NDCL REPORT
Hello again, here are the teams i brought during NDCL (as well as a couple of teams that my teammate iPetBigFoot brought). Initially I didn't intend to sign up for this tournament, because work was getting really busy and I wouldn't have much prep time, plus I wasn't having much fun with the format and had intended NDPL to be my final tour until something major changed. I ended up signing up anyways with hopes of teaming with my friend Eragon as purely a support, but we ended up getting split and I ended up as a starter. To be honest, I didn't have much fun in this tour (lol) but I think Eragon and I identified some cool things that pushed the meta a bit.
Week 1 vs Voltix - W
Going into this tour, as mentioned I didn't have much prep time, so my idea was to focus on using iron defense body press pokemon to fish wins. After NDPL, I had identified garganacl as a real threatening cheese mon, and Logice had built this team for NDFL with some advice from me about how to polish it. I decided to just load it up vs Voltix, because I thought garganacl looked good into the type of mons he normally uses (mega salamence, heatran, zeraora, amoonguss, diancie etc). He ended up loading a team that basically fully lost to garg. Draco meteor mence made it a little harder to manage, but voltix misplayed a few key turns and garg pulled through for the win. Overall, i still think garganacl is pretty nuts but the rest of this team is a little too fair to properly abuse the pressure it puts on. Also iron hands is a fraud pokemon
Week 2 vs Schister - L
Weird looking team vs Schister, but similar idea to week 1. I wanted to load a strong iron defense body press cheeser. I remembered eragon and I had built a mega steelix team many months back, maybe for NDBD a full year ago? I thought Steelix actually looked pretty strong, especially with helping hand ttar to lock in more neutral kills with body press. Its also surprisingly bulky on the special side, even beating out heatran under the right conditions. I ended up misplaying my endgame a decent amount, which put me in a spot to get rolled by heatran to lose. Overall pretty neat team, I'd definitely explore steelix more in the future. Helping hand on TTar also netted me a moonblast KO on flutter in the mirror very reliably, which was a cool reason to deviate from the typical bulky specs flutter set.
Week 3 vs Eragon - L
Completely troll team this week. Eragon and I had been prepping together all season, and we decided that if our game didnt matter we'd bring troll teams. My team ended up getting stomped so we decided it'd be funny to have the bug-off. I basically just took a SV DOU structure and replaced dragonite with mega pinsir, while Eragon came up with a pretty cool and unique mega heracross team. Not much else to say here, tailroom was too much for pinsir to overcome.
Week 4 vs Frixel - W
IPetBigFoot subbed in this week, and pretty early in the week we decided we wanted to load something with nihilego. This was an old sun variant I had built, so we made some very slight adjustments (scorching sands instead of overheat on zard, different nihilego tera) and shipped it. Frixel tried to cheese us with the same garg team I brought week 1, but we had taunt incineroar so garg was just completely shut down. Nihilego looked pretty unbeatable into the rest of the team, and allowed bigfoot to pressure garg enough to win the endgame with sun. Nihilego is a pretty nuts pokemon, its good into a very large chunk of top tier mons, and is a great addition to sun teams that really want that extra rock coverage/
Week 5 vs Enzonana - W
Bigfoot again this week. We identified pretty early in the week that we wanted to load sand dracovish this week, and bigfoot was already comfortable with this team from NDPL/FL. We made some very slight adjustments again, putting miracle seed on rillaboom and changing Dracovish to have substitute. ALSO, this is maybe the first appearance of this demon flutter set me and eragon came up with. I had started using bold max hp max defense flutter with booster speed in VGC, and it was just doing illegal things every game. So we decided to start using it in natdex as well, and it was similarly doing criminal things. Twave booster speed on a tyranitar team let us create a lot of opportunities for flinches, paras, strong speed control for vish outside of sand, and enable lando harder. It also matches up way better into the flutter mirror, since most flutters are specs nowadays. Here is the calc that convinced us this flutter should be on this team: 252 Atk Life Orb Technician Marshadow Shadow Sneak vs. 252 HP / 228+ Def Flutter Mane: 265-312 (84.3 - 99.3%) -- guaranteed 2HKO
Overall, broken ass flutter set and some solid play by bigfoot netted us the win here, for a big 2-0 from bigfoot
Week 6 vs Terekusai - W
By far the best team i built and loaded this tour. Roaring moon had been completely overlooked thus far, and me and Eragon had been talking about it more since seeing how successful it was in VGC even in flutter mane formats. It proved to be just as effective in natdex, allowing for great typing and fast speed control without utilizing a mega slot. This team was similar to some structures I had used in SV DOU during world cup, utilizing roaring moon + meteor beam glimmora to create a ton of turn 1 pressure, and then endgaming with a strong spread attacker and setup sweepet (garde and kingambit respectively). Glimmora is just about as well positioned as Nihilego, it trades some of the speed for earth power coverage. Overall, roaring moon should definitely see more usage and be tiered, i think it is a crazy good pokemon.
Unfortunately for me, Terekusai brought okidogi which was extremely powerful into this structure, beating all of my endgame options and having a favorable typing to stop glimmora's early offense. Fortunately for me, he missed gunk shot and i got to win the game.
Week 7 vs Code - L
Episode 4 of "Kunal brings a ratpacker team and loses". Still at a 0% winrate with ratpacker builds! This team was very cool though, I hadn't considered meloetta at all previously in the tier, generally considering Z Celebrate to be a pretty cheesy strat with lower value than other cheese strats. But Meloetta actually utilizes the omniboosts extremely well, and i was very surprised by its potency. If I had more time to prep, I probably would've realized i needed to make some team changes to have a more even matchup spread into what Code likes to use, but unfortunately this week I had 0 practice games and just raw loaded this.
My takeaway from this week was that meloetta with a stronger dedicated support (blastoise, jirachi, etc) is an extremely scary mon that actually matches up very well into most of the meta. I think you could build a similar structure to sealife's bronzong ursaluna team but with meloetta rather than zong ursa as your wincon, and the team would just perform extremely well.
Semifinals vs Eragon - L
Finally had to play Eragon for real, and decided to lock in another sun variant after some other mostly unsuccessful testing. Eragon had built this sun team initially and shared it with me, but i made a few changes (that ended up coming back to bite me ultimately). Matchup-wise, it was pretty even on paper except for the celesteela, which kind of owned my team, but it was definitely playable by preserving the right mons to cover its various tera options. Unfortunately i missed an untimely icy wind which resulted in losing both flutter and zard without getting any value in return, which basically sealed the game. I also swapped off of stomping tantrum on ogerpon ~2 minutes before the game, which ended up mattering a lot. One cool thing about demon flutter on this team is zard gets to drop tailwind and run overheat, which pumps its damage output by a ton.
Recap
Overall I performed pretty poorly this tour, which kind of reflected my enjoyment (or lack thereof) of the tier recently. I'm still glad I got to play and bring some cool new sets, that I think will heavily influence the meta going into derby.
Shoutouts to eragon, iPetBigfoot, and gephicka for being teammates and testing buddies this time around
Hello again, here are the teams i brought during NDCL (as well as a couple of teams that my teammate iPetBigFoot brought). Initially I didn't intend to sign up for this tournament, because work was getting really busy and I wouldn't have much prep time, plus I wasn't having much fun with the format and had intended NDPL to be my final tour until something major changed. I ended up signing up anyways with hopes of teaming with my friend Eragon as purely a support, but we ended up getting split and I ended up as a starter. To be honest, I didn't have much fun in this tour (lol) but I think Eragon and I identified some cool things that pushed the meta a bit.
Week 1 vs Voltix - W
Going into this tour, as mentioned I didn't have much prep time, so my idea was to focus on using iron defense body press pokemon to fish wins. After NDPL, I had identified garganacl as a real threatening cheese mon, and Logice had built this team for NDFL with some advice from me about how to polish it. I decided to just load it up vs Voltix, because I thought garganacl looked good into the type of mons he normally uses (mega salamence, heatran, zeraora, amoonguss, diancie etc). He ended up loading a team that basically fully lost to garg. Draco meteor mence made it a little harder to manage, but voltix misplayed a few key turns and garg pulled through for the win. Overall, i still think garganacl is pretty nuts but the rest of this team is a little too fair to properly abuse the pressure it puts on. Also iron hands is a fraud pokemon
Week 2 vs Schister - L
Weird looking team vs Schister, but similar idea to week 1. I wanted to load a strong iron defense body press cheeser. I remembered eragon and I had built a mega steelix team many months back, maybe for NDBD a full year ago? I thought Steelix actually looked pretty strong, especially with helping hand ttar to lock in more neutral kills with body press. Its also surprisingly bulky on the special side, even beating out heatran under the right conditions. I ended up misplaying my endgame a decent amount, which put me in a spot to get rolled by heatran to lose. Overall pretty neat team, I'd definitely explore steelix more in the future. Helping hand on TTar also netted me a moonblast KO on flutter in the mirror very reliably, which was a cool reason to deviate from the typical bulky specs flutter set.
Week 3 vs Eragon - L
Completely troll team this week. Eragon and I had been prepping together all season, and we decided that if our game didnt matter we'd bring troll teams. My team ended up getting stomped so we decided it'd be funny to have the bug-off. I basically just took a SV DOU structure and replaced dragonite with mega pinsir, while Eragon came up with a pretty cool and unique mega heracross team. Not much else to say here, tailroom was too much for pinsir to overcome.
Week 4 vs Frixel - W
IPetBigFoot subbed in this week, and pretty early in the week we decided we wanted to load something with nihilego. This was an old sun variant I had built, so we made some very slight adjustments (scorching sands instead of overheat on zard, different nihilego tera) and shipped it. Frixel tried to cheese us with the same garg team I brought week 1, but we had taunt incineroar so garg was just completely shut down. Nihilego looked pretty unbeatable into the rest of the team, and allowed bigfoot to pressure garg enough to win the endgame with sun. Nihilego is a pretty nuts pokemon, its good into a very large chunk of top tier mons, and is a great addition to sun teams that really want that extra rock coverage/
Week 5 vs Enzonana - W
Bigfoot again this week. We identified pretty early in the week that we wanted to load sand dracovish this week, and bigfoot was already comfortable with this team from NDPL/FL. We made some very slight adjustments again, putting miracle seed on rillaboom and changing Dracovish to have substitute. ALSO, this is maybe the first appearance of this demon flutter set me and eragon came up with. I had started using bold max hp max defense flutter with booster speed in VGC, and it was just doing illegal things every game. So we decided to start using it in natdex as well, and it was similarly doing criminal things. Twave booster speed on a tyranitar team let us create a lot of opportunities for flinches, paras, strong speed control for vish outside of sand, and enable lando harder. It also matches up way better into the flutter mirror, since most flutters are specs nowadays. Here is the calc that convinced us this flutter should be on this team: 252 Atk Life Orb Technician Marshadow Shadow Sneak vs. 252 HP / 228+ Def Flutter Mane: 265-312 (84.3 - 99.3%) -- guaranteed 2HKO
Overall, broken ass flutter set and some solid play by bigfoot netted us the win here, for a big 2-0 from bigfoot
Week 6 vs Terekusai - W
By far the best team i built and loaded this tour. Roaring moon had been completely overlooked thus far, and me and Eragon had been talking about it more since seeing how successful it was in VGC even in flutter mane formats. It proved to be just as effective in natdex, allowing for great typing and fast speed control without utilizing a mega slot. This team was similar to some structures I had used in SV DOU during world cup, utilizing roaring moon + meteor beam glimmora to create a ton of turn 1 pressure, and then endgaming with a strong spread attacker and setup sweepet (garde and kingambit respectively). Glimmora is just about as well positioned as Nihilego, it trades some of the speed for earth power coverage. Overall, roaring moon should definitely see more usage and be tiered, i think it is a crazy good pokemon.
Unfortunately for me, Terekusai brought okidogi which was extremely powerful into this structure, beating all of my endgame options and having a favorable typing to stop glimmora's early offense. Fortunately for me, he missed gunk shot and i got to win the game.
Week 7 vs Code - L
Episode 4 of "Kunal brings a ratpacker team and loses". Still at a 0% winrate with ratpacker builds! This team was very cool though, I hadn't considered meloetta at all previously in the tier, generally considering Z Celebrate to be a pretty cheesy strat with lower value than other cheese strats. But Meloetta actually utilizes the omniboosts extremely well, and i was very surprised by its potency. If I had more time to prep, I probably would've realized i needed to make some team changes to have a more even matchup spread into what Code likes to use, but unfortunately this week I had 0 practice games and just raw loaded this.
My takeaway from this week was that meloetta with a stronger dedicated support (blastoise, jirachi, etc) is an extremely scary mon that actually matches up very well into most of the meta. I think you could build a similar structure to sealife's bronzong ursaluna team but with meloetta rather than zong ursa as your wincon, and the team would just perform extremely well.
Semifinals vs Eragon - L
Finally had to play Eragon for real, and decided to lock in another sun variant after some other mostly unsuccessful testing. Eragon had built this sun team initially and shared it with me, but i made a few changes (that ended up coming back to bite me ultimately). Matchup-wise, it was pretty even on paper except for the celesteela, which kind of owned my team, but it was definitely playable by preserving the right mons to cover its various tera options. Unfortunately i missed an untimely icy wind which resulted in losing both flutter and zard without getting any value in return, which basically sealed the game. I also swapped off of stomping tantrum on ogerpon ~2 minutes before the game, which ended up mattering a lot. One cool thing about demon flutter on this team is zard gets to drop tailwind and run overheat, which pumps its damage output by a ton.
Recap
Overall I performed pretty poorly this tour, which kind of reflected my enjoyment (or lack thereof) of the tier recently. I'm still glad I got to play and bring some cool new sets, that I think will heavily influence the meta going into derby.
Shoutouts to eragon, iPetBigfoot, and gephicka for being teammates and testing buddies this time around