Gen 3 ADV PU

[Parpar]

Played ADV PU for the first time and enjoyed it. Thought I would bump the the thread and share my thoughts on the tier and mons in it with a rough viability ranking. I don't like plus and minuses and its not in order in tiers. ADV PU is in a good spot. Nothing felt too overwhelming or I didnt feel restricted in the builder which is always enjoyable for me.

This mon is rivals ADV UU Kanga in viability which is quite wild. As time went on I see why you couldnt build without it. It's an important element to the speed dynamic to the tier which also serves as an offensive or defensive pivot with the coverage to boot. Rightfully the only S tier and wont change ever I feel.
Trapping in this tier is kinda lame but when is it not. The more bulky sets can get great value. With paralysis being common it also enables the mon even to higher degree.
I'm not a fan of this mon... I see the why it deserves high praise being one of the few ground immunes with reasonable bulk and free serene grace psychic clicks. I always saw my self wanting to use another sp def wall like nair/swalot or use abra for my psychic clicking needs. I will probably see the light in the future and build something where I enjoy it.
Super slept on. Psychic in lower tiers is always free. Paired with a great speed tier in the metagame it can go a long way. With only move you need being psychic you can explore with moves like Encore, Twave, Sub, Punches, HP water, CM etc.

 

[SergioRules]

Hey gamers, here's an update on ADV PU.

e: this turned out a lot sappier and more long-winded than I expected it to be but the first paragraph should explain why this feels like a big deal to me.
After much consideration, I have decided to step down as caretaker of the tier. My motivation has been at an all time low for Pokemon stuff in general and I think this is the best course of action both for myself and the tier. Next month will mark my 10th year on Pokemon Showdown (23rd year as a Pokemon player) and while I don't think I'll ever fully quit Pokemon, I have felt a shift over the past few months or so towards other things in my life. I've been dragging my feet on updating resources for a long time, getting sample teams, and just the general upkeep it requires and I've only done what I have mainly because of ZU's community asking me to do so. I won't be fully disappearing as I still am passionate about the tier, I just don't have the time to be in charge of it anymore. I'm grateful to see the changes that have happened since I took over the tier almost THREE YEARS AGO and proud to see how much the tier has grown since, now being included in large tours like PUPL, ADVPL, and having its own part in the PU Classic, and making the push for Old Gen lower tiers to have their own subforums for resources and discussion.

Wanna give shoutouts to a few key people as well:
Akir My fellow oldgen supporter, I quite literally couldn't have done it without you. You were the one who gave me the opportunity after all and have always been available to ask for advice, vent, or just casually chat. I probably couldn't say thank you enough.
Slowbroth The original ADV caretaker, always there to offer advice as well. You laid out the ground work to turn this tier into what it is today, I just built off of what you started.
Drud One of my closer friends on this site, you might not have had as much of an impact on ADV as these other people but you have always been there to talk and bounce ideas off of (or just listen to me complain about shit). I really appreciate you bro.
Lily LordST Medeia Gangsta Spongebob MrSoup TSR At some point or another, all of you played the meta enough to have a say in some decisions, an unofficial council of sorts. Whether it was VR voting, figuring out what we wanted to do with Baton Pass, or voting on bans, you have all helped this tier become what it is on a more technical side.
Finally, I want to thank everyone who has played ADV PU over the past few years. As I already said, we took a relatively unknown, rarely played metagame and turned it into something that has become a mainstay in both the ADV and PU communities. We couldn't have done that without you, the people who actually play the game. Thank you.

I have the pleasure of announcing that the next ADV PU caretaker will be plznostep, a great player who I'm very confident will do a fantastic job of doing what needs to be done to keep the tier growing and improving. It'll likely take a bit to get things switched over to him in here, and I wouldn't expect any changes to happen before the end of PUPL but I know I'm leaving the future of the tier in good hands.

 

[Amity]

Played this metagame for a tiny bit when trying to learn it for ADV slam and I really enjoy it! I like how fresh the playerbase is to this meta and it made entry very refreshing when I can toss out ideas and try to understand the meta a lil better. One of these said ideas is the reason for this post, when I brought this up in short concept to a friend I said it might be something but has its flaws here and there. When I opened the idea up to the wider public we started optimizing the spreads a little more and people started building new comps with it, and I feel like this Pokemon has a genuine place in the ADV PU metagame. This Pokemon that I'm talking about would be... Numel.


Numel @ Leftovers
Ability: Oblivious
EVs: 128 HP / 120 Atk / 152 SpA / 4 SpD / 104 Spe
Mild Nature
- Earthquake
- Fire Blast
- Toxic
- Protect / Hidden Power Grass

Although Numel's base stats are kinda terrible (highest base stat is 65 :skull:), its typing really carries it. Minun doesn't run Hidden Power Water at all so Numel consistently gains entry on it and pressures switches with its great STAB combination or Toxic. Ground switch-ins typically dont like taking Numel head-on, while typical Fire switch-ins get hit with EQ or Toxic, or Marshtomp can even get bopped by HP Grass. Numel's neutrality to ice and grass while not taking much damage from the defensive users of these moves means it isn't uncommon for Numel to find entry against bulkier teams, pressuring the likes of Minun, Swalot, Duskull, Dragonair, Mawile, Tangela, Magcargo, and Pineco. Being immune to T-wave while aptly pressuring the T-wavers is great in paraspam tier too, making it less vulnerable to getting Trapinch'ed.

Its winning 1v1 matchups vs Minun, Pineco, and Charmeleon, the three most common leads in the tier, also makes it a very good lead! Numel can even safely click Toxic against these leads on turn 1 to catch a bulky water switching in, its just so good at generating momentum. Not only does it win against these leads but even oddball leads like Combusken, Grovyle, and Swalot lose to it on average, and against physical leads like Furret and Arbok it can use Protect against to scout.

The EV spread may seem weird but I promise every EV here counts. 120 Attack 3HKOs Dnair while consistently OHKOing Seviper and Minun, 152+ Special Attack OHKOs spdef Pineco and offensive Trapinch while 2HKOing pdef Duskull, the Speed outspeeds offensive Trapinch and min speed Swalot, the HP is a lefties number + 1 to mitigate passive damage, and while the one point in spdef is generally a dump, it consistently lives a 2HKO from Charmeleon Fire Blast from full so that's cool. In the past I've used max HP / SpD with Sassy, but I quickly realized offensive spreads are a bit better since Minun still bounces and the offensive pressure + outspeeding pinch outweighs the bulk. Do note with Mild Numel has a bit more trouble switching into Swalot Sludge Bomb (or CB Arbok Sludge Bomb) but you can also pivot around Swalot's coverage. I think toxic protect is generally best and hp grass kinda helps into marsh and omanyte if you can afford it, but other options like Rest w HBell Lickitung exist too.

I would talk about comps but I think its something a wider group of people should explore before we truly know, although one synergy I found is with Furret, as Numel switches into Furret's usual switchins such as Duskull Mawile Tangela and Magcargo (i wish it switched into Graveler lol) as well as Minun trying to offensively check Furret.

Anyway, despite its flaws, quite a few of there being if that wasn't obvious, I do think Numel has a real place in ADV PU. IMO Its not quite the Chinchou fad that happened a year ago where all it does is kinda check Minun and Sealeo, everything just carries HP Grass anyway bc of Marshtomp's existence. If Numel picks up in tournaments and gets ranked on the VR that would be awesome, even if it ends up being C alongside other mons that have a tiny niche (although ik some ppl like slowbroth would put it B- or C+). Even a bad ranking would mean people gave thought about it even if that thought is "that one shitmon Amity talked about". I'm glad that I got to add ADV PU to my repertoire of niche old gen lower tiers that I know and I hope to see this metagame stay fresh and exciting!

 

[Aurist]

Hello, I have been building for feen throughout this year's ADVPL and the team just got eliminated so I thought I'd make a teamdump, partly because it feels like activity has slowed down and I wanna get things moving again!

Happy to say at this point prior to semi finals we finished with the top record in PU at 5-2. Of course much of this was feen's stellar piloting but I do also think we were one of the more ahead of the game teams in PU this time.

Btw, teams are linked on the sprites and replays are linked below them.


Week 1 - feen vs gulch (W) (1-0)

Kept it simple starting off, building around fat modest Sealeo because the power and level of compression this mon gives is nutty. Gonna see a pattern here in a few of the teams, of Duskull/Dnair + 1 backup phys tank + 1 backup sdef tank. Dnair was hard MVP this game, activating Shed Skin a lovely amount of times and just being the wincon it always is lol. Combusken was really scary for this team but feen took the right route of hard trading with the Furret and getting it in range for any of our walls to kill later game.


Week 2 - feen vs Lily (L) (1-1)

This was a flop week for my prep, I said "we gotta watch out for Lily recycles" in the team cord and then we led Seviper into Lily's Trapinch team that I literally helped build in PUBD lmao. Here you can see a key flaw in teams that rely on Seviper to break fat mons like Lickitung - if anything goes wrong then you simply can't break. It's a pretty standard balance team aside from that, brought back the fat modest seal bc it's incredible. Not hard recommended to run this team due to needing to work extra hard to keep Seviper alive.


Week 3 - feen vs Monai (L) (1-2)

I kinda love this team with the shnasty Slowbroth Ancient Power Togetic, things didn't quite work out with some awkward pivoting around Mawile followed by literally endless para turns/misses/etc, to the point Monai said "sorry we couldn't have a real game". I think the Tenta+Shuckle idea was a bit PUBD-pilled and didnt fully work into the (slightly outdated) ADVPL meta but I would run this team back anyway. Tentacool is a mon you bring to prep for both Spikes and Clamperl in the same slot, and covers Shuckle wonderfully who walls practically everything else. AP Resttalk Togetic is kinda cheesy, but rly good at catching balance teams off guard and provides a good mixture of offensive and defensive presence.


Week 4 - feen vs Medeia (W) (2-2)

This week we decided it was about time to get really serious with breaking which can only mean one thing - The Perl. If you think this team is familiar that's because this is the team I built for Quarante8 in PUBD but with a Togetic over the Duskull. The Togetic helped quite a lot as we already had a normal resist in Mawile and being less of a momentum sink plus packing the extra twave turned out to be exactly what the doctor ordered. The key idea behind the team is obvious - SubPass into hard to wall mons, and it's kinda broken and I know I'm not the only player who has been thinking SubPass is becoming degenerate in Adv PU. Screech is a fun tech on Arbok that lets us take hold of the initiative on switches, feen didn't quite read properly on turns 8-9 here with Screech->Sludge rather than Screech->EQ but even that could have paid off if the poison came in. Screech Bok is more suited to Spikes teams overall thanks to forcing out the Spikes immune stuff like Toge/Dusk in for their backup tank, but it can still work on a team like this because of how much momentum it can generate behind a Sub.


Week 5 - feen vs mind gaming (W) (3-2)

We were tasked with ending the mind gaming winstreak and to break our even record. We knew straight away we wanted to bring Spikes, as we hadn't brought it before and it looked pretty good into scout. I have been toying around with trying to make Encore Minun + Yawn Swalot + Spikes work for a fairly long time now but struggling to get the right combo of mons. I ended up settling on an unusual pick, Mightyena, because it's hard to run Pineco+Minun+Swalot without Heal Bell but the main beller of the tier Lickitung is too passive, plus Howl Yena is underrated tbh. I also wanted to pack lead Sealeo as a counterpick to all the lead Charmeleons we were seeing and the fact we had been running a lot of ground-weak leads, and the lead paid off perfectly. Anyway feen was getting ahead in the game with some nice pivoting against mg's pretty cool abra+porygon team, then mg misread a turn on Swalot and got omega punished by a crit fire punch and instantly forfeited. With that we didn't get to show off the Yena or the Encore or Yawn, but this was one of my fav teams to test with and I'll def play with it again.


Week 6 - feen vs TyCarter (W) (4-2)

Bit of a more normal this team returning to the boring Duskull + Dragonair core and boring Charm lead, scout looked lovely for Pinch so we said let's trap Swalot and then win the game - so we did, but for bonus measure feen also para'd the charm and read the double perfectly and trapped it too. From that point it was just a matter of keeping Dragonair alive as the wincon. Wartortle was a nice mixed tank option with a spread Lily had come up with in PUBD, allowed us to tank stuff while still covering spikes. It got crit and had a hard time but still did stuff anyway.


Week 7 - feen vs Lazuli (W) (5-2)

We brought out the lead Grovyle for last week as we knew we'd ran like 80% ground weak leads and wanted to counterlead, and saw a lot of Swalots in scout and wanted to lure it. Ended up packing HP Fire on Grov to make our Spikes MU better and once again didn't end up facing Spikes (we must have anti-Spikes'd too close to the sun) and did end up facing a Dnair lead which we didn't expect, but Grovyle still got a solid kill on Togetic thanks to Endeavor. Also thought Shtomp was nice into the MU and it was - we were initially gonna run with an Ice Beam Shtomp + some phys breaker like Furret but we realised we were already gearing up the team to hate on Tangela so we ran Surf instead. Once we had a standard para core we knew Seviper was the move, redeeming her turn 1 death in week 2 massively as feen got a ton of clean reads with it, leading to a nice W and rounding out the 5-2 record.

Shout out to Just_Leonardo for hanging around and letting me bounce ideas off, and to FJ2K for being a good supportive manager. Hope to see yall around in future tours and hopefully with a price tag to my name next time

 

[Just_Leonardo]

Shout out to @Just_Leonardo for hanging around and letting me bounce ideas off, and to @FJ2K for being a good supportive manager. Hope to see yall around in future tours and hopefully with a price

And thank you for all the juicy teams I have  stolen borrowed for when I get around to playing ADV PU!