Quote:
Originally Posted by Fat alkinesthetase
tspikes suck right now lol. a whopping 20% of all rain teams carry tentacruel anyway because it spins forever (check toed teammate statistics if you don't believe me) so already a significant chunk of teams are basically immune. in addition many of the top threats ignore them (genesect, dragonite, rotom-W, genies), and the tspike setters themselves generally have better things to do. cruel should be running toxic these days and forry/roserade should be running spikes.
i have heard that toxic spikes are useful against boosting HO teams, but honestly if you have the time to even set them up, you shouldn't be having issues against those kinds of teams in the first place; it's something i've never really understood. other than that tspikes are only useful for crippling things like pink blobs, starmie and celebi that have natural cure, and that's not exactly a huge concern for most teams. the vast majority of teams should not be running tspikes at all in this metagame
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I disagree that tspikes are bad right now. If you're not running a spinblocker then, sure, I can see why you might say that. Without a spinblocker, you're going to be constantly worried about keeping rocks up, leaving you little extra time to ensure that tspikes stay on the field.
Tentacruel is mostly seen on rain teams, who are typically not very weak to tspikes anyway. Tspikes are most useful against Sand Balance/Offense teams, who very frequently carry important threats that are affected by them. Notable examples are Tyranitar/Hippowdon themselves, Terrakion, Keldeo, Breloom (Technician), Garchomp, Jellicent, and Starmie. Having tspikes on the field + a spinblocker that can beat starmie 1v1 puts sand (or weatherless) teams like these at a significant disadvantage.
I do agree with you, though, that, to an extent, tspikes are generally not as impressive against several HO teams, but they're not so mediocre against these teams that they aren't worth setting up. The best example I can think of is having to deal with something like an outraging haxorus/kyurem-B/Garchomp on a drag mag team. Skarmory isn't going to be extremely reliable against those teams, and having a pokemon who can recover stall an outrage locked dragon (in the case of my Defense of the Titans team, Quagsire) is really important.