Other Metagames (AG) This is Kartana (She's Got my Back)

[Kilgrave]

Hello and welcome to what must be my 4th RMT and the first one for Sun and Moon.

First, a little backstory:
I love Kartana. It's one of my favourite new Pokemon and I love playing around with it. In the early days of SuMo, I grabbed a team of random gen 7 mons and tested them on the AG ladder. One of these was a choice banded Kartana and I fell in love with the set.

So I had an idea: Can I build a team around Choice Band Kartana?

What you are about to see is the weird and wonderful ideas I came up with. When you see some of these, you will be like, wtf are they smoking (*cough Deoxys-A), but I've played around with this for a while and it works (although low ladder AG is awful).

Here it is:

Deoxys-Attack

Not going to tag anyone by accident
Ability: Pressure
EVs: 4 HP / 252 Atk / 252 Spe
Jolly Nature
- Drain Punch
- Extreme Speed
- Knock Off
- Zen Headbutt

As a few people once said:

★Catalystic: it's scarf
Quantum Tesseract: wtf
Synoptic ❤: I mean
Synoptic ❤: It's not bad
Synoptic ❤: But not good either

Yes, wtf? Well, I want you to keep in mind while reading this that everything I put here was to counter everything that is a threat to banded Kartana. The first threat that I thought of was fast mons. 109 speed is great, but there seems to be a bit of a speed creep this generation, where everything is at the absolute maximum speed and/or scarfed. My Kartana is not maximum speed, so it is important that I have something to check these fast Pokemon.
What I did was take the fastest Pokemon in the game, and threw a Choice Scarf on it. It is every bit ridiculous as it sounds. Not only does Deoxys-A outspeeds the entire unboosted meta, it outspeeds the entire boosted meta. It outsped a Mega Gyarados after a Dragon Dance, and a Primal Groudon after a Rock Polish. This thing has over 700 speed. Also, it's a great partner to Tapu Lele, so I had to put them together.
Although, I find that Deoxys-Attack, ironically, doesn't have the attack for the job. I don't know if I'm just overestimating its potential.
The greatest thing Deoxys-A has is the element of surprise. Nobody expects a scarf Deoxys, and they know that it's fast as hell, so they sent in their best answer, usually a scarfer. Deoxys leaves these threats vulnerable, lures opponents into a false sense of security, and picks off the biggest threats. It's niche but I love it.

Tapu Lele

Ability: Psychic Surge
EVs: 252 HP / 252 SpA / 4 SpD
Modest Nature
- Psychic
- Moonblast
- Nature's Madness
- Taunt

Tapu Lele and Deoxys-A go together like, uh, I don't know. They go together well. The only thing Deoxys-A fears apart from not doing enough damage to kill the opponent is priority, Tapu Lele solves that problem just by being sent out. Also, its power and terrifying STAB combo is really useful. Taunt is there for a surprise one-up on any setup sweepers, particularly slower ones, looking to ruin my day.

Arceus-Water

Ability: Multitype
EVs: 252 HP / 252 SpA / 4 SpD
Modest Nature exact same as Lele I never noticed that
- Stealth Rock
- Judgement
- Recover
- Tailwind

Water Arceus is my best defensive mon, and also my Fire-type counter, because Kartana doesn't like them either.
Arceus is a great help because it has Stealth Rocks and Judgement, which is really helpful because Ho-Oh screws over my team every time. Arceus-Water can take the hits that the rest of my team cannot and recover them off. I was hoping to take advantage of Tailwind but tbh it's just a filler move as I have never used it.

Salamence

Ability: Intimidate -> Aerilate
EVs: 252 HP / 4 Def / 252 SpA
Modest Nature
- Defog
- Hyper Voice
- Dragon Pulse
- Roost

Being someone who hasn't quite got over the lack of the Mega Evolutions in Sun and Moon Z-Moves do not make up for it, I knew I had to put a mega on my team. I chose Mega Salamence to provide a mix of both offense and defense. I invested HP rather than Speed in order to have another bulky Pokemon, as my team was a bit lacking in that. Intimidate is really useful for those physical attackers. I chose Dragon Pulse over Draco Meteor because I don't want to be constantly switching out or be used as setup fodder: this Mence is meant to sit around and take the hits, and then deal some good damage back.

Help?

Quantum Tesseract: wtf
Quantum Tesseract: hyper voice
Apparently Hyper Voice isn't that good, I put it there because I used Mega Mence a lot in VGC and that was standard. What do I replace it with?

Yveltal

Ability: Dark Aura
EVs: 4 HP / 252 SpA / 252 Spe
Timid Nature
- Oblivion Wing
- Dark Pulse
- Focus Blast
- Roost

Yveltal is another powerhouse of my team. An almost all-offensive set really applies a lot of offensive pressure. Life Orb gives Yveltal an insane amount of power while still allowing me to use whatever move I want, making it capable of leaving massive holes in a team, leaving it open enough for a Kartana sweep. Not really much else to say apart from that Yveltal really helps set the stage for Kartana.

Kartana

Ability: Beast Boost
EVs: 252 Atk / 4 Def / 252 Spe
Adamant Nature
- Smart Strike
- Leaf Blade
- Sacred Sword
- Psycho Cut

"This is Katana, she's got my back. She can cut all you in half with one sword stroke just like mowing the lawn. I would advise not getting killed by her, her sword traps the souls of its victims."
​

Here it is: the star of the show: Kartana. I love it so much I named the team after a related line from a movie I have never seen before.
All of that aside though, banded Kartana is pure attack. With a band it reaches 760 attack, so opponents sometimes have a hard time not getting picked off.
Generally, I save Kartana until the very end, when most of the opponent's Pokemon have been removed from the battle. Then, usually, it sweeps through the rest of their team, provided that it doesn't get picked off itself, which sometimes happens.
A good example of a Kartana sweep is this replay, from the AG open versus Catalystic. While i did not win, I won one game using this team, thanks to Kartana, which sweeps the last three Pokemon on his team.
However, sometimes, I win without even needing to bring out Kartana, but yet again, that might just be because of low ladder AG.

Shoutouts

• Everyone who was in that replay (in the block of text about Kartana). That was the most fun I've probably ever had on Showdown.

• Everyone who has contributed to my Pet Mod, Z-Moves Everywhere. Thanks for giving me something special to focus on here in the forums.

So that's it. This was meant to be my 300th post, but I didn't finish this on time so this will be my 301st instead. Thanks for reading, and I'll be happy to accept any changes.

Please help me get out of low ladder AG it's horrific.

 

[Kilgrave]

It's been a week since I posted this and I'd greatly appreciate it if this team got rated :)

(sorry to bump)

 

[MZ]

No it's good that you did bump, I completely missed this.

That being said, the issues with the team are too numerous to all go over, but basically you'll notice your composition doesn't actually account for any threats. You have a lot of offensive mons or max HP mons, but pretty much every opposing offensive Pokemon is going unresisted, from Mega Rayquaza to Xerneas, as long as they can break through 252/0 arc water and 0/0 Megamence which isn't exactly hard. In the meantime you don't have much offensive pressure yourself because Deo is running a stupendously weak set, none of the other mons are insanely threatening, and the team itself is just ridiculously slow. Additionally... listen I wouldn't really call 252 hp / 252 spa a viable set on waterceus, mence, or lele. None of them benefit from dropping all speed at all, and the ones you'd theoretically want to run defensive need investment to do anything. You can check out the smogdex for better sets, but theoretically you'd want to speed creep mence, make waterceus more physically defensive, and just run fast tapu lele because its defenses are absolute garbage for the meta. I understand this team thrives off of unusual sets but these are doing you no favors.

As for the other three, the one thing I've gotten out of Kartana is at least run Jolly. There is no reason to be slower than opposing Megaray (most of them do not run +Speed) and lose to even more things than you currently do. I don't think Choice Band is a particularly good set, but I haven't worked with it enough so it's probably nice to still work with. Yveltal weirdly drops sucker/taunt for roost/fb, and while I get you might want to lure darkceus with focus blast for deoxys roost is just garbage on offensive yveltal who can regain health with oblivion wing and doesnt want to waste time using it. Sucker Punch is a much better use of that slot. As for Deoxys, the set is just complete garbage that relies on surprise factor and probably isn't too effective even with that. I wouldnt run drain punch when superpower exists, I wouldn't run physical when special is at least slightly less depressingly weak, and I wouldn't run +speed when you've already turned the strongest mon in the metagame into a weak revenge killer. That's it for sets, if I wanted to actually fix the team I'd be dropping almost everything and working on something a little more viably tuned around kartana+yveltal which seems like a workable core and not getting too caught up. If you want to use a less viable mon in Kartana, that's pretty cool. However, sticking it with other gimmicks and straight up bad sets like scarf deo, defog max hp modest megamence, max hp lele, and 0 speed tailwind waterceus just piles on too many poor sets for the good things on the team to support. Sorry I really can't be more positive about this, hope this big wall of text helped and good luck with this team.