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OU RBY OU Discussion Thread

In any scenario in which you would use lead Jolteon, you should just use lead Zapdos instead. What does lead Jolteon even do?
I like jolteon because it performs better into jynx/gar, but there's also that question of; if the electrics are inconsistent/difficult to sleepsack anyway, why not go for zap and just get a better reward? You're probably looking for a good matchup anyway, so you might as well get a better payoff if you're using something less consistent.

I think for me, the main reason I find myself wanting to use jolt lead is if I'm already using back zam. I still want the good lead matchups into gar/jynx, and in that case I think jolt makes sense if my intention is to rip twave t1.
 
I think jolt makes sense if my intention is to rip twave t1.
It generally shouldn't be. Lead Alakazam is already sacrificing a dominant opening game for consistency (which is a legtitmate choice). With Jolt, you're sacrificing even more, because Jolt doesn't have the same level of consistency. I can just switch in a ground. I can play a double switch to ground and then to Jynx and then boom... your lead didn't do anything.
 
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With Jolt, you're sacrificing even more, because Jolt doesn't have the same level of consistency.
Yes, which is why I generally don't use it unless I can't use zam or zap (if I want them in the back). Sacking jolt to sleep against a rhydon team also isn't the end of the world, I think where jolt becomes really bad is when your kicks don't get the job done and chansey waves you, and then your jolt gets murdered instead of slept. I think zap is better in that scenario because you can fit agility/rest more easily.

Ultimately I agree, I don't like it as a replacement for either zam or zap lead. I think it has some place as a discount version of either one that you can use along side them, but I totally get how it can feel too shit at either to be worth it.
 
Yes, which is why I generally don't use it unless I can't use zam or zap (if I want them in the back). Sacking jolt to sleep against a rhydon team also isn't the end of the world, I think where jolt becomes really bad is when your kicks don't get the job done and chansey waves you, and then your jolt gets murdered instead of slept. I think zap is better in that scenario because you can fit agility/rest more easily.

Ultimately I agree, I don't like it as a replacement for either zam or zap lead. I think it has some place as a discount version of either one that you can use along side them, but I totally get how it can feel too shit at either to be worth it.
After a ton of thoughts about leading with Jolteon: you should have back Jynx.

What counters Jolteon?: Rhydon and Exeggutor

Jynx is there to save the day.

*****
But I think Jolteon is still bad to lead with because it doesn't accomplish the primary objective of getting sleep accomplished first, and then instead impeads getting sleep off entirely by blocking it with paralsysis. Sleep clause is there for a reason, there is no paralysis clause, because it isn't as powerful.
 
In the midst of complaints of nobody wanting to talk about the game, I've also been thinking about Jolteon recently.
I feel like Pin Missile Lead and Rest Back Jolteon can be divided into two different pokemon, basically.
Lead Jolteon with T-Wave, Thunderbolt, Double Kick and Pin Missile is very hard to wall out - when you get a favorable matchup on say Starmie lead, and they swap on twave or stay on tbolt, you start the game off very strong, threatening to crit through stuff, and generally score lots of damage on sleeping threats. However, there's three main caveats to Lead Jolteon. 1: Rhydon. Normally, you justify a rhydon weakness by running Zapdos who's a big monster that kills everything, but Jolteon's measurably less destructive. Speaking just on lead here, I like how Lead Jolteon has better clicks vs Alakazam and Starmie - leading zapdos vs starmie and twaving on blizz and then tbolting as they swap happens a lot and isnt really ideal...God forbid starmie freeze or crit. Zapdos in lead just has less consistent clicks, but the point remains. There's a rhydon weakness, and are you really gaining enough upside?
The second critique is that it can mess with your sleep game, like outlined by Believer of GXE. Alakazam lead teams frequently spread twave and attacks early though, and they get by, using normal moves on their Exeggutor to push sleep through early, or just keeping sleep for the late game. It's not a particularly unworkable caveat, but it's something to keep in mind with Lead Jolteon.
The third is that it often twaves at lead and has Snorlax enter on it, and just beat it out. Once Jolt has to swap out, it loses a lot of threat, and you see a Jolt just get manoeuvered around a lot and not do all that much.
In my mind, Jolteon is a higher ceiling version of Alakazam as a lead, that just really doesn't want to face Rhydon. Whether or not you think this is worth it is based on how consistently you can get an advantage in the games where Jolt gets a fine matchup. I don't have a lot of love for lead Jolteon, because I feel like the huge leads it can generate can also be generated by other pokemon relatively often, and opting into the Rhydon fish just isn't necessary at all. Meh. I would run it in less serious games, but I'm unconvinced it's a part of the optimal mixed strategy of playing RBY in tournament.
Honorable mention to the Jolteon + back Jynx pairing. I didn't really consider this as a lead set, because it's pretty clearly a fake lead, you just want to swap jynx on enemy Starmie, and otherwise you're just twaving gengar and bolting into jynx(?). Swapping jynx on stuff like zam as well, context dependant. I don't know. I haven't played with it very often, but it's just another way of changing the jynx team's lead matchup spread a bit. It doesn't make anything too crazy but I think it's neat.
I got tired writing and I think anything beyond this would just be yap, but the long and short of it is I think that the rest set in the back has a couple of requirements, i.e: doesn't want to vs rhydon, doesn't want to vs rest egg(inversely likes to see egg rushing), wants to see zapdos. It has a similar matchup spread to Rhydon teams, but trades off losing to Rhydon teams in exchange for more tauros resilience(so better versus Everything Else). I think it crests the bar to be a part of the optimal mixed strategy, probably.
This isn't meant to be like, trying to be an arbiter of truth here. Just what I think about the pokemon. Good but not worth using more than sparingly.
 
High A:
Mid A:
Low A: The Cholaski (Jynx/Chansey/Cloyster/Tauros/Starmie/Golem)
High B:
Mid B:
Low B: Classic Don (Starmie/Exeggutor/Chansey/Snorlax/Rhydon/Tauros)
Classic Zam + Mie (Alakazam/Exeggutor/Chansey/Snorlax/Starmie/Tauros)
Just to hate on the B tiers a bit more. Classic Don would obviously be in Mid B above the specials team if not for wrap being pretty good against it. Having a wrap weakness is not good considering wrap teams are very low skill teams. Many bad players know how to play wrap teams optimally, because the strats are brain dead. Classic Don gets to walk around like he can just stroll into A tier half the time, because people don't play wrap enough. Play wrap more guys! This guy is getting an ego!

The specials team... ugh. The fact that many players who use this team do desperate things like put double edge on exeggutor is evidence of the inadequacies of this team. It's begging to have Egg or Chansey be replaced. It makes me sad because a team of the top 6 pokemon in the game should be A tier, and it's so close! But the weaknesses of the team are too obvious and will eventually make themselves known to you. Maybe not this game, maybe not the next, but it will happen. And every team has weaknesses, sure, but this team's weaknesses feel slightly harder to play around than others'. Needs more power!
 
+ ---- + ------------------ + --------- + ------ + ------- +
| 1 | Alakazam | 30.90857%
| 2 | Starmie | 24.60772%
| 3 | Jynx | 20.06382%
| 4 | Gengar | 11.51512%
| 5 | Jolteon | 4.44745%
| 6 | Zapdos | 2.41273%
| 7 | Tauros | 1.55654%
| 8 | Exeggutor | 1.27072%
| 9 | Chansey | 1.10585%
So: I went ahead and clumped how to lead Jynx into 2 main categories, and this will be the lions share of all leads. Alakazam and Starmie are clumped as one. Those two combined; they occupy 54% of leads. Jynx and Gengar are then lumped as one. They occupy 31% of leads. If I consider this only two things, this makes 85% of leads two things.
I'm going to estimate Jynx equity turn 0, without calculating for Starmie or Alakazam, and then proof some math for how to lead Jynx against starmie+Alakazam at the end as one.This means I have to calculate how often Jynx is favorable to me instead of my opponent in the very early game for everything except starmie+Alakazam:
Jynx vs Jynx =50% favorable outcome so 50% of 20 is 10%.
Jynx vs Gengar=50% (remember this is an estimate) so 50% of 11.5 is 5.75%.
Jynx vs Jolteon=75% favorable event for Jynx, 75% of 4 is 3%.
Jynx vs Zapdos = 80% favorable event for Jynx, 80% of 2 is ... 1.6%
Jynx vs Tauros is roughly 50% favorable for Jynx,
50% of 1.5 is 0.75%
Jynx vs exeggutor: 80%+ favorable for Jynx 85% of 1.2 is roughly 1%.
Jynx vs Chansey is roughly 80% favorable to Jynx so 80% of 1.1 is 0.9%

Now let's add up all those numbers in bold to get how often jynx finds favorable situations.
That number is 10+5.75+3+1.6+0.75+1+0.9=23%.

Now for the starmie+Alakazam combo which makes up 54% of leads:
Next is to consider, if you consider yourself having a paralyzed Chansey as favorable, then we can calculate how often we need to switch to Chansey turn 0 to protect our equity. We already know from everything else that we have 23 of the 50 we need to be ahead of our opponent. So we are 46% of the way there. Now how do we get enough of our own Chanseys paralyzed? (Alternatively we can cast a blizzard on opponents that try to get tricky and expect us to try to swap to Chansey to take paralysis and they might try to get something like say exeggutor turn 1 to capitalize on that.
So let's start with how often our opponent is doing that? Let's say our opponent uses starmie/zam to t-wave 66% and try to out swap to exeggutor 33%. How do we mathematically defeat that opponent? I will show you with math and estimates.
Lets do an example:
Jynx uses Lovely kiss 50%, we also swap to Chansey 50%.
Lovely kiss 50%: so 66% of the time our opponent t waves, we get paralyzed with our Jynx 50% of the time and manage to get a 62.5% lovely kiss(remember we take paralysis) turn 0 off for 62.5% of 66 is 41.25% then of the the other 38.5 that we either missed or took full para, we get a redraw of another 62.5% chance for our lovely kiss to land so 62.5% of 38.5 is 24%
So of the 66% possible we can capture favor for, roughly 62.5% is on turn 0 and another 24% is captured on turn 1, now I'll add some estimates if both of those didn't work it's another 62.5% of 24 which is 15, but at this point they have counter switched, but we are full health but paralyzed so we will subtract 30% to turn that 15 into only 10.
41+24+10=75% so we hold 75% equity of 66 which is 49.5%.
Now for the 33% that they switch to exeggutor.
We get 0.75% of 33 which is 24.75% if we miss, they have exeggutor in vs Jynx so we get another 0.75 of 8.25 which is 6.2%
24.75+6.2= 31
This means 31 of 33 it favors Jynx.
So we hold 93% equity of 33=31
We also hold 75% equity of 66=49.5
31+49.5=80.5%.
Lastly Alakazam+starmie combined make up 54% of leads so we get 80.5% of 54 which is 43.5%.but we only use Jynx lovely kiss half of the time for our scenerio so we capture half of this. Which is 21.75%.
Now to calculate for the equity of our Chansey swaps being favorable for our Jynx leads.
Our opponent in our scenerio rips thunderwave 66% of the time so we capture 66% of 50 straight up for 33%, but then having a paralyzed Chansey from here is flimsy to say that it's ahead until we get sleep off....but I don't care to calculate too far into this.
The other 33% our opponent actually out swaps us 50% of the time and gets their Exeggutor in favorably vs our Chansey, meaning we have to swap back to Jynx and they pick up 75% of 33%. Which is 24.75, which means we get 8.25. If they miss we then get 75% of 8.25 which is 6.2%. now we divide all of this by two, because we swap half of the time, meaning the we get an additional 3.1% of favorable scenerios from sheer luck, when they out swap us, and then they miss.

54%=total pool competing for.
Of this we capture 80% of 66% of 54, which is 28% of the 100.
As well the 3.1% of the 100.
Now we add in what Jynx accomplishes vs the other 46% of leads, which makes up 23 of the 100.

In conclusion, Jynx should be favorable to our fictional Alakazam+starmie, as well as other leads a total sum of 28+3+23=54%. So we win 54/100.

This 54/100 is vs all of opponents using the leads as posted at the start of this post. 1760+GXE opponents meaning just using Jynx will yield a positive outcome more than half of the time, vs all of opponents, with the caveats that you consider a paralyzed Chansey a favorable outcome, for some of the outcomes.

This is obviously done with estimates, but I think I used enough data points to say I should be within 80% of what I think. I actually think Jynx is more like 60/100 favorable. But my math is showing 54/100.
(Meaning 54 of 100 matches favor Jynx into all possible scenerios)
Also I did not calculate for leads used less than 1% of the time.
The fictional opponent I presented is actually probably using a range that's more difficult than what you might actually find in reality such as their Alakazam+starmie is (t waving 66%, swapping exeggutor 33%) some actual opponents will only t wave, which would make for different math. That math actually favors Jynx even more heavily though.
Tldr; use Jynx and win. Jynx wins 54/100 matches vs 1760+GXE total lead composition possibilities, and I'm estimating slightly higher at like upper 50's.
(This means Jynx finds itself 54 of 100 matches in a favorable position and 46 of 100 in a not favorable position out of all of the possible things opponents will lead with, at the rates they will lead them with, from the standpoint of the 1760+ GXE players last month, though we did have to estimate to how our opponents will play Alakazam+starmie on turn 0).
As in, with what I'm saying; if you just lead Jynx you should be able to win vs anyone, at least the starting first 2 turns, more than half of the time, regardless of anything, because in our scenerio we are playing against the range of possibilities instead of the opponent.

***So what I calculated is an estimate for a binary yes/no calculation for if it's positive for the Jynx lead player by turn 2 to be in a positive scenerio, and concluded 54/100 matches vs 1760+ GXE players, that the total sum of their range (all leads possible) will produce a favorable turn 2 scenerio for myself leading with Jynx 100% of the time.
 
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