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i'd be sure to fuck in a much more mutually benefecial direction next season, promise D=
recommend me some art rock. don't pull punches in terms of pretension, my own wells run a bit dry
from an outsider-lookin-in perspective of uu, substantiated by convos w/mains n the rare ladder run, ive surmised that the tier seems to balance on an echelon of a few debatably-overbearing dudes, and the banning of any one of them might result in a tilt that heavily favours another. would you consider this to be valid in any capacity, and if yes, how have you considered approaching this?
i'd be sure to fuck in a much more mutually benefecial direction next season, promise D=
recommend me some art rock. don't pull punches in terms of pretension, my own wells run a bit dry
from an outsider-lookin-in perspective of uu, substantiated by convos w/mains n the rare ladder run, ive surmised that the tier seems to balance on an echelon of a few debatably-overbearing dudes, and the banning of any one of them might result in a tilt that heavily favours another. would you consider this to be valid in any capacity, and if yes, how have you considered approaching this?
Well, you know Ought. Others that are in that similar playing field are Maps and Atlases, Local Natives, Alvvays, St. Vincent, The Arcs, and Messer Chups (more surf psychedelic, but you'll love them. They're fucking weird lol). I have more non-rock music so if you're ever interested in my electronic collection let me know.
I don't think you're wrong, but I don't necessarily think you've hit the nail on the head. Balance/BO has been the dominant play style since ORAS has come about, but that doesn't necessarily suggest that the tier focuses around a few mons. Quite the opposite, these "dudes" as you call them allow a conventional user to build the same team in 20 different ways and still be effective. That may be indicative of a centralizing meta but not to the point where the tier is unhealthy, in my opinion... Some things were just too overbearing for the less viable mons to see the light of day. Getting rid of Alakazam and Salamemce was a necessary step for this type of team building to become available.
The question is where do we go from here? Do we allow Hydreigon to take the fall so that offense no longer becomes rampant, or do we accept the tier as it is and revisit the tier after we've had more time to scope out the scenery? Is there another option, perhaps using some dark horses to re-balance the tier? In the viability rankings, everything from B- up is fairly usable. How does this fact contribute to our decision making process? If I can still use haxorus over Hydreigon, is the tier broken? I'll be honest with you, I'm not 100% sure.
One thing I do know is that we all need more time to examine the state of the meta... Hasty decisions will only make the meta worse, and better a long decision-making process where all considerations are taken into account as opposed to any mediocre quick decision making. I know my answer is a little less than you were hoping for, but if there was an obvious answer there would be no need for you to ask such a question.
It's time for this week's interview, and I've got yet another great one for you all! I'll leave it down below, but feel free to look for it in the OP as well.
Can you tell us a bit about yourself?
Hi n__n I'm an 18 year old Portuguese dude who graduated from High School this year. I'll be a psychology student in college in 3 weeks. Hype! During my free time I like to do weeb stuff (even though I'm nowhere near as much of a weeb as the memes and my avatars make it seem) and play both Pokemon (obviously) and LoL with my friends. Pretty boring stuff. Don't play League though; that game is legit worse than Pokemon and anyone who says otherwise is either delusional or just lost in OST finals due to bad luck.
Most known for?
Managing in SPL and captaining in the prestigious World Cup of Pokemon, I guess. Aside from that, I invest most of my time on Smogon in lower tiers, with my biggest accomplishment as an individual player being having played RU twice in SPL (with some hilarious chokes along the way). Never getting a chance to play UU at the highest level of competitive play still saddens me a little to this day though, but it can't really be helped. I'm also a self-proclaimed like whore, so I guess I'm also known for openly asking for likes. alas
Favorite Pokemon?
There are a lot of Pokemon I like a whole lot, but my absolute favorite has to be Walrein, a Pokemon which many people have come to hate due to Hail Stall shenanigans in previous generations. Personally, I think it has the most majestic design out of all Pokemon (and a really nice fur too, which means it would probably feel amazing to hug a Walrein). Don't believe me? Check out this old drawing I made. Some of my other favorite Pokemon are Aerodactyl, Kingdra and Drifblim.
Most Used Pokemon? AloBliss, the absolute best Pokemon to ever grace the UU metagame. In the current metagame it's definitely Crobat. I know some people believe it does nothing but hit the Defog button once per game and die right after (looking at you, Sam!), and while that actually happens in some match ups, I feel like Crobat still has a lot of valuable traits that make it worth using. Defog is #1 due to how starved UU is for hazard removal (especially after a certain overpowered Dragon got banned), but it also has a x4 Fighting-type resist, U-turn and a deceivingly high damage output when equipped with Sky Plate or even Choice Band. I also use Krookodile and Celebi a lot, but that's also true for pretty much everyone else who plays UU at the moment, so there's that.
What brought you to Smogon and competitive Pokemon in general?
It's sort of a long story, but here's a shortened (still long though) version of it: I started playing Pokemon as a kid due to peer pressure. Pretty much every cool kid owned a Game Boy and a Gen 3 cartridge, so as the good son I was, I immediately started bugging my parents so they'd buy me the games as well. They did, and I had tons of fun and made many friends thanks to Pokemon. To this day, I still keep in touch with some of the people I met throughout my childhood thanks to this game, which is pretty cool (even though most of them aren't really interested in Pokemon anymore). So yeah, even though the people who introduced me to Pokemon slowly lost interest in it, I totally fell in love with the whole franchise, buying the most recent releases as soon as I could afford them and searching for stuff like tips and tricks on the Internet. Thanks to those searches, I stumbled upon a small Portuguese Pokemon community (which unfortunately got shut down in the meantime), where I got introduced to the whole notion of competitive Pokemon and the many different resources related to it that exist on the internet, including Smogon. This was sometime during late 2008/2009, when Shoddy Battle was the main simulator. Naturally, I was terrible when I started out, and my teams were mostly made by 6 random Pokemon that people 6-0d me with on the ladder before with Smogon analysis sets that had no synergy at all. However, I steadily started improving and eventually migrated to English communities. Created my Smogon account in 2010 (although I didn't start using it until late 2011) and ditched Shoddy for Pokemon Online, since it looked way more appealing (awesome reasoning, I know). Thanks to the PO community, I got involved with many people that have personally influenced my growth as a human being and as a player too, but I'll go over that later in the interview. BW got released and I became a respectable player (what people nowadays call ladder heroes, although the ladder was a lot more competitive back then) in that community, even though I had some massive immaturity issues. Months passed and SPL3 was just around the corner. Some managers felt like it was a good idea to scout for talent in the PO community in chances of getting a steal or two, which made me finally start using my Smogon account to get involved with the community. RU was the tier that caught my attention right away, and I won the first official RU tournament ever on Smogon (the team I RMTd after that tournament should be somewhere in the archived section of the RMT forum. It's called Save The World and is probably a good read even today, despite my somewhat broken English back then). The rest is history, since my explanation is starting to get pretty long already, but this is how I found Smogon in a nutshell.
What is your favorite Generation of Pokemon and why?
This is probably one of the toughest questions you could ask me, as I like a lot of different generation of Pokemon equally. Competitively, Gen 3 is probably my favorite, even though I'm far from being an ADV expert. All I know is that watching ADV games during WCOP/SPL feels pretty good and that crafting strategies to tackle the Battle Frontier is equally awesome (although that definitely doesn't count as "competitive", but what do I know). I admit that I like Gen 6 competitively a lot more than I should, mostly because of its lower tiers and Battle Spot Singles though. As far as In-Game goes, it's a tie between Generations 2/3 (only because of the Battle Frontier though)/4. Gen 5 could make it as well, but I haven't actually played BW2 at all thanks to the League of Legends curse that took over me at the time. Fun fact: My name on most English community is a reference to Pokemon Pearl and not any anime/cartoon/American TV series girl called Pearl. Not directly related to the question, but still worth mentioning IMO
Thoughts on the current metagame of ORAS UU?
In all honesty, I'd probably like it more if I wasn't forced to slap a Fairy-type Pokemon on every single team I make thanks to a certain three-headed dragon, but I actually think it's not a bad metagame at all in spite of that, at least when compared to the dark times when Alakazam and Salamence were lurking around the corner ready to murder every single team. It's far from being a perfect metagame (but then again, it's not like there's a single flawless metagame across all 6 current generations of Pokemon), but it's been improving steadily for a while now and I believe that it has what it takes to become the healthiest ORAS tier by the time Gen 7 is released. Also, we have Pokemon that can break Alomomola!
What is your favorite playstyle?
As far as the current UU metagame goes, I can use any kind of team just fine, but whenever my back is against the wall I almost always end up bringing really fat balance teams with at least 1 strong win condition, so I guess that should count as my "favorite playstyle". But since that's too vague and not really a satisfying answer, I guess we could also say that I'm a Rotom-Frost Hail (used to run the hell out of that back in ORAS RU, think I brought it against Hikari in SPL6), a Sticky Web (brought that to SPL6 semifinals against Meru + most of my POWC games), a Froslass + Sableye Spikes Stacking and an AloBliss Offense enthusiast.
Nah, no way man. Jokes aside, I feel like it's important to clear up a misconception which many people who picked up UU for Grand Slam developed: Offense is far from being the only viable playstyle in UU, and right now I feel like pretty much every single playstyle is equally good. There are good stall teams and players (as shown by pif), good HO teams (dodmen is a god at building those, for real), and Bulky Offense and Balance are pretty much everywhere too.
I'm obviously excluding AloBliss from the equation because that's obviously the dominant playstyle for years to come.
Are there any specific Pokemon that you think are unhealthy for UU and may be deserving of a Suspect Test in the future?
There are two Pokemon I'd like to be banned: Hydreigon and Celebi. The former is self explanatory, and other respectable people have been wanting to see it getting suspect tested for a while now too (read Hogg and GrilledClawitzer's posts in the NP thread for reference). I agree with them because Hydreigon is a pain in the ass for pretty much every playstyle to handle depending on its set, with stall being the safest against Hydreigon overall (and even then, Taunt + Roost and even some variants of Mixed Hydreigon can probably take at least 1 Pokemon with them). Wanting to see Celebi banned is definitely a controversial opinion, but I feel like it's in a pretty similar boat to Hydreigon as far as pressuring teams goes. Due to the amount of different options its Nasty Plot set has, it's pretty hard to find Pokemon that can constantly stop it from running rampant, especially considering the vast amount of set up opportunities it gets in this tier. Other sets are pretty good too, with Baton Pass being the most dangerous out of all alternative options. Thunder Wave to lure faster Celebi checks is a viable strategy as well, and something that should probably be used more.
What are your thoughts on UU Open this year, and who do you think has a good shot at taking it? "Fuck UU Open" - A slightly salty Pearl after getting bodied by Vinc2612
I actually like what I'm seeing! As of Round 6, there are a lot of really strong players (and also newcomers to both the UU tier and Smogon tournaments in general) who I could see winning it all, with my 2 favorites being the winner of pif vs Vince and ZoroDark. However, I could see almost everyone who's still in it doing well enough to win, and am particularly looking forward to seeing more of Stallion (who can actually be considered a real veteran, unlike that one slightly grizzled fellow), Sabella (a friend and a good player overall) and all of my UU mains out there (Sam I Yam, killintime, warzoid, THE KING OF UU and Mazz).
Who are some of your favorite people in the Smogon Community?
For what it's worth, if I had to mention every single person whose presence I appreciate in the Smogon community, the answer to this question would probably be longer than the rest of the interview together. With that said, my absolute favorites are obviously the ones who have been with me since day 1, those being the people I met on PO who migrated to Smogon with me (HODOR, Hikari, Tapu kokoloko, cbb :D, Esteemed User Ginku, Key, Django, LuckOverSkill and probably other people who I overlooked due to having a lackluster memory) and also the friends I made in the BW1 RU community (Manager Nails, league addict SilentVerse, smash addict Molk among others who have stopped playing this game since then). Other awesome people I've met on Smogon more recently are Omfuga, whose bluntness I appreciate most of the time, TonyFlygod, teal six, Isa, Kushalos, TheEnder, Tokyo Tom, the belgian brothers, Poek97, rozes, TDK, flcl (superior weeb and Pokemon player, my role model), Anti, Hack, Stathakis, Bouff, CASED VICTOREE, blunder, Meru, choolio, FinchinatorPO among others.
As for the UU community, the people I talk to on a daily basis: Hogg, dodmen, ict, Sam, IronBullet, GC, YABO, killintime, Amaroq, Manipulative, Pak, Kreme, Eyan, tsr and the list goes on and on and on and on and on. Big apologies to the people I was too lazy to include, you guys know who you are and I love you all the same :D
tl;dr fuck slurmz
Finally can you provide for us a team that you think reflects your current playstyle with a brief explanation of how it works?
There's no way I'm going to disclose my secret strategies like this!
Inspired by this one cringe-inducing picture, I decided to make a Jellicent team for this metagame, as I believe it has a lot of potential due to its ability to threaten slower builds and punish people who use Tentacruel to remove hazards on every team, while remaining perfectly functional against more offensive teams. The plan for most games is to get hazards down while trying to keep every member of the team as healthy as possible through smart predicting and Sylveon's ability to pass Wishes to the rest of the team. Aerodactyl and Celebi glue the team together by working as very good win conditions against weakened teams, while also patching some of the squad's specific weaknesses. Leaf Storm on Nasty Plot Celebi sounds is a really weird choice, but it punishes people who use Pokemon such as Choice Specs Sylveon to get damage on Celebi and is a good nuke even at +0. For those of you who aren't convinced yet, Earth Power and Leech Seed are also good 4th move options on this team. This build is a little weak to both Nidos and the aforementioned Choice Specs Sylveon, but it's still possible to make it past them by pressuring them through smart playing. If this team doesn't really make you happy, I'm planning on posting a RMT after Grand Slam, so stay tuned for that, I guess.
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Thank you for your time and the great interview, Pearl! If you have any questions that you would like to ask him, feel free to leave them below. I'll be back next week with another interview!
Ow so I'm just one among others, ok.......... . .
BENFICA PORTO OR SPORTING IMPORTANT QUESTION FOR FURTHER CONFRONTATIONS.
give spl uu starters in ur opinion.
minimum point gap for ur tours run soon?
ur idol mons/irl??
wheres passion ;_;?
lov talking to u stay who u r pls dont change. love to blaspheme about other users with u :pp
love u so much for real <33 fellow portuguese we rule this site.
Thoughts on my RU Council Comic Series? You can ask Arifeen for Episode 4 "Voting on Shaymin and Slurpuff". It's kind of long but character development as you know is very important. Other series are in the work.
6354 likes before this post. Roughly 5,9 likes per post, which is pretty good considering that around 250 of my posts were made before likes got implemented on Smogon. Here's my favorite trick to rack up likes:
hey guys like this post please :D
For real though, just make good posts and likes will come naturally. Use funny pictures whenever it's possible, people love those. The other alternative is to become such a bad poster that people will like your stuff out of pity, but I'm pretty sure you don't want that.
My fascination for the playstyle actually came from spamming CBU-esque teams on the UU ladder (and somehow going 41-0 with 'em LOLOL), so I guess we could say that he's Jesus Christ himself and I'm one of his devoted prophets (Serious answer: as much as it pains a couple of haters, I actually feel like CBU could turn into a valuable part of our community if he put his mind to it)
Hello??? Toxic Blissey beats NP Celebi all day long man. Any other Blissey set is a travesty, just saying
Entei is the objectively correct answer to this question. Still shocked about how it can break through Alomomola with ease if it gets well timed Sacred Fire burns, but yeah
My two personal favorites are Nagi no Asukara and Monogatari Series SS, although there's a big chance Danganronpa 3 joins the top depending on how it ends
Kanbe Kotori from Rewrite. The anime adaptation is actually doing justice to her character (to an extent), thank god. I'm just a sucker for good tragic characters. Nanami Chiaki (SDR2 and DR3) and Shiodome Miuna are also really good girls, but I'm not like Shake who switches waifus on a daily basis. just felt like mentioning them
thanks, i'll try my best :D that gif is adorable btw (and for the ones who feel like reading the rest: i got lazy and stopped writing stuff flawlessly so you'll have to bear with me)
Ow so I'm just one among others, ok.......... . .
BENFICA PORTO OR SPORTING IMPORTANT QUESTION FOR FURTHER CONFRONTATIONS.
give spl uu starters in ur opinion.
minimum point gap for ur tours run soon?
ur idol mons/irl??
wheres passion ;_;?
lov talking to u stay who u r pls dont change. love to blaspheme about other users with u :pp
love u so much for real <33 fellow portuguese we rule this site.
tricky question because rn i feel like there many people that could possibly do well in a spl environment depending on many different factors (including managers, teammates, how the metagame shifts from now till then etc), but here's a rough draft: dodmen, hogg, you, ib if he plays, zorodark, pif, christopher the greatest, hairy toenail, eo if he plays, xmarth if he comes back from the ded, kokoloko is he plays and then the newcomers who could do amazingly but are still risky picks due to inexperience w/ tours of spl's caliber aka manipulative, amaroq, vapo among others. excluded some obviously good people like hikari omfuga and teal because it's very unlikely to see them playing uu in spl8. didn't include king uu on the list because even tho he's come a long way since spl6 i still feel like banking on him to perform for an entire season is kinda risky. up to him to prove me wrong if any manager decides to take a shot tho. everyone else who wants to be part of the list: work as hard as you can, nothing is set in stone yet and i'm always happy to see newcomers doing well!
as many as it takes for me to make playoffs. idc if i'm seed 1 or 12 fighting for a slot in a tiebreaker, all i want is to be there. maybe this is a bad mindset, but i feel like it's a lot better to just try your best and see how many points you can rack up than aiming for a specific seed before anything is decided
mons idols = fooly cooly, vince and bkc, amazing players and really chill dudes as well
irl idols = tough because i admire pretty much everyone who fought through hardships in order to make it to the top, but as cheesy as it may sound, i look up to my parents a whole lot, not only because of what they do for me but also because of how much they fight to be happy on a daily basis. i'm also a fan of doublelift and hotshotgg (2 league of legends related people who chased after their dreams as hard as they could and became incredibly successful. their stories are worth reading even if you couldn't care less about the game imho)
passion is busy with school stuff and not really interested in mons anymore :(
thanks for being around man, i've probably said this at least 10 times recently, but i truly appreciate your presence and support n__n
either dpp uu or oras during mega pidgeot's reign IMO. dpp uu is self explanatory and the latter wasn't particularly healthy, but i just loved it for no reason at all. the award for the most fun and absurd uu metagame goes to xy during hawlucha's suspect test though because 5 defensive mons + hawlucha was literally the only viable playstyle and it was fucking insane LOL
late xy ru would've been flawless if not for moltres. alas! my personal favorites are bw1 ru and bw1 ou during excadrill/thundurus's suspect test (since my ladder hero team was pure fire despite having like 3 different focus blast users)
most overrated = mamoswine. shit is pretty hard to fit onto squads/equally hard to build around and isn't really much better than krookodile, which also has intimidate, acceptable bulk and stab knock off to pressure shit harder. only thing it misses is priority, but that's not too bad. as for underrated pokemon, there's a lot of stuff that could use some love, but my #1 choice would probably be cloyster due to its ability to single handily smash (no pun intended) teams after one single misplay. i'd say blissey but that would feel like cheating lol
spl is a blast if you land on a chill team and i absolutely love it. getting the chance to interact with so many different players who have knowledge about tiers you've probably never touched and following their progress and games truly allows you to see how much room for improvement there is within this game. as for individual tournaments, smogon tour because the competition is top notch and not having to schedule until playoffs = godsend
in all honesty, my taste in music is actually pretty shitty lol, mostly because i'm not devoted to any style in particular, which means that i've missed out on a lot of classics. hopefully the experts of smogon will help me improving in this regard! however, i can tell u that for now my favorite kind of music is r&b and my favorite artist is late 90s/2005 mariah carey (1v1 me, haters). this track in particular is magic to me: the subtle vocals, the shook ones sample, the lyrics and everything else simply heal my soul. best mariah album = butterfly btw, altho the emancipation of mimi comes close. i also have a thing for liquid drum n bass. in fact, both of my uu sun teams are named after after this song.
i'm borderline addicted to chocolate to the point where i avoid buying it entirely. blame my mother for that
to be entirely honest with you, no matter how friendly we get with each other, i'll always think that some of your opinions regarding this game are pretty fucking insane, and i doubt that's gonna change anytime soon. as for whether you're delusional or not, here's my answer: not as much, since you've finally realized (in my eyes) that you're not actually close to being some sort of based uu jesus and have a lot of stuff you can improve on, which is respectable. stay chill man
thanks man! i still need to watch your games vs wq. sad that you lost, but good run nonetheless n_n
idk if we're talking about breakfast cereals here, but i'll just assume that. i don't actually eat those all that often anymore, but if i had to choose my favorites, i'd definitely pick chocapic (i don't actually know if the americans of smogon have ever heard of em, but they're really tasty i swear)
as for performing well in tournaments, i'm not actually much of a powerhouse, considering i haven't really accomplished anything notable as an individual player on smogon and am far from being the absolute best, but if you really want a tip for me, i'll tell you to remember that pokemon is actually a pretty dynamic game and that there are a respectable amount of variables to account for during a game, including your own win condition, your opponent's win condition, his possible plays, your possible plays and all the risk/reward involved in the decision making. it's important to respect your opponent and what he can possibly do, but not in a way that forces you to play passively during the entire match, if i'm making sense. besides that, remember that your mental is also a really important part of pokemon. be sure that real life shit doesn't cloud your thought process, that you have time to commit to pokemon and feel like getting your games done and all that kind of stuff
i just love it when the enemy team's adc suffers, man
last time i climbed up to diamond 1 i actually did it playing support (tahm/kennen/zyra) and top lane lissandra mostly, but i've stopped caring about my rating since then
Thoughts on my RU Council Comic Series? You can ask Arifeen for Episode 4 "Voting on Shaymin and Slurpuff". It's kind of long but character development as you know is very important. Other series are in the work.
I won't like ur posts because the fashion that you answered the questions made it extremely difficult to tell which questions your answers were answering.
And also posting about how all UU playstyles are "equally good" to make people feel better about the tier I guess IDK when it's obviously centralized doodoo
That out of the way:
What inspired you to build alobliss? Did u think alomomola was basically like 10 pokemon in 1 from playing too much RU, or like...?
Hottest 3D female?
How is Portugal? o_o
Best ORAS tier? (the correct answer is LC but i'm willing to listen to your incorrect opinion)
Are you ever reassured seeing the intelligent UU suspect voters successfully ban stupid pokemon such as Salamence, Alakazam, and Victini? Do you ever fear that UU suspect voters will become like LC suspect voters and let blatantly broken shit run rampant (twice)?
Thoughts on RU mola? I mean obviously you think it's broken because you have a brain but gimme some depth
What are your thoughts on the tiering system? What should change, and what should not?
What do you think was more successful or practical: Kokoloko system or current suspect system in all other tiers?
How do you feel about Senior Staff's opinion ultimately nullifying that of all the tier leaders and councils for their respective tiers?
Best BW tier? I'll accept any except OU since all other BW tiers are flawless (OU's not bad tho D:)
Have you preferred managing or playing? What if you won more when you played (lol)?
Do you think Shadow Tag and/or Arena Trap are inherently broken and should be banned in every tier?
Thoughts on wcop format-wise? Should Wcop be abolished as the second team tour? If so, what other type of tournament could there be?
ORAS has had such bad lower tiers compared to BW (discluding PU cuz idk about PU oo). Do you think there's a reason for this (inherent mechanics like knock off or mega evolutions, or simply council policies)?
Do you think GameFreak intentionally puts whack shit in the game just 'cause they get bored?
Thoughts on the ability: stakeout?
Thoughts on Smogon's current state?
Shakeitup: top 10 tournament player of all-time?
Thoughts on ORAS OU?
I look forward to the answers to these loaded questions.
pearl! youre an awesome guy and super nice! glad you helped me in uu, anyway
who are some of the best teammates you've ever teamed up with in a tour? who are some players you'd like to team up with in the future?
are there any trophies youre after?
how do you go about preparing for tour games? can you give specific examples?
which mons would you want to drop from OU/BL and why?
if you were stranded on an island with no resources available besides food/water (think wild life, some fruits in trees, and a river), which 3 mons (non-uber) would you choose to be there with you? assume you are not their trainer, they are just wild mons
whats the most creative set you used in oras uu?
in your opinion, who are the best overall tournament players right now?
why do you play league even tho its worse than mons?
if you were somehow able to design a mon to include in gen7, what would it be like? typing, stats, notable moves? include a drawing if youre up to it
who took over this account and what did u do to the real omfuga
couple of quick questions:
- do you prefer playing or managing in team tours?
- what made you choose psychology as a career path?
- on a scale of 1-10, how much does it pain you that manipulative is raking in the likes from your interview?
her feature in starstruck makes the song objectively worse, but teenage dream is my fucking jam no matter how many bland pop songs she releases, so she gets points for that
as for the part everyone cares about,that being whether i'd do her or not: she's cute ngl
i had a massive crush on shakira as a kid (mostly because of her music video with alejandro sanz), but beyoncé stood the test of time better. to be fair, beyoncé never had much exposure in portugal compared to shakira, so it took me a lot of time to go over her stuff, but all things considered, she's a lot more interesting IMO. appearance-wise, shakira is way too slim for my taste, so it's a default win for queen B
thanks man! i'm happy you decided to learn this tier, considering you were already a pretty good player back when i tutored you. expecting great things from you still, especially after the 1233212343234323232 shoutouts from greek players after you passed them ur whole squad repertoire
who are some of the best teammates you've ever teamed up with in a tour? who are some players you'd like to team up with in the future?
ciele and conflict in spl3, porengan, tesung and bugzinator in spl6 and joey pokeaimmd in spl7. as for other tours, pretty much everyone in pocl's team europe this year and the jynxes in nupl (which is the tour that allowed me to meet the one and only tonyflygod :D). there's also ender from this year's wcop; really unfortunate that he had his trophy snatched away from him like that, but working with him was a real pleasure. super motivated and smart person
as for people i'd love to team up with in the future, jamvad has to be the absolute #1. really smart and innovative guy whose youtube content i appreciate. would like to disclose more, but there's no way i'm gonna let other managers screw over my draft plans! dash
vgc17 trophy i'm not much of a competitor honestly, but getting a grand slam trophy would be cool because it's pretty af and is the one that fits me best as a player (ghosting scandals and shady germans winning it aside, obviously). besides that, i'm only quitting smogon entirely after i win spl
how do you go about preparing for tour games? can you give specific examples?
i'm not much of a full-blown counterteam person, but if my opponent seems overly weak to a specific strategy, i'll try to incorporate it onto my squad in a subtle way. good examples of that would be the wepwn pokemon slayer (note: this replay ends on turn 2. the legend says you'll be cursed with brain aids if you watch it till the very end) and REUNICIUS, destroyer of worlds and regimola. if i'm facing someone who's solid overall and has a similar approach to mine i'll just use something that's within my comfort zone. i try to mix it up if my opponent is someone who counterteams often, but it's rare to find people like that nowadays besides my italian friends during smogtour season, so yeah
which mons would you want to drop from OU/BL and why?
if you ask this question to a reasonable sample of the uu community the most common answer will be starmie and for a good reason, considering this tier needs more pokemon that can remove hazards :( i wouldn't mind seeing latias in uu either for the same reason. wouldn't drop any bl mon at the moment besides maybe togekiss (and only because it checks another equally broken pokemon) though
if you were stranded on an island with no resources available besides food/water (think wild life, some fruits in trees, and a river), which 3 mons (non-uber) would you choose to be there with you? assume you are not their trainer, they are just wild mons
pokemon that are known to be kind to human beings like lapras and blissey. the third would be an alolan exeggutor because it's fitting for the scenario, amuses me with its appearance and IS A FUCKING DRAGON LOL
jokes aside, taunt mega aggron (shoutout dodmen) is a neat tech to make sure your team doesn't get 6-0'd by some slow set up sweepers (with snorlax being the #1 offender)
in your opinion, who are the best overall tournament players right now?
ciele, vinc, bkc and SHAKEITUP are the ones who've been making the most waves recently IMO, but they aren't the only ones. this stour season will be decisive to solidify some people's places tho considering it's the most likely gonna be the last stour to include dpp
why do you play league even tho its worse than mons?
i swear i tried to come up with an acceptable drawing, but it was starting to look ugly as shit but just think about it as a crossover between ground-type wormadam and a cute fairy like azumarill. so basically, a fairy/ground pokemon with good defenses, stealth rock and good stab moves to damage shit and maybe recovery, but that's optional since you can just pair it with alomomola n_n
how does it feel having one of the best accents on this site?
anime reccomendations for someone who hasn't delved too far into it aside from the more popular ones (naruto bleach opm dbz etc)? doesnt have to be some shonen style thing
