Thoughts on Quagsire
I decided to run some stall the other day since I've never actually built and used a stall team before. The team itself was honestly terrible but quag was intriguing due to its useful (albiet specific) role compression. I'm not gonna say its a good physical wall, since unimpressive stats with not so useful typing cause many strong neutral moves to smoke it. It can't check urshifu, zapdos-g, pheremosa, or even cinderace all that well. Especially if they're CB. It can check less powerful ground types like garchomp and lando, but it hates toxic. However, here is a list of pokes it shuts down:
Of course, its not a hard wall to all variants. CB kyurem can 2hko with the right move, freeze dry coverage is probably an instant loss (though its only good for water ground types so its rare). CB zygarde hurts but is manageable.
I understand standard bulk up buzzwole also checks kyub and zygarde while threatening them out more efficiently, while also hard walling urshifu and generally being a better overall physical wall, but for the fat stall teams quag is decent on I would argue quagsire is more reliable. Doesn't fold to a single crit and it doesn't need to bulk up to counter opposing setup. This of course is all in addition to being a harder wall to melmetal (due to STAB resist) and giving a counter to regieleki, as well as being a better safety net to other miscellaneous setup mons. It doesn't counter things like calm mind fini and blaziken at all, but if it needs to take a boosted hit in a pinch and retaliate it probably can.
To be clear, I'm not saying its great, and its including it in a team instead of buzzwole is a give and take that probably takes more than it gives, but what it gives definitely gives it the edge on other pokemon in some decently common scenarios.
Here's the set I'd recommend:
Quagsire @ Leftovers
Ability: Unaware
EVs: 252 HP / 252 Def / 4 SpD
Relaxed Nature
- Scald
- Earthquake
- Curse
- Recover
Pretty standard fare. Scald for burns, EQ for useful stab boosted by curse. Recover is self explanatory. The only oddity is curse, and why use it instead of toxic. The rationale is on the stall teams quag is on, other mons can spread the toxic instead of quag. And quag likes cursing up, not to sweep, but because it wants to take as little damage as possible from enemy attacks to preserve recovers. It also helps quag beat other physical attackers in some scenarios, since if you switch quag in on something it walls and curse on the switch, the incoming attacker might not be able to overcome a +1 quagsire. You might wonder why I don't use a physical to abuse curse. Well, curse is only for specific scenarios and the consistency of burns is much better than the inconsistent chance of quagsire sweeping.
To conclude, if you want to be scum and build stall maybe give quag a try. He might be the hidden tech you needed to get 3000 points on ladder.