OU The Legitimacy of Rhydon in GSC OU

MiracleWhipz

MiracleWhipz

Hello everyone,

After a lot of thought, I began to wonder how viable Rhydon truly is in GSC OU. After playing a bit of OU and spending some time in the team builder, it seems that everything Rhydon offers can be emulated by other Normal resists that come with additional benefits.

As a Curse sweeper, Rhydon's preferred set (Rock Slide + Earthquake + Curse + Roar) is vulnerable to Toxic and is easily shut down by the ubiquitous Cloyster or any of the legendary Electrics running Hidden Power Water (even HP Ice deals considerable damage). If you opt for a mono-Rock set with Rest as the last move to address the status issue, then you have to ask—why not just use Tyranitar? While Tyranitar lacks an Electric immunity and doesn’t quite match Rhydon’s raw physical bulk, it makes up for it in virtually every other area. As a Rock/Ground type, Rhydon fails as an Electric absorber because it gets destroyed by Hidden Power Ice and Water. In this role, it’s also outclassed by Golem, who offers more utility with Rapid Spin and the wall-breaking Explosion. When considered as a Snorlax phazer, Rhydon’s bulk allows it to be a decent response, but its susceptibility to status and poor special defense often make Steelix the more appealing option in that phazer/Lax check slot. Even as a Ground that could spread paralysis, Nidoking offers that with Thunder with additional utility in Thief and Lovely Kiss.

In the team builder, it's incredibly difficult to find a place for Rhydon. In battle, you have to play very carefully to avoid special super effective attacks and Toxic. All of its potential roles can be better performed by another Normal resist or Ground type. Why is it still in OU? It can't shine a lot in the tier, but what about the tier below it?

Examining the UU roster of Pokémon, Rhydon could have solid niches there. Its powerful Rock Slides and Earthquakes could allow it to be a wall breaker, it could even go mono Rock without having to compete with another Rock/Ground. Its typing and bulk can allow it to perform defensive duties against threats like Granbull, Scyther, and Dodrio. As for its checks and counters the UU tier is filled with bulky water types, a decent amount of grass types, and a lot of powerful special attackers with Rhydon hitting coverage. I think it may be worth it to drop Rhydon to UU and test it there.

1753109641186.png
 
Last edited:
I've never been able to build a Rhydon team that doesn't feel like a fish. It's dangerous but its matchup spread is horrible when you consider all the things packing strong special stab, ice/water/grass coverage, stab eq/cc, or toxic. Feels unreliable as a long-term lax check, hit and run attacker or curse sweeper. It can cook sometimes but so can high-end UUBLs like Espeon, P2, Molt etc. If any more experienced players have any wisdom about how Rhydon is being underutilized that would be cool to see, but right now IMO it doesn't merit the OU label. Also would love to see some usage stats from recent tours.
 
tylerkehne said:
I've never been able to build a Rhydon team that doesn't feel like a fish. It's dangerous but its matchup spread is horrible when you consider all the things packing strong special stab, ice/water/grass coverage, stab eq/cc, or toxic. Feels unreliable as a long-term lax check, hit and run attacker or curse sweeper. It can cook sometimes but so can high-end UUBLs like Espeon, P2, Molt etc. If any more experienced players have any wisdom about how Rhydon is being underutilized that would be cool to see, but right now IMO it doesn't merit the OU label. Also would love to see some usage stats from recent tours.
Click to expand...
1753199223380.png
(From SPL XVI GSC Discussion)

The description sums it up pretty well. For a little more detail, Rhydon's typing and special bulk does not allow it to do much outside of checking most Snorlax variants. Thanks to Rhydon being the primary Snorlax check on many teams, Rhydon can't abuse certain opportunities in fear it'll take too much damage (or get blunted by status) to efficiently check Snorlax. For example, in a situation where Raikou is getting ready to rest, any Ground type (or Tyranitar ) would love the opportunity to harass Raikou and cause the opponent to juggle defensive switches. Rhydon can't be so liberal with switching it because takes minimum ~43% from a Hidden Power Ice (not factoring in spikes). If it can't switch into a sleeping Raikou safely, then it sure can't switch into Zapdos who deals a minimum of ~45% from a Hidden Power Ice.
 
I feel like Rhydon has always been one of those things where you remind yourself "oh yeah I should probably be able to handle that" but, at the same time, is awfully shaky to be piloting yourself. In this era where you're probably already running EQ or even Surf on Lax to punish Golem, though, Rhydon's taken a backseat even in the former regard (although I will say that the cost of letting Golem do its thing unopposed is less immediately painful than letting Rhydon do the same).

Still, it's hard not to look at builds like NidoGarTar where everything except Snorlax takes SE damage from Rhydon's STABs and wonder if it's worth kicking the tires on ol' Rhydon and mixing it into your rotation.

That said, I think a drop to UU might be a bit hasty. Surely there are UUBLs worth dropping before we start targeting Rhydon, no?
 
My latest project in the builder is trying to make curse rhydon offense work, and I've been having a miserable time lol...
It has attractive traits with its its ground typing and huge stab EQ, but it's really held back by its godawful SpDef and slightly too slow speed. It owns lots of offense teams if you get it in nicely, but it also gets owned by nearly any special attack, which really sucks if you also want to use it against lax. Its high risk high reward, but hard to justify when ttar exists. Admittedly it's ground typing can be nice for aggressive punishes on the electrics that ttar can't do, but make one wrong move and rhydon is out of commission. Rhydon offense teams are also terrified of surprise surf coverage or hp waters, but having to scout those moves is pretty awkward and loses tempo, as well as putting you closer to hp ice 2HKO range with spikes. It also feels very underwhelming into stall with the standard curse roar set as it's deathly afraid of toxic and starmie.

I haven't completely given up as there's a few more team concepts i want to try, but it definitely feels underwhelming in OU rn. No clue about how it'd be in UU tho, I've yet to play that tier lol.
 
Last edited:
:gs/rhydon:

Rhydon is a very specific Pokémon I've always felt like was a bit underexplored in the modern metagame. And at first glance, yeah, why would you try and build with it when Tyranitar and OU's four other Ground-Types are right there for competition? The rise of Golem certainly hasn't helped it, providing a valuable niche as a Rapid Spin user while being similar enough to Rhydon to attempt to cover most of the same matchups in the builder, especially when you take Self-Destruct/Explosion into account as both a user of and one of the better available pivots into the move. Rhydon's up there with Blissey as one of the Pokémon most often cited for a potential tiering change to UUBL, but I want to take a more in-depth look at Rhydon and come to a decision on what I think should happen.

Archetypally, Rhydon is designed as a bulky physical tank, with high HP and excellent physical stats backed by complementary physical STABs but balanced out by low special stats and Speed and multiple common Type weaknesses. Historically it's tried making use of similar sets to other GSC OU staples such as Curse + Roar and even RestTalk at one point, but Rhydon's defensive disadvantages complemented by that low Speed make it harder for Rhydon to perform more consistently than its more specialized competition on a wide variety of teams. Something else I think is worth mentioning that I realized while looking into GSC Rhydon is how... Rock Slide honestly feels kind of useless on it? The problem isn't with Rock Slide itself or with its offensive coverage alongside Earthquake. The problem is that the list of meta-relevant Rock-weak threat Rhydon would like to be clicking the move against, which isn't as large as you might think- all threaten out Rhydon's main sets in one way or another. Zapdos threatens it out with Hidden Power's coverage, and the Fire/Flying-Types Moltres and Charizard are both rarer in usage and can threaten Rhydon with their own coverage, especially Solar Beam if being used on Sun teams, or with the sheer power behind even resisted Fire-Type moves that, even in the best case scenario for the Rhydon player, still have a nasty habit of inflicting Burn at the worst possible times. the Ice-Types of OU aren't safe matchups for Rhydon at all and most of the already few viable Bug-Types in this tier aren't even weak to Rock at all. Most everything else is either hit harder and more accurately by Earthquake or, should Rock Slide be absolutely necessary, be better covered by the much more versatile Tyranitar anyway.

The biggest problem for Rhydon is just that this metagame is just simply too fast paced for it. Rhydon tends to do better in Balance-centric metas and while the Self-Destruct/Explosion resistance is nice, it's not nearly enough to account for all of Rhydon's other flaws and competition for a team slot. I suppose you could try and double up on team slots with Rhydon and one of its competitors, but at that point you're just stacking weaknesses for the opponent to take advantage of. The current metagame favoring offensive output has not been a favorable environment for this Pokémon due to Rhydon not being able to provide much team support for these offensive threats or provide defensive counterplay that cannot be replicated by other Pokémon. If Rhydon is going to succeed in this tier and prove it deserves to keep its OU status, the playerbase is going to have to help it out and see if the metagame can evolve and produce a valuable enough niche for this Pokémon that, perhaps most importantly, is something that Golem or Tyranitar cannot replicate. Both of these Rock-Types are Top 10 caliber staples of the tier, and at this state of the tier there's very little reason to use Rhydon over one of them.


So, what should be done with Rhydon's tiering status, at least for right now? This is where things get a little muddy. The growing opinion seems to be that Rhydon should be dropped into UU and perhaps tested in that tier just in case it does end up overbearing. Rhydon is currently UUBL in ADV, but I do think there are enough differences between GSC and ADV to not want to immediately assume whether or not Rhydon will be balanced in this environment. The thing is, this isn't just a matter of if Rhydon should be categorized as OU- this is also a situation of whether or not the UU playerbase wants or needs Rhydon, and I think that's the part everyone's ignoring here. Historically speaking tiering drops post-generation have been the most successful when the Pokémon being dropped also provides value for the tier it is being dropped into. So to me, this feels more like a question for them than the OU playerbase at this point of agreement. Me personally, this is what I would recommend:

  • If the UU playerbase wants to welcome Rhydon into their tier, allow them to drop Rhydon into UU while holding a suspect test among qualified players to determine if it's overbearing or not, which would determine if Rhydon ends up as a UU or a UUBL placement.
  • If the UU playerbase does not want to welcome Rhydon, keep Rhydon in OU for now and only drop Rhydon into UUBL if the tiering council determines Rhydon has not developed enough in the metagame to further warrant its designation as an OU Pokémon.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top