call I would have been in a slight advantage, but thanks to a lucky crit I didn't need to worry about being outplayed in the endgame and from there won handily.

week 4 vs Lily https://pokepast.es/a0cf383f38a382bd
I thought that Lily would try to win this game on matchup so I was expecting webs a little bit:
Screen Shot 2019-11-11 at 5.19.24 PM.png

but I was expecting the frail webs that were really popular at the time and didn't want to go too far into matchup, so I thought that air balloon diglett and ponyta would be enough to give me an even matchup while still having a good matchup spread against all the other stuff that was possible. Unfortunately she bought the bulky webs variant with nasty plot vullaby that this team really isn't equipped to deal with, and after the Z wild charge the match was pretty much over on matchup. The team does has a pretty cool tech though: Ponyta + air balloon final gambit diglett. With the air balloon diglett can perform its traditional job of counter trapping diglett if it kills ponyta, but with final gambit and 20 HP it also has the massive utility of trapping standard staryu from full after allowing Ponyta to clean up shop once its premier check is gone.

week 5 vs Zoro: https://pokepast.es/a6ed66e98cddae65
I had noticed that Shrug wasn't really handing Zoro grounded poisons and I speculated that Zoro hadn't been following LC closely enough to be familiar with whirlpool Z psychic staryu, so I decided to run a pretty self explanatory toxic spike + poison trap team with some techs that someone less familiar with the meta might be caught by. I knew that I had a mag weakness, but I don't particularly like ferroseed and I don't think magnemite is very good right now so I thought I would be fine.

Unfortunately in the actual game he was using scarf magnemite, but my own Z psychic staryu turned out to be a fantastic pick and exerted around the same amount of pressure on his team. I used it to trap his foongus as planned after bluffing evio by harding it in, and with some doubles in the early game ended up with a very solid lead. I think I played the late game probably the worst out of all of my games of snake with some definite misplays muddying the waters of what should have been a guaranteed win, but thunder wave pawn and such a fantastic early game set me far enough ahead to net the win.

week 6 vs Jake: https://pokepast.es/8bc972a986c9aac4
Jake was consistently not running foongus and diglett at this point, so I wanted to go hard in on one of these Pokemon not making an appearance and decided to go a bit more hard no no diglett while using Z hydro HP fire staryu to give me an edge against ferroseed teams. I also included toxic spikes as Jake at that point seemed to prefer ferrospritz as his core of choice. I also had a very cool diglett set but I can't reveal it as I'd like to use it for circuit.

I think this was overall the most exciting game to play for me. We both had aspects of our picks that were really good for the other: my Z hydro staryu had a great matchup against his defensive core and his scarf diglett and Z vullaby had a great matchup against mine (the two of them in tandem solidly gave him the matchup, though). I was able to use some shenanigans to minimize the Z vullaby damage and break his core with the staryu, but the ultimately the game came down to a game of chicken between who would end up doubling to diglett in a mareanie vs mareanie situation, and he predicted correctly and won the game from there. I think we both played pretty well here and it was a fun game despite my loss.

week 7 vs Kingler: I'm not linking this team because the team is pure AIDS, you can rebuild it yourself if you want it
I still believe that Levi is the single greatest builder in LC right now, and at this point in the tour Kingler was just letting him build for him making him a much tougher opponent than he was at the beginning of the season. I wanted to use something completely out of my normal range of building options, so I decided to bring some heavy smash spam as Levi is occasionally known to be weak to veils (and smash spam has a similar matchup spread to veils).

I don't know how levi did it but he somehow predicted the smash spam perfectly and used its single hardest matchup in abragast+sturdy juice magnemite. Smashspam isn't really the type of team that you can outplay through a matchup to win, so I decided to play to hax and pray and ended up getting the win with a choke on his part near the end.

At this point school was ramping up and my team was 100% out unless we went like 20-0 in the last two weeks, so I asked to be subbed out for the remainder of the tour as serene wanted to get some games in pretty badly. I was subbed in pretty late in the final week as serene wanted to do something, and while I had been prepping a team idea for luthier for a while it involved Clamperl and I didn't want to do him like that. I ended up stealing a team and replacing one mon as I didn't really care enough about my record to set aside time to do intense prep.

Overall I'm satisfied but not thrilled with my own performance this snake, with a 4-3 in the season that actually matter being not too shabby. There's a lot of things I'd like to do differently that I hopefully get the chance to do in other team tournaments. I wasn't really a fan of LC as a whole this snake as I believe that this particular metagame promotes matchup fishing to an insane degree and that our records reflect luck and matchup fishing skills more than they do overall play. I think as a whole we did pretty well this snake despite some hax really skewing many of the records, with Luthier and Jake having the two best performances (Jake being the indisputable best performance), Osh, Lily, Zoro+Shrug and I having middling ones and Kingler, Trash+tko and London+teal needing some improvement.

I think hopefully what this snake shows for SPL is that managers should really be looking to draft at least one high level builder. Kingler was bombing the first couple weeks largely from his teams being so lackluster, but once Levi took over in the latter half of the tour he actually became a difficult opponent. Trash+tko were so out of the meta near the beginning (you can hardly blame trash in all fairness as he was never supposed to start), and it came through in their teambuilding with mediocre teams for most of the tour really holding them back. The Rumblers were probably the worst culprits of this, with neither London nor Teal being competent at building making them counterteam bait through the entire latter half of the tour (and their first two wins coming from webs and pre-Levi kingler). In my opinion London wasn't really playing particularly bad, he just didn't have the team building know-how to keep up with the intense prep and got run over as a result.
 

Shrug

is a Community Contributor Alumnusis a Tiering Contributor Alumnusis a Past SPL Championis a Past SCL Champion
LCPL Champion
ok the above has inspired me to go into the vault and withdraw some rare shrug sets. i have, unlike jake, seemingly forced myself into two additional months of this wretched meta so i will not be dropping everything i have. sigh. but here you go, along with recommendations for the albums i lifted the nicks from when i went in.

week 2:
https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/smogtours-gen7lc-455548
1573509078152.png

Omanyte @ Waterium Z
Ability: Weak Armor
Level: 5
EVs: 36 Def / 200 SpA / 240 Spe
Modest Nature
IVs: 0 Atk / 30 SpA / 30 Spe
- Hydro Pump
- Ice Beam
- Hidden Power [Fire]
- Shell Smash

here is the big beautiful omanyte zoro brought against osh. unfortunately we picked the version without spritzee and ran into bandfoo, this dude might have had more success otherwise. but the idea was to create an omanyte set that was never bad in a mu. this is done by making it wa, allowing it to come in and fire off a z-hydro, and hp fire for ferros that usually come in for free. it has shell smash in case circumstances favor a sweep, but it's not really something you're looking for most games.

week 3:
https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/smogtours-gen7lc-456656
1573509579649.png

Pawniard @ Safety Goggles
Ability: Defiant
Level: 5
EVs: 156 Atk / 36 Def / 116 SpD / 196 Spe
Jolly Nature
- Knock Off
- Iron Head
- Sucker Punch
- Stealth Rock

lol the gogglesman. had zebra down as a foongus user, got webbed and zoro played well out of it, but the point behind the team was to create the impression of overcoat vulla (spritzee + no grass type) to bait sludge into pawn then get the extra turn on the spore letting me rocks + knock on the first time this guy came in. WA vulla + pony could then be checks for fighting types freeing up NP vulla in the back. obviously no foong meant this didnt work but thankfully it did live enough gastly suckers to get us the w.

week 5
https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/smogtours-gen7lc-458776
1573509973849.png

Lust For Life (Foongus) @ Eviolite
Ability: Regenerator
Level: 5
EVs: 156 Def / 80 SpA / 156 SpD / 80 Spe
Bold Nature
IVs: 0 Atk / 30 SpA / 30 Spe
- Giga Drain
- Sludge Bomb
- Hidden Power [Fire]
- Synthesis

jake used this too, but here's an idea for a three attack nonspore foongus. everyone loved using sporeblockers for obvious reasons so i figured why not skip past that step and create a foongus that breaks down ferrospritz cores held together by dig and also is favored in foongus wars. in the game against tazz he brought trapstar which was quite good against the team we brought, water resist foongus got taken off the map and we didnt have a dig (another variant did) to punish the star. that, plus the mag turn we got wrong, meant an uphill climb.

album is called "album" and it's by the band girls. bedroom pop that's not afraid to move a little in kind of beach boys / beatles patterns.

week 6
https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/smogtours-gen7lc-460303
1573510386972.png

Run On Love (Spritzee) @ Eviolite
Ability: Aroma Veil
Level: 5
EVs: 212 HP / 196 Def / 12 SpA / 76 SpD / 12 Spe
Bold Nature
IVs: 0 Atk
- Moonblast
- Calm Mind
- Wish
- Protect

my entry into the battling fray went pretty well, all told, in large part thanks to this guy. i felt like cm was underrated + surprising, which i needed given how well luthier knew my building patterns. it was a strange causality of the covet / psychic revolution for some reason, but with a trapper (dig for me) this thing still went off. most teams have to take a turn to remove the evio allowing you to get a boost + a wish up and the momentum gathers up from there. i'm particularly proud of the way i bluffed fast psychic with this set and used that to start boosting, def one of my favorite plays I made in the tour.

album is tove lo's "queen of the clouds", the second best pop album of the decade (jai paul's leaks are #1). i recommend the deluxe edition (it's called something stupid) that has "love ballad", the best song on the album released as an extra for some reason.

week 7
https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/smogtours-gen7lc-461266
1573510889576.png

Zen (Snivy) @ Eviolite
Ability: Contrary
Level: 5
EVs: 156 HP / 80 SpA / 240 SpD / 16 Spe
Calm Nature
IVs: 0 Atk / 30 SpA / 30 Spe
- Leaf Storm
- Hidden Power [Fire]
- Mirror Coat
- Synthesis

brought the bulky snivy to my first game against jake. he's a noted ferrospritz user so i planted this guy front and center to try to pick him apart. caught a foongus instead, which mirror coat took off, but at the cost of a poison, which caused me to fuck with my plan. im still debating whether the coat was right at all. hed still have had foongus even if i went pawn or whatever, and rocking there wouldve put the scarf vulla on a timer in a way that was really pleasing. i keep coming back to the fact that i wouldve had to eventually because snivy was key to checking his onix say or revenging diglett. maybe i couldve strung together doubles but against someone who had been playing as well as jake i figured simple was best and took the foong off. the poison was annoying because i intended to recover after dig killed something, forcing him into a gambit (great for whichever of abra / mare was left) or making him go out to a say vullaby which would be on a timer after i went after rocks aggressively. poison fucked with the plan because i wasnt really in a spot to be making marginal hp gains as wouldve been possible in a clean snivy scenario. then i got the vullaby play wrong in a way that prevented me from taking the game more offensively. i made a couple good plays to stay in it but he finished the advantage well. jake was rlly our best player during this tour, hm.

album was Re-up Gang's "We Got it For Cheap Vol II", one of the best mixtapes ever released. in a way it's the complimentary twin to "hell hath no fury", revealing the degree to which the precision and beat specificity of that album was a conscious choice used to create meaning. (hell hath no fury is one of the most tonally consistent rap albums ever and one of the best looks at american capitalism created in any medium past the turn of the century). but in we got it for cheap they just let it rip, delightful stuff.

week 8
https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/smogtours-gen7lc-462292
1573511657249.png

Real Earth (Tirtouga) @ Psychium Z
Ability: Solid Rock
Level: 5
EVs: 4 HP / 212 Atk / 12 Def / 76 SpD / 180 Spe
Impish Nature
- Stone Edge
- Zen Headbutt
- Shell Smash
- Stealth Rock

was struggling for inspiration in the build against kingler. he can use anything and levi was dropping a lot of good shit on him that was difficult to prepare for. in the end i looked back to gen 6 and absdaddy's six wincon team that he used to make shakeitup quit lcpl in tears. the centerpiece of that team was rocks smash tirt, which i resurrected with a twist in the z-psy. the idea was that at preview the bray + tirt makes him think smash tirt rocks bray and causes him to orient his gameplan around saving the timburr or the foo to stop this. then get this shit in early against lead vullas or what have you then put up rocks. this makes him think resttalk / scarf bray and suddenly reenter his foo or foongus into the tirt gameplan. then, bang, smash up and z it off. beauty. didnt end up happening in that game, obviously. p happy with how i played it, sd pawn was an obvious problem, as was shellos, but i knew if i could either make shellos try to stop tirt or come in behind timburr in terms of boostcount i could deal with it. which is what happened, i played the timburr v pawns just right and made progress with the double and knock, which eliminated vulla as a check as well as foongus afraid of ice punch, leaving shellos as the backup. just get abra to take the sleep and then i had two free setup turns on shellos coming in and out. kingler played much better than his record suggests this tour. obviously he'd like some of the games back but he was unfairly maligned by dudes who didnt really observe his plays.

album is "The Cold Vein" by NYC underground rap duo Cannibal Ox. only ninjadog, who really does have good taste, knows about this album, but it is a fucking gem. basically the premise is what if new york city circa 2000 was a different galaxy? it appeared as a wall poster in the insufferable boyfriend's room in lady bird, which was an attack, but it really does bang.

week 9
https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/smogtours-gen7lc-463315
1573512726876.png

livin' was easy (Budew) @ Eviolite
Ability: Natural Cure
Level: 5
EVs: 116 HP / 236 Def / 36 SpA / 36 SpD / 76 Spe
Bold Nature
IVs: 0 Atk
- Sludge Bomb
- Sleep Powder
- Spikes
- Synthesis

wont really go into the game as much because im a little irked with myself about it. went berserk with the timburr early, really did an insane amount of work with it, then played like a fucking oaf and put myself in a position where i could be lucked to lose. just had to save the spritzee for the staryu, shouldnt have been in that spot, fuck. whatever, didnt matter for the team, bleh. budew has been a pokemon ive liked for a long time now that no one has really tried to use competitively. they were wrong and i was right. faster than timburr, able to sleep, comes in on fight checks, lays spikes, dents vullaby, it's really quite good. shame i couldnt honor it with a win. this is the best set for it, sludge / giga can be swapped around.

album is "the glands" by the glands. indescribable and lovely, an hour of just great vibes, listen to it

semifinals
https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/smogtours-gen7lc-464059
1573513115044.png

Agoraphobia (Diglett) @ Eviolite
Ability: Arena Trap
Level: 5
EVs: 36 HP / 236 Atk / 236 Spe
Jolly Nature
- Earthquake
- Beat Up
- Pursuit
- Final Gambit

tough game because it took us very close to the edge of elimination and i thought i really fought myself back into a winnable position from a bad matchup. i thought because of the effectiveness of snivy against him (i brought it like three weeks earlier) he'd go out of his way to stop it by nonwebbing and having like multiple counters. he, conversely, thought i wouldnt use snivy against and brought a team that snivy went crazy on. mindgame battle: lost. abragast with hidden powers went fucking nuts on the ferrospritz i brought, esp with webs because i had the diglett check. but i decided to be patient and look for a trap on the gastly and for spritzee cm kills from there. it nearly worked. i was surpirsed by scarf dew, which took mega health from vulla when i mightve got rocks, but i kept webs off knowing hed be afraid of pony with what i thought was z dew, because i could kill and hp grass or fc might have been really good. then scarf vulla got me. i went to foo trying to set up a reflect and preserve spritzee's evio, but scarf fucked me, didnt matter because i got the spritzee up on his fear of hard gastlying on the psy. what the poison did was prevent me from getting into a loop where i recovered on the foo / vulla he had to go into to avoid killing my ferro with his gastly and getting trapped. he didnt have knock on foo so id have been ok if i doubled back to spritzee when he went foo on the ferro-gast mu. maybe i couldve considered harding into dig on a sludge even -- i wouldve been left with 1 hp. that wouldve been a mega good play too. sigh. if you told me id have been in that spot from preview id have taken it prolly. good game though.

album was "microcastle" by deerhunter. not their best album (Halycon Digest) but still got that deerhunter mix of indie rock bangers, sunshine indie pop, and rlly effective ear-filling space-occupying slower shit.

overall i think i had a p good snake. shouldve won more than i did but it's cool. i think what writing this reflect has brought to mind most is the need to consider how we want tiering to work in gen 8. having trapinch around made the meta and building more fun in the inverse way that webs made it fucking insanely annoying. i think notions of "broken" hide a more interesting discussion around the idea of skill-promoting elements in the meta. this means teambuilding skill as well as ingame skill. trap meta you could come up with a cool concept and build a team to support it and then play your way to a win from a bad mu or get outplayed from a good one. this meta saw dudes bring webs two or three times to try to pop a coinflip off at the start, leading to some lopsided games that were annoying to watch. idk. seems like we should be trying for the former one there.

thanks to EviGaro for taking a last-round chance on my stupid lc main ass. shoutout to ZoroDark for bringing the fire (rip clauncher). thanks to Luthier (nice trophy bud), jake , Kingler12345, LilyAC for some good games. and to everyone who has been my friend on this website since i got on here like five (5) years ago (?). tht a wrap
 

Attachments

lost the first two weeks usin snubbull, came back to play ou and then realized testing was a meme. reused good teams and woulda won 2 weeks if i didnt choke hard vs jake, but learned that the best way to teambuild is 2 reuse good old teams;.
thanks BurntZebra for the first team u used to beat me and woulda won if i wasnt awful in the end and thanks dcae for the double boost team that always comes thru clutch when i need it

glad i almost went 3-2 LOL this snake wasnt as bad as my first snake and trash the greatest lc we have to see
cool sets:

Staryu @ Eviolite
Ability: Analytic
Level: 5
EVs: 200 SpA / 240 Spe
Timid Nature
IVs: 0 Atk / 30 SpA / 30 Spe
- Hydro Pump
- Hidden Power [Fire]
- Psychic
- Thunder

WHen your team's only counter to staryu is your own staryu ur best bet is to lead w/ it and just kill it with thunder LOL forget timburr the real threat is staryu bros thankfully it usually comes thru w/ thunder
 
it is i, the snubbull lover. teams are not good but ill post them anyways.


vs. tazz
had to sub in and i like snubbull. onixferro for the hazard stacking. snubbull to check fighters. timburr + scarf vullaby + abra to abuse hazards. p simple team but crit on snub lost me the game


vs. zorodark
thought birds were cool vs him, so i used this team. doduo + vully = birdspam core, mudbray for volt immune, scarf pawn for speed control, foo and staryu cause i liked those mon. didnt realize my staryu weakness and lost to it. oh well!

vs. luthier

just threw up smth randomly thinking snivy and timburr was good vs him. no clue how i made this team

vs. kingler12345

i either asked luthier for help or he came to me for help. he told me crani webs would be good vs him and i said sure sounds fire and fun. basically his webs team but with lo crani over snivy.

vs. london13

wanted to have fun and went to pamplona's replay. saw star get smacked by magby so i had to use it too (replay). basically my last yrs veils team w/ magby over zig. dig was evio in the game but it was supposed to be sash.

a cool set i liked.
Onix @ Groundium Z
Ability: Weak Armor
Level: 5
EVs: 236 Atk / 36 Def / 36 SpA / 196 Spe
Adamant/Jolly Nature
- Earth Power
- Earthquake
- Stealth Rock
- Stone Edge/Rock Blast
ada if stone edge, jolly if rock blast. helps check wisp ponyta with epower + zmove. also hits mudbray p hard

sorry for lack of info compared to last snake, didnt try that much this yr cause lost motivation and less time than i expected. sorry team :(. hopefully gen 8/ekans tour brings me back if not ill prob be done with mons.
 
your post strikes me as either willingly ignorant, or trying to start shit in your debut to make a name for yourself (which is confusing, because you've been playing for a while). maybe it's an attempt at being entertaining. Personally, I remember doing just fine being not "middling" in our game? I think it's absolutely right that you need to draft a good builder, but anyone should be able to build and getting a bad matchup should be on the player, not the manager. If you fish for matchup by using an inconsistent team, then get a bad matchup, seems like that's on you. Our game is a prime example of small mistakes leading to a loss; after my opponent decided that banking on consecutive 20% chances is his optimal way to win, I didn't give myself enough time to calc shellder icicle spear against 15 def foo, which is why I switched out into Abra, losing me the game. That was a very costly mistake for me and lost me an important game in an elimination week, which is regrettable. The thing is though, I could build on my own just fine; my "lackluster" teams the first 4 weeks were perfectly serviceable regardless of the matchups I got. To be clear, I misplayed a TON against luthier, the teal game was a disaster, the osh game wasn't much of a game due to the outlier luck, and the zebra game I took a terrible trade early on with staryu and got punished for it. This is alos why I credit Levi with the (better) matchups I got the second half of the season, because he had a better idea of the state of building in this tier post-Trapinch ban than pretty much everyone else (I agree with you that he's the best builder in the tier).They aren't winning immediately or even that much better by any means, though; as a player, I have to actually make reads and understand game state. Focus on how people actually play instead of being a microcosm of current smogon tournament culture; not doing so didn't really end well for your man shakeitup if I remember correctly.

Now that I've addressed your constant snarky bullshit against not just myself or my team, but other players (who haven't even said anything about you, ever)
I think we just have completely different philosophies on the most efficient way of doing well in tournaments, where you in my opinion prioritize playing over building far too much and I depending on the meta view it as 50/50 (and perhaps in this one 60/40) relationship. Personally, I don't think it is a coincidence that the three teams with the weakest building cores were the ones with the worst records, and "serviceable" teams don't really cut it in this type of tournament. Small mistakes can lead to a loss and play absolutely does matter, but having strong positive matchups through good picks can buffer you against those small mistakes and give you a solid advantage that will usually translate to a win, especially in this pool where in my opinion the gaps in player skill were not significant enough to make up for matchup advantages the majority of the time. All of your wins coming after Levi helped you is a pretty good illustration of this, even though your teams were "serviceable" they required you to outplay against the superior opposing teams.

I think "middling" has a negative connotation that I didn't intend: by middling I mean average, solid, etc. I predicted almost everyone in this tour to go around even (with some noted mistakes on Jake where I didn't believe he could get back into the meta so quickly) because I don't think there are large gaps in player skill; "middling" means a perfectly fine performance, it isn't a criticism. Additionally, I think all of you trash+tko and London were generally playing perfectly fine, but especially in London's case were edged out by similar quality players using superior teams.

The drama predicts were intentionally played up dramatically to get people to read the thread. The first matchup I predicted, for example, wasn't really genuine: I knew that shrug at that point had been including techs and his weaknesses were not as they appeared, but I needed to call something bad so I just screenshotted a team that looks bad on a surface level.

Pure cheese matchups like our game aren't great exemplars of this phenomenon, but I'll give the example of Osh and plas to illustrate why I talked that way about matchup fishing being reflected so much in our records (also using webs as an example but I think this example works better as Webs has a lesss radical matchup spread and it was used over multiple games). Osh was webbed 3 (4?) times, with him being caught by surprise twice by Lily and I and him predicting it correctly against luthier. Our match thanks to a scarf diglett was usually going to come down to a speed tie, but his team against luthier with both scarf vull and snivy was heavily positive for him as he predicted luthier bringing webs, and when he didn't predict Lily bringing webs he had a negative MU and couldn't overcome it. Matchups in those two examples and many others this snake represented a pre game advantage that could not be surmounted by any gap in player skill. You did make some small mistakes the first couple weeks, but you might have had this buffer had you had more than serviceable teams.

I apologize if some of the posts come off the wrong way: I consciously wanted to make these entertaining and interesting to read and I guess I used too much trash talk that wasn't clearly distinguished from the genuine opinions. My gripes this tournament were and are much more with the meta than they are with the players, who I believed to be generally solid with nerves from so many first-timers to be expected. I would love for your philosophy on play vs matchup to be true but I very much disagree in this particular meta.
 
tazz

Thanks for the response; like I mentioned, I completely agree with your point on building being more of a central focus in this metagame. Building for your opponent's tendencies well in this meta is essential because there's so many more threats; we banned most of our centralizing strong threats in wingull and Trapinch which paved the way for a bunch of ways to exploit common structures to exist (think life orb abra for mienfoo-foongus-vullaby cores and such) and be viable. This means that using a "good" team multiple times doesn't really make sense especially in a tour like snake, because everyone's looking at your tendencies and figuring out ways to get a good matchup against it. I think you're completely right on that, and you're right that it's why I came to dislike the meta greatly; even though I had to shift my philosophy of the tier over the course of the season, I didn't really enjoy having to build for my opponent; it's clear that that is a far better strategy than what I had been doing, and the results obviously show it better than I could. I've always thought of myself as more of a player than a builder, though perhaps I think of myself slightly differently as a result of this tour.

Regarding how your post came off, that was mostly my point of contention; I thought this snake had a lot of player blame at a community level, which I thought shouldn't have been so. Having unique predictions is important to gauge community opinion better, as well as generate interest in the tour, but it's easy to go overboard when the stakes are higher. I think shittalking other players is fine as long as there's reciprocity btw--we play this game for fun after all, and if you're friends with someone like Finch, you can't really NOT make fun of him, can you?
 

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