review balancehackmons weed three
quojova vs teamo 
teamo is using ballfire's
tears of gold stall. quojova has a lot of very flexible mons with no obvious breakers, so the structure at a glance is indistinct but i'd guess it's on the slower side. no way to tell what the plans are at preview.
quojova's regenvest steela, which is poor into teamo's thunder cage users, and teamo's ting, which doesn't like being around zac zama fairyceus, are used to feel things out early game. fairyceus finds an in on teamo's 61% dozo and blissey is the switchin, which i think is an inaccuracy. preserving the very valuable eleceus against an unrevealed set is the right call, but getting the blissey caged allows the interaction seen in the game, where a heavily boosted and atk-dropped fairyceus hits all its cages and forces a kill.
in retrospect i think hard celesteela actually might have been better, as you can free yourself from cage with mortal spin and from there try to outmuscle with eleceus + imposter, though with fairyceus revealing scales it's hard to say how reliable this would've been. in conjunction with this idea, celesteela and/or ting could have been risked in order to try and knock the lefties. sample line: hard steela on cage (20-23), knock on th, mortal on cage or second th, and from here you can consider hard etern, eleceus, or imp with great long-term chances into knocked fairyceus. other possibilities like vcreate are very unlikely due to team structure and even if they somehow hit steela on the switch you're still doing mostly fine.
anyway, etern was one of teamo's greatest assets, and quojova's regen + imposter core start standing almost unopposed. teamo's ting takes a surprise mortal from slowbro, and dozo later takes a mortal from impostered ting due to there not being satisfactory defensive counterplay. quojova's chansey gets in vs imposter to land heal bell, curing zamazenta and leaving them greatly favored in time and mobility, though eleceus still stands against a very electric-weak team so it's possible teamo can still make something happen.
teamo brings in eleceus on a salt cured zama, hoping to catch knock with a retaliatory thunder cage to remove it from the game. instead it's steela pivoting in and going back out to zama to remove the salt cure. quojova successfully lands knock off and even manages to save the zama, but plays a dubious hard imposter on cage and proceeds to miss two cages of their own, losing the imposter while eleceus is still very healthy. zacian-c is revealed, which makes quite a bit of sense (zac-hero + fairyceus is a bit odd), and swords dances on the eleceus while teamo opts for sap, scared of a potential headlong or torque 2hko. the interaction seems to favor quojova, because if teamo tries to stay in here then zac will just boost again and force a kill.
hard steela is played by teamo, which feels very incorrect when dozo is around, and vcreate proceeds to take it out, leaving quojova a mon ahead once again. teamo goes to imposter, then doubles out while quojova stays in and vcreates.
i can understand quojova's line of reasoning with staying in, as neither zama nor bro are safe switchins to +4 vcreate with gigaton to follow, but i can't help but wonder whether it was possible to consolidate by sacrificing one of them and healing the other. perhaps it was all heading for a losing endgame against eleceus, with zac-c losing credibility as a revenge killer due to no isword + revealed no headlong, but surely something could at least have been tried. i guess quojova felt that zac was never getting another opportunity again while eleceus wasn't scared of it and dozo lurked in the back with several recovers still remaining, which is 100% fair. at any rate, it looks like the game is heading for a fairyceus vs eleceus endgame. most other pieces have the primary role of slowing down the opposing team's arc and enabling their own.
the position from here is very asymmetrical and interesting. quojova has the healthier supporting pieces, with slowbro and celesteela in good shape, though both are weak to cage. zama is largely immaterial here because eleceus is already knocked and there's no sapblocker. teamo's dozo and ting are doing really badly and it's hard to say whether they'll even be able to land knock off on fairyceus, but the full hp imposter is a massive boon. quojova's rotting zacc is also a surprisingly relevant force here as you can force out +0 or +1 eleceus, lose no momentum in the process, and successfully wrangle imposter with either zama/bro or the all-consuming chaos of the speed tie. overall it's very difficult to evaluate who's better here and what the correct plays are.
for the 2nd time in the game, quojova makes a hard fairyceus on recover play with the primary goal of getting a leftovers tick (extremely cool), then switches to slowbro on a predicted knock but it's hard eleceus instead from teamo. slowbro takes huge damage from cage and parting shots into fairyceus, and things start going down.
despite the early crit from eleceus, it's fairyceus that barely wins the 1v1, aided primarily by the leftovers difference and a couple of timely moonblast drops. in an extremely unconventional decision quojova opts not to boost past +3. from what i can tell there are a few possible reasons for this. giving zacc an easier time vs imposter was my first thought, but non-crit +6 cage is never killing and you can always murder imposter with boosted gigaton, so that doesn't make much sense. then i considered the possibility of teamo bailing on the arceus mirror and trying to get imposter in on -atk fairyceus, like hard imposter (or even hard ting, threatening knock, and go imp after it dies) on turn 82. the idea here would be that you could cage the imp, then spam take heart to survive while the cage did its work. i think the real answer is simpler: the fourth take heart might simply just not have been worth it. in a matchup where cage chip is doing most of the work from both sides, buffing your moonblasts from 8.5 to 10 and nerfing their cages from 14 to 12 just isn't very good, especially when you can moonblast and have a good shot at increasing your survivability anyway. either way, i think this was overall the correct decision, and i give massive props to quojova for playing it.
imposter comes in only after eleceus dies, which isn't very challenging as after quojova trades off the fairyceus and scares imposter away with fraud extraordinaire zacc, the endgame heavily favors them due to all of teamo's remaining mons being losers. some very questionable play against impostered zama takes place, but all of quojova's mons stay alive and imposter takes the poison and then ting dies and it's over over.
i've said for a while that take heart arc interactions are some of the most understudied things in this game, and this awesome game will hopefully get more people on board with that opinion. really cool shit here
cityscapes vs treeko928 
treeko has akira offense bullshit (you can tell from scizor), i have pika webs balance bullshit, things will definitely be transpiring here. before im able to start having flashbacks of facing hearts + akira last year, the fucking game starts and i have regenvest flutter vs chicken.
on preview im extremely scared of zac as both my fc mons are fairy-weak so something like sd popbomb could kind of just win on the spot. i also have no ice resist against kyuw, but flutter should take care of that. at any rate, im looking at treeko's team and immediately thinking scarf vcreate cause the rest of the guys are pretty slow, fortunately i have goddess fc palk who takes a life orb vcreate for fucking 21 percent. i want rocks to kill kyuw easier and zac HARD SWITCHES IN on my stone axe.
this is basically a nightmare scenario for me and i start panicking. i have to go to either aerilate steela (webs>espeed) or bounce clod and ultimately decide on steela. simply put, webs will drastically ease the matchup and this could be one of my best opportunities to get them. treeko clicks stone axe and im like phew, its some utility loser and also likely doesnt have spin, so i sticky web and it swords dances anyway. i sap which is almost definitely wrong but the zacian fucking EXPLODES and i breathe a huge sigh of relief cause the rest of treeko's team is physical and i figure theyll probably escort themselves into the gaping maws of faln chungus and john pork.
treeko wants to remove hazards. at this point im fairly sure kyuw has to be scarf with blaziken confirmed as lo, and i also go ahead and rule out remover scizor. all the other guys get nodiffed by pikachu (except sap sipper mortal pert [sap sipper tidy isnt a set cause you always always lose to imposter] who's admittedly a bit scary) so i go to it and (likely fc) clear amulet pert comes in. this means no sap sipper because the entire point of clear amulet is sap counterplay, so i click grass knot and it dies.
scizor's next and i can definitely try to counter it with palkia, but this leaves me open to weird last moves and i don't want to invite any complications, so i trade off the pika. blissey comes in on my flutter and i uturn to clodsire cause it does nothing and the blissey gambits which feels very good for me.
the ensuing position of flutter + palk + ape vs dead sciz + chicken + kyuw definitely favors me, but it's mildly interesting and i've thought it over a bit. going annihilape as the midground (we can always kill kyuw with knock -> combat torque) still feels pretty much correct. i feel like treeko was close to having some inroads with shift gear chicken in some lines, like say ape vs sciz -> kyuw, i get crit by boomburst and die, flutter revenges the kyuw, chicken last shift gears on astral, kills me with headlong, is maybe close to killing palk if i miss dtail? and sg + sap chicken mightve just straight up been winning i think which is really funny.
regardless, none of this happens, john pork mogs the fuck out of the chicken, scarf kyuw is hardly unexpected at this point, and the green chungs pro max unceremoniously kicks its ass. great victory
it's been a while since i've had one of those insanely fast offense games where you have to make the most of extremely limited information and time. sounds rly fun to play one of these matchups repeatedly and see what happens, you could probably get a ton of different positions. i didn't really judge treeko's play because with so many unknown factors going on, it's really hard to say what the best line was. i don't know the team but it's also possible treeko just had an extremely bad matchup, pert doesnt even fucking beat the celesteela cause boomburst does a billion and i have salt cure, akira mightve been right to insult it
anyway shoutouts to treeko for actually bringing offense against me, it's been a while since anyone's done that in tour and i've loved watching offense pick up usage in ompl. PLEASE ban court change so i can use this shit and never worry about getting completely cteamed with nothing i can do
lazzerpenguin vs akira 
sevag has a weird team that looks like a bunch of breakers mashed together. akira has a very slow garde balance with fastest mon ultra. sevag probably wins this cause gren farms the entire team save for possible fc steela, and fireceus + lando are problems on top of this. chansey can also sapblock steela if it is fc.
sevag has the first initiative with teleporter steela into desoland fireceus, and chansey reveals imposter (!) to scout the unecro set. he then immediately switches gren in on combat torque and takes 95 and gets paralyzed. in most cases this would just be a loss, but fireceus kind of just beats every mon on the team and wins the tie vs ghostceus so akira runs out of mons and loses. i dont really have much to say about this game cause akira caught the gren, used her outs vs the fireceus, and then still lost
moral of the story: dont bring fireceus to tour games come on man. annoying matchup fish guy. at least use the nihilslave entrain last with like screens + lunar dance shoutout nihilslave
moral of the story 2: if youre gonna use garde you need webs or fastmons or something otherwise this shit can happen
wheaty vs ballfire 
ballfire is using his tears of gold stall which i linked in quojova vs teamo. wheaty apparently has succumbed to the voices after 2 weeks of using real teams and has brought nuclear chicken + chomp bullshit with a 50% more fake defensive core than usual. frog is around to counter eleceus, so wheaty probably wins if he can consistently generate momentum and kill the dondozo.
chicken gets an opportunity early and spends it clicking fucking lo seed flare on the dozo switchin, only to miss and get sent packing by salt cure. aegi is a regen teleporter which means there will be no shortage of momentum, so the hp of the breakers is the only resource he has to manage. ballfire locks the fuck in and keeps going to dozo on the chicken, massively chipping it down with helmet and not getting punished by a seed flare callout.
some more fucking around takes place featuring bounce teleporter poisonceus (??) before cb moldy chomp comes in on tinglu and fucking kills it from 70 with power whip (?????). webs psea enam is revealed as the joint imposter proofer, which makes the team quite a bit more coherent cause the aegi is a pretty solid spinblocker and you can out-offense stuff a lot easier with webs. anyway, chomp is pblades so the same helmet strategy doesn't work on it, and wheaty catches the steela trying to stay in and wins shortly after due to there not being a ground resist.
i don't think ballfire was ever realistically winning this game cause he never makes progress ever, though it might theoretically have been possible to survive chomp's onslaught if ting was preserved, stone axe went up, and steela came in on the teleports (idea to bait vcreate onto helmet dozo). i really don't know how to feel about wheaty's team, feels like it should be so inconsistent into the meta at large especially if you're not able to get and maintain webs early, but the stable teleporter core is very strong in such a uturn-reliant meta. definitely punished ballfire's building habits at the very least.
icemaster vs fififlutters 
fifi is using wheaty's infamous
bomb squad (this shit is over six months old? god damn). icemaster has what looks to be dialga + zac defensive core with fire immune flutter, offensive fireceus, ultra prob imposter proofed by zac or maybe dialga.
turn 4 icemaster reveals fucking balloon wbb flutter (with tspikes!) and fifi's chicken is consigned to the fate of putting fries in the bag for the rest of the game. fireceus reveals some weirdo mg knock mortal set and regenvest dialga shuts down everything the zam tries to do, so fifi can't really get anything started, until dialga disastrously comes in on ting's knock off trying to regen, and subsequently zam picks it off from 51 with fleur cannon. from here the position completely sucks to play for icemaster, as there's no ghost resist, wishpass chansey is hard to interfere with, and the dmaw ultra misses a crucial draco meteor on the steela from an already dire position.
i think the position before dialga was knocked was uninteresting, and the position after dialga died was uninteresting, but in the span of time in between those two events there was some cool uncertainty going on. no doubt zam was getting through sooner or later, but preserving dialga would've bought icemaster quite a bit of extra time, and with tspikes added into the equation, the position could've gotten pretty tense; if zam comes in too infrequently, it runs out of moongeist pp and dies. probably best play for fifi would've been going ting on the tspikes in an effort to deny them, in which case icemaster should probably trade off the balloon, letting the chicken loose under the rationale that there was no stable imposter-proofer with giratina's boots knocked and tspikes up. overall i would say fifi would have the better position here (maybe 60-40) but it would've been super interesting and it's a shame none of that played out.
sammyce123 vs damflame 
sammy has slow garde balance but there's imposter so he doesn't lose to fake pokemon like fireceus. damflame has a pretty aggressive build going with likely wbb gear to imposter proof the etern. yveltal and venu are general weirdos and theyre definitely up to something.
venu lead reveals drought, meaning we're probably looking at growth ghostceus and a chicken capable of outright illegal things. sammy takes control of the game early by losing the teleport tie into waterceus then doubling back into imposter (very good play). chicken is revealed faster than waterceus, probably scarf though chlorophyll is also a possibility. damflame switches to etern, which is immediately copied by imposter and revealed as the standard mg 3atks. regenvest registeel is the switchin from sammy, wbb gear from damflame.
neither side has taken significant damage at this point, but i think sammy has made decent progress in this position. teams like damflame's thrive on information asymmetry and catching the opponent off guard, and with fast chicken + etern set + venu set (this one is more important than you might think) revealed it's pretty easy to sammy to form a gameplan. things deteriorate further when gear tries to teleport out but registeel just uturns to imposter, a classic weakness of these teleporter improof structures. that said, trickscarf chicken is bound to get good opportunities this game.
anyway, only 2 unrevealed mons remain on damflame's side, but he still succeeds at punching the registeel in the face with lo vcreate yveltal, leaving it at 2% in exchange for getting nuzzled. not a bad trade. venu doubles in on etern, refreshing sun, but damflame goes for rapid spin instead of teleport which i don't know about. i feel like you have to get etern or ghostceus in and start tearing holes in the opposing team before registeel is allowed to regen, cause if you get paralyzed then it's real bad. demon ghostceus comes in and starts clicking +2 triple arrows into the audino, but it gets hazed and sun runs out so it has to run away.
etern is the switchin here, i think venu was the better choice cause registeel is too healthy at this point. etern takes nuzzle and manages to slaughter sammy's etern on the switch. after more exchanges, blaziken tricks its scarf onto waterceus and etern finds yet another opportunity under sun, this time claiming the life of imposter. damflame is up a pretty significant amount of material at this point. garde comes in and yveltal is the most obvious sacrifice in history, but ghostceus is chosen to come in instead of chicken and i think this is the deciding misplay. with registeel being regenerated far out of etern range at this point, ghostceus is the primary win condition, and trading off most of its health against a mediocre garde is just what sammy wants. damflame is able to double in the venu in order to click healing wish, but registeel is standing there at high hp so whatever comes in will get nuzzled, meaning the position is unsalvageable.
this was a really tough game to watch, damflame's team and plays were really cool and i feel like he just barely came up short at the end (i would feel this way even if he wasn't my teammate). sammy to his credit played excellently as well in what i think was objectively a worse matchup for him (nobody is beating hwish + ghostceus especially not that gas station audino). oh well
regarding sammy's team, mortal scald waterceus is a bit eccentric and i assume the idea is gambit (maybe knock) regen etern to remove regenvest registeel so that the waterceus and garde can go crazy. too bad this doesnt work against wheaty's sinister regen aegislash + poisonceus
qt vs clas 
qt has a classic solid qt team with likely regenvest registeel + ting, fc waterceus, offensive chomper. clas has a pretty orthodox dual breaker balance with garde + chicken, there's a korai for speed control.
clas gets the garde knocked turn 2 and then tries to win with sg chicken against full hp fc waterceus and then reveals that they had tidy up>shackle on their th unaware ogre and then forfeits. they then proceed to win the series which is really funny.
anyway, obviously the plays made were suboptimal, but what i take issue with more is the attitude toward the ogre. after the game i was messaging akira that clas should've learned from the time i beat qt on ladder with wish/bunker/take heart/revdance fc ogre when they had imposter
here (this was in a rematch mind you), i meant that kind of as a joke but ogre is genuinely not a bad mon here if the regenvests can't always come in and threaten salt cure. like i can definitely see a world where you knock and chip whichever regenvest can salt cure you, set up to +6 alongside imposter, try to grab either 2 kills or 1 kill + waterceus chip, avoid getting revenged by chomp because of tidy up making you faster (!!!!!), safely bail out into chicken, and play out the rest of the matchup with ogre as a silly hazard remover.
ultimately i understand the decision to forfeit and clas might've improved their mental state for the rest of the set by doing so, but some truly mind-boggling shit could have happened in this game and i felt pretty disappointed. open yyuor mind... i wanna say theres some gen8 tour game where i run like bounce ogre and forget to put a recovery move on it and win anyway... we live in a society.... mons is fucking stupid
mindnight vs tttech 
tttech has what looks to be a pretty slow balance, mindnight is using an edit of my
throat spray offense after losing to it w1 (shoutout damflame); lunala replaces blacephalon and zama replaces groundceus. interesting choices.
mindnight leads flutter, which i don't think is the best choice, you wanna keep the block idea hidden in the back; i think zama was the best lead with the idea to remove vests early and torch everything later on. some dancing around happens with the hazard kyogre and zamazenta against tttech's regenvest steela and prank giratina; not much happens here and neither side gets hazards. tttech brings in eleceus and etern comes in, which is a really weird play but i think it might actually be the best. spdef eleceus is a pretty big problem for mindnight and etern can threaten gambit on it.
anyway, tttech goes to steela on the etern but just doesn't nuzzle it, so etern is able to land multiple fat roars of time on tttech's team; additionally, tttech makes a very questionable decision to not heal giratina on the roar of time recharge turn. eventually yveltal comes in, at which point mindnight cashes out and gambits into it before going ogre to keep up the pressure.
from here tttech gets introduced to the wonders of prank mystic water ogre, which takes out the steela and causes various problems for the zama before going down. now heatran comes in, eleceus attacks it instead of recovering, imposter switches in on earth power and survives revealing it was changed to max spdef, giratina clicks haze and dies because it was on 2%, and finally tttech forfeits because his guys are all dead.
i don't fucking know what happened in this game. this shit was extremely silly. i don't think there are really any notable takeaways from this besides that mystic water kyogre is real and she WILL see you underwater
anyway matchups this week are hype as fuck ngl im so glad we made it into bo3 this shit fucking rules
W VIRIZZIONS (3) vs (5) Heart Takers 
Zoomer Zeraoras (4) vs (4) Gholden Witches 
Commanders (4) vs (4) Dazzling Diancies 
Pink Ponyta Club (5) vs (3) Crazy Diamond Dialgas 
